and my machine is me
1. When I Became My Machine
Selfishly, I have centred the human in this conversation, with a focus on the Human Condition as I try to make senseA of what we are meant to be doing. As part of a species subject to immense changes, it is hard for any of us to truly know the other, but we are all united in that we are all essentially living the same sort of lives if it were to all be reduced to its most basic of forms. As much should be true. A human is a human as much as a fish is a fish - you take either of those two out of its required environmental conditions to live, and both have the same chances of surviving - none. Or it should be so, but perhaps the human’s anticipation might have saved it. But how did it know to anticipate that?
1.1. About the Human Creature
The human is a mystery to the human itself. It has spent a majority of its enlightened life trying to understand how it works. It has treated it lie it would any other animal, observed them in their habitat, analysed them in clinical settings and even sliced it all up to see what makes it it. But even after all that, the smartest of the humankind stand baffled as to what makes it so special.
1.1.1. A Species Not Like the Other
The human, the Homo sapien is special. Not only did it outlive the other Homo bipeds; it has over its millennia long existence learnt to overcome many a trial that has come its way ever since (Homo sapiens - Meaning, Characteristics, & Evolution 2024). It has seen and learnt what it is to do and what is it not to do. Perhaps due to its enterprising nature, or perhaps due to its ability to to organise in groups and tackle problems head on, or perhaps due to a lack of greater threats (owing to as yet undiscovered higher species with greater capabilities), or simply compelled by the urge to survive, the human can be argued to be the only intelligent creature in the world it inhabits. Never mind the fact that it is the human that decided that it is to be so, in all its infinite imagination and limited understanding of its world, the fact remains that the human is not like the other intellectual un-evolved species around it. Not only does it understand itself, but also the mannerisms of the creatures around it (Homo sapiens - Meaning, Characteristics, & Evolution 2024, Homo sapiens - Anatomy, Physiology, Evolution 2024).
And through its understanding of the rights and wrong in its world, it knows many a thing. Knowing of things is such an important facet of its life that it places it on a pedestal. It places those of its kind that know more than most higher than itself. But the most important part of all of this is the implicit agreement that this knowledge is shared. This knowledge is communal, thus every individual can claim of its power. Knowledge however is ever changing. And the outcome of its use changes the world for either the better or the worse depending on who uses it. As a collective species, we then share of the universal after-effects of these changes. The human is not a species like the other, it defends using knowledge and records it for those human that come after it. And so it anticipates for the future. Because it knows ultimately, regardless of the era that it is born in and notwithstanding the circumstances it has to live through, that things aren’t so different after all.
The human is thus not born unknowing and unaware, it is born armed with the knowledge of many. It is no wild creature out in the hinterland which has to teach itself how to live each day unsure of what that comes next for it. It is prepared for eventualities theorised but unseen.
1.1.2. Acceptance of Change - For the Good and the Bad
An aspect of the humans’ (assumed) superiority over the other creatures is owed to its being in a constant state of evolution. Not physically, as in where an animal’s body adapts to its changing environment by selectively breeding for traits that lengthens it lifespan, but rather mentally, where the human uses it mental faculties of observing, theorising and creating that it physically invents ways to adapt to its environment, allowing it to break free of the necessity to live in a specific environment to thrive (Introduction to Human Evolution 2024, Pontzer 2012). And so it has lived for years.
The outcome of its creations are important, and it has long-lasting implications on the humans’ understanding of the world around it. The more it understands, the more it is able to achieve. Events previously considered fortunate enough to have lived through would soon become mere commonplace occurrences. And so fundamentally life-changing were these outcomes that they would be used as markers for a whole new way of living - the Industrial Revolution (Groumpos 2021). The First Industrial Revolution brought with it long distance locomotion, the automation of repetitive mechanical tasks having to be done by humans, and the ability to do more with lesser human hands. People previously employed were made obsolete, and even fewer were put in charge of managing the new machines. The Second Industrial Revolution used these technological advancements as a basis, more advancements were built upon it, the existent systems made more efficient, and so the cycle continues to this very day (Industrial Revolution - Definition, History, Dates, Summary, & Facts 2024).
