"Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?"

Also posted at the World Future Society.

Anti-Futurological Answers To Futurological Questions: "Am I Going To Become A Cyborg In the Future?"

No, you are absolutely not going to become a cyborg in "The Future." And if you are a self-declared futurologist, or your thinking about technoscience questions has been deranged by your exposure to pop futurological formulations, the reasons you are not going to become a cyborg in "The Future" may come as a surprise to you:

The ready-to-hand gizmos on which many of you rely without thinking to spur your memories or communicate with your intimates, the therapies and vaccinations that have enhanced your body's resistance to diseases, the spectacles or contact lenses on some of your eyes or the pacemakers in some of your chests, the clothes you are wearing, the language you are using to organize your thoughts and testify to your history and your hopes, the laws, norms, infrastructural affordances, marketing and surveillance profiles that articulate your attention and your conduct, even the acquired but unconscious deportment of your body through which you signal your state of mind to your peers in ways both you and they are scarcely aware of… all of these material and ritual artifacts and techniques are already absolutely prosthetic, and all of these are already usefully susceptible to analysis in cybernetic terms (cybernetics is, you will recall, the study of the forms of communication, regulation, and control in and among biological, mechanical, and electronic systems). As I like to point out over and over again, all prostheses are culture and all culture is prosthetic; "technology," properly so-called, is the ongoing collective prosthetic re-elaboration of personal and inter-personal agency in history. The definitive impingement of the cybernetic upon the organismic is inaugurated by the entrance of a being onto the stage of history itself, culture is the natural way of cyborg protagonists in the world.

And so, you are not going to become a cyborg in "The Future" either because you are already as much a cyborg as you ever will be, or because the fantastic "Sooper You" which is what you really mean by the phrase "becoming a cyborg" involves profound errors or mystifications on your part about what technology and culture and history actually substantially mean in the first place and these errors and mystifications are never, ever going to become more right or more relevant or more sane later on.

It seems to me that this gesture, and the false quandaries arising from it, are all perfectly typical of futurological discourse: The question, "Am I going to become a cyborg in the future?" begins with a basic confusion about a technoscience issue. Rather than clarifying that confusion by actually addressing it, the futurological form of the question reframes the initial error as a predictive dispute about "future facts." What it is crucial to grasp is that such a re-framing is not only incapable of resolving the confusion at hand, but actually depends on the maintenance of the confusion, which is thereby transformed into a kind of black box into which all sorts of idle desires and dreams and dreads of super-potence, omnipotence, and impotence can be plugged and indulged in a way that has the sufficient appearance of "serious thought" while in fact precluding any serious thought from taking place at all.

Futurology provides no intellectual resources unique to itself with which to speculate (or organize) more reasonably about the diversity of costs, risks, and benefits of specific technoscientific changes to their actual stakeholders -- the relevant expertise will be found among the scientists, policy makers, and communities directly concerned with those changes -- meanwhile, futurology mobilizes confusions, fantasies, and fetishes occasioned by the technoscientific change to distract, derange, and denigrate our attention from existing intellectual resources the better to indulge irrational passions and peddle amplified consumption and acquiescence to the elite incumbent beneficiaries of the status quo to whom is entrusted the delivery of that amplified consumption which is what "The Future" of the futurologists usually amounts to.