These texts shaped how we think about technology, power, and the body. Their vocabulary still circulates — sometimes as inspiration, sometimes as justification for the opposite.
This cluster maps the foundational texts and concepts that built the ideological architecture of the digital age. Haraway, Barlow, VNS Matrix — and the distance between what they meant and how their words are now used.
The question this cluster asks: who is using this concept, and to what end?
Terms in this cluster
Cyborg
Haraway, 1985. The boundary between human and machine as a political construction. Now also a billionaire’s personal brand.
Situated Knowledge
All knowledge is produced from somewhere. There is no view from nowhere — only the pretence of one.
Informatics of Domination
How information systems build new hierarchies. The algorithm does not discriminate. The discrimination is in the data.
Digital Libertarianism
Barlow, 1996. The internet as a space beyond state jurisdiction. The vacuum did not stay empty.
Hacker Ethic
Curiosity as moral duty. Knowledge as commons. The ethic that built open source — and was then absorbed by the companies it enabled.
Cyberfeminism
VNS Matrix, 1991. Technology as terrain of gender struggle. The clitoris as direct line to the matrix.
Black Box
The input goes in. The output comes out. What happens in between is not available to you.
Obfuscation
Deliberately making systems opaque. A corporate strategy. Also, potentially, a tool for the less powerful.
Cyborg Musk
The same vocabulary Haraway used to question power, redeployed to justify concentrating it.
Objectivism (Rand)
Self-interest as moral virtue. The philosophy that Silicon Valley did not invent — but adopted.