(((Knowledge Ecology)))

If you crossed Donna Haraway with a software developer building apps for smart phones (what a weird thought!) you might end up with something like THIS. A noteworthy excerpt towards the end of the interview contains this rather insightful commentary on cyborg anthropology:

Can you explain what a cyborg anthropologist is? 
Case: You take technology and humanity and you understand how they interact with each other. For a long time, it really didn’t matter if a user interface was easy to use, because it was either for the military or the government and people just dealt with bad user interfaces. But as more and more people used technology, everything has completely changed. And it’s going very quickly. So what a cyborg anthropologist does is looks at the relationships between humans and technology and how it affects us and objectively sees what the heck we’re turning into because we’re this species of human plus machine where we’re symbiotically evolving each other. We choose to buy something and it continues to live and it evolves. Or we choose not to buy something and it goes away. So we’re seeing this species of phone and this species of electronics evolve alongside us and augment our brains. And it’s fascinating to look at. We also have a lot of future shock. You can look away for two years and the whole landscape has changed.

I like the autonomy afforded to different species of technology in the interview even as I continue to struggle with the fact that we have no idea what effects the kinds of beings we are releasing onto the Earth will have.