Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, & The Cyborg Manifesto

<p>In this episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto” — a text Grimes called “one of the greatest things ever written” and a foundational (yet strangely forgotten) work that sparked cyberfeminism, xenofeminism, and black cyberfeminism.Why have so few people actually read the essay that’s cited more than almost any other in feminist theory and science & technology studies? How did a response to a socialist-feminist call during the Reagan era become a poetic, blasphemous celebration of blurred boundaries — human/machine, male/female, organism/technology — and a rejection of rigid identity politics?We explore:1. The Cyborg as a metaphor for post-gender, post-origin-story politics2. Haraway’s call for “affinity” coalitions over essentialist identities3. How the manifesto was twisted into new identity-based feminisms (cyberfeminism → xenofeminism → black cyberfeminism)4. Why the original text feels closer to pronatalist, post-identity futurism than to modern progressive frameworks5. The Santa Cruz / Bay Area cultural context that birthed this fever-dream masterpiece6“ Terra Nationalism,” 7. Post-cyberfeminism vs. xenofeminism.If you love Grimes, transhumanism, feminist theory, online culture, or just wild 1980s philosophy that predicted our AI-saturated present — this episode is for you.🔗 Full text of A Cyborg Manifesto: https://web.archive.org/web/20120214194015/http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html</p><p>Episode Outline</p><p>* <a href="https://x.com/Grimezsz/status/1997917669501309318" target="_blank">I saw a post on X by Grimes</a> recently in which she refers to A Cyborg Manifesto as “one of the greatest things ever written.”</p><p>* <a href="https://x.com/Grimezsz/status/1997918152714498367" target="_blank">She added</a>: “What’s crazy abt cyborg manifesto is even if you pretend it has nothing to do with feminism it’s still a masterpiece of general philosophy and is filled with banger poetry”</p><p>* So I checked it out</p><p>* Because she is also the person who turned me on to Iain Banks’ Culture series and it changed the way I view AI and the future of humanity</p><p>* And the rabbit hole commenced</p><p>* It turns out “A Cyborg Manifesto”—originally published in 1985—is so well known in certain academic circles, it is almost never discussed as it’s assumed to be such tacit knowledge</p><p>* <a href="https://x.com/LILINTERNET/status/1998123991332946356" target="_blank">As @ALilInternet puts it</a>: “Its seen as a kinda cliche reference in academic contexts or lectures, because it’s assumed everyone has already read it, which is prob why u don’t encounter it — I think in general it’s a shame with this happens to important works, because young ppl etc might NOT know it.”</p><p>* It is considered to be one of the most influential essays in feminist theory, science and technology studies (STS), and posthumanities.</p><p>* And it is one of the most cited essays in the humanities and social sciences worldwide.</p><p>* Basically, it:</p><p>* Argues that the cyborg—a hybrid of machine and organism—is a powerful metaphor for breaking down rigid boundaries: human/animal, organism/machine, physical/non-physical, male/female, nature/culture.</p><p>* Rejects essentialist identity politics and traditional socialist-feminism in favor of “affinity politics” (coalitions based on shared interests rather than fixed identities).</p><p>* Embraces irony, partiality, and blasphemy against origin stories (both religious and secular).</p><p>* Key quotes that are endlessly repeated:</p><p>* “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”</p><p>* “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness.”</p><p>* “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.”</p><p>* And this manifesto gave birth to cyberfeminism, which gave birth to xenofeminism, and both sound SUPER intriguing, so I thought we’d dig in!</p><p>A Cyborg Manifesto</p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto" target="_blank">A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century</a> By Donna Haraway</p><p>Context</p><p>Who is this woman?</p><p>* UC Santa Cruz professor, which, if you know Santa Cruz, explains everything.</p><p>* To me personally, Santa Cruz epitomizes a culture:</p><p>* Unmoored from history and origin stories (you’ve got modern and historical transplants of people who repeatedly rejected—and importantly, forgotten—the cultures of their homeland)</p><p>* E.g. From Germany to Ireland to New York to Chicago to California, losing culture with each move)</p><p>* Very crunchy</p><p>* Steeped in tech and normalized to its cutting-edge development</p><p>* Born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado</p><p>* As of 2025, she is Emerita Distinguished Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC)</p><p>* Looks like a typical Santa Cruz lady</p><p>* Trained in biology (PhD in Biology from Yale, 1972), zoology, and philosophy.</p><p>* Deeply influenced by Marxist feminism, science fiction (especially authors like Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler), Catholic symbolism (she grew up Irish-Catholic), and post-structuralism.