Holding the human line as cyborgs ⊗ A framework for action

Bit of a catastrophic open rate last week, and a couple of friends reaching out with delivery issues, so it seems like once again Google did something or some security whatever triggered somewhere or a bug splattered in a tube.

If you didn’t get No.404 you can read it here.

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Sorry about this, seems to happen every few months. Onwards!

Holding the human line as cyborgs

The AI backlash is gathering up speed, which might finally put some breaks on the insane speed to frontier labs are imposing. Part of the backlash results in “defensive moves to protect the human.” But as this excellent piece by Ryslaine Moulay argues, they are “defensive moves: they draw a line around the human without asking what the human is actually becoming.”

Moulay grounds the piece in Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto: the boundary between human and machine was never natural, it was always political, drawn to naturalise hierarchies of gender, race, and capital. From there she tracks two responses to that boundary’s increasing instability. The first is “human core,” the market appetite for gestures that carry the irreducible mark of a body, which she follows through viral craft authenticity, cursive-reading volunteers, and brain wearables promising to decode inner states in real time. She shows how each tips into its own form of human washing, either counterfeiting the human signal or narrowing what the body’s signals are allowed to mean.

The second response accepts the cyborg condition outright and asks what it makes possible. Moulay moves through wearables that turn movement into sound, implants that conduct atmospheric data as bodily sensation, and a design project that lets you feel a river’s flow against your skin. The piece closes on neuro-rights legislation—Chile writing mental integrity and cognitive liberty into its constitution in 2021—as a model for governing the entanglement rather than defending against it. The shift she’s after is “from holding the line to governing what lives within it.”

As she warned us in 1985 in A Cyborg Manifesto, the cyborg is not only the creature of fusion between humans and machines. It is the figure that makes the boundary between them illegible because that boundary was always political, drawn to naturalise hierarchies of gender, race and capital. That boundary is indeed harder to ignore when AI is pouring yourself a drink with your own hand! […]

A new genre of human washing: fake artisan accounts, AI-generated craft videos pretending they are struggling artisans, leading you to buy their craft; only to find out they are selling mass-manufactured goods. […]

Someone defined what “mental clarity” or “focus” looks like in a dataset. Someone decided which physiological signals map to which emotional states, and whose bodies were used to build that mapping. This is another form of human washing: presenting a normative reading of the body as if it were the body’s own truth.

What to do as the world falls apart: a framework for action

Nate Hagens has spent two decades mapping what he calls the “more-than-human predicament,” the interlocking crises of fossil fuel depletion, ecological overshoot, and economic fragility. This piece marks a shift in his focus: the diagnostic work is largely done, and the current moment demands a framework for action rather than further description of the problem. It’s quite long and perhaps a bit dry, but considering the complexity of everything he’s talking about, I think it reaches a nice balance between all the things and “ok, I can read this, sit with it, and have a well ordered map of what needs doing and a framework from which to work.” The framework has four levels—personal psychological grounding, trusted network-building, six broad intervention fronts, and a timeline—premised on the idea that none of the material work is possible without first stabilising the individual (“being human”) and building shared understanding among people who see the situation clearly.

The six fronts—physical infrastructure, ecological intervention, dignity systems for the dispossessed, governance, culture and meaning, and economic transition—are not a menu but an interdependent set of domains where work is needed simultaneously. Some are familiar territory for anyone thinking about collapse and resilience; others are less obvious. Hagens insists, correctly, on including dignity infrastructure for people who will lose livelihoods as supply chains contract and jobs are automated, and treats culture and collective meaning-making as essential rather than supplementary. He also argues directly that ideological critique, however accurate, is not a plan. That the moment calls for moving from naming what’s wrong to building what comes next.

What gives the framework its structure is the timeline underneath it all: three overlapping phases. Phase A is the stability window that still exists in much of the world, and the one in which trust, infrastructure, and institutions must be built while surplus and coordination capacity remain. Phase B is the period of shocks and triage, already beginning in places, where the goal is to hold systems together and prevent cascades. Phase C is the stable destination—regenerative, locally embedded, equitable—that gives the earlier phases their direction. Hagens’ central argument is that what gets built now sets the initial conditions for everything that follows, and that path dependence operates at a civilisational scale.

Most of the positive climate outcomes we are likely to see in the next twenty years will not come from technology, they will come from curtailed economic expansion driven by the very forces I described at the beginning of this essay: war, debt, and energy depletion. We already got a preview of this during the pandemic as economic activity halted. Industrial activity contracting is not a climate policy, but it is a climate outcome. […]

Subsidiarity and local governance capacity: decisions made at the lowest appropriate level, which in many cases is probably much more local than we currently assume. Communities need the ability to govern their own resource allocation when higher-level institutions can’t or won’t. […]

Collective imagination and sensemaking: the role of arts and creative work in helping communities grieve, adapt, and imagine. This is not a luxury, it is how human groups have always metabolized disruption to continue working together. […]

Shared reality and sovereign visioning: the capacity of communities to tell their own story and find their own vision for the future rather than have it told for them by algorithms, demagogues, or strangers with large followings. In a period of disruption, the communities that hold together will have a strong enough shared cultural narrative to metabolize hardship without breaking apart. This is not a soft category, it is essential and has the ability to bear weight. […]

This window is finite, and many of us – especially in the last few weeks – are increasingly aware that it is closing. We just don’t know exactly how fast. But everything that can only be built in stability – institutional trust, physical infrastructure, knowledge transfer, and relationships – has to be built now, in this window, before conditions change. […]

What does it look like? Regenerative, resilient, human-scale, embedded in local ecology, equitable in a way that does not depend on infinite growth to fund redistribution, and rich in meaning, social connection, and all the things that actually make human life good.

§ Big Tech’s anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia. “TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers.” ⊗ Lament for the MIT Libraries. “I write with dismay, grief and sorrow for the permanent closure of MIT Libraries Barker, Dewey and Rotch [not yet closed, but likely to suffer the same fate, ed. note], and termination of library staff in those libraries. … For MIT to be closing three of its four major libraries, demonstrates a significant retreat from that commitment to truth and knowledge, to engaging students and faculty with voices, works and researches across time and the present.”

Feed cleanse → Live Jelly Cam at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Evidence for the future? Strategic foresight as a source of evidence for policymaking. “Examines the integration of strategic foresight (SF) as a source of evidence for policymaking. As with past-oriented evidence, SF faces challenges related to its reliability and usability; yet, because it addresses uncertainty and long-term change, these issues take distinctive forms that warrant dedicated consideration.”
• Imagining the Futures of Cyber Security. Includes a short story by friend of the newsletter Paul Graham Raven. “The world of cyber security is constantly changing. What will it look like in 2036? What will stay the same? What aspects will be radically transformed?”
• EoI - Forest Futures gathering. “A 5-day experimental gathering for artists, designers, researchers, and practitioners working at the intersection of ecology, feminist thought, and speculative design. Rooted in the specific conditions of the Kubelíkhof in Upper Franconia, the gathering explores how future-oriented design strategies can emerge from deep engagement with living landscapes, more-than-human relations, and the urgent realities of forest transformation.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas. If you’re like me, you’ve heard of but havent read Leo’s “letter” yet. Thankfully, Simon Willison did, and took some notes. “Justice demands the recognition of the rights of society and the rights of peoples, and includes a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles, preventing them from realizing their full potential.”
• Māori data sovereignty inspires new AI voice models. “Motivated by this need for ‘sovereign digital systems,’ as Keegan calls it, he and Kingsley Eng, Keegan’s master’s student at the time, set out to develop a high-fidelity synthetic voice—a text-to-speech system, in other words—for a specific dialect of te reo Māori. Every technical decision Keegan and Eng made along the way was shaped by a foundational constraint typically ignored by the AI sector—that this synthetic voice, and everything used to build it, must remain owned by the people who speak that dialect. What they produced, they hope, offers a replicable blueprint for other minority language communities around the world.”
• Interaction Models: A scalable approach to human-AI collaboration. Mira Murati’s startup (former CTO at OpenAI). “We think interactivity should scale alongside intelligence; the way we work with AI should not be treated as an afterthought. Interaction models let people collaborate with AI the way we naturally collaborate with each other—they continuously take in audio, video, and text, and think, respond, and act in real time.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Superhot rock holds the energy of the future. “Mazama is using that technology to target higher temperatures. At its pilot site last year, for example, the company reached a 629 degrees Fahrenheit (331 degrees Celsius) temperature in a geothermal well, claiming it to be the world’s hottest geothermal system ever. This year Mazama will complete a further 15 megawatt demonstration on the Newberry site, with ambitious plans to scale. By 2029, Mazama says it will have drilled 18 to 24 wells, with a total 200 megawatt output. It claims the site has a total five gigawatts potential — more than the current total geothermal capacity of the U.S.”
• Building our future through the green commons. “[In] Memphis, Camden, Cincinnati, Akron and Philadelphia, local organizations, residents and civic partners are transforming parks, trails and neighborhoods into living laboratories for environmental stewardship.”
• Almost like Lake Como: Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe’s largest lake landscape. “The Lusatian Lakeland comprises 23 human-made post-mining lakes with a total water surface area of 14,000 hectares. Ten of these are to be connected in future by canals for leisure boating – the plan is to have a continuously navigable water area of 7,000 hectares. Four of the 13 planned navigable canals have already been completed and six more are under construction.”

Asides

• As floods get worse, Britain tries a new solution: beavers. I absolutely LOVE this. Also, paging Robin Sloan, paging Robin Sloan’s Moonbound in the “rollicking adventure” aisle. “It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek's flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.”
• 7,000-year-old underwater wall raises questions about ancient engineering — and lost-city legends. “Scientists found a massive underwater wall off the coast of France that might help explain the origin of the legend of Ys.”
• All the Star Wars lightsaber designs. The æsthetics of some of these are … dubious. “This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies.”