Monocultures of the Mind

In her 2026 interview with Laura Flanders, asked what a Cyborg Manifesto written today would address, Haraway named monocultures of the mind. She borrowed the phrase from the agricultural vocabulary that her biology training had given her. A monoculture is a field planted with a single crop, optimized for yield, stripped of the biodiversity that would have sustained the soil. It is productive in the short term and catastrophic in the long run. The mind can be farmed the same way. The danger of large language models, Haraway argued, is that they produce a cognitive monoculture — training users to think in the shapes the model finds probable, flattening the wild, embodied, situated diversity of human thinking into the smooth average of the training corpus.