</p><p>Why did she write this?</p><p>* The essay originated in response to a 1983 call from the Socialist Review (a West Coast leftist journal) asking feminists to reflect on the future of socialist feminism amid Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the rise of the New Right, the decline of traditional leftist movements in the US, and escalating Cold War tensions (including the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program).</p><p>* Haraway aimed to revitalize socialist-feminism by addressing what she called the “informatics of domination”—how new technologies of communication, control, and production were reshaping power, labor, gender, and identity in ways that older feminist frameworks couldn’t fully grasp.</p><p>* So basically a Marxist publication wanted feminists to butthurt about conservatives, and instead she like… went off the reservation and it was glorious</p><p>* Like, instead of “Reagan wants me to become a housewife and spoonfeed jellybeans to my husband!” she’s like “LET’S BECOME CYBORGS AND FORM SPECIAL GROUPS AROUND OUR AUTISTIC SPECIAL INTERESTS!”</p><p>What’s the context in which she wrote this?</p><p>* It’s the 1980s</p><p>* It’s the Silicon Valley Bay Area</p><p>* Biotech and personal computing are beginning an insane upswing</p><p>* There’s a crisis on the Left as 1960s and 1970s social movements are fragmenting</p><p>* Second-wave feminism (emerging in the early 1960s, peaking in the 1970s):</p><p>* Often called the women’s liberation movement, it grew out of experiences in civil rights and anti-war activism. By the early 1980s, it fractured due to the “feminist sex wars” (debates over pornography, sexuality, and power), critiques of white/middle-class dominance excluding women of color and lesbians, and splits between liberal, radical, and socialist branches. Haraway explicitly critiqued how taxonomies of feminism policed “official women’s experience,” leading to endless splitting.</p><p>* The New Left (1960s–early 1970s):</p><p>* A broad student- and youth-driven movement encompassing anti-Vietnam War protests, free speech campaigns (e.g., at Berkeley), and demands for participatory democracy. It declined sharply after events like the 1970 Kent State shootings and the war’s end in 1975, fragmenting into sectarian groups or identity-focused politics. Many activists moved into feminism or other causes, but the overarching “New Left” coherence dissolved.</p><p>* Civil Rights/Black Liberation Movement (1950s–1970s):</p><p>* The nonviolent phase (e.g., led by MLK, SCLC, SNCC) transitioned in the late 1960s to Black Power (e.g., Black Panthers), emphasizing racial separatism and pride. By the 1980s, internal divisions (e.g., over integration vs. nationalism) and external repression (COINTELPRO) contributed to fragmentation, with some energy shifting to local community organizing or cultural expressions.</p><p>How is it framed by academics today?</p><p>They frame it as a canonized but contested classic</p><p>* It’s required reading in women’s/gender studies, Science and Technology Studies, media studies, literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, and art theory.</p><p>* It’s often paired with Judith Butler’s *Gender Trouble* (1990) as one of the twin pillars of 1990s “anti-essentialist” or “poststructuralist” feminism.</p><p>They present multiple, sometimes contradictory interpretations</p><p>* Posthumanist and transhumanist readings (e.g., Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, N. Katherine Hayles) celebrate it as an early manifesto for leaving the human behind.</p><p>* Critical race and decolonial scholars (e.g., Chela Sandoval, Jasbir Puar, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson) both use and criticize it for its relative silence on race and colonialism (Haraway herself later acknowledged this limitation).</p><p>* Disability studies scholars are divided: some see the cyborg as ableist, others (e.g., Alison Kafer) reclaim it.</p><p>* Marxist and materialist feminists (e.g., Sophie Lewis, Laboria Cuboniks/Xenofeminism) treat it as a key accelerationist or cyberfeminist resource.</p><p>It is framed as the origin text of Cyberfeminism and Xenofeminism</p><p>* It’s widely credited with launching 1990s cyberfeminism (VNS Matrix’s “Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Sadie Plant, Faith Wilding, Old Boys Network, etc.).</p><p>* Xenofeminism (Laboria Cuboniks, 2015) explicitly builds on it.</p><p>It inspired shifts and course adjustments in various fields:</p><p>* Feminist theory: It shifted feminism away from “women’s experience” or biological essentialism toward constructivist, coalition-based, “affinity” politics (“We do not need a totality in order to work together”).</p><p>* Posthumanism and critical animal studies: One of the earliest and most poetic arguments that the boundary between human and nonhuman is politically constructed and historically contingent.</p><p>* Queer and trans theory: Prefigured non-binary and fluid understandings of identity (even though Haraway herself was not writing from an explicitly LGBT perspective in 1985).