This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning.\u00a0 I begin by revisiting the cyborg as an entry point to feminist social science, drawing a connection to Kamala Harris as the cyborg\u2019s political manifestation, and placing both in an epistemic context defined by algorithmic logic.\u00a0 In part 2, I propose the node as a theoretical successor to the cyborg, however representative of a new way of thinking that I call matrix thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was socially constructed as a feminist cyborg (Haraway 1991 [1985]).\u00a0 Her public persona fused two irreconcilable parts: one-half relatable woman running an historic campaign with profound appeal to marginalized groups; and one-half cold, hard prosecutor transcendent of race and gender (Gaddini and Figueras-Pont 2024).\u00a0 This contradictory hybridity belies Harris\u2019s tenuous position within a hegemonic power structure where whiteness evokes authority, competence, and safety (Deutsch 2023; McIntosh 1990).\u00a0 By the official launch of her campaign in August 2024, Harris\u2019s messaging had evolved to center the liberation of American women from encroachment on their reproductive rights (Gaddini and Figueras-Pont 2024).\u00a0 Ironically, the call for women\u2019s liberation was rejected by voters in favor of an opponent who could be construed as the grotesque figurehead of patriarchy.<\/p>\n Harris\u2019s electoral loss suggests that the cyborg, as an avatar of feminist social science (\u00c5sberg 2010), is also defunct.\u00a0 The reason why is captured by Audre Lorde\u2019s (1983) adage: \u201cthe master\u2019s tools will never dismantle the master\u2019s house.\u201d\u00a0 Despite its subversive framing, the cyborg, like the master\u2019s tool, can only ever be a thinly veiled extension of the oppressor.\u00a0 Haraway\u2019s (1991 [1985]) cyborg and Harris as a cyborg candidate fail as liberatory figures because, despite narratives to the contrary, each emerges from an algorithmic logic that is shared with militaristic capitalism.\u00a0 Such logic, which arguably underpins the Modern era, tends to flatten complex needs and social dynamics into linear calculations and simple recipes that lack depth and authenticity.\u00a0 The social sciences are not immune from the influence of algorithmic thinking.<\/span>\u00a0 This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning.\u00a0 I begin by revisiting the cyborg as an entry point to feminist social science, drawing a connection to Harris as the cyborg\u2019s political manifestation, and finally placing both in an epistemic context defined by algorithmic logic.\u00a0 In part 2, I propose the node as a theoretical successor to the cyborg, however representative of a new way of thinking that I call matrix thinking.<\/p>\n Early feminist STS scholars challenged strict binaries of male vs. female, natural vs. artificial, and internal vs. external and sought to disrupt the presumption of the male body as universal (Suchman 2008, 141).\u00a0 At the forefront of this wave was Donna Haraway, who introduced the cyborg as \u201ca hybrid of machine and organism\u201d to represent the relationship between \u201cimagination and material reality\u201d (1991 [1985], 149-150).\u00a0 Haraway (1991 [1985], 150) describes the cyborg as a figure with the \u201cpotential\u201d to be liberatory; arguing that it would subvert patriarchy and oppression despite emerging from a world dominated by militaristic capitalism.\u00a0 Haraway (1991 [1985], 150) proposes that oppressed, would-be cyborgs could self-liberate from dehumanizing \u201ccyborg colonization\u201d through a rejection of traditional narratives, including acknowledgement of natural human origins, because out of natural difference comes natural domination.\u00a0 Illustrating the extent of the cyborg\u2019s capacity to sever the restrictive legacies of tradition, Haraway famously argued that her cyborg \u201cwould not recognize the Garden of Eden\u201d (Haraway 1991 [1985], 151).<\/p>\n The theoretical cyborg\u2019s capacity to blend imagination and material reality has shaped liberal, American feminism which, specifically in the case of Harris, relied on the dissonant messaging that a politician can emerge unrepentantly from a political legacy of militaristic capitalism and nevertheless still serve as the progressive feminist choice.\u00a0 For example, Harris\u2019s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention came to a terrifying crescendo with a rallying vision for an America that boasted \u201cthe most lethal fighting force in the world\u201d (Harris 2024: 8).\u00a0 It is notable that Harris carries the same vision for America championed by overt defenders of patriarchy, thus normalizing the role that Harris herself plays in upholding oppression, despite her liberatory messaging to women.<\/p>\n Harris\u2019s loss to an adjudicated rapist should be jarring to American feminist scholars because of the profound failure of the political cyborg as a liberatory social construct.\u00a0 Coalition-building is central to liberation (Harro 2000), and cyborg politics offers a weak mechanism for this.\u00a0 For example, Haraway called for the messy, incomplete, partial, and sometimes contradictory gravitation of cyborgs towards defiant \u201caffinity groups\u201d (Haraway 1991 [1985], 150-151).\u00a0\u00a0 Haraway\u2019s description of affinities suggest that liberatory coalitions are forged spontaneously.\u00a0 Spontaneous affinity is useful for connection, but it is merely a starting point.\u00a0 Moreover, it is not a fleeting affinity that is liberatory, but a deeply forged, interconnected unity.<\/p>\n The shallow nature of cyborg politics parallels a growing social reliance on AI technologies that also speak to our superficial affinities: the cyborg candidate and your Amazon product recommendations are both optimized for cursory appeal.