From a localised people living a mostly agrarian lifestyle concerned with only that which had a direct effect on their lives to now a globalised populous untethered by their physicalities subject to the whims of individuals only assumed to exist, the human is not the same human as it was a mere two hundred years ago. While it could be argued that despite all of these changes, the makings of the Human Condition has remained somewhat the same - being born, working from day to day, having meaningful interactions and interpersonal connections, and ultimately dying - the things that make a human a human - are all still the same regardless of the era one was born into, it would be silly to discount the psychological effects of the many Industrial Revolutions on the human and its specific Condition.
Making sense of the technologies that were part of our lives used to be simple - anyone could and still can explain how a steam engine worked, or how long distance phone calls were made, and there used to be identifiable causes that would hamper the working of these technologies. These were useful tools for people to enhance their quality of life, and the Human Condition remained unchanged as a consequence or a lack thereof of these machines. Or so it was right up till the event of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
1.1.3. A Social Species that Communicates
The ability of the human to form groups is not necessarily special amongst all the creatures that live in packs. They exhibit the same behaviours as those exhibited by animals in the wild - they form packs (both blood related and through affinity), they are territorial, and establish hierarchies of importance (Young 2008). But human organisation is more refined than simple territorial aggression. It has over time realised that it needs to interact in a manner more civilised, where it can allow other humans in its space with both parties under agreement that they have to put aside their disagreements for the current endeavour that requires strength in numbers. There is a right way and a wrong way to get their intentions across.
All animals communicate in some form - they vocalise sounds to inform those of the same species around them - be it audible to the ear or in frequencies beyond those of the human hearing range. All creatures vocalise, there is an important need to communicate to warn, to acknowledge, to woo. Each sound vocalised has behind it important, and at times, life saving intentions and emotions of care (Porges and Lewis 2010, Keeling 2019). No intelligent animal out in the kill-or-be-killed environments they live in would carelessly vocalise, putting themselves at risk of being discovered, unless there was something more important to gain by doing so. We are all evolved to live as long as possible after all.
But the human has evolved from simple vocalisations. It created Language, or acquired it, or evolved to make sounds that resemble it. And while the general consensus of how we came about it is still under study (Origin of Language 2024), it is the other quality apart from the developed brain that makes the human different from all the other intelligent lifeforms on the planet. We might not be able to explain the origins of it very clearly, but the mechanism in which it functions can be categorised as a system - it follows a syntax, and obeys grammatical rules and structure - and from these arrangements of symbols can be derived information with meaning - the same vocalised intent but in written form for wider dissemination (Schmandt-Besserat 2014). The ability to communicate has always been an important cornerstone of the human way of life - with its necessity stressed upon even more by the selectivity of those individuals who were taught how to read and write. Only when access to these tools was democratised to people from all walks of life was when all humans were made truly equal (Goody 1986). Communication, especially Written Communication can be argued to be one of those technologies that significantly altered the Human Condition and brought forth a new way of living. It allowed for a new way to interact with each other, and this enhanced interactivity has eventually snowballed into the current status quo of communications technologies today (Rogers 1986) - in the human’s need to communicate better, it ushered the development of technologies that would bring it ever so much more closer to the other.
1.1.4. Not a Monolith
It is easy to think of people as the same - fundamentally it is just variations of the same animal living out the same sort of life. You are born, you spend a couple of years learning, you then work, you stop working because you physically cannot anymore, and then eventually you pass away. In between your being born and dying, you might be taken care of by individuals, there will be individuals whom you will soon take care of, with each of them living out the same general life structure as you once did. You are in essence not an individual thing, just slight variations of the same human (Inwagen 2024).
When questioned on their identity, it soon arises that in actuality people do not think so - calling into question the validity of this generalised Human Condition. Maybe the sentiment held true when people lived in small circles with little to no external influence on their lives, such as in a pre mass communication society. What one knew was solely dependent on the people around them disseminating that information. What one knew was right was undoubtably true, and an external force that believed otherwise was either untrustworthy or in extreme scenarios wrong.
Which is not to say that even then the people within a group were all variations of the same individual. No, opinions would have still differed, but those opinions, or a life that informed them, would have to be cast aside in the pursuit of the common good. Thus was presented a united front. But the advent of mass communication technologies brought in external forces, forces that said as they pleased, reaching those who would have to previously kept their opinions hidden to avoid trouble. Soon the opinion was allowed to exist, it was only that, and if you didn’t subscribe to that school of thought, you could just not buy that book or listen to that radio broadcast.
