“Now Are We Cyborgs? Affinities and Technology in the Covid-19 Lockdowns” by Emily Baker and Annie Ring: Summary and Critique

🤖 Cyborgs and the Lockdown Condition

• The chapter reactivates Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in the context of the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, showing how the pandemic accelerated human-machine hybridity.
• Haraway’s cyborg—“a hybrid of machine and organism” (Haraway, p. 149)—is reframed as central to understanding how technology mediates labor, identity, and connection in crises.
• The authors argue, “The Cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (p. 150), particularly as lockdowns made us more dependent on screens, devices, and digital networks.

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🧑🏽‍🔬 From ‘Sister Outsiders’ to ‘Cybourgeoisie’

• The chapter contrasts privileged white-collar remote workers (the “cybourgeoisie”) with frontline keyworkers (often women and people of color), redefining who embodies the cyborg.
• Historical labor contexts are invoked: “The first cyborgs were those workers whose work was systemically devalued or constructed as unskilled” (p. 60).
• PPE is reimagined as a “prosthesis that enables, rather than blocks, human connection” (p. 60), challenging technophobic narratives.

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🧬 Gender, Race, and Anti-Essentialist Feminism

• Baker and Ring adopt Haraway’s anti-essentialist stance, stressing that cyborg identity rejects naturalized definitions of gender: “There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female” (p. 172).
• Saidiya Hartman’s account of “wayward lives” (p. 60) informs their view of the cyborg as resisting historical and racialized domination.
• Maria from Metropolis is cited as a prototype of the anti-essentialist cyborg—a figure that oscillates between virginity and sexual freedom (p. 60).

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🏠 The Conservative Return of the ‘Household’

• Lockdown re-imposed the patriarchal, surveilled “household”: “The household has landed back on us with such an almighty conservative thump” (p. 61).
• The chapter warns that digital homes may become “electronic cottages” of isolation and surveillance, deepening inequality and atomization (p. 63).
• Preciado’s analysis of virus-era biopolitics is used to show how domestic spaces became “new frontiers” of disciplinary power (p. 62).

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💡 Technological Resistance and ‘Informatics of Domination’

• Haraway’s concept of “informatics of domination” is key to analyzing how digital systems exacerbate control under capitalism (p. 61).
• The authors echo Haraway: “Science and technology… are possible means of great human satisfaction as well as a matrix of complex dominations” (p. 181).
• They promote critical, skillful use of technology—writing, creating, and connecting—as methods of reclaiming power from these systems.

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🔗 Affinities vs. Identities

• Haraway’s idea of “affinity”—“not by blood but by choice” (p. 155)—is central to their vision of cyborg politics.
• They invoke Goethe’s Elective Affinities to frame household and workplace communities as fluid, experimental constellations (p. 64).
• “Identities at work… can give way to affinities built across the classes created by the neoliberal university” (p. 64).

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🎭 Art, Writing, and Cyborg Creativity

• The cyborg is seen as an artist and writer whose tools are “the least-worst, least-surveillant platform; the webcam and mousepad” (p. 65).
• Lockdown cultures—poetry, philosophy, and virtual gatherings—become arenas for “exposure”, “sharing”, and “presentation of the self” (p. 65).
• The authors cite Nancy’s Inoperative Community as a model for fragile yet meaningful sociality (p. 65).

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📉 Play, Work, and the Critique of Capitalism

• Haraway’s phrase “All work and all play is a dangerous game” (p. 161) captures the risks of gamified, capitalist modes of connection.
• The authors propose a “prosperity without growth” (Jackson, 2017) that values collaborative creativity over profit.
• They caution against influencers and one-way communication, embracing instead “two-way channels that facilitate meaningful dialogue” (p. 65).

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🌍 Outlook: A Cyborg Future Beyond Lockdown

• The chapter ends on a hopeful note: “It is up to the cyborgs… to orientate the momentum… towards greener, happier, healthier and more connected futures” (p. 66).
• Writing, as cyborg practice, becomes a model for empathy, political action, and collective identity.
• Haraway’s vision—“This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (p. 181)—serves as the ideological anchor for this new community.

🤖 Posthumanism

• The chapter updates Haraway’s cyborg for 21st-century conditions, presenting the cyborg as a lived condition during the Covid-19 lockdowns rather than a speculative metaphor.
• Reframes identity through technologically mediated embodiment, challenging humanist boundaries between human/machine, public/private, and work/home.
• “We argue that cyborg ‘affinities’ open up new ways of challenging the deadly atomisation… of neoliberal capitalism” (p. 59).
• Links to Giuliana Ferri’s notion of the cyborg as part of “critical interculturalism embedded in outsider narratives” (p. 61).