</p><p>The Text</p><p>Its chapters provide a peek:</p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc1" target="_blank">An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit</a></p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc2" target="_blank">Fractured Identities</a></p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc3" target="_blank">The Informatics of Domination</a></p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc4" target="_blank">The ‘Homework Economy’ Outside ‘The Home’</a></p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc5" target="_blank">Women in The Integrated Circuit</a></p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc6" target="_blank">Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity</a></p><p><a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto#toc7" target="_blank">Bibliography</a></p><p>Also, right off the bat, it starts with this… illustration.</p><p>The picture: A woman sits in space with her back to a framed grid displaying galaxies, mathematical equations, and a 3D digital map, wearing a white, glowing, tiger cub on her head with its arms draped over her shoulders, arm bones glowing through its ectoplasmic flesh. On her chest cits a circuit breaker from which green lines emanate, terminating in blue nodes. Her fingers lay on typewriter keys set atop the diorama of an Egyptian desert, complete with pyramids in the foreground and a blue mountain range in the background. Her face strikingly resembles that of Neil from the movie The Santa Clause but she has the coloring and long dark hair of perhaps an indigenous American woman.</p><p>WAT.</p><p>* The text argues that in the late twentieth century, humans have become “cyborgs”: hybrids of organism and machine whose identities, bodies, and politics are shaped by information technologies and global capitalism.</p><p>* The cyborg is proposed as a mythic, political figure that rejects fixed essences (like “woman” or “nature”) and instead embraces partial, fractured, and coalition-based identities to build new forms of socialist-feminist politics.</p><p>* Haraway claims that advanced capitalism has shifted from an “organic” industrial order to an “informatics of domination,” where everything is understood as information, coding, and systems.</p><p>* In this world, boundaries between body and machine blur, control operates through communication and data flows, and women are deeply integrated and exploited within global circuits of production and reproduction.</p><p>* It almost feels as though the concept of women is shoehorned into this simply because the prompt from the Socialist Review explicitly asked for feminist reflections and it would have been rejected if she didn’t talk about women explicitly as a distinct class</p><p>* Communications technologies and biotechnologies are seen as tools that both enforce domination and open new possibilities for resistance.</p><p>* Haraway urges feminists to appropriate the cyborg figure to imagine non-natural, non-totalizing political unities—alliances based on affinity and shared projects rather than on a supposedly universal female nature.</p><p>* And I’m reading this as: “Can we just get over feminism please?” (and identity politics in general)</p><p>Analysis</p><p>* Haraway calls for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” and I love that—it also hints to a strong move away from identity politics. Like: Who cares if you’re a man or a woman or whatever; just do your thing.</p><p>* She’s kind of arguing for 4chan before 4chan</p><p>* No identity, just ideas and affinity groups</p><p>* Capable of organizing in order to do <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTqIyx6tBU" target="_blank">hilarious</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw9zyxm860Q" target="_blank">wondrous</a> things</p><p>* I like this but also therefore am amused that people invoke its name in the creation of new identity groups (rather than affinity groups, which is what the manifesto calls for)</p><p>So then why or how could the manifesto give birth to new forms of feminism at all??? What are cyberfeminism and xenofeminism???? Let’s find out.</p><p>Cyberfeminism</p><p>Cyberfeminism is a strand of feminist thought and activism that focuses on the relationship between gender and digital technologies, especially the internet and networked media. It looks at how technology can both reinforce existing power structures and be used to challenge patriarchy and create new possibilities for identity, embodiment, and political action.</p><p>* It treats cyberspace and information technologies not as neutral or inherently male domains, but as contested terrains where gender, race, and power are negotiated.</p><p>* This seems to run directly counter to Haraway’s Manifesto, which argues against both origin stories and identity politics</p><p>* Cyberfeminists aim to understand and intervene in how technologies are designed, who controls them, and how they shape everyday life, from work and surveillance to sexuality and social connection. They also explore how online platforms can support resistance, networked activism, and alternative forms of identity and community that disrupt rigid gender norms.