Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto

Cyborg Afterlives: Rethinking the Legacy of A Cyborg Manifesto

Nearly forty years have passed since Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto ruptured the intellectual landscape of feminist theory, postmodern philosophy, and cultural critique. What once appeared as a speculative and ironic vision of hybrid beings—“part machine, part organism, part chimerical assemblage”—has today become the texture of our everyday life. The cyborg has long ceased to be a metaphor confined to theory; it is inscribed in our gestures, our tools, our rhythms of labor and leisure, in the very architecture of our desires.

Yet, this assimilation has paradoxically diluted the subversive, emancipatory potential Haraway envisioned. If the cyborg once offered a horizon of irony, play, and resistance to normative categories, today it risks being reduced to a banal condition of existence: an unquestioned symbiosis of human and machine, celebrated in the rhetoric of progress and innovation. The cyborg, stripped of its critical edge, has been folded into the apparatus of contemporary power—a power that thrives on ubiquity, seamlessness, and imperceptible forms of control.

The boundary between organic and technological, physical and digital, has become so porous as to appear irrelevant. Our bodies extend into biometric data, quantified steps, algorithmic feeds. Intimacy is mediated by platforms; memory outsourced to clouds; perception itself filtered through devices. This radical integration has created a new form of dependency that oscillates between convenience and coercion. If once the machine was an external prosthesis, now it functions as an environment, a habitat, and—often—a prison disguised as liberation.

Here lies the crucial shift: the cyborg is no longer merely a metaphor of possibility but a condition of being that demands critical vigilance. The emancipatory irony of Haraway’s manifesto has been overshadowed by the totalizing logics of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and techno-determinism. To acknowledge this is not to retreat into nostalgia or technophobia, but to reawaken the spirit of resistance inscribed in the original text: to imagine ways of inhabiting hybridity without surrendering to its disciplinary force.

What is required today is not an uncritical embrace of technology, nor a wholesale rejection, but an ethics of counter-design. Such an ethics must cultivate spaces where human–machine entanglements can be lived differently, where the cyborg can reclaim its ironic, playful, and emancipatory charge. This involves a shift of perspective: from technology as destiny to technology as negotiation; from inevitability to responsibility; from the automation of life to the reinvention of living.

To think of ourselves as cyborgs, then, is not to accept passively the infrastructures that govern us, but to recognize the unfinished, precarious, and malleable nature of our hybrid condition. It is to insist that symbiosis need not collapse into domination, and that machinic entanglement still harbors the possibility of freedom.

Perhaps the most radical gesture, forty years on, is to return to Haraway’s cyborg not as a prophecy fulfilled but as a question unresolved: how might we transform this chimera—this hybrid, this mosaic—into a companion of critique, a figure through which to resist capture, and a reminder that even within systems of control, the seeds of emancipation can still be cultivated?

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved