ABSTRACT
The social and personal impact of technology has become one of the defining issues of the present. Speed marginalises the subject, transferring war, economics—even entertainment—to a higher level, where the unreliability of the subject is eliminated as a threat to the efficient operation of systems. Speed, for Virilio, has not brought romance and thrill, but the complete remeasurement of human experience. The speed of response, the strategy of anticipation, the distance that ballistic technology reduces to nothing, all contribute to the complete erasure of space as an issue in human existence. Martin Heidegger starts by arguing that technology is not merely a practical relationship to reality. While Heidegger offers a rare attempt at a metaphysics of technology, Donna Haraway’s analysis is grounded in postmodern political history. Her main aim in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is to challenge the traditional left-wing dependence on organic and essentialist models of humanity.
