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 that carries it. She argued that this assumption — that pattern is more essential than presence, that the message matters more than the medium — enabled the dream of disembodied consciousness that runs from Wiener through Moravec to the transhumanists, and that it is both technically productive and philosophically dangerous. The book reads cybernetics, artificial life research, and novels by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and others as parallel expressions of the same cultural negotiation: the gradual displacement of the liberal humanist subject by the posthuman, a figure defined by its entanglement with technology rather than its autonomy from it. Hayles insisted that embodiment matters — that cognition is always situated in a body, that information always requires a material instantiation — and that the erasure of the body from digital discourse was not liberation but ideology. The book remains the most rigorous account of what is lost when digital space is theorised as if bodies do not exist.