How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Source: https://archive.org/details/howwebecameposth0000hayl ↗
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.
Central argument
Hayles argues that a single assumption — that information is separable from its material substrate, that pattern trumps presence — has driven three waves of cybernetics, artificial life research, and postwar science fiction toward the same destination: the fantasy of disembodied intelligence. This move, she contends, is not a neutral technical abstraction but an ideological operation that erases the body from digital discourse while presenting that erasure as liberation. The result is the posthuman: a subject defined not by autonomy from technology but by entanglement with it, and whose emergence exposes the liberal humanist self as a historically contingent construction rather than a universal ground.
Critique
Hayles's insistence on embodiment as the corrective to disembodied information theory is philosophically compelling, but her account risks overstating the coherence and intentionality of the cultural formations she traces — three distinct waves of cybernetics are treated as expressions of a single ideological trajectory, which smooths over significant internal disputes within each field. Her literary readings, while sophisticated, tend to recruit novels as confirmations of an argument already established elsewhere, raising the question of whether the fiction is genuinely evidence or illustration. A deeper tension is that her own corrective — situated, embodied cognition — remains underspecified as a constructive framework; she is more rigorous in diagnosing what the disembodiment assumption costs than in showing what a genuinely materialist information theory would look like in practice.
Why it matters for product
Product teams routinely operationalise the same assumption Hayles critiques: user research is abstracted into personas, behaviour is captured as event streams, and decisions are made on pattern data that has been deliberately stripped of the situated, physical, emotional context in which it was generated — exactly the move from presence to pattern she identifies as ideologically loaded. For a CPO, this is a structural problem in discovery: the further upstream the abstraction, the less the product decision reflects actual embodied use, which is why qualitative, contextual research resists being replaced by analytics without loss of something consequential. Hayles also sharpens the question of what AI-assisted product tools actually do when they process user data — they inherit and amplify the assumption that the signal matters and the body does not, which should inform how much epistemic authority a product organisation grants to those outputs.