The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Bek Hamelin, a particularly talented young student sent my way by one of my treasured fellow travelers, Dr. Rua Williams. I haven't edited these terribly much, and as I post this, I'm running on about two hours of sleep, so please bera with me if it takes a couple of days for me to iron out some errors/omissions. My many thanks to Bek for the opportunity to think with them about these matters!
BH: What is a cyborg to you?
EC: We start from the lay understanding of the cyborg, namely the idea of a organic-technological being (note that I’m not limiting this to humans; something I’ve been rolling around in my head lately is that those videos of dogs communicating by using a button board express some kind of cyborgish caninity). I construe “technological” in the broadest possible sense, the sense familiar to, say, readers of Foucault (etc.): to refer to techniques by which power is exercised upon the body. Language is a technology, urban planning is a technology, laws are technologies, and I won’t belabor the point further. All of these things relate to our organic bodies (such as they are) and other such bodies.
But aren’t we all cyborgs, then? Oh, good heavens, no. I’m unprepared to go so far as to echo Cy. Jillian Weise, and make “depend[ing] on machines to breathe, stay alive, talk, walk, hear or hold a magazine” a necessary criterion to differentiate between cyborg and tryborg (Weise, 2018), but I agree with the basic need to differentiate. Indeed, an earlier intervention by Weise comes closer to my own approach:
Tryborgs want to be cyborgs. This is why they go to bed with Fitbit, brag about gigabit and buy kit with Bitcoin. They have an affinity for the it or the Id. But even when they find a mate by swiping right, and then tell that mate how many steps they walked since Sunday, still they are not cyborgs. To mistake them for cyborgs is to confuse the figurative with the literal. [...] Tryborgs rely on the nonexistence of actual cyborgs for their bread and butter. If cyborgs exist, how will the tryborg remain relevant? Wouldn’t we just ask the cyborg for her opinion? The opinions of cyborgs are conspicuously absent from the expert panels, the tech leadership conferences and the advisory boards. The erasure is not news to us. We have been deleted for centuries, and in the movies, you will often see us go on a long, fruitful journey, only to delete ourselves in the end. (Weise, 2016, emphasis mine).
The difference between a cyborg and a tryborg/other non-cyborg is, in my analysis, a matter of political commitments and marginalization. A strictly lay understanding of cyborghood (I’ve been using the German coinage cyborgkeit in my own notes to differentiate my understanding from others; more on that later) could encompass the billionaire who has used his son as a “blood boy,” only to replace him later with an exogenous supply of albumin, or the attorney supplementing his perfectly capable paralegal with a large language model (to his detriment), or the seller of AI-generated images as works of art. All of these people could easily argue that they’re organic-technological hybrids, to varying degrees (see AI-enhanced “second brain” notetaking techniques). What makes these people tryborgs is less that none of them would die without their dubious augmentations, but because, for all of them, their engagement with the organo-technolgical unity is devastatingly earnest. This sort of tryborg can only start from a naively positive understanding of their relationship to technology. They are operating in nauseous genuineness; the cyborg is doing something else.
At the very beginning (the first line!) of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway sets out the project of constructing “an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit,” “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” constructed around the “image of the cyborg” (Haraway, 1985). It is a shame she doesn’t spend more time on irony as a component of her cyborg; I find it useful as a differentiator between cy- and tryborgs. The cyborg differentiates themself from the tryborg insofar as their identification is not cloyingly technooptimistic, or bloodlessly depoliticized. Indeed, the cyborg is often vexed by their augmentations (note, I’ve not been saying “enhancements”!). “I’m a cyborg,” is a statement that is most true when it drips with a hint of dissatisfaction, because that dissatisfaction is an index of the necessary political commitments that divide the cyborgs from the tryborgs.
BH: Do you feel like a cyborg?
EC: No? Yes? I think “like” is a useful modifier here. I don’t believe myself to be a cyborg, in either the traditional sense or the sense elaborated above. I’ll develop that more when we get to the dehuman.
BH: How are you a cyborg? Can you describe it?
EC: I am not. See below for more.
BH: Is your cyborg-ness for surviving or thriving? Functionality or living better? Or something else?
EC: Something else, easily. Again, we’ll get to that when we get to the dehuman.
BH: Do you know of some ways that cyborgs use technology in language? Or ways you have encountered or talked about? What are your thoughts on this arena
EC: I’ll admit this one is a touch out of my wheelhouse; I’m not paying terribly close attention to the conduct of others who have adopted the cyborg label. Here, then, and only here, I follow Wittgenstein: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
BH: Is there a connection between ‘the dehuman’ and ‘the cyborg’? How are they related? How are they different? (I moved this one up because my answer here will help with my answer to the call center question -e.c.)
