Been wondering, does anyone still use the term proto-cyborg? Iām curious what grinders here think of the term?
When I first heard of biohacking from articles in 2004, grinders were keen on distinguishing between proto-cyborgs with RFID and magnets, and an actual cyborg like Kevin Warwick was when he had the 100 electrode array in the medial nerve of his left arm. But I havenāt heard the term used lately.
My understanding of the distinction is that a body hacked with mechanical hardware is a proto-cyborg, a prototype / transition phase to developing full fledged cyborgs which specifically implant cybernetic technology, which I understand here to mean an electronic modification or addition to the nervous system specifically. That is, machinery which reads from, writes to, or replaces part of the organismās nervous system, thereby being integrated into the organismās cybernetic feedback loop.
Of course, thinkers like Donna Haraway use the term ācyborgā much more loosely, metaphorically even, as a general expression of all of tech-using humanity. āWe are all cyborgs,ā as it has become popular to say. This was long before actual grinders though, and had less to do with the actual field of cybernetics and everything to do with sci-fi myth-making. But my point is, there are more generic usages of the term (even to the point of becoming meaningless) and more specific usages like back in 2004.
When people have asked about it Iāve introduced myself as a āproto-cyborg,ā but I find it just leads to confusion as I have to explain what a proto-cyborg is apart from a cyborg, and since they donāt know what cybernetics is. But then, when people see me in wearable tech and call me a ācyborg,ā they are in just as much confusion as to what a cyborg is. I find myself tempted to just go along with the crowd and call myself a cyborg to avoid having to explain, but then I only reinforce to the misunderstanding.
To use the term ācyborgā in the somewhat looser, casual sense that we often use it around here, what do my fellow cyborgs think? How do you distinguish different types of ācyborgsā or different ways we use the word? For those who have been grinding for a while, do you remember just how the term āproto-cyborgā was used?
