Donna Haraway’s Utopian Promise

The essay drew on chimeras of all kinds (hermaphrodites, conjoined twins, Frankenstein’s monster) to represent the double vision Haraway saw as crucial to resistance. Communications technologies were a system of domination, but because they were composed of information, or text, they were more fluid and rewritable than the old industrial technologies and could be exploited and subverted to feminist ends. Haraway leveraged the tropes of science fiction to imagine a utopian future of biohacking and self-determination: babies with baboon hearts, biotechnologies that allowed for synthetic replication rather than organic reproduction, hybrid bodies that blurred the boundary between animal and machine. Genetic engineering had recast our understanding of bodies: organisms were essentially information-processing systems that could be edited at will. Both machine and human were “coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world,” she wrote, and the cyborg represented “the self feminists must code.”

Haraway was, at the time, a professor in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, which sat at the crossroads of the counterculture and Silicon Valley, where the production of semiconductors was just starting to give way to the PC. The manifesto was in many ways as sui generis as Santa Cruz itself, seemingly independent of the entire lineage of socialist and feminist thought that had come before it. Haraway wrote with irreverence and stylish provocation, lobbing immensely quotable lines like “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” “Our best machines are made of sunshine,” and other bits of “banger poetry,” as Grimes put it last December, on X, calling the manifesto “one of the greatest things ever written.” Although it was produced in a technological landscape very different from our own, Haraway’s vision of the machine-mediated body continues to electrify new generations of feminists, from leftists such as Sophie Lewis, who’s made the case for “gestational communes” enabled by artificial wombs, to cultural critics who regard the cyborg as a more recognizably lib-fem symbol of self-authorship and girl bossery. The writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for example has argued that Beyoncé, who plays with the constructed nature of celebrity, is an embodiment of Haraway’s cyborg.

All of this feels like the faint stirrings of a revival. After decades of being stalled on the runway to the future Haraway envisioned, we are now approaching what the Valley bros call “takeoff.” The digital technologies that were still embryonic when the manifesto was published have reached late adolescence and will soon transform our world beyond recognition. It would seem that we’re finally on the precipice of the long-awaited dispensation of the cyborg. Harawayian feminists who know their way around GitHub should by rights be poised to seize the master’s tools and vibe code their way to liberation. So why doesn’t it feel that way?

I COULD POINT to the political disappointments of recent years—the assaults on reproductive rights and transgender health care—that have dashed what was arguably the most promising fulfillment of Haraway’s vision of a feminism rooted in technological self-determination. (It seems absurd to talk about artificial wombs when more than two hundred million people worldwide do not have access to contraceptives.) I could cite the much-touted gender gap in AI usage (compared with men, women in the same roles are twenty-two percentage points less likely to use AI products at work), or the studies that suggest AI automation is slated to disproportionately affect jobs generally held by women. At a moment when clerks, paralegals, and administrative assistants are working alongside the tools that will likely replace them, Haraway’s call for a “joint kinship” with machines feels more like an echo of the corporate doublespeak that frames automation as liberatory. Tech companies hawk chatbots to female professionals in much the same way the dishwasher was marketed to the 1950s housewife—as a time-saving mechanism that will free them from drudgery, with the added promise that it may accelerate their climb up the corporate ladder, helping them prepare for salary negotiations or coaching them on presentations. “Imagine having a mentor available at any hour, offering guidance without judgment,” Erin Grau, a start-up founder, writes in a Time magazine op-ed. “Master new skills at your own pace, free from the weight of imposter syndrome that haunts so many women in male-dominated spaces.” The radical potential of biohacking has similarly undergone corporate capture, becoming absorbed into the wellness and longevity industries that promise women control over their bodies while subtly nudging them toward hegemonic standards of attractiveness and health. It requires a certain willful determination to see the woman who tracks her blood-oxygen levels on her Oura Ring, applies estradiol cream to allay menopausal symptoms, injects Juvéderm to prolong her youth, and swallows cocktails of nootropics to help her focus for ten hours at a computer as a cyborg subversively hacking her own source code and not, say, a hamster running desperately to avoid being tossed off its wheel. (Judith Butler, a feminist who is every bit as skeptical of nature as Haraway, has called the “perfectibility thesis,” the notion that humans can achieve their full potential with the help of AI, a “fascist idea.”)