\u00a0 But these calculations belie a darker truth: managing the complex human experience under linear algorithmic processes invites suffering and oppression (O\u2019Neil 2019; Eubanks 2018).\u00a0 Preeminent STS canon, including Theodore Porter\u2019s (1995) Trust in Numbers<\/em> and James C. Scott\u2019s (1998) Seeing Like a State<\/em>, critiqued the algorithmic management of people and environments decades ago.\u00a0 Both algorithmic logic and the earlier coined \u201ccomputational logic\u201d (Porter 1995) standardize and flatten thick, interconnected worlds into thin, linear representations that allow for faster and easier decision-making devoid of empathy or care.\u00a0\u00a0 Some have argued that the advent of generative AI has initiated an entirely new episteme defined by reliance on machine-mediated, algorithmic truth (Pasquinelli and Joler 2020).\u00a0 I disagree.\u00a0 Drawing from Foucault\u2019s (2018 [1970]: 393) \u201creturn to origin\u201d theory that Modernity is driven by humankind\u2019s existential quest to be governed under a God-like authority which can never be reached, I think it\u2019s more likely that symbolic demise of cyborg and the rapid acceleration of AI proliferation are interrelated phenomena that portend epistemic instability of the Modern era.<\/p>\n In short, Haraway\u2019s (1991 [1985]) cyborg is governed by old, computational logic, rendered by an awkward fusion of disparate parts; fantastically confusing but insufficiently complex to inspire truly liberatory networks among heterogenous actors.\u00a0 Similarly, AI technologies represent cyborg logic made manifest. The technological, political, and cultural chaos of the moment demands a liberatory figure that departs from algorithmic thinking altogether.<\/p>\n The Cyborg is Dead (CC0) photo sourced from pexel.com (c) Tara Winstead<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To reconceive the cyborg as something epistemically new, I return to Haraway\u2019s description of physical bodies as \u201cmaterial-semiotic generative nodes\u201d (Haraway 1991 [1988]: 200).\u00a0 As a site of generative interconnectedness, I argue that the node offers a richer symbolism than the cyborg.\u00a0 For example, while the hallmark of the cyborg is algorithmic hybridity, the node reflects a complex, dynamic, and critical process: lymph enters the lymph node and leaves materially changed, while the lymph node is also changed by exposure to pathogens and cells carried in the lymph.\u00a0 The figurative translation is this: if you and I are nodes and empathy or care is the lymph that transfers between us, then we are both changed with every single interaction.\u00a0 Our dynamic connection exists within an infinitely larger system of networked nodes that I imagine as a matrix.<\/p>\n From philosopher Malcolm Ferdinand (2021), the word \u2018matrix\u2019 draws from the Latin mater or mother, while \u2018matrix\u2019 also refers to the \u2019womb\u2019 in French.\u00a0 As it relates to the node in my proposed symbolism, the matrix that holds all the interconnected nodes is not one body, but infinite bodies, in the way that the French \u2018matrix\u2019 is the maker of bodies.\u00a0 Furthermore, bodies acting as nodes are not limited to humankind but can be anything that serves to evoke change upon another node, from animals to mechanical objects.\u00a0 I call capacity to leave others positively changed the quality of nodality.<\/p>\n As a descendant of material-semiotics, nodality accepts that meaning is made through interactions of language and culture on physical bodies but goes further to acknowledge the specialness of nodes.\u00a0 Adding tension to disciplinary wisdom, nodality avoids reliance on generic distinctions, like male vs. female, but surely appreciates that any individual node can carry unique qualities that inspire connection.\u00a0 Nodality is thus unbounded by the physical body or form, because distinguishing qualities are often formless.\u00a0 For example: when I hear a bird sing, her song travels to me like lymph.\u00a0 Her song evokes emotion and is imprinted as memory, and I am changed for having heard it.\u00a0 Day after day the songbird and I strengthen that lymphatic pathway and feelings of empathy, until I can no longer imagine life without her, despite hardly having seen, let alone touched her body.\u00a0 Once I have gotten to know her song this way, I would still be reminded of her if I heard a recording or even an artificially generated song.\u00a0 Ironically, the cruder the rendering the more it would make me long for her authentic song.\u00a0 Whereas feminist standpoint theory posed that understanding the lives of women strengthened objectivity (Harding 1992), so is our own capacity for authenticity strengthened by our greater understanding of nodality, or the unique physical or psychic attributes that inspire heterogenous nodes to connect.<\/p>\n The node draws from material-semiotics as a site of intersection between the material body, language and culture, but further considers the bidirectional exchanges with other nodes, as symbolized by the lymphatic system.\u00a0 Dynamic interconnections among and between human and non-human nodes form a complex matrix, wherein the affective quality of nodes is called nodality.\u00a0 The example of the songbird\u2019s tune on my psyche captures the problem with disciplinary overemphasis on the body: it denies the persistence of disembodied authenticity and the role of nodality within a larger social matrix.<\/p>\n As a manifestation of Donna Haraway\u2019s (1991 [1985]) theoretical cyborg, candidate Kamala Harris was defined by an algorithmic concoction of shallow affinities.\u00a0 The logic of the cyborg candidate reduces the national constituency to simple cohorts whose favor can be gamed in process that has parallels with AI.