A Cyborg Manifesto

In the AI Story

The Manifesto's specific target was the feminist tradition that located women's authenticity in nature, the body, or the pre-industrial home — a tradition that, Haraway argued, ceded to patriarchy the terrain of technology, reason, and public production. Against this, she proposed the cyborg: a creature equally at home in the factory, the laboratory, and the kitchen, whose identity could not be reduced to either the biological or the technological pole. The political force was inseparable from the ontological one. If the boundaries between human and machine are already porous, then the politics of domination cannot be fought by retreating to a purer human essence. It must be fought on the hybrid terrain where actual power operates.

Haraway anticipated the large language model with eerie specificity. In the original essay she wrote that microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The translation of mind into artificial intelligence was, for her, already underway in 1985. Four years later in Primate Visions, she posed the question that reads now as prophecy: what is the telos of a discourse in which the boundaries among machines, animals, and humans are exceedingly permeable?

The popular uptake misread her. Techno-enthusiasts took the cyborg as celebration of human-machine fusion — chrome and circuitry, the Terminator, the Wired fantasy of transcending the meat. This was never what Haraway meant. The cyborg was always a figure for the politics of hybridity, not a prophecy of merger. By the 2003 Companion Species Manifesto she had moved on to a figure she found richer: dogs, wheat, gut bacteria — organisms whose co-constitutive entanglements with humans demonstrated that the boundary-dissolution she cared about was biological and ordinary, not futuristic and exotic.

The Manifesto's relevance to AI is not that it predicted large language models. It is that it provided the only framework adequate to inhabiting the crisis of identity that such models would provoke — a framework built for hybridity rather than against it, honest about power rather than naive about technology, and capable of staying with the trouble rather than resolving it into either celebration or despair.

Origin

Haraway wrote the Manifesto at the University of California Santa Cruz during the early Reagan era, responding to a specific debate within the Socialist Review collective about whether socialist feminism had adequately reckoned with the information revolution. She had already trained as a biologist at Yale and taught in the History of Consciousness program at UCSC, where the disciplinary boundaries she attacked were themselves being composted into something new. The essay was published in 1985 and reprinted in her 1991 collection Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, after which it became the founding text of a generation of scholarship in science and technology studies.

Key Ideas

Blasphemy, not belief. The Manifesto is a deliberately irreverent intervention, not a program. It refuses both techno-utopianism and techno-nostalgia.

Already hybrid. The cyborg names what we are, not what we might become. The boundary between human and machine was never where we drew it.

Politics before ontology. The cyborg is a political figure first. Its value lies in what it makes thinkable about power, not in what it predicts about technology.

Refusal of purity. Every myth of an uncontaminated origin serves someone's interest in domination. The cyborg composts such myths into something more honest.

Partial, never whole. The cyborg does not promise wholeness or resolution. It promises the ongoing work of making connections across difference without collapsing the differences.

Debates & Critiques

The Manifesto has been criticized from multiple directions: by humanists who read it as celebrating dehumanization, by techno-pessimists who read it as naive about corporate power, and by later feminist scholars including N. Katherine Hayles who argue that the biological grounding of Haraway's later work on companion species limits its applicability to AI. Haraway herself has noted in recent interviews that a Manifesto written today would have to address the Open AI world directly — and would focus on what she calls monocultures of the mind rather than on cyborg capability.