How We Became Posthuman

N. Katherine Hayles traces the historical shift from the liberal humanist subject to the posthuman entity, focusing on how information became conceptualized as a disembodied essence. She investigates the Macy Conferences on cybernetics held after World War II to analyze how scientists prioritized pattern over presence, effectively decoupling data from its physical substrate. The text bridges the gap between scientific development and cultural imagination by pairing technical histories with literary analyses of authors like Philip K. Dick and Bernard Wolfe. These case studies illustrate the dismantling of the autonomous individual in favor of the cyborg, where the boundaries between biological organisms and computational systems blur.

Scholars of media theory, science studies, and literature read this to understand the genealogy of digital culture. The book provides a framework for analyzing how technological abstractions influence our definitions of what it means to be human. Readers gain a technical and philosophical perspective on the social construction of the cyborg, learning how material embodiment remains necessary even in a landscape dominated by virtuality and artificial intelligence.

Deep and open-ended; a demanding read.

Best for readers like The Deep Diver. Which reader are you?