Is your Fitbit turning you into a cyborg? In this week's podcast we explore the Quantified Self Movement, which encourages gathering data about ourselves in the quest for self-improvement. We get into what this means for our culture of maximization and productivity, how new technologies have helped us to think of ourselves as machines, and how the singularity movement envisions our cyborg future. On the way we talk about Donna Haraway's feminist Cyborg Manifesto, how long Ray Kurzweil thinks it will take for us to live forever, and what it means to be human. You know, the small stuff. Come "process" it all with us…resistance is futile!
Links to Stuff We Talk About
Theory
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991)
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/
Reader-friendly introduction to Haraway’s cyborg manifesto in Wired: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway_pr.html
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/understanding-media
Context
Documentary about Ray Kurzweil:
http://transcendentman.com/
Articles
John Berman. “Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says He Can Bring His Dead Father Back to Life Through a Computer Avatar.” August 9, 2011. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id=14267712
Gary Wold. “The Data-Driven Life.” The New York Times Magazine. April 28, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?_r=0
“Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030.” CNN Money. June 4, 2015.
Bonus
And if you’re interested, check out choice photos of White Men Wearing Google Glass, M.T. Anderson’s amazing novel FEED, and the mysterious replacing-ship-parts question Maria threw out there: Ship of Theseus.
Music this week from our fav electric lady Janelle Monae, Kanye, the STNG soundtrack composers, AND Styx.