Living in a Post-Cyborg Era

Steve Mann, Posthumanism, and the Body We Are Becoming

This essay was developed collaboratively with AI. Intellectual direction, research framing, fact-checking and editorial decisions were made by the author Kristaps Brīze.

In February 2002, Steve Mann arrived at St. John's International Airport in Newfoundland wearing a computer. Not a laptop or a smartphone, but a custom-built wearable system he had spent more than twenty years integrating into his daily perception. Cameras, sensors, processors, and electrodes formed what Mann described as an extension of his nervous system. An engineering professor at the University of Toronto and a graduate of MIT's Media Lab, he had become one of the first people to live continuously with a technologically augmented body.

Airport security saw something else. Agents removed the system by force. Electrodes were torn from his skin. Hardware was damaged. Disoriented without equipment he had worn for decades, Mann fell repeatedly while boarding his flight and later returned home in a wheelchair.

The incident exposed a problem larger than one traveller's misfortune. Human augmentation had advanced to the point where technology could become part of a person's functioning body. Institutions, however, still operated according to older categories. The world had produced a cyborg; its systems had no place for one.

For many observers, Mann embodied a vision that had emerged from late twentieth-century technology culture. In 1985, Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto presented the cyborg as a figure that blurred conventional boundaries: human and machine, natural and artificial, biological and technological. By the 1990s, the concept had migrated from theory into art, design, and engineering. Mann's experiments seemed to demonstrate that the distinction between human and machine was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

Yet the airport incident revealed a limitation in the cyborg narrative — and pointed toward a different conceptual frame. Posthumanism, as theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles developed it, does not celebrate the hybrid as triumphant or transgressive. It asks what kind of subject the hybrid actually is: decentred, distributed, dependent on infrastructures, and vulnerable to the systems that surround it. Where cyborgism tended to focus on the body itself, posthumanism shifts attention to the environment the body inhabits — the legal categories, bureaucracies, and material systems that either accommodate the augmented subject or, as in Mann's case, refuse to. What failed at that airport was not technology. It was the world around it.

This distinction has consequences that extend far beyond questions of identity and perception.

Much of the discussion around cyborgs and posthumanism has focused on how technology changes the way we sense, think, and act. Far less attention has been paid to a simpler and more concrete question: what happens to an augmented body after death? Millions of people now live with implanted medical devices — pacemakers, defibrillators, cochlear implants, joint replacements, neurostimulators, and increasingly sophisticated bioelectronic hardware. As populations age, these technologies are becoming ordinary components of everyday life, and of death.

Some implants create surprisingly practical problems. Pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators contain lithium batteries that must often be removed before cremation. If left in place, they can overheat and explode. A 2002 study reported that roughly half of UK crematoria had experienced such incidents. What appears to be a medical device during life becomes a safety hazard after death. Other materials persist more quietly. Titanium joints, surgical steel, silicone components, rare earth magnets, microelectronics, and battery materials enter burial grounds or require separation and processing during cremation and disposal. Environmental studies suggest that current impacts remain limited, but the trajectory is clear: as populations age and medical augmentation becomes standard rather than exceptional, the technological body is beginning to produce a material legacy that existing infrastructures were never designed to manage.

The posthuman body has two distinct afterlives. The first is material. Metals remain in the ground. Batteries persist. Components circulate through waste streams, recycling systems, and industrial recovery processes. The distinction between human remains and technological remains becomes increasingly difficult to draw. The second afterlife is informational. Medical implants, wearable devices, biometric sensors, and health platforms generate vast quantities of data throughout a person's life. Long after the body has disappeared, records, profiles, behavioural histories, and algorithmic predictions continue to exist across databases and networks — identities that outlast the bodies that produced them.

Neither of these afterlives was central to the original cyborg imagination. Yet both are becoming defining features of contemporary technological existence. The question is no longer simply how technology changes the body during life. It is how technological bodies persist beyond the lifespan of the individual who carried them — and how one generation's aspiration to extend life may quietly pollute the conditions inherited by the next.

Technological augmentation is not an experimental lifestyle. It is increasingly a condition of ordinary life. For artists and designers working across the Baltic-Nordic region — societies that combine some of the world's most advanced medical and digital infrastructure with an acute historical awareness of what institutional systems can do to bodies that fall outside their categories — this shift opens a productive and uncomfortable territory of inquiry. The most interesting questions are no longer about celebrating technological futures or fearing them. They concern maintenance, dependency, waste, infrastructure, and care. They concern the systems that surround technological bodies rather than the technologies themselves.

In this sense, Steve Mann's experience remains instructive. His failure was not technical. The technology worked. What failed was the environment around it: institutions that had no category for the kind of body he had become. Twenty-three years later, we inhabit a world filled with technologies that have successfully entered the body. What remains uncertain is whether our legal systems, medical infrastructures, environmental policies, and cultural institutions have evolved at the same pace.

In 2002, airport security treated part of Steve Mann's body as removable equipment.

Today, the boundaries between body and technology are far less clear, yet the systems around us still depend on clear categories. We increasingly live as hybrids, die as hybrids, and leave hybrid remains behind us. The posthuman condition is no longer a speculative future. It is becoming an administrative, ecological, and cultural reality.

The challenge is not to imagine new technologies. It is to recognise the kinds of bodies they are already producing — and the traces those bodies will leave behind.