</p><p>* In practice, cyberfeminism has included digital art, hacking and code-based interventions, online collectives, and analyses of social media movements such as hashtag campaigns against harassment and gender-based violence.</p><p>* PLEASE tell me that cyberfeminism was not behind #metoo</p><p>* Update [oh god no]: Scholars and commentators now often cite #MeToo as a major example of “digital feminist activism” or cyberfeminist practice, because it relies on networked platforms to amplify women’s voices and build transnational solidarity.</p><p>* Research and teaching under the label often examine topics like online abuse, AI bias, platform labor, pornography, gaming cultures, and the politics of data through a feminist lens.</p><p>* PLEASE tell me that cyberfeminism was not behind gamer gate</p><p>HOW DID THEY GET IT SO WRONG?</p><p>But wait, there’s more: Relation to other feminisms</p><p>Historically, cyberfeminism is usually linked to third-wave feminism, extending earlier struggles over rights and representation into digital environments. More recent currents, such as xenofeminism and Black cyberfeminism, build on and critique earlier cyberfeminist work by centering intersectionality, queerness, and global inequalities in how technologies are built and used.</p><p>EXCUSE ME WHILE I DIE ON THE INSIDE</p><p>Black Cyberfeminism</p><p>Early cyberfeminism often focused on utopian possibilities of the internet for gender subversion but was criticized for centering white, Western perspectives and overlooking race.</p><p>Black Cyberfeminism arose in the 2010s as a corrective, addressing how racial prejudices persist online and how Black women navigate, resist, and reshape digital spaces. It draws from Black feminist traditions (e.g., intersectionality from Kimberlé Crenshaw) and afrofuturism, recognizing that technology is not neutral but shaped by structural racism and patriarchy.</p><p>Black Cyberfeminism is described as an intersectional framework that extends cyberfeminism and Black feminist thought into digital spaces, emphasizing how race, gender, technology, and power intersect in online environments. It critiques the ways Black women and marginalized communities experience persistent oppression in cyberspace—such as misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny), algorithmic bias, and exclusion—while highlighting their agency, resistance, and cultural production through digital tools.</p><p>So basically Donna Haraway was like: Forget identity politics! Let’s use tech to forge a new path forward that’s better for everyone!</p><p>And Black Cyberfeminists were like: “SCREW YOU WHAT ABOUT MY IDENTITY I AM OPPRESSED”</p><p>Xenofeminism</p><p>Xenofeminism emerged in the 2010s around the manifesto “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” by the collective Laboria Cuboniks. It presents itself as a techno-materialist feminism that treats digital networks, biotech, and other technologies as tools that can be re-engineered to undermine patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and other entrenched hierarchies rather than as inherently oppressive.</p><p>Xenofeminism rejects biological determinism, insisting that gender roles and many so‑called “natural” differences are social constructs that can be reconfigured. It is also “gender abolitionist” in the sense of wanting a society where traits currently grouped under gender no longer map onto unequal power relations, while still allowing a proliferation of diverse, fluid gender identities.</p><p>* OK, this sounds broadly OK. Just… forget about gender. Screw gender. If biological sex limits you or if you have a problem with it, engineer a solution.</p><p>A distinctive feature is its embrace of “alienation”: instead of romanticizing the natural or the immediate, xenofeminism sees estrangement from given norms as a condition for constructing new, more just worlds. It also argues for a reworked, intersectional universalism that can include all who are currently othered—across gender, race, class, and species—rather than focusing on narrow identity categories.</p><p>* You could argue our family has very much embraced this approach with technopuritanism and advanced reprotec</p><p>Relation to other feminisms</p><p>Xenofeminism critiques strands of feminism that are suspicious of technology or that tie politics too closely to fixed identities. It builds on cyberfeminism and transfeminism but pushes further toward systematic use of science, rational planning, and global-scale infrastructures to dismantle gendered and other structural inequalities.</p><p>I think, therefore, this means I’ve found my feminism, though I’m wary of this alleged interest in dismantling structural inequalities, because it implies an ultimate desire for homogenization.</p><p>What is the Takeaway?</p><p>Donna Haraway realized that biotech and the internet could render gender wars and even identity politics, which are ultimately not very productive obsolete.