Identity
An annotated collection of 5 books & essays on identity, spanning 1968 to 1999. Featuring works by Ted Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Donna Haraway and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Iron Man
Hughes wrote this children's fable in 1968 as an elegy for his wife Sylvia Plath, embedding grief and identity into a story about a being of unknown origin who must define himself through choice rather than manufacture.…
A Scanner Darkly
Dick's semi-autobiographical novel presents a surveillance apparatus that destroys the very agents operating it — Bob Arctor spies on himself without recognising the subject, a structural metaphor for what happens when m…
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
Haraway's manifesto argues that the boundaries between human and machine, physical and non-physical, male and female, are not natural facts but political constructions — and that the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid of org…
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
If The Second Self studied what people projected onto computers, Life on the Screen studied what they became inside them. Turkle spent years observing and interviewing participants in MUDs — text-based virtual environmen…
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Hayles traced a single, consequential assumption through three waves of cybernetics, postwar science fiction, and contemporary information theory: the idea that information can be separated from the material substrate th…