The minds of people aren’t that simple after all, and the personal moralities of each persons right and wrong was soon representative of their own status quo when so many external voices were on the air. There were voices within the once de-facto united group. There was no protection offered by the group, but rather there was respect in having your opinions. The world at this point was embroiled in wars and battles, with people whose nations were participant not fully in agreement with the policies of those in power - who was an individual more special than the rest of them. No longer pleased with the purposes they were laying down their lives, the individual was compelled to take a stand against the unquestioning blind-faith masses.
Given this context, a tool like the internet that democratised thought, that allowed all thoughts to be broadcast to the world, that found in the farthest reaches of the world someone who agreed with an opinion you had, a tool that allowed the individual to truly represent themselves - it is no wonder that it was accepted with open arms and praised for its ability to bring forth a new era of people (vlogbrothers 2024). Now more than ever, we are not a human, we are all very different types of human. It’s not as if the individual could just exclude the opposing individual from the world. We all have to live alongside each other, for the sake of greater peace.
1.2. Man-Made Horrors Beyond Comprehension
The human has left its mark on all that it has created - the tools it devised were meant to function as an extension of their physical capabilities. Ever since the first stick with pointy rock attached that made holding prey animals easier, to whatever Artificial Intelligence fuelled sci-fi dystopia of machines we find ourself in today - the machine/tool in question has always been representative of human intent. But whose intent is it that we carry out in our acceptance of knowledge for the common good?
1.2.1. Electronic Devices as an Extension of the Self
We live in an era of Modern Technology - a new way of living that is easier than those that came before it, the people afforded utilities at the mere touch of a button - with The Internet at the core of this way of life. And in its small lifespan so far, it has become so ubiquitous with our way of life that us alive today forget how recent of a technology it actually is (Roser 2018) - it’s only been around since 1990. The Internet could be any of our fathers or grandfathers - thats how recent it is - which is to say that there exists a generation alive today that was more or less raised on The Internet as much as it was on The Real World.
My Phone is Not Just A PhoneExactly that. My Phone is not just my phone, it is something much greater than that. I can’t say that about my laptop, or a tablet I use, or the family computer - these are merely tools in my daily life much like the printer or microwave. I can’t say that about a landline connection either. Sure both the landline and my phone serve the same basic purpose of communicating - I use it to make phone calls. I could just as easily make use of postal services to send someone a message, or email if I want a quicker response. But the Phone is so much more than its dictated purpose (Ough 2023) - to essentially make calls and send messages, and/or save important data, images, notes. The Phone is an extension of my own faculties - I can do what I want when I want. I am a font of information that I can readily access thanks to my permanent connection to the internet, a gallery of images of moments of my life and of those around me thanks to the camera on me at all times, a library of memoirs, conversations and reminders that all put together a picture of me that is accurate to how I want to be viewed, and an electronic reconstruction of myself from all the data gathered from me from the moment I wake to the moment I sleep, and through my sleep as well.
My phone is not just a phone. It is me.
Is it Still a Phone - Extending these Thoughts
Realistically, no human really has a choice in any of this. We are simply born, and we have to make sense of the conditions that are laid out in front of us. As with Moore’s Law, the technology we use in our waking moments have out-grown us by leaps and bounds within the span of our lifetimes while we have remained the same human this whole time. We as a people today exist in what Zižek (2014) calls a state of ”future shock”, where Modern Technology has developed at a rate much quicker than it is possible for the human mind to comprehend both these developments and the socio-economic, socio-political, and socio-cultural impacts that they have left in their wake. That these devices are ubiquitous and commonplace, and that we look upon times before the advent of them as a much more difficult time to be alive is representative of the accepted total good that comes about from the utilisation of these devices.
I too am one of many people alive today that grew up with a connection to the internet, whose presence in my life I really never had to question. It was just there. And while I knew of people who hadn’t grown up with it, they had by the time of my brain developing grown accustomed to it. My Human Condition came along with an internet connection, whatever conditions caused the internet to flourish and the optimism for a better future (Cudd and Eftekhari 2021). My socialising as a person was and is tethered to the internet (Epstein 2024). I have known it as a tool and The Internet - a virtual realm separate from The Real World.
