We already live in the cyborg era
For several centuries, the advance of technology has been relentlessly dissolving human limits that previously seemed immutable. We’ve been calling this ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’. Lots of things about it have been good, for lots of people.
But what happens when we turn that transformation on ourselves: our bodies, our relationships, and how we reproduce?
The transhumanist revolution isn’t an ominous possibility just round the corner. It already happened. We live in the cyborg era, and have done for 50 years. This newsletter documents the collision between the values we carried over from previous eras, and the technologies we’re unleashing in the current one. My particular focus is how these changes impact on our intimate lives: how men and women meet and form families, and how we live together (or not) as families.
Why subscribe?
Many of us are trying to make sense of this unsettling new age. I want to contribute to that sensemaking. To that end, you’ll receive short despatches from the frontlines of the Anglosphere’s rapidly evolving cyborg culture, roughly once a week. And I’ll share occasional updates on my writing and other appearances elsewhere.
About Mary Harrington
I fell into writing by accident, after two decades of adult life in which I tried every avenue I could think of to avoid it. I’ve been a janitor, a communard, a marketing executive, an internet founder, and a psychotherapist, among other things. Having given up trying to avoid my fate, I’ve joined UnHerd, where I write twice a week as a contributing editor. Elsewhere, my work has appeared in the London Times, the Mail on Sunday, the New Statesman, the New York Post, and The Spectator among many others.
You can find me here on Twitter as @moveincircles.
About my books:
The King and the Swarm
What if the Singularity already happened? How would we know? In The King and the Swarm I’ll explore the revolution now unfolding all around us, and show how our merger with our own technologies has not just already happened - this isn’t even the first time.
The King and the Swarm will be published in early 2027 by Swift in the UK, and Basic Liberty in the USA.
Feminism Against Progress
Feminism Against Progress argues that we don’t have to see feminism as part of a relentless upward moral trajectory. It can also be understood as women’s cultural and political response to the transformation of our intimate lives, throughout the industrial era. But, I argue, as the industrial age recedes in the rear-view mirror and we plunge ever deeper into the cyborg era, we’re importing values and ideals under the guise of ‘feminism’ that no longer serve women’s interests.
Feminism Against Progress (publisher’s page)
Feminism Against Progress (Amazon link)
