Are cars cyborgs?

The car-garden hybrid, formerly known as the suburb, is a machine-to-green cyborg, but nevertheless it is wrong. Written 1999.

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Syncretism can not legitimise anything. A cyborg is not better than a cy, or a borg. Unfortunately a lot of people think like this: they think that fusion confers moral value. Worse, they think fusion legitimises conservatism.

There are two famous and influential examples of a technological conservatism being justified by fusion. The first is Ebenezer Howard's Garden City. That late-Victorian predecessor of 20th century suburbs justified its own existence, by claiming to be a fusion of town and country. The second example is the cyborg. This pre-existing term was adopted by the feminist technology theorist Donna Haraway. It has become a technology ideal for a new generation of feminists, and is influential outside the academic community where it originated. Its academic prestige makes it difficult for non-academics to counter the cyborg ideal. That ideal is, in principle, that technologies should be limited to technologies which are fusions. Especially, human-to-machine fusion technology, or its forerunners. Technology in a free market economy is usually human-oriented anyway: the cyborg ideal legitimises this limitation of technological innovation.

The objection to syncretism is that it relies on a syncretic fallacy: that a fusion of entities is always superior to an entity which is not a fusion. If the fused entities exist already, syncretism is a conservatism: because it values fusion of existing entities above innovation. Although post-structuralists would not speak of 'moral duties', they say in effect that humans are morally obliged to overcome dualisms by fusion. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway's syncretist anti-dualism is evident: "...certain dualisms have been persistent in Western Traditions....self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive...to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial..." Transculturalism, transgenderism, and 'boundary transgression' are typical recent syncretist ideals - all easily associated with cyborgs. Four false ethical claims of syncretists are especially relevant here:

• False claim: any x-y fusion is better than any z (...any cyborg better than any non-cyborg...)
• False claim: specifically, any x-y fusion is better than any innovation z (...cyborg stability better than any non-cyborg innovation...)
• False claim: any entity, which can not exist in a world in which fusions are maximised, should not exist (...no non-cyborg in the cyborg world...)
• False claim: a world of maximum fusion is better than any alternative world (...cyborg world best of all possible worlds...)

Car + house + garden = GNP

It is accurate and relevant to treat cars, gardens, single-family houses, parks, roads and landscaped employment areas as a single technological hybrid. It draws from the older technological conservatism of the Garden City movement. At the end of the 19th century, high but non-slum densities became possible: the Garden City movement and similar planning philosophies were a rejection of this technology. Cyborg technology is a rejection of technology which does not integrate or fuse with humans: cyborg ethics restate older demands for a 'humanised technology'. A car is certainly more human-oriented than a train: for some feminist technology theorists, the car is more 'female' than trains. Cyborg ideals do not necessarily appeal to technological gender essentialism, but certainly they serve to legitimise cars, as against trains.

Two fusion technologies combine in the car-garden hybrid: the city-nature fusion, and the human-car fusion. That is simplifying a complex hybrid: it combines cultural values of nature, green, flowers, trees, parks, gardens, house, family, childhood, home, security, mobility, individual freedom, market, achievement, cocoon, romance, travel, exoticism, community, glamour, and beauty - among others. This is an immense cultural friction, at the service of technological conservatism: try running for political office on an anti-garden, anti-family platform.

The combination car, travel, house and garden, accounts for about one-third to half of household expenditure in western Europe. In some countries, the products and services maintaining the entire hybrid may account for half of GNP. That would include much of the construction sector (roads, housing, employment parks), industry (vehicles, components, fuel), maintenance, and financial services. Clearly there are also sectors which can not be reduced to 'car culture': pharmaceuticals or education, for example. That emphasises, that the hybrid described is not just a loose categorisation, but can be considered an entity.

One test of relevancy for the idea of a car-garden hybrid, is to compare economies where it is absent. In low-income economies, certainly - but a better comparison is with eastern Europe. Statistically, economically and emotionally, much of the 'suburban lifestyle' was missing from the former Soviet-dominated states. 'Soviet Bloc' urban planning of the 1970's, is the counter-image of the American suburb (and of the European new towns and garden cities). Grey, monotonous, concrete apartment blocks, placed one after the other along tram lines: that is the image. In details the contrast may be less: densities may not have differed so much, and compared to Ethiopia, eastern Europe had high car ownership. But the image matters, rather than details. People in western Europe and the USA are vaguely aware, that there is a complete alternative urban model. They know that it means: no car, no garden, and waiting for the tram in the snow.

'Car + garden' versus 'Soviet City'

The term cyborg is loaded with some of the same emotional values as 'American technology' against 'Soviet technology'. A pastel-coloured keyboard with rounded corners can be 'cyborg', a rectangular metal keyboard for Cyrillic script somehow is not. However, it would be simplistic to see Donna Haraway as just a Cold War propagandist. She may have been influenced by growing up in Cold War America, but the emotional charge is older than that. The table below gives an impression of the 'emotional load' of the cyborg ideal. That implies: people who like the idea, like it for the values in the cyborg column - and conversely, they detest the images in the non-cyborg column.

The rejection of that alternative world needs a cultural and political legitimation: that is provided by conservative theorists of technology and society, like Ebenezer Howard and Donna Haraway. Cars are cyborgs: they meet the image (or will do when the manufacturers produce cyborg models). Cars are human-extending - as much a 'fusion' as many of the other technologies called cyborg. However, all of that has no value, it indicates no direction, it makes nothing right. Cyborg fusion in combination with garden city fusion, can not legitimise post-suburban urban dispersal.

In summary, older humanist technological conservatism demanded prohibitions of technological innovation in this form: Only technology of service to humans may exist. The cyborg syncretic conservatism of Haraway and others says: Only technology which can fuse with humans may exist.