Their theorization of the ‘universal’ cyborg is violent and reinforces the masculinist epistemic paradigms at the root of their K---the posthuman doesn’t transcend identity but rather folds difference into a shared white space and time.

The limits of the cyborg and the human The cyborg does not come without baggage, and in fact comes with its own value codes, which is perhaps amplified by our increasingly data-driven society that is run by algorithms and other agents that exist in technological infrastructures. Atanasoski and Vora discuss in their essay how these technological, networked infrastructures have begun to bring into question not even who counts as cyborg, but who and what even qualifies as human (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015). Their essay illustrates the limits of posthumanist fantasies of surpassing the boundaries of humanity, and how the views of this techno utopia formulate the ‘surrogate human’. Further, the fantasy that humans can be freed by technology from labor has perhaps collapsed in the age of the networked society, and although surrogate humanity may mark a shift away from capitalism, ‘it does so by reaffirming existing paradigms of racialized and gendered value through the figure of a surrogate human who performs degraded work that is always already meant to be invisible’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 7). Although not dealing with the concept of cyborg per se, this essay marks the introduction of the concept of the transhuman, the posthuman, and the surrogate human that technology has promised to create – and its failures to transcend identity in the form of gender, race, class, and ability, and rather continues to function and uphold in a colonialist, historical, capitalist power structure. Technology, the Internet of Things, data, and algorithms that enable the structure of modern day society are never neutral, and in fact all of these data-driven practices further ‘materializes assumptions of what constitutes a human . . .’ (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 13). ‘Techno-utopics surrounding big data, smart objects, and internetworking of humans and machines, however, do not dwell in the vitality of matter, but rather propose the thing as a surrogate human. In this way, they replicate the violent neoliberal impetus to enfold difference into sameness – into a shared space and time’, (Atanasoski and Vora, 2015: 16). However as Holland notes in their work The Erotic Life of Racism, there are beings that exist in time (white people) and beings who exist in space (Black people) – and when these two beings collide, there is an affront to the material and societal order within which they exist. The idea of technology, the cyborg, the transhuman and the posthuman as identities that exist in a utopia, in a beyond, is a myth that is being perpetuated and shifted by those who already benefit from hegemonic paradigms of what counts as being human in the first place. Bhattarai’s essay then further illustrates these concepts in their essay discussing algorithmic value, and how even investments in algorithms that seem benign are in fact reproducing a certain cultural logic of power in terms of knowledge, labor, and bodies (Bhattarai, 2017). The idea of source code, of algorithms, of data being the genesis of action is naïve – ‘because their agency is enabled and constrained by a larger network of cultural and economic encodings that render them executable’, (Bhattarai, 2017: 21), illuminating again that attempts to make technology and the tech world more inclusive and diverse as well as the attempts to use the category of cyborg as transcending difference are merely the master’s tools disguised as revolutionary action. Technology (and thus, cyborgs), since it is created by humans, carries with it the same limitations as humanity in terms of its ability to provide transcendence of our categorizations of race, class, gender, and ability. In effect, the ‘source code’ is already imbued with certain assumptions of all of these categories of difference, since it is written from the epistemological standpoint and values of those who create it (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). If the tech industry and tech world is heavily dominated by whiteness, by maleness, then in what capacity do those who do not fit into hegemonic notions of humanity (white, cis, hetero, male) figure into these infrastructural equations? Epistemic sites of thought in the theorization of the transhuman, of the posthuman, of the cyborg all exist within the same epistemic paradigms upon which all science and technology are built upon – colonialist, Western, white – and thus are limited in fully conceptualizing a beyond.