As a tool it is unlike anything else - it singlehandedly changed how we as a species communicate. No longer was one limited to physical circles of people with whom you shared no interests at all, one could create a whole virtual network of people with whom they could discuss on bulletin boards and forums the most niche of topics without fear of judgement. Then there was the anonymity, you were valued on what you knew and could offer to strangers rather than who you were in reality. If the world around you was rife with discrimination, or you were simply struggling to make ”real” connections, The Internet was your way out of it (Ortiz-Ospina 2020). It was a defined space, it had its own people, its own specific culture - all the hallmarks of a nation-state to declare its own identity - and so it was going to be (Inwagen 2024). What other tool could offer you all of this for the low low cost of having been born in a part of the world that has access to the internet (Ritchie et al. 2023), and an education that offered one some semblance of media literacy and online safety to make full use of its seemingly unlimited potential?
1.2.2. Electronic Devices as a Tool for Harm
The Internet was constructed to serve the person using it. A world where you could see only what you wanted to see, read only what interested and was pertinent to you, and put out only what you felt best described you. You could create a space that was meant for only you. No one who wasn’t meant to reach you could. In a world so divided you could find solidarity when The Real World didn’t offer you any meaningful interpersonal connections.
However, the internet was ultimately a tool - and as a tool it could be both beneficial and deadly. What if you were to find yourself on the wrong side of it, and suddenly it was a tool against you? In this hyper-individualistic socio-cultural landscape where one is meant to outshine the other, a personal device like the phone that you’re tied to to carry out most of your daily interactions isn’t exactly the best idea (Shanspeare 2022). An individual was unfortunately a commodity to be traded on the open seas of the internet. It had allowed for anonymous discussions of the wildest ideas, a space free of judgement and unfortunately at times no consequence for actions performed on it. And as a commodity, there are pros and cons to behaving a certain way, or rather exhibiting patterns that gets the most interaction from the masses on the internet (vlogbrothers 2024, Mbowe 2024).
Like a virtual Pandora’s box, the internet brought about collectives intending both harm and good. And so effective it was in it’s ability to bring individuals together (Dolata and Schrape 2016) that we all forgot that on the other side of the screen was as actual person and not just the curated avatar of themselves they made to represent themselves. Actual people with the same old opinions of right and wrong, and now a tool that allowed for the amplification of these opinions.
What if someone were to incite the masses to take their opinions off The Internet and into The Real World? Well they have. Especially now in a social media age, where everyone is seemingly perpetually online and being treated as a metric to serve the purposes of large tech-conglomerates (Keary 2024), it is easy for any one of us with our targeted content to fall down a horrible rabbit-hole of misinformation and self-harm (Rossi 2024, Keary 2023). There had been actual harm caused by the tool, and we were not prepared to handle it. And it would happen again, and again, and again.
1.3. What is One to Do?
Today is a day of information overload. I know too much about things I don’t even want to know about. And every time I use my phone I know more and more. And it’s always something horrid. I want to put my phone down and disconnect from it all, but I am waiting to hear back about something important and need to be on my phone in case I miss it.
We are in a new age of upset, and we have to acknowledge the role both a mass communication network and a device small enough to fit in the palm of our hands has played in causing this to be so. By removing the intermediate tedium of having to be in a specific spot, logging on to a computer device and then onto the internet, we have removed the metaphorical door between the self and the rest of the world. Things of both sides have spilled in to the other side, and as we stand, the line between private and public gets more obscure. Curated identities, faceless allied individuals against what is a accepted moral good, the questioning of things so accepted that we have begun to doubt the very makeup of the world we inhabit, named individuals against the accepted moral bad, that one can say whatever without repercussions, today’s upset is beset with a weird moral quandary - if you are not for, you are against. We are also in a new age of surveillance. The thing in your pocket that once used to be for the sole purpose of making calls on the go is now tracking your every move. Even when stationary, all your interactions with the device are points of information that inform the systems that track you of what you are - your likes and dislikes, what you said in passing, the one thing you had to look up to prove a point, or just what makes you curious. For every one of us existing in this reality, there is a virtual us on a server somewhere - a virtual us that we (the layman) have no access to.
We could just log off for good. Put down the devices that tether us to this awful virtual reality and live in the real reality. We’d be missing out on so much going on, but it would be so worth it, right?
The truth is, I don’t actually know. But surely, with all this knowledge we can make something that makes us question our own condition and helps us come out of this more aware of ourselves.
