Get Your Smart On
Re-reading Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto in light of Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley.
I first encountered Donna Haraway's “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a feminist epistemologies seminar in the early 1990s. At that time, we felt that we were on the cusp of something new, and her writing spoke to this feeling from a feminist perspective. Reading her was exhilarating. I had never read anything like her before. Back then, we were in a fever dream over the liberatory potential of the tech that was transforming our worlds very quickly — the personal computer and the internet. Academics on the left truly believed that the internet would democratize knowledge and connect people across the globe. My own first published piece (in Hypatia, the feminist philosophy journal) was a dialogue with a friend about how the internet enabled a third wave of feminism. It was the end of the Reagan era, and we felt we had weathered a storm and come out the other end. We spoke of the “virtual” and “digital” exactly as some are now talking about “AI” and “agentic AI.” Experience really is a humbling thing…
Because of this context, and what I was bringing to the text, I thought of Haraway as one of the many voices promoting this new tech as good, even though her piece was the first place where I learned about the military origins of the internet. I kind of overlooked or set that part aside to get at the figure of the Cyborg, that machine-organism chimera that animates the piece. I was not the only one who glommed onto the figure, as we all began to think of how we were interfacing with our machines, blurring the lines between human and hardware.
In phenomenological circles, we were extending Merleau-Ponty’s account of how tools like eye glasses become a part of our embodiment, as a way of seeing how we were taking on technologies like mouses and keyboards as part of our own subjectivities. We theorized how technology wasn’t just something we were using, but it was actively reshaping our bodies and social relations, creating new power dynamics globally. As Haraway tells us, everything can be interfaced with in “nearly infinite, polymorphous ways.” We were getting a first taste for interfacing with computers and getting enmeshed on the internet. A queer time and place… I cannot overstate how uncanny it felt to chat with someone you met online, how dangerous and thrilling a boundary crossing. Suddenly, we were free to be anyone we wanted to be online, identities loosened… Even getting an email was magical.
Haraway’s Cyborg is meant to embody “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity,” thriving on “permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” This fractured, messy subjectivity is, for Haraway, a basis for political solidarity built not on essentialist notions of identity (like a unified "woman" based on biology) but on affinity and conscious coalition. Resistance in the age of the informatics of domination involves understanding and engaging with these technological systems, aiming to disrupt them by “recoding communication and intelligence to subvert.” From Haraway's perspective, even within the grid of control, there's potential for unexpected uses, for carving out spaces, for wielding the tools that marked you as Other to redefine the world. Others found eachother online, and communities emerged for the disenfranchised and disaffected. Haraway’s was a challenging, hopeful vision of fighting power within its own technological terrain.
Re-reading Haraway’s essay now, at the same time that I have encountered Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley, and now that we seem to be waking from the fever dream of tech as a liberatory force, I can see that Haraway was a lot more aware of the military origins and the 3Cs animating it - command, control, communication, the military’s control structure. She was writing about technology in a way that retained a memory of the 60s and 70s’ resistance to the proliferation of these tools, and she was using their language. Later on she would say thing that led me to believe she believed her Cyborg, which went the equivalent of “viral” for that time and place, was misunderstood, and attempted to give us other figures to offset the way we glommed on to it. Reading Levine helped me see more of her piece, and develop a whole new appreciation for her work in her “Cyborg Manifesto” and beyond.
For example, a whole-ass section of the essay is subtitled “the informatics of domination.” In this section, she argues that the way we have understood reality to be organized (our Western ontological system since Aristotle) is falling away. Lines are being blurred, boundaries are being crossed, and the Aristotelian language of essence is compromised, a language powered by binary distinctions that underlie how we make sense of human experience. She focuses on three divides: human/animal, organism/machine, and physical/non-physical. The cybernetic interface between organism and machine is represented as the Cyborg figure, an ironic, political dream, unfaithful to its origins. Much like AI, the Cyborg was first theorized in science fiction, which is where she turns for inspiration, mentioning Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Vonda McIntyre.
What I missed back then was just how ironic this use was, for Haraway. Despite the origins of this technology in an informatics of domination, in 3Cs, and computation as an ideology of surveillance and control, Haraway still held fast to the hope (illegitimate?) that these tools could be used in unintended ways and lead to unintended ends in liberation. Normally I would put my faith in human ingenuity, but reading Levine’s Surveillance Valley has put a thumb on the pessimism scale for me.