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🧬 Feminist Literary Theory / Cyberfeminism

• Engages deeply with Haraway’s socialist-feminist cyborg as a figure of political resistance against gender essentialism.
• Critiques pandemic-era gender regression: “There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female’” (Haraway, p. 172; cited on p. 60).
• Challenges normative roles of caregiving, motherhood, and domestic labor during lockdown.
• Positions the cyborg as an anti-essentialist feminist agent resisting both traditional femininity and techno-phobia.

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📡 Biopolitics / Surveillance Studies

• Extends Foucault’s concept of biopower into the digital home, drawing on Paul B. Preciado: lockdowns intensified “disciplinary infiltration of homes, lives and minds” (p. 62).
• Intersects with Haraway’s warning about “informatics of domination” (p. 61), where home-working technologies blur control and care.
• Surveillance becomes embedded not only in government responses but also in domestic life through platform capitalism.

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🔗 Marxist & Political Literary Theory

• Offers a critique of neoliberal capitalism’s restructuring of labor and identity through the pandemic.
• Coins new class identities like the “cybourgeoisie” (white-collar remote workers) versus “keyworker cyborgs” (low-paid essential workers) (pp. 59–60).
• Reflects on intersectionality: race, class, and gender determine who suffers most in the technologized lockdown society.

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🧪 Affect Theory & Community Studies

• Builds on Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community to describe affective, artistic, and fragmentary communities formed in lockdown: “exposure, sharing, and presentation of the self” (p. 65).
• Suggests that writing, art, and play during isolation were not escapist but modes of resistance and community-building.
• Embraces Haraway’s vision of partial, collective knowledge: “This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (p. 181; cited p. 66).

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🧱 Queer Theory

• Incorporates Saidiya Hartman’s “wayward lives” to highlight historical queer, Black, and feminist resistances to domestic confinement (p. 60).
• Celebrates “the anti-essentialist lives already being lived by cyborg-beings”, particularly queer, racialized, and precarious subjects (p. 60).
• Positions gender, sexuality, and technology as fluid, not fixed, countering binary identities in both theoretical and social terms.

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✍️ Literary Praxis / Writerly Theory

• Writing becomes a cyborg practice—a combination of body, machine, and social resistance.
• “Writing… is a means of connecting, one that helped so many people around the world to make our way through lockdown” (p. 66).
• Reflects on Helene Cixous’s “there-not-there” presence of women’s writing as resistance to invisibility (p. 65).
• Creative labor is framed as both work and play—with the risks of being commodified: “All work and all play is a dangerous game” (Haraway, p. 161; cited on p. 66).

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🏛️ Critical University Studies

• Challenges hierarchical academic identities by encouraging affinities over divisions: “Identities at work… can give way to affinities built across the classes created by the neoliberal university” (p. 64).
• Advocates unionization, solidarity with outsourced workers and students, and rethinking institutional community through cyborg ethics.

⚖️ Class Privilege and the ‘Cybourgeoisie’

• While the chapter critiques privileged remote workers (the “cybourgeoisie”), it also implicitly centers their experience, potentially under-representing those without stable jobs, housing, or tech access.
• “We, in the new cybourgeoisie, adjusted to these new ways of working…” (p. 63) — the authors acknowledge their own privilege but focus much on the academic context, risking elitism.

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🧩 Partiality and Perspective Limitations

• Though Baker and Ring emphasize “partial connection” (p. 65) and non-total knowledge (Haraway, p. 179), they do not always fully explore how their own social locations (race, ability, geography) shape their theory.
• The chapter concedes this when stating: “We acknowledge the partiality of our perspective” (p. 61), but this caveat may not be sufficient for a work tackling global, intersectional crises.

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🏠 Idealization of Affinity and Fluid Community

• The invocation of affinities (p. 64) and “fluid flexibility” of relationships (p. 65) may be criticized as utopian, particularly when structural forces like capitalism, racism, and patriarchy resist such transformation.
• The metaphor of the “vulnerability of a bubble” (p. 65) could be seen as underestimating the durability of systemic violence and identity-based oppression.

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📡 Underplaying Surveillance Risks of Technology

• While the chapter resists technophobia and affirms tech as a means of pleasure and resistance (Haraway, p. 180), it might be too optimistic about the possibilities of “least-worst” platforms (p. 65).
• Critics may argue that digital tools—even “two-way” ones—carry inherent risks of data extraction, commodification, and surveillance that aren’t deeply explored here.

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🧠 Overextension of the Cyborg Metaphor

• The cyborg figure is applied broadly—from keyworkers to writers to Zoom-users—which, while inclusive, may dilute the political potency of the concept.
• Using the cyborg to encompass almost all technologically-mediated human experience risks turning it into a vague or totalizing metaphor.

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✍️ Artistic Creation Framed as Resistance – But for Whom?

• The chapter positions writing and creativity as vital modes of resistance and community (pp. 65–66), yet doesn’t fully examine who is excluded from such artistic access under conditions of poverty, grief, or oppression.
• As the authors ask: “Does [writing] create new forms of invisibility for those without access?” (p. 66) — the question is crucial, but not fully answered.