2. Thoughts that Inform the Creature - Making a Better Creature
It would be impossible at this point to undo fifty years’ worth of rapid technological development tor us to go back to a state of ”normalcy” that were the socio-technological interactions just a few years ago. There has been undeniable good that has come about thanks to these technologies, this is a fact that cannot be denied. Unfortunately, the bad just keeps getting worse, and instead of a tool whose use at the hands of the user is free of moral implications, i.e the tool itself is not at fault, the technologies we implement itself is seen as evil.
I, We, You, Me, Them and Us
Mainly Referencing
Slavoj Zižek, Event
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s
Manfred E Clynes & Nathan S Klein, Cyborgs and Space
Slavoj Zižek, Event
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s
Manfred E Clynes & Nathan S Klein, Cyborgs and Space
2.1.1. People are Tricky
As noted earlier in Section 1.1 on what factors contribute to what determines something to be generally considered Human - in pursuit of what people do and say. We are a social species who self-organise (self-organise in that you are either forced into it by those around you, or that is just how things seem to be, or the conditions are favourable for you to exist as is.) ourselves and those around us in top down hierarchies of influence, power and care. You are born into it, that is, you come into the world with no choice in the matter of who is in power, what socio-economic conditions you are born into, and the ultimate aim of it all would be to live it out to the best of your abilities.
Hierarchies of Care and Influence
Starting off with the simplest of the three - care and influence - which exist as two views of the same metric - to look at how people exist. Let’s say we have a person, 𝑝, who exists within the hierarchies mentioned above. Within the framework of a hierarchy of care, if we simplify it down to a set of people who care for 𝑝- 𝐴, a set of people who 𝑝 cares for - 𝐵, and a third which is everyone else irrelevant to 𝑝- 𝐶.
Within a hierarchy of care, what is important for something to be cared about is the value it offers. Obviously there are degrees to the amount of care offered to entities - the top of the hierarchy are the set 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵. A tier below would be 𝐴 ∪ 𝐵 − 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵 - cared of by friends and family. While 𝑝 might not not directly care for everyone in 𝐴 ∪ 𝐵 − 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵 , because people in 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵 do value their opinions, and 𝑝 values 𝐴 ∩ 𝐵, the values of the former influence the latter - that is, I care for my friend, they are influenced by their friend, so I might indirectly value their value to my friend. The set 𝐶 is a set of people 𝑝 can choose to be indifferent about aside from surface level politeness owed to each individual as is their right.
Introducing person 𝑞, who obeys all the same rules as set out for 𝑝. They both have people they care for and people they don’t care about. The same stands true for 𝑟. Lets now assume that 𝑞, 𝑟 ∈ ((𝐴 ∩ 𝐵)𝑝) , but within the ((𝐴 ∩ 𝐵)𝑞, there are some that absolutely against 𝑟. What does one do then?
Hierarchies of Power
You, and me - we are fully fleshed out versions of 𝑝, 𝑞 and 𝑟. We are the common man - which is to say that we do not have the tools that would allow us to change the world as we know it. We only have control over what is in our influence and under our care. And as the common man, we stand at the bottom of the hierarchy of the power systems that make the human world - the Complex that supports life as we know it what it is. Within these structures, we are not individuals with opinions, values and personalities, rather that we are units of consumption and progress. We exist as employees in the factory of life, with our worth being equated to the work we can offer in exchange of the benefit of being allowed to exist within the system.
This reductionist view of over eight billion people is wrong, we know that. Logically it is us, the workers, who uphold the hierarchy of power by deferring to those more capable of leadership, the upper management of politics, not the other way around. Yet our reality does not reflect the logic (Epstein 2024). We know that we provide our input through our elected representatives, but then why do we feel so hopeless and powerless. People are shaped by the time they live in. Logic be damned, we have to live our lives despite what makes sense and what doesn’t. We are all children born into a family arranged in a manner that benefits the larger systems at play.
2.1.2. The Cyborg is Free of the Constraints of the Hierarchies
For years and years you had the systems of power that dictated what an individual could and could not do within their homes and the wider communities they lived in and all of a sudden there’s this machine that threatens everything as you know it. This change brought about by emerging technologies and how it forced society itself to adapt or become obsolete is what Haraway (2006) writes about in A Cyborg Manifesto. Within A Cyborg Manifesto you are made aware of a dominant class and a repressed class within humans and now you have this third entity that has replaced the dominant class, never mind what becomes the repress class altogether, and yet it is free off the burden it should have by virtue of its position, all while still existing under the hierarchies of power that are exerted by the military industrial complex. As an organism born of both reality and fiction, as Haraway says, the cyborg transcends reality and brings forth what Zižek (2014) calls a new reality. While one can argue that the cyborg is simply what comes along in the natural progression of humanity’s need to be more than - just because it has the technological capability to do so (Clynes and Kline 1995), the fact still remains that it was dreamt of by man, It was created by his hands and in his image, and now it represents both the best and worst of man itself. It has obtained this position by displacing man himself. It has no weaknesses that it cannot logic away, and assuming it was programmed with the fortitude of man and the binary thinking of machines, it’s no wonder that we are scared of it - it is us but free of the hierarchies of care.
