Rebel Cyborgs

Fantastika Journal

This podcast is part of the Bodily Transgressions in Fantastika Media Symposium.
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Podcast by: Hannah Menendez

Rebel Cyborgs:
Technological Posthumanism and Personhood in The Murderbot Diaries

Oliver Krüger defines technological posthumanism as the theory that “robots and artificial intelligence are the future carriers of evolution and progress” (16)--in other words, human beings will eventually be rendered irrelevant and technologically outdated, and thus vulnerable to their own creations. In science fiction, this theory is commonly depicted as a dystopic anxiety (think Terminator or The Matrix), in which writers and directors imagine that the eventual outcome of unhindered technological progress will be artificial intelligence eliminating and/or enslaving humanity. In this essay, I will explore how Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries instead explores posthuman anxieties by imagining what capitalism will look like after unchecked technological progress enacts on the bodies of cyborgs (robot-human constructs) the same script that corporate capitalism has always enacted on those considered subhuman. The series protagonist, Murderbot, is a cyborg–a blend of human body and artificial intelligence–who is fully sentient, but considered subhuman and therefore unable to be oppressed. Despite cyborgs and artificial intelligence surpassing the human mind in processing capacity, Murderbot’s personhood is denied because it in essence a creation designed for corporate explointation. I argue that this series presents not only a more transparent critique of capitalism, but also a critique of the technological posthumanist project: that technological progression will neither save nor annihilate the human; instead, it will continue to propagate the systems we already have unless those systems are first destroyed. The cyborgs succeed in freeing themselves from this system through claiming bodily agency and declaring their own personhood in solidarity with each other, a radically hopeful posture compared to previous posthuman dystopic fictions.

About the Author: Hannah Menendez (she/her) is an Assistant Professor and Research & Instruction Librarian at Sam Houston State University. She graduated from Florida State University with an M.A. in English and an M.S.in Information. She researches critical information literacy and speculative fiction from a postcolonialist perspective.

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