The Harawayian cyborg was revolutionary because it reappropriated, to feminist purposes, a monster whose mingling of metal and flesh posed a truly horrific specter of body horror during the late Cold War. Four decades later, this icon has entirely lost its disruptive power. Some AI nerds speak of “centaurs,” the neologism for AI-human collaboration (though one whose zoomorphism imagines the chimera as purely biological), but generative AI poses a more profound ontological blur, one in which the boundary between the organic and the synthetic cannot be playfully transgressed because it’s practically invisible. We speak to a disembodied intelligence that is everywhere and nowhere, and answers from some mystical cirrus cloud of computing that seems to hover over our bodies, which is where we envision our minds residing as well. Now that academic reviewers often struggle to tell the difference between human- and machine-generated prose, and AI-detection tools feel about as reliable as a coin toss, it’s hard to see how the “confusion of boundaries” that Haraway advocated has any meaning at all.

The monster that best captures the current nature of human-machine hybrids is the wraith, a creature that isn’t impeded by barriers and that serves as an uncanny double of real people. The possibility that your body and voice can be given a ghostly second life, against your will, in the form of sexualized deepfakes or revenge porn is arguably the true technological horror of our time. This brand of puppetry and ventriloquism is merely the most extreme application of an industry of rapacious extraction that is fueled by human biodata and intellectual property and has run roughshod over the notion of consent. If the cyborgs of Terminator and Blade Runner dramatized the anxieties of the 1980s, the most salient cinematic icon of our own perverse technoculture is “Samantha,” the disembodied AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her. Two years ago, OpenAI debuted a voice eerily similar to Johansson’s for ChatGPT 4.0 after she denied Sam Altman, its CEO, permission to use hers; Altman was reportedly obsessed with the film, a fantasy about a newly separated man who falls in love with the immaterial Samantha, who is capable of bestowing pure, inexhaustible female attention, unhindered by all the things (work, emotional exhaustion, intellectual interests) that preoccupy the lives of actual women.

The spectral nature of AI is most insidious when it comes to the human labor that invisibly buttresses these commercial tools. “Ghost work” has become the catchall for the tasks done by gig workers behind the scenes to make AI appear autonomous, from contract laborers in the Global South who are paid two dollars an hour to label AI training data, to skilled freelancers from North America who work from home as data annotators. A 2024 New York Times profile of three women who’d taken on this side hustle—a fiction writer, a graduate student, and a flight attendant on unpaid maternity leave—featured a tagline about “the human work of teaching AI,” along with a photo of the mom reading to her toddler, as though to suggest that the synthetic intelligence she was training was an equal beneficiary of her nurturing capacities.

Haraway understood that the very technologies that break down traditional power structures also enable new forms of exploitation and control (what she called the “informatics of domination”). She saw that these technologies would help create a labor market in which jobs were increasingly precarious, hours were fluid, benefits were no longer guaranteed, and work flowed in and out of the home. (She called this, borrowing from the economist Richard Gordon, the “homework economy.”) And she predicted that the decentralization of labor would make traditional modes of organizing much harder, a fact borne out in an AI industry where shadowy subcontractors employ gig workers across the world who have little contact with one another.

Yet Haraway insisted that these tools nevertheless held opportunities for feminists, given that structures that are not natural but synthetic can be hacked, recoded, and redesigned. Unlike the old power relations, which were “nostalgically naturalized,” the new systems contained “serious potential for changing the rules of the game.” But she offered few concrete suggestions, in her manifesto and in her later work, for how these technologies could be subverted for feminist ends. The cyberpunk visions of the 1980s likely held, for Haraway, a purely intuitive, aesthetic appeal. At a juncture in history when politics seemed to have reached a dead end, computational technology offered an invigorating metaphor: it was malleable, porous, and rife with possibility. As Haraway memorably puts it in her manifesto: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” One can hardly blame Haraway for not anticipating, amid the merry anarchy of 1980s hacker culture, just how lively those machines would become, and how opaque the systems that govern them would turn out to be. In lieu of her utopian vision of self-determination, we now live in a world of black box algorithms, proprietary software, and models so impenetrable that the corporations building them have resorted to gnostic methods of “interpretability” in order to decipher their inner workings. We are entangled in networks of domination that make it difficult to distinguish input from output, the biological from the artificial, the body from the body double. Given the very real harms embedded in digital spaces mediated by multinational tech corporations, what would it mean to embrace Haraway’s cyborg myth of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions,” and “dangerous possibilities”? Can “reprogramming” the self be a revolutionary act in the age of Claude Code?

