Comment by bbor

Wow, thanks for sharing, incredible stuff. I'm happily surprised to see this upvoted on here, I guess HN hides a sizable-yet-silent group of my fellow hopeless hippies!

Before approaching the content, the writing style here is one of the best versions of the vaguely french provocative style loved by psychoanalysts -- this is what Zizek, Boudrillard, and Foucault are/were ever striving towards. Occasionally funny yet deadly serious, poetically symbolic yet scientifically minded, and unique yet eminently comprehensible. It's infectious!

  Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste.

In case anyone hasn't read Hegel yet, now you don't have to -- a beautifully succinct summary of his whole project.

  Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.

One day, when I start up a software engineering institute for the (a?) new era, I'll get this quote chiselled in massive letters above the entryway. This is the end of the road (or a blind turn?) that starts with facetious hypotheticals about self driving cars, such as "who's to blame if there's an accident", "how should the car weight different human lives", "how do we deal with the anxiety of choosing externally-provided safety over self-determined risk", etc (see https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/trolley-5 and https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-driving-car-ethics). My code is more meaningfully my body than a cancer cell would be, and the jury's still out on how it might compare to the rest of my ever-decaying fleshy bits.

   Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction... We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

... and this, in turn, will go above the doors to the New World Order headquarters.

Thanks again, OP. I'll have to look into this author more!