How We Became Posthuman

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

How We Became Posthuman: A Short, Easy Guide

What the book is about
N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999) asks what it means to be human when technology, information, and machines are deeply part of our lives. She argues that posthumanism does not spell the end of humanity, but a change in what we mean by “the human.” The old idea of a fully autonomous, disembodied self tied to liberal humanism is no longer adequate. Humans and technology are already intertwined, and information has a real, material presence.

How Hayles argues
She combines close reading of literature with studies of science and technology. Drawing on cybernetics, feminist theory, and philosophy, she shows how cultural stories shape how we think about bodies, minds, and machines.

Chapter highlights (simplified)
- Toward Embodied Virtuality: Old ideas of mind separate from body are challenged as humans become more entangled with intelligent machines.
- Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers: Media shift from print to digital; reading practices and technology change each other; information has meaning beyond its physical form.
- Contesting for the Body of Information: Macy Conferences on Cybernetics explore information as something that can exist apart from matter, and how this thinking has evolved.
- Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: The relationship between humans and tools is examined, including ideas about cyborgs and the limits of a purely human-centered self.
- From Hyphen to Splice: Limbo by Bernard Wolfe is read as a critique of postwar tech changes and gendered ideas about identity.
- The Second Wave of Cybernetics: Self-organization and how human sensation and cognition shape reality are explored.
- Turning Reality Inside Out: Philip K. Dick’s novels question what is real and how observers influence reality.
- The Materiality of Informatics: The body and information are linked in new ways, drawing on thinkers like Baudrillard and Foucault.
- Narratives of Artificial Life: Real and imagined life forms stretch what counts as living and intelligent.
- The Semiotics of Virtuality: A tool called a semiotic square helps map different posthuman ideas, using novels like Blood Music and Snow Crash as examples.
- Conclusion: What Does It Mean to be Posthuman?: Technology enriches our sense of embodiment and reshapes what it means to be human.

Why it matters
The book helped bring posthumanism into broad scholarly discussion. It challenges simple binaries between humans and machines and invites readers to rethink identity, embodiment, and agency in a technologically saturated world.

Reception
How We Became Posthuman is widely seen as a landmark work, praised for its ambition, depth, and its blend of science and literature. Some readers find Hayles’s style dense or hard to follow, and a few critics say parts of the argument rely on sweeping generalizations. Nevertheless, many scholars view it as essential for understanding the changing relationship between people, information, and technology, and for feminist critiques of cybernetics.

Publication details
Published in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press, the book is 366 pages long and helped launch a major line of inquiry in posthuman studies.