EC: I’ve been rolling this one around in my head a bit, because up to this point I haven’t come up with a good way of describing this difference, much to my embarrassment. Let’s try this: the dehuman is to the cyborg what forced rhubarb is to ordinary rhubarb. Dehumans are produced when the oppressor needs the cyborg’s aptitude for being-HCI, without the political commitments, the irony, or the autonomy the cyborg typically enjoys. Dehumans are cyborgs (or non-cyborgs) who are enframed within a productive situation; their habitus is one oriented around productivity (in the normative sense, under capital, in the cases I examine, under anglosphere service industry conditions). I think, vain as it must seem, my own words from earlier might be useful here:
The "dehuman" is the product of the process (the flow if you're a schizoanalyst or a business automation developer) of dehumanization carried to its climax. It is a figure acted upon until it cannot act, or until any action it can take is rendered always and already futile. The dehuman is utilized, in the proper sense that it has been made useful, and then it is used. When a dehuman is used, it is often to bridge the chasm between the properly human and the properly mechanical; it is the material to build a bridge over the uncanny valley. The dehuman is the customer service representative par excellence, the perfect interface of flesh-thought and machine-computation, torn down and rebuilt to fit any purpose, any discipline, any market. Most crucially, the dehuman is made, not simply emergent; to name oneself dehuman is to say "somebody did this to me, and now, like Iago, 'I am not what I am'" (I.i.65) (Cariglino, 2024).
In my answer to your next question, I’d like to illustrate some of these processes at work.
BH: In your piece “pinning the dehuman”, you discuss this concept of becoming dehuman through talking about being a call center employee. You touch on the gendered and disabled dynamics at play, how the dehuman is “the product of the process” and about the machine human interface. Can you tell me a bit more about this? And this relationship of exploitation, the character built from it, and what it says about body-minds and machines?
EC: Some personal context: from 2016-2020, and again briefly in early 2024, I worked as a call center agent, first for a large telecommunications company, then for a much smaller one. These experiences were not uniformly unbearable (the stretch in 2024 was, but there are other reasons for that which I cannot yet work into this theoretical framework.) but they shared key features of dehuman-production (we could say “dehumanization,” sure, but I want to highlight the deliberate, rational process by which dehumans are produced as a resource).
Perhaps the key element here is a general awareness that one’s role is to function as an interface between various systems, both computational and social, and a caller who does not have access to those systems. There’s a fascinating old article in Mother Jones about an early iteration of the job I used to do, entitled “Drugged, Bugged, and Coming Unplugged,” that I like to quote when talking to people about this subject position:
In the brand-new Centralized Repair Service Bureaus that are sprouting up throughout the Bell System, the techniques of work-force control are considerably more refined. Nearly 50 repair service clerks sit in groups of four, their eyes glued to the cathode flicker of jet-black video display terminals. Gone is the howler of the Washington office. In its place, a color television displays a bar graph with the office's "speed of answer" record for the day. Here, the clerks have only eight seconds to answer the electronic beep signaling another customer on the line-a 12-second speed- up over the Washington office. A supervisor rushes forward to explain the new system. What he says holds true for workers throughout the Bell System. "These girls are merely an inter- face between the customer and the computer” (Howard, 1981).
The first of the two companies I worked for is what is called an “incumbent local exchange carrier,” in other words, the local wireline telephone service monopoly. Most of the ILECs in the United States (indeed, definitionally, all of them) started out as Bell Operating Companies, local subsidiaries of the original AT&T. What Howard describes here is a working situation that, save for the introduction of computer-based phone systems, modern PCs at each workstation, and a policy that every inbound call is answered automatically, without the agent accepting it or not, this particular working situation is largely unchanged. The key portion I was struck by is the quote from the repair service supervisor, “these girls are merely an interface,” because it drips with unintended meaning. Let’s close read it:
“Girls” is doing a lot of work here; from the late 19th century (after a brief period during which teenage boys were considered for the role) to the end of widespread operator assisted calling, the vast majority of telephone operators employed by local telephone companies were women (one of my managers, while I worked at the larger telco, started out as an operator in 1997; the gender dynamics were largely unaltered even then.) I return, briefly, to Haraway’s initial statement that the cyborg ought to be a “political myth faithful to feminism,” to note that Haraway’s cyborg came about with women/womanhood squarely in mind.
