The Committee to Nuke Elysium

In contrast to the medical, electrochemical, and pharmaceutical enhancements first envisioned for cyborgs, the effects of our consumer appurtenances thus far remain superficial and reversible—stranded on an island without an iPhone, your problems are no different from those faced by Robinson Crusoe. If our helplessness in such an environment is due to our being cyborgs, than we humans have been cyborgs for a very long time.

Lepht Anonym’s cyborg erotics harken back to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, in which a political impatience with the biological conditions of human life urged a radical break with biological limits and the cultural baggage that comes with them. “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden,” Haraway writes; “it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” Where the retail cyborgs that Amber Case describes seem to be seeking that Edenic reunion, a numbing togetherness of family and community, made possible by tools that promise to make us “more human.” Troubling and total, Lepht Anonym’s cybernetic commitments remind us that we co-opted pseudocyborgs are domesticated version of the true cyborg: angry, damaged, and feral.