IF THERE CAN BE SAID to be a cogent feminist response to AI, it has rested almost entirely on policing and regulation. The most visible effort has been bipartisan legislation to criminalize AI-generated abuse and offer women various methods of fighting back (96 percent of deepfake videos are nonconsensual porn, and virtually all of them feature women). After the passage of the Take It Down Act last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a victim of sexualized AI-generated imagery, introduced a bill that is meant to provide recourse for those targeted by nonconsensual deepfakes. Campaigns like #MyImageMyChoice petition governments and tech companies to confront the problem, leveraging the language of ownership and autonomy that was forged in the pro-choice movement. Given that deepfakes threaten to “further blur the lines between what’s real and what’s not,” as one commentator puts it, the solution has been to make the boundaries as clear as possible, a project that has often cast women as the dour sheriffs in an industry run by cowboy CEOs, and that seemingly runs contrary to Haraway’s insistence that digital technologies held new and exciting opportunities for feminists.

Of course, the tendency to take Haraway at face value—the very danger that her ironic blasphemy was meant to avoid—has often led to overly literal interpretations of the manifesto. For all her allusions to biotechnologies and protheses, she was not particularly enthusiastic about technology itself. The “tools” she wanted feminists to seize were stories, and she looked to science fiction, primarily, as a wellspring of wild hybrid imagery, where any kind of future was possible. Some of the most memorable and insistently relevant passages of the manifesto are those about language and narrative:

A struggle for language, a struggle against perfect communication—it’s hard to imagine a more urgent challenge for our present moment, when language is itself being automated and streamlined. Large language models are designed to make the unwieldy nature of human communication as efficient as possible, an ambition that is starkly at odds with Haraway’s cyborg politics, which called for polluting the channels of information. In a technological order that is designed to avoid friction, resistance logically requires cultivating chaos. Perhaps this might resemble “glitch feminism,” which writer and curator Legacy Russell has described as a practice of undermining the logic of digital platforms through “mutiny in the form of strategic occupation.” Glitch feminism, she writes, embraces “multiple selves” and slippage between online and offline performance in order to resist the proscribed logic of the algorithm. Russell is every bit as vague as Haraway was when it comes to what feminists should actually do in the world. In a 2020 interview with BOMB Magazine, she argued that the virtue of manifestos lies in their ability to extend the collective imagination beyond the limits of existing narratives: “They can be ambitious and wild and experimental. They can set out new rules for things that haven’t even been built yet. They can make demands that feel impossible, but give us all something to work toward.”

Some of the most compelling tech critics writing today have called attention to the dangers that AI poses to the collective political imagination. The sociologist and Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin has pointed out that in the age of AI, “imagination is a contested field of action, not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize, but a resource, a battleground, an input and output of technology and social order.” To practice that kind of imagination, she argues, it’s not enough to simply critique the technologies that happen to exist; it’s necessary to interrogate the larger social narratives (efficiency, profit, social control) that make certain innovations feel inevitable and desirable in the first place.

This interrogation of the status quo is largely what Haraway’s manifesto was aiming at as well. The technology she ultimately wanted to rewrite was the political imagination, a machine that is, at its best, plastic and nonlinear, capable of producing art and narratives that imagine futures that have no obvious continuity with the past. The creative generation of new stories is antithetical to the very premise of machine learning, which draws from historical data and regenerates and recasts narratives from the past. It’s hard, in fact, not to see contemporary AI as a strategic effort to contain and control the latitude of political possibilities, offering brainstorming companions that steer users toward familiar solutions and writing tools that reduce communication to a series of ready-made templates that distill the statistical mean of conventional wisdom. The “struggle against perfect communication” can happen only by rejecting the narrow limits of these tools and reclaiming the right to tell stories about the future that are mutable and open-ended, and that serve no obvious instrumental goal.

“A Cyborg Manifesto” is itself one of these stories. If the essay continues to inspire readers in 2026, it’s not because it offers any kind of practical roadmap for practicing feminism in digital spaces but because its lively and bracing rhetoric maintains the power to energize a movement sapped by moralizing, rigid statutes, and the security of “totalizing” narratives. In an age of widespread political despair, when the well has run dry and corporate technologies are framed as the last best hope for our species, Haraway’s cyborg politics remains a model of what feminism can look like when it indulges in wild speculation and dares to imagine the possibility of radical alternatives.