feeding your cyborg and brushing its hair

04 Oct, 2025

In my latest way of disengaging from sterotypical small talk (heyhowareyouwhat'syournamehowdoyouknowherohsweetiusedtolivetheretoowhatdoyoudoforworkohicouldneverdothat), I have taken to asking people: are you happy with your online experience?

Most laugh and say hell no! Like it's obvious, like it's normal that everyone in the world is on an infinite scrolling line of vertical videos and hating it, without a question. Most of our internet use has become a chore that needs upkeep, otherwise we're told that we risk falling off into a lonely abyss. It's a requirement now - we have become like frightened pigs, huddled at the back of a pen, watching the shadowy butcher approach.

It's my thought that a lot of these negative emotions come from the centralization of the internet's town squares. By engaging with everyone in the world, brought to you on a timeline someone else made for you, you're not finding any gems of fulfillment. The internet experiment has gotten smaller and smaller. Just a few years ago, a study found that the average American spends 50% of their app time in their most-used app, and almost 80% in their top three apps ¹. This means that people are spending more time living a digital life that has been prescribed for them by a corporation. Their design, their colours, their algorithmic psychological manipulation. What does it mean for you when your sense of self is so strictly governed by a for-profit company's rules?

real and not real

I don't think we should be thinking of our digital experiences as fundamentally separate from our bodies. We are quick to describe our internet as "online" and the flesh world as "real life." We are living in the future now, meaning that an online life is, in every sense, real. In A Cyborg Manifesto ², Donna Haraway theorized that the physical and nonphysical worlds were becoming non-precise. The human was becoming cyborg, a harmony of machine and organism. It is no longer safe at this point in history to passively let your digital self consume without critique. The human and the digital are one.

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet […] From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. (15)

The internet gave innovative, power-seeking, intelligent human beings the ability to impose a grid of control on the planet. The digital machine now knows what you want before you do. It wants you to forget your inconvenient human contradictions, and to find ways to adapt your identity in alignment with the 'appropriate' cultural domination. There is a looming evil to this idea, that so much of our self-expression, ideology and behaviour can be directly looped back to the financial interest of the tech industry.

In that pit of doom where those ideas lurk, what keeps me positive are the types of people who respond with an enthusiastic yes! to my conversation-making question. These are people who have found the second cyborg world, guided by small web principles, self-coded websites, and small community building away from the corporate internet. Many things here are not fully formed. They are contradictory. They are not categorized. They are not always palatable for everyone, in the same way that things must be palatable on the corporate internet, so as to please the masses. A key focus of this world is the value in individual output. To feels satisfied with your contributions to the community, you cannot be a passive consumer. You must connect with people in a way which is meaningful to you.

The cyborg world(s) must be in constant dialogue with each other. The world of kinship must be democratic, and must be built in community. If we run too far we run the risk of repeating the same cycles until we create a neo-grid of domination. But I think it's effective now to ask you what cyborg world(s) do you wish to build? How do we productively chip away at building this online world, keeping in mind the sensibility of it being half-human, half-machine? What does caring for a cyborg self look like? How do we bathe it? How do we keep it fed?

What does talking look like for cyborgs? In the corporate internet, communication wears down and becomes frustrated, divided. We believe that our neighbours are diametrically opposed to ourselves. We see a neighbour as a threat, and we remove ourselves from our communites or dive in to attack only violently. This needs to change in the cyborg world(s) we are building, lest we wake up one day and find ourselves alone. The best worlds I've found are ones in which the town square is governed by a shared set of principles, between people who can disagree productively, with a fundamental care (and crucial understanding) of rights.³

The internet was created for everyone, but these hyper-limited corporate spaces are not. I must acknowledge that I am a woman on a corporate internet that was not built for me. I am also a woman on the internet that taught me how to write, how to connect, how to empathize. I am a woman cyborg on an internet on which I am free to expand, and to build something new. In order to live as animal-machine, I must be willing to participate in community-building while also daring to create a new world for myself.

In building something new, we can't progress backwards. Haraway describes "writing without the founding myth of an original wholeness" (pg 57). Those who do not see an "original wholeness," which does not burden them with the nostalgia of the old days, see instead possibility. We are not returning to the "old internet." We see an opportunity for something to be built collaboratively, including the voices of the ignored, of the powerless. How can we build a cyborg world that is beyond anything the internet has seen before? In recognizing the total naive romanticism of this idea - there is a part of me that believes in the new tech of true human connection and individuality. This digital future goes beyond any one person and it is only true that through our unity, something new will be achieved. Even if the world we are looking for is fundamentally impossible, it is our motivation for building.

If our souls are simultaneously online and not - for the sake of ourselves we must cultivate online spaces. We do not have a choice to consume passively. This is the root of the corporate internet as unfulfilling and hollow - it is because we are neglecting to acknowledge the needs of our cyborg selves, allowing a culture of profit-hungry tech to dictate what type of species/human/machine we are becoming. As cyborgs, we build our homes and our neigbours' homes. We share in the wealth of the ripe digital garden. We brush our hair and take our vitamins. We plug in.

one ask of you

Small web patrons - I was inspired by Professor Chris Novellos' webfutures syllabus, and its many cool resources. I am interested in putting together a 'syllabus' for the small web with readings and videos about the new internet, and the ways in which communities can be fostered. If you have a suggestion for material please email me from my contact page, contributions will be credited. You can also email me just to send me your collected links pages you already host on your blogs.

special thanks

To the many people who use their cyborg time and energy to do cool things online. I am so inspired by you.