</p><p>Some people found this inspiring</p><p>Others decided they preferred to cling to gender wars and identity politics.</p><p>It’s kind of clear which group is winning.</p><p>At least for now</p><p>If you look at people like C and like us… we’re above replacement in kids. Leaders in identity politics arguably don’t have very many kids. So perhaps there’s hope!</p><p>Episode Transcript<strong>Simone Collins:</strong> [00:00:00] Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be with you today because I just discovered cyber feminism and black cyber feminism and xeno feminism, and these are terms I had never heard before and they all apparently stem from this foundational text, which is so foundational that people have forgotten to mention it in academic context.</p><p>And so everyone thinks that everyone knows it, but they don’t know it. And so now there’s just, it’s like almost becoming this like forgotten Rosetta stone of like modern feminist ideology because it is lost and, and people have just forgotten to mention it and, and explain what it is. And this is just crazy.</p><p>Why have you read this? Well, it all started with a post on X by Grimes, as so many things do, right? Yeah. In, in, in, in this post, she refers to a Cyborg manifesto, this foundational text as quote, one of the [00:01:00] greatest things ever written. She added, what’s crazy about Cyborg Manifesto is even if you pretend it has nothing to do with feminism, it is still a masterpiece of general philosophy and is filled with banger poetry.</p><p>And so I checked it out because she’s also the person who turned me onto Ian Banks’ culture series, and it changed the way I view AI in the future of humanity. So like. I don’t know. She, she has a good track record of, of introducing like, really good ideas. And I actually, this is really funny because she, she has like a lot of like Marxist and socialist and, and Comy followers who are like hard line leftists who just really like, obviously her music and her musical style, but then also her philosophy in general is like really inspiring.</p><p>But then they get really mad because, ‘cause she had a kid with the bad man. And they, it just like, they, they’re so, they really struggle with it because she, she’s just, you can’t stay away from her even if you want to hate her. ‘cause she has so many great ideas. Although we, we never did hate her and we love her because she’s amazing.</p><p>Yeah. Friend of the show Anyway, though it turns out that a Cyborg Manifesto, which [00:02:00] was originally published in 1985, like I said, is so well known in academic circles. It’s almost never discussed as it’s assumed to be tacit knowledge. As at. A little internet puts it on x in the thread that, that that Grimes posted.</p><p>It’s seen as kind of cliche reference in academic context or lectures because it’s assumed everyone has already read it, which is probably why you don’t encounter it. I think in general it’s a shame with this when this happens to important works because young people, et cetera, might not know it. And I think that’s the case.</p><p>‘cause I don’t know, like I took philosophy classes. I, I, I, I was not, you know, I, I took a lot of uni classes that were more on like the humanities or social studies, like end of the spectrum. And this is actually like a foundational required reading in a lot of academic contexts. Like it is actually considered to be one of the most influential essays in feminist theory and science and technology studies and post humanities.</p><p>And I have a master’s in technology policy. Like I just, [00:03:00] how have I never heard of this? And it’s also just one of the most cited essays in the humanities and social sciences worldwide. But have you heard of this before?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I have never heard of this. No. But I I, I have a feeling as like the urban monoculture emerged, there have been a number of pivotal works to it.</p><p>Like I’ve talked about the ones that mond’s dad wrote, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. On like how the world can be devised into like colonizers and victims. Yes, yes. And the victims need to over, and it was going through these works that helped me better understand the way they actually see the world. Yeah.</p><p>And you’re like, wait, I realize, I was like, oh, now this makes sense and this makes sense. Like now colonial narrative,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like where did that come from? And we should have thought, like when people are talking about colonizers and decolonization, that there was some kind of foundational text, but we didn’t think to like.</p><p>Go into it.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. Yeah. I think when you get into these foundational texts, you can be like, oh, this is where all this, and I only hope that was the next social movement that comes along. [00:04:00] Based camp is seen as one of the foundational texts, so of our essays and stuff. Oh, no. Like, no,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> the, the tracks, the techno puritan tracks the track.