In his Beyond the Beyond blog (hosted by WIRED magazine),  cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling recently made some comments on my post, “Cyborgs and the Augmented Reality they Inhabit.”

Here’s how he describes the piece:
[…] an argument about the definition of Augmented Reality and the definition of Cyborgs, until you can get ‘em to click together like puzzle pieces. But so much debris is left on the floor when they’re done with the theory tin-shears, that the debris looks more interesting than the remainder.
Though it may appear quite critical, I actually agree with Sterling on this point—authors on this blog have rendered augmented reality (and the cyborgs that inhabit it) quite banal.  Or, rather, the techno-saturated world that has emerged in the 21st Century appears to us far more mundane than the exotic dystopian imagery that enveloped the famous cyberpunk novels of yesteryear.  The fantasy of ocular implants and digital immersion have given way to the seemingly unremarkable reality of smartphones and Facebook. Through the “theory tin-shears” futurist art of the past becomes the sociology of the present.  But, the study of present realities will never be as exciting as the imagining of future possibilities.
Sterling goes on to offer a second bit of musing/critique:
*Today, for some reason, I find myself wondering about “machine-to-machine Augmented Reality,” meaning forms of AR with no human perceptions. Obviously that’s entirely technically possible, and I rather imagine that, already, most AR data is never seen by people — they’re “points of interest” that never attract any interest, or geolocative databases automatically loaded onto smartphones yet never accessed by people.

*Emphasizing M-2-M AR would be an interesting ontological attack on “Reality,” because, well, machines aren’t supposed to have any reality. In cyborg discussions, people are always privileging the org while nobody sticks up for the cyb. If an augmented tree falls in a forest and only machines hear, does it make a noise?

This critique that we tend to overemphasize the organic is somewhat amusing (if quite provocative) because, generally, criticism comes from the other direction.  Critics of the way the “cyborg” term is employed on this blog (e.g., colleague and technosociology blogger Zeynep Tufekci) tend argue that championing the cyborg fundamentally de-privileges the humanity of a subject, making her more vulnerable by undermining the basis of her political rights (I think this is the critique anyway…).

The problem is that, both these positions, are competing forms digital dualism.  They start with the assumption that humans and technology are separable — that they were separate in some prehistoric past or will be separate in some fantastical future.  I simply don’t believe that the techno-social can be extracted from the human in any recognizable way (or vice-versa).  I argued a similar point in response to Sang-Hyoun Pahk’s recent “why i don’t like ‘augmented reality‘” post:

[…] I believe that the online and offline worlds are formally necessary in determining one another. Yet, that is not to say that either is a sufficient cause in determining the nature of the other. In other words, we cannot make sense of one without the other, but we also cannot make sense of one by looking ONLY at the other. In this way the online and offline worlds are simultaneously distinct and mutually constituted.

Trying to essentialize human or machine is a game of abstraction that, at the the end of the day, distracts from the present political struggles characterizing our current techno-social mileu.