Cyborg Maintenance: Design, Breakdown, and Inclusion

Abstract

The lived experiences of common cyborgs are ignored by those who most wish to be cyborg. I push back against the utopic, teleological imaginaries of the Transhumanist movement using a daily concern for actual cyborgs: maintenance. Scholarly work on maintenance is sparse, relatively recent, and generally focused on infrastructure and large technological systems. I merge the work done on these large technological systems with the biopolitical work by disability studies scholars and activists. I show that the common narratives of innovation that insist that technology becomes faster, more efficient, and more durable over time are false, and how upkeep rather than upgrading will be the norm for cyborg bodies. I call for a more deliberate design ethos for producing more accessible maintenance as well. The interfaces between technology and the body are sites of significant breakdown as each degrades the other. Moisture, acidity, and healing processes make it difficult for technological systems to last long within the body, and the intrusion of foreign material into the human body triggers scarification, fibroses, infection, and systemic reactions. Disabled people regularly navigate these concerns, and their description of the sorts of work they do to keep up their techno-bodyminds does not match well with the transhumanist narrative. The concerns of cyborg maintenance need to be considered as technologists continue to produce technological interventions into our bodies, and disabled folks for whom such intervention is already a reality can tell us a lot about how that needs to happen.