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Cyborg

Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer

Steve Mann, with Hal Niedzviecki

2001

288 pages

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Keywords

Wearable computer Interface Design

Mixed or Merged Reality

Identity and Subject Formation

Resources

Mann’s web: www.wearcomp.org

 

Cyborg is Steve Mann’s manifesto. It is autobiography, cyborg treatise, a scathing political commentary, and a description of one person’s everyday experiences with a unique technology, a computer that you wear.

Using the medium of the wearable computer, Mann outlines an extensive framework for the interaction of human and computer. With his criteria and philosophy, he expands the definition of the wearable computer to constitute it as a facet of the human, both limiting and liberating.

Wearables can also protect. One purpose for WearComp (Mann’s wearable computer model) is to act as a weapon against surveillance by others. The answer is to turn the computer/camera back on those who rob one of identity. Look at the lookers in order to free oneself.