2.2. Disillusionment with Artificial Intelligence and the Allure of Electro-mechanical Entities
Mainly Referencing
Michael Wooldridge, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain
Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman
Michael Wooldridge, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain
Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman
Of all the technologies that have come about since the post-80s boom in technical ability, and of those that have stayed on since then, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is by far the most mundane of them all. Yes, it allows the machines we utilise to do more. Yes, it also allows the machines to not be constricted to their binaries, but rather announce to the operator that the answer to a question lies somewhere between a yes and a no. And yes it allows for computers to see as humans would. Yes to these and many more, but what still remains is that we are just trying to emulate human. What started out as one man’s test to see if a human could differentiate between a human and a computer on the other side of an opaque screen has now led to such a clear demarcation of what is what so that a computer can memorise what things should be (Wooldridge 2021) . And where is the humanity in that?
If the human is anything it is curious, and nothing escapes the understanding of the human more than the human itself. From folk medicine to pseudoscience to spirituality and philosophy, we are always trying to understand ourselves more. And brain itself is the most elusive bit of the human. The brain controls the human, it makes it do things and sometimes those things can be poking into the brains of the mentally unwell and treating neurons in the brain like electric circuits. Just as humanity created tools to perform as extensions of themselves, the tools themselves took on an identity of their own and were turned around back on to people, to break down their behaviours into smaller processes that all added together ultimately as an individual person. The question that often gets asked is if the human the brain or a soul? While so sounds more appealing in that it has a more individual distinct identity, and if the human is the brain then surely we are all the same? And so pioneers of cybernetics like Grey Walter and Ross Ashby go around replicating human behaviours as electronic circuit (Pickering 2010). In an attempt to understand the human brain Grey Walter created his turtles, Machina Speculatrix, battery powered motorised creatures that moved about in search of the other or in search of a power cells to keep itself going. If this is at the core of what makes us envision the idea of cyborgs, that bits of human that is damaged can be replaced by electronic bits designed to replicate that function and supplement as and when it can, its not far-fetched to call ourselves cyborgs now, is it? We became post-human in our pursuit of understanding, by creating abstracted representations of human functionality, to examine and test on in a virtual clean environment, and learn more about ourselves, a more nuanced and less bloody approach to performing experiments on humans (Hayles 2008). All we’re doing is removing ourselves from direct line of fire.
This is simply why electro-mechanical, hard-coded machines are so alluring, they sit on the opposite end of all of this. There is no intent behind these ma chines that isn’t the creator’s intent. Any changes made to it would be possible by someone who understood it. People are like electro-mechanical machines. We know only what we know, we choose to, and we only exert so much influence. We are both prone to errors and confusions.
3. Refrences
Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline (1995). “Cyborgs and Space”. In: ed. by Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor. The Cyborg Handbook. Routledge, pp. 29-34.
Cudd, Ann and Seena Eftekhari (2021). “Contractarianism”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Dolata, Ulrich and Jan-Felix Schrape (2016). “Masses, Crowds, Communities, Movements: Collective Action in the Internet Age”. In: Social Movement Studies 15.1, pp. 1–18. DOI: 10 . 1080 / 14742837 . 2015 . 1055722. eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2015.1055722. URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2015.1055722.
Epstein, Brian (2024). “Social Ontology”. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. Fall 2024. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Goody, J. (1986). The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521339629. URL :https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9Kn8dVDrF50C.
Groumpos, P. P. (2021). “A Critical Historical and Scientific Overview of all Industrial Revolutions”. In: IFAC-PapersOnLine 54.13. 20th IFAC Conference on Technology, Culture, and International Stability TECIS 2021, pp. 464–471. ISSN: 2405-8963. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.10.492. URL:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896321019297.
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