Compost, Not Posthuman
No, I'm not post-human, I'm compost. Haraway said this to Laura Flanders in 2026 with the characteristic precision of a thinker who has watched her concepts be taken up, repackaged, and returned to her in forms she does not recognize. The posthuman — transcendence through technology, the upload, the singularity, merger with the machine — is not her project. The cyborg was never a figure for transcending the human. It was a figure for composting it: allowing the myths of human purity, autonomy, and exceptionalism to decompose so that something richer could grow in the resulting soil. Compost is not glamorous. That is the point.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Silicon Valley imagines the human-AI future as an upload — consciousness transferred to silicon, the meat transcended, the mind liberated from the body's decay. The image is clean, frictionless, immortal. It is also, in Haraway's analysis, the latest iteration of the god trick