Software’s philosophical implications are not only social and political but also metaphysical. Code channels human ingenuity and intention to produce a new, hybrid world, the cyborg world. It both creates and destroys distinctions, reworking our ontologies and necessitating a revision of our politics. Code may both advance and counteract political imperatives: thus, free software directly addresses the question of determining the contours of our selves and the politics we choose. Technology and politics become inseparable when technologized entities are political actors and objects of our political philosophy. A new political philosophy for this technological age must reflect the blurring of boundaries, and the new obscurities, that technology induces. The liberatory potential of free software lies in its potential to address both these effects. Implicit in discussions of the role of computing in business and science, ethics and politics, is another realm, cyberspace. The elsewhereness of cyberspace promises escape; its lack of essential nature or telos inspires wistful theorizing, speculation about its culture, laws and politics (Silver 2000). Cyberspace is, however, a plastic space: while its original design arguably facilitated diverse freedoms, there is no reason to believe these features will exist in perpetuity. Other spaces--physical, economic, technical, social, historical--supervene on cyberspace; its independence is a mirage. The denizens of this hybrid realm are hybrid creatures, assemblages of biological and technological organization: cyborgs.

A term coined in the early days of the space race, “cyborg” describes a biological entity that “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments” (Clynes and Kline 1960). While the term originally referred to supplementing human astronauts with life-support and communication systems, today its application is more ubiquitous. Cyborgs wear glasses, use electronic pacemakers, communicate wirelessly, shop online, have credit card applications evaluated by software agents, are policed by digital eyes, and write code to change the behavior of machines that work with, for and against them. Cyborgs offer one avenue for theorizing the relationship between the bodies and digitality, for exploring the extent of the cleavage between our bodies and our environment. Neither our mental nor our physical aspects carve out a unique niche for us: as Marvin Minsky suggested, we may well be meat machines. But our increasingly technologized understanding of ourselves provokes theoretical challenges to the notion of machines as distinct from humans and nature. In these, the human, the machinic, and the natural unify. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Machines, then, are, “indissociable human extensions (an extended phenotype)” (Haraway 1995), demonstrating that humans and nature are one. These challenges stress the sociopolitical, potentially dystopic, implications of the breakdown of the mechanic/organic boundary and implicitly critique celebrations of the irrelevance of the materiality of information (Wolfram 2002). In such a picture, “code is elevated to the lingua franca not only of computers but of all physical reality” (Hayles 2005). While such triumphalism predicts the ascendance of code, the cyborg future requires us to investigate how this code is controlled.The description of humans as “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2003) suggests that the extension and enhancement of the physical body by tools and prosthetic devices renders vague the boundaries of the body. Together, these theses displace the notion of persons confined by bags of skin; instead, we merge with the external world through technology. The self, then, is a “coalition of biological and non-biological elements, whose membership shifts and alters over time and between contexts” (Clark).

The dominant form of technological augmentation is the computing device: our cyborg selves are not just any old man-machine hybrid but a new entity that blends the physical and the informational. Human behavior emerges from the interaction of different components of its technologically enhanced cognitive environment: thus, human agency and decision-making are blurred by non-human agents. These distributed environments for cognition, raise the possibility we might not control the parameters of our interactions with them. If cyborg intelligence resides partially in its human component and partially in the machine component, then code becomes a subject of inquiry into the distributed self, and provokes questions about its control. The worry that we surrender decision making to our cognitive extensions is not idle Luddite speculation. It is the real fear of becoming passive recipients of opaque technology. Questions of technology are no longer external to us: to inquire into the nature, shape, form and control of technology is to inquire into our selves. Those to whom we grant this control are those to whom we vouchsafe control of our selves.

In a world in which computer technology infiltrates all interactions with the physical world, when its prosthetic enhancements become ubiquitous, our world is no longer a physical one populated by cyborgs, but is itself a cyborg world, where humans and machines commingle in a merger enabled and governed by software. This interaction, ranging from mundane uses of computers for personal productivity to networking, from e-government to computer prosthetics, to our saturation by the informational content of media, is in part determined and limited by the abilities of the machine, which are in turn determined by its software. Software, the machines on which it runs, and the humans that use it, create the cyborg world.

As the cyborg displaces man/machine dualism, the cyborg world dissolves the dichotomy of physical space and cyberspace. Cyberspace is sometimes treated as vastly different in both its being and its attributes (Katsh 1996). The projected separateness of cyberspace enables optimistic theoretical views of it as beyond requiring full social and political protection. But “[p]olitics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics follow” (Sterling 1994). When we are machines rather than only their users, when our interactions with others are modulated by this shared space, when all is interface, cyberspace is not elsewhere. As cyberspace fully interpenetrates the real world, questions about a suitable politics for cyberspace, and its relationship to the politics of physical space, are replaced by questions of the politics of the cyborg world. To devise a normative political philosophy for the cyborg world, we need not turn away from the physical world to study cyberspace; rather, we must focus on the world in which man and machine have blended. The political philosopher’s first task is to uncover the roots of power in this world.

Our freedoms in cyberspace are those granted by code and the protocols it implements. When man and machine interact, co-exist, and intermingle, cyberspace comes to interpenetrate the real world fully. In this cyborg world, software retains its regulatory role, becoming a language of interaction with our extended cyborg selves. The mediation of our extended selves by closed software threatens individual autonomy. We define a notion of freedom for software that does justice to our conception of it as language, sketching the outlines of a social and political philosophy for a cyborg world.

In a cyberspace underwritten by free software, political structures become contingent and flexible: the polity can choose to change the extent and character of its participation. The rejection of opaque power is an old anarchist ideal: free software, by making power transparent, carries the potential to place substantive restrictions on the regulatory power of cyborg government.

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