Of course this supervisor (a man, mind you) sees these girls as almost like an acoustic coupler joining the subscriber’s landline phone to the computer running the trouble ticketing system - not just an interface in the generic sense, but a human modem! This is the relevance of “between,” because the role of this particular form of dehuman is to bridge a gap between the fully human telephone subscriber and the fully mechanical trouble reporting system. Traversing that gap on one’s own, at least at the time, was still seen as a dehumanizing process (paranoia about widespread adoption of computers in government and industry was a common trope among late 20th century civil libertarians; there are some fascinating PSAs directed by Godfrey Reggio you should look up) to which full humans ought not subject themselves, and that computers were insufficiently humanistic to cross on their own. (One could, if one wanted, argue that one way of stating the aim of HCI research is “narrowing the gap until the dehuman is no longer necessary, at which time, well, y’know…” This is where the troubling consequences of dehuman-production start to emerge, the sort that end in ashes. We must remember there are things at stake here, perhaps more in the medium term future than I might have expected the last time I wrote on this topic.)
“Merely” is also significant, in part in relation to my parenthetical immediately above; the goal state is to not need the dehuman at all, so her role must be reduced, made mere, until it is entirely unnecessary. This has been a goal, to lean on our present example, since the dawn of telephony - human operators, “telephone girls,” were thought of from the outset as something that should be mechanized, automated away (I can’t place the source since I’m away from my library at the moment, but something to the effect of “the girlless, cussless telephone”).
I focus primarily on contact center work in my writing, because it’s familiar enough to, more or less, autoethnographize from memory, but I arrived at this idea of the dehuman when trying to solidify my critique of other autistic scholars’ engagements with the presumed affinity between autistic people and machines/the mechanical.
BH: Moving more towards cyborgs again, how do you see autistic communication different from non-autistics?
EC: Everything I can think of to say at the moment is better discussed in Yergeau’s Authoring Autism. I will go so far as to order you a copy when I get paid if you can’t get it otherwise.
BH: As we are talking about larger social models and theoretical frameworks, could elaborate on glitched, cyborg, dehuman, etc. could also talk about the literal communication differences you or others experience. Or whatever you’d like really, I'm interested in it all
Following that, in what ways does tech change or play into autistic communication in your life and/or in your studies?
[Did not answer]
BH: So I had a previous interview with Oswin Latimer, who is an autistic consultant and friend of Rua’s as well, and they have strong convictions against behaviorism and are working to build neurodiverse language outside of it. While it is not something I initially planned to cover in my paper, I find that behaviorism is something important to talk about when looking at man-machine relationships, and I saw in your draft “Talking Typewriters Talk Back” that you also are strongly against behaviorism. Can you elaborate a bit on how you see behaviorism fitting into this larger conversation about technology and people?
EC: This is simple: behaviorism is a philosophical framework that has been used to justify the industrial scale abuse of autistic people (applied behavior analysis), and even if it wasn’t, it’s a reductive and dehumanizing analytic of human conduct. With no apologies to Margaret Thatcher, the behaviorist’s world is one in which “there is no such thing as society, only individuals” and their behaviors.
Put somewhat more directly: behaviorism is the theoretical basis that makes dehuman-production possible. Whether we do it to young (but not only young!) autistic people in the so-called therapeutic process of ABA, or to the worker in the form of workplace training, the philosophy at work is behaviorism. It’s important to consider it in the context of HCI because (and this is an unresearched generalization, don’t take this as gospel) mainstream HCI development/research sees the user as a container full of behaviors to influence through the design of user interfaces (think “nudge theory").
BH: In my readings on cyborgs in class, Joshua Earle discusses care and maintenance and what that looks like for cyborgs, especially for physical disabilities like prosthetics. Earle dives into how maintenance should be the upkeep of current tech enmeshment, rather than upgrades to new things, and how this upkeep should be accessible by the user rather than just done by the company. Do you see any sort of resemblance in your own experiences and understandings of cyborg tech?
EC: Up to this point, I have been struggling with how to integrate the ideas of care and maintenance into what I’ve heretofore considered a pessimistic, and essentially fatalistic, concept of the dehuman. That is to say, I’ve not yet had a chance to account for what it would mean to reverse the flow of dehuman-production, or even if such a reversal would have a result we’d expect it to have (that is to say, rehumanization) or some other outcome.I’ve been musing on this during the long stretches of off time at my new job, which itself is the nearest thing I’ve encountered so far to a rehuman-production flow for call center dehumans in particular.
BH: What sorts of care or maintenance are required for the machine connections that you know?
EC: If such a thing exists in the general sense, if there’s some kind of ur-rehuman-production flow, it likely entails a long rest period (I took most of this year off, at incredible personal cost) and reintroduction to a kind of therapeutic habitat that shares superficial features with the deuman-production flow (similar work, using similar tools, but at a radically slower pace and under far less emotional tension.) I’m not an occupational therapist, and I’m under the impression I’m getting close to reinventing their wheel (or stretching it into a triangle) so I’ll leave this thread here for now.