\u00a0 As AI technology rapidly proliferates and political cyborgs lean more into imagination than material reality, the stage is set for a liberatory figure that is governed by non-algorithmic logic.<\/p>\n Drawing from Haraway (1991 [1988]: 200), I propose the node as the cyborg\u2019s theoretical successor. In contrast to the cyborg, the node is warm, internally integrated, and generative in the way that it attracts empathic connection with other nodes.\u00a0 It has a driving purpose that is more indicative of its state of mind than the output of an algorithmic process. Its logic draws from the contributions it retains from nodal connections, rendering it future-facing, collaborative, and unafraid of change.<\/p>\n As social scientists, we can contribute to the creation of liberatory networks by shifting from investigations of embodied hybridity to examinations of nodality: why nodes connect and how they authenticate social constructions.\u00a0 Arguably, this shift supports an epistemic departure from algorithmic Modernity to whatever qualitative, post-AI ethos may come next. This post was curated by Contributing Editor Dayna Jeffrey.<\/p>\n \u00c5sberg, C. (2010). Enter cyborg: tracing the historiography and ontological turn of feminist technoscience studies.\u202fInternational Journal of Feminist Technoscience,\u202f1(1), 1-25.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Berman, E. P. (2013). Not Just Neoliberalism: Economization in US Science and Technology Policy. Science, Technology, & Human Values. 39 (3), 397-431. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/0162243913509123\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Deutsch, B. (2023). The male privilege checklist: An unabashed imitation of an article by Peggy McIntosh. https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?page_id=2402.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Eubanks, V. (2018).\u202fAutomating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Ferdinand, M. (2021). Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Foucault, M. (2018 [1970]). The order of things (2nd ed.). Routledge, an imprint of Taylor and Francis. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.4324\/9780203996645\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Haraway, D. (1991 [1985]).\u00a0 Chapter 8: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.\u00a0 In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women \u2013 The Reinvention of Nature.\u00a0 New York, NY: Routledge.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n ____________ (1991 [1988]).\u00a0 Chapter 9: Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.\u00a0 In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women \u2013 The Reinvention of Nature.\u00a0 New York, NY: Routledge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n \u00a0 Harding, S.G. (1992). Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epistemology from\/for Rainbow Coalition Politics. Development and Change.\u00a0\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n _____________ (1995). \u201cStrong objectivity\u201d: A response to the new objectivity question.\u202fSynthese\u202f104, 331\u2013349. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/BF01064504\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Harris, K. (2024). Democratic National Convention Speech [Speech transcript]. PBS.org. https:\/\/d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net\/static\/2024\/08\/REMARKS-AS-PREPARED-FOR-DELIVERY-Vice-President-Harris-Acceptance-Speech.pdf\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Harro, B. (2000). The cycle of liberation.\u202fReadings for diversity and social justice,\u202f2, 52-58.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Lorde, A. (1983). The Master\u2019s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master\u2019s House, pp. 94-101 in C. Moraga and G. Anzald\u00faa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Press.\u00a0\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. https:\/\/ psychology.umbc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/57\/2016\/10\/White-Privilege_ McIntosh-1989.pdf.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n O\u2019Neil, C. (2017).\u202fWeapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. New York: Crown.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Pasquinelli, M., Joler, V. (2021). The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism.\u202fAI & Soc 36,1263\u20131280. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s00146-020-01097-6\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Porter, T. (1995). Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press.\u00a0\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.\u00a0\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Suchman, L. (2008). Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial.\u202fThe handbook of science and technology studies,\u202f3, 139-164.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n Varoufakis, Y. (2024).\u202fTechnofeudalism: what killed capitalism.\u202fBrooklyn, NY, Melville House.\u00a0<\/cite><\/cite><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/cite><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\nPart 1: The Cyborg is Dead<\/h2>\n
Cyborg Origins and Politics<\/h3>\n
The Cyborg\u2019s Algorithmic Thinking<\/h3>\n
![\"cyborg](\"http:\/\/blog.castac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/02\/pexels-tara-winstead-8386440.jpg\")
<\/p>\nPart 2: The Node Rises<\/h2>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
To close, I return to Haraway\u2019s statement that the cyborg wouldn\u2019t recognize the Garden of Eden.\u00a0 The difference between the cyborg and the node is perhaps best summed up by this: the node would easily recognize Eden by its many birdsongs.<\/p>\nReferences<\/h2>\n