"CI: That point about bleeding edge cosmetic enhancement is a good segue for my next question: cyborgs and robotics used to be the domain of NASA theorists, futurists and science fiction writers, a quick scan of your list of participants in the 50 posts... project reveals a cast of landscape architects, cartoonists, design bloggers, technology evangelists and writers from the gaming industry. Has ‘cyborg culture’ proliferated to the degree that everyone has something to say on the topic now?"
(((Really interesting point among many in this interesting interview. I don't think it's "cyborg culture" that has proliferated. It's digital metamedia that's proliferated, so that people who might have once been futurists or NASA theorists can enter the previously unknown technosocial niches of "design blogger" and "technology evangelist.")))
(((This is an interview about a project with an extremely heavy science-fictional tinge that is in fact quite remote from science fiction. It lacks the look, feel, extrapolative techniques and sense of wonder payoff of science fiction. There's no fiction in it, and it has scarcely a whiff of science. Basically, it's a large clique of obviously intelligent and creative people who all more or less know each other through the Internet, and are all loosely riffing about cyborgs, and what-cyborg-means-to-them. A cultural artifact of this kind could not have existed without collapsed barriers-to-entry in publishing.)))
(((And it's not even dull, fannish, or self-indulgent. It's a little overwhelming in its volume and its focussed erudition, but it's a very readable and illuminating "project" (whatever a "project" is). Certainly it's far more interesting and gets much more to the core of the matter than, say, a commissioned science fiction anthology titled "Cyborg!" which might have had fifteen science fiction stories about cyborgs. Even if they'd been great science fiction stories by top sci-fi authors with lots of gosh-wow and plot twists, they wouldn't have torn into the depths of the subject in this remarkable way.)))
