Everyday cyborgs and the love-hate cybernetic relationship

Abstract

Everyday cyborgs are created through the implantation of a cybernetic device in the form of an ICD that will protect them from a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). Using their voices and of those that live with them, I relate their stories of cyborgisation, beginning from the reasons why they came to be a techno-organic hybrid mediated through the medical system. With no space inside their bodies to accommodate the ICD, it sits on the in-between of inside but also as a reverse silhouette on the outside. Taking the outside-in, the ICD generates a body whose ‘absent absence’ is caused by invasion and alienation (Leder, 1990). Eventually the ICD sinks into the body, losing its prominence, and acclimatisation to the new bodily hybridity is a process that follows implantation: accepting the ICD as a corporeal structure and becoming an important ‘part of me’. Nevertheless, the presence of the ICD continues to alter the daily life of the everyday cyborg from where they can go to how they interact with others. Spouses and partners of everyday cyborgs are grateful for the ICD that allows them to stand down from their watch offering day and night insurance against SCA. The everyday cyborg complains about the over-protectiveness of loved ones who now see their role as protecting everyday cyborgs from harm they might do to themselves (as opposed to protecting them from the slim possibility of malicious hackers). Indeed, the everyday cyborg reconciles the lack of autonomy they have over the ICD activating through: 1) viewing the ICD as doing something ‘for’ them rather than ‘to’ them, and 2) blaming excessive activities causing the ICD to shock them relocates agency with the cyborg.