Herein lies the huge chasm between Haraway and Levine, both of whom seem to understand the military origins of our current technological landscape. Where Haraway thinks we can use these tools against the powers that seek to surveil, predict, and control us in a totalitarian technocratic regime, Levine does not seem to think any of this is redeemable. He writes that surveillance and control are “baked into the DNA” of our technologies. As he extensively documents in Surveillance Valley, the internet wasn't born out of a desire for open communication or democratic ideals. Nope. Its roots, stretching back to the Vietnam War, are firmly planted in military objectives and surveillance.
Levine traces this history through projects spearheaded by ARPA (now DARPA), established as a counterinsurgency research agency under John F. Kennedy. The goal? To win the unconventional counterinsurgency war in Vietnam by understanding and controlling populations—both guerrilla fighters abroad, and then as it came home to roost, anti-war protesters at home. Early technological precursors like the Hollerith tabulation machine, initially for census work but later used by Nazi Germany to identify ethnic groups for extermination, highlight the “double-edged sword” nature of tech, or perhaps its inherent potential for nefarious use.
But the true blueprint for the internet's surveillance potential emerged with projects like Project Cambridge (or Project Camelot) at Harvard and MIT. These initiatives aimed to use computers and networking to ingest vast amounts of data—dossiers, financial transactions, surveys, criminal histories—to analyze it, generate predictive models of human behavior, map social relationships, and predict uprisings. The explicit goal was to aid counterinsurgency efforts, ghetto pacification, strike-breaking, and the monitoring of student protests and black militancy.
Students at the time saw the writing on the wall, protesting the ARPANET as a weapon of “computerized people manipulation,” a tool of “surveillance, political control, and military conquest.” They feared the “Octoper,” a computer network with tentacles reaching into every sector of society, turning people into “automatons.” As Haraway writes, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” The real danger is not that machines will come to resemble humans more and more, but that humans will come to resemble more and more their machines.
Levine details a conscious, deliberate effort to rebrand the internet, distancing it from its military origins. Figures like Stuart Brand, a journalist linked to CIA psychedelic experiments, played a key role in promoting the idea that the internet would lead to utopia. Wired magazine, coming onto the scene in the 1990s, served as a major marketing engine, presenting Silicon Valley as a hub of cool, rebellious messiahs sticking it to the man, propelling us into a better future.1 The narrative put forward in Wired, coinciding with America winning the Cold War, positioned the internet as the operating system for a new, utopian, global democratic village.
However, Levine argues, this mythology conveniently ignored the underlying reality: the internet was, and is, run by massive American corporations inextricably linked with the American empire and its security state—the NSA, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon. Companies like IBM have deep, decades-long ties to the state. The idea that these powerful, undemocratic entities, whose business models depend on collecting vast amounts of data, would suddenly usher in a period of individual empowerment and democracy is, for Levine, naive at best.
Our GenX generation stepped right into the narrative, and the narrative took on the power of origin myth. How many times have you heard the story of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building the personal computer in their parents' garage, anchoring technological innovation in the myth of male genius and social progress? Even in Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, the story begins with the first dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, and with an industry that celebrated itself, as did Google, to “Do no evil,” itself an acknowledgement of sorts.2 I have to go back now and see how this beginning is positioned historically, but given Levine’s receipts, well, I don’t know what to make of this. An omission that is close to the lie…
Because the internet was designed as a tool of surveillance and control, its inherent structure and the interests of the powerful entities that built and maintain it, prevent it from being a genuine tool of liberation. The utopian narrative is not an inherent potential of the technology gone awry. It's a carefully crafted marketing mythology designed to mask the underlying reality. Attempts to use the tech for resistance through technical means (like encryption apps) are often ineffective or co-opted, functioning within the system's design rather than fundamentally challenging it.
Even the anonymity network Tor or secure messaging app Signal, are presented with deep skepticism by Levine. He notes that Tor was initially developed by the US Navy and continues to receive government funding, partly as a “psychological weapon” to pressure other countries on censorship. While it might offer some protection from low-level surveillance, Levine argues that state-level intelligence agencies have ways to penetrate it. Ultimately, he sees these tools as "false solutions" and "honeypots," distracting people from the pervasive private surveillance carried out by tech companies and siphoning energy away from a genuine political movement for privacy.
In Levine's view, the dream of the technocrats—a world where everything and everyone is transparent and manageable—has largely come to pass, and this extinguishes freedom. On the other hand, Haraway offers a framework for finding agency and political possibility within a technologically mediated world of domination, suggesting we can become fluent in its languages and subvert them. Are we cyborgs capable of recoding the grid, or are we simply nodes within a network designed to monitor and manage us, sold on a utopian myth to ensure our willing participation?
To be continued…
Tired of subscriptions? Consider making a one time donation, starting at just $1 🧡 on Ko-Fi.