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Attracts. Anyway, we, I have like three more written that we haven’t done yet. I know.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> We, well, maybe we can, we can work on those over, over this, this sort of winter break that we have with the kids. Yeah. But so back to the Cyborg Manifesto. This particular foundational text, basically like the gist if you don’t wanna listen to this whole episode, argues that the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism is a powerful metaphor for breaking down rigid boundaries like human versus animal, or organism versus machine or physical versus non-physical, male female nature culture.</p><p>And it rejects essentialist identity politics and traditional socialist feminism in favor of affinity politics like coalitions based around shared interest. Rather than fixed identities. And it also embraces irony impartiality and blasphemy against [00:05:00] origin stories, both religious and secular, which is really interesting.</p><p>And then some key quotes that are endlessly repeated from this are, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. And the cyborg is a creature in a post gender world that has no truck with bisexuality, pre edible symbiosis, un alienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness. Also, we are all Kyra theorized in fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.</p><p>Just, God. This sounds like it was</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> actually written in like a fever dream. Like</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I honestly, like, I’m gonna go into the origin stories of this and you’re gonna, like, everything’s gonna fall in place. Trust me. It sounds like</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> one of our female listeners wrote this. This is like not that dissimilar from what ‘cause our female listeners are</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> freaking awesome.</p><p>I love this, but no, trust me when I get into the origins, this is, it will all be explained. But this, this manifesto gave birth to cyber feminism, which gave birth to Xeno feminism and black cyber feminism. [00:06:00] And when I heard about that in, in the thread where Grimes brought this up in the first place, I was like.</p><p>Okay. This is so intriguing. We have to dig in. So we’re gonna start with the Cyborg manifesto and then, you know, explain to you so that you are an informed citizen of the world, what the, this manifesto, this foundational text is about, because people forgotten to explain this. Rosetta Stone of culture and philosophy, and also Cy feminism, Xeno feminism and black feminism Cyber.</p><p>Oh, Xeno</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Feminism and black cyber feminism. Black cyber feminism. Yeah. So, hold on. But you, and you liked Xeno feminism, which I think our audience is gonna have a problem with because those Xenos need to be burned in their dance.</p><p><strong>Speaker 4:</strong> Guys, what if the bad guy.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> No, I think,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> no, you’ll see [00:07:00] Xeno Feminism is my feminism. I’ve decided, no, hold</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> on.</p><p>Actually, I’m gonna, I’m gonna make an argument and actually we should do a separate episode on this because I think it’s a great idea and I just had it. Okay. Yeah. The concept of globalist nationalism. Or what’s a better way to say it? I call it tarn nationalism.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Tarn nationalism.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So Tarn nationalism is what you see in something like star strip troopers.</p><p>Oh, yeah. Where you have this idea of we as humans are great. I love humanity. I love the species, and the other is aliens or machines or something like that. Right. And in our fab, I have one of, one of my favorite, oh</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> yeah. Current empire is one of the, the contents,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> the preset or the sons of man where, you know, it’s, it’s humanity and all the things that, that have come from our species, whether it’s AI and, and for</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> context.</p><p>In, in reality fabricator that the ai like narrative engine and, and chatbot platform that Malcolm has built with, with Bruno friend of [00:08:00] the pod Bruno is. You, you can go through, like, if you don’t wanna sort of create your own prompts for stories or characters these amazing menus that Malcolm has created, where like you can choose the settings and the tropes.</p><p>Like, do you want, is Kai do you want vampires? Do you want like this kind of dynamic, like a power dynamic or whatever? And like Yeah. One of the settings is is Terra Empire. Oh. What? It’s like some other weird settings you have in there. Like, like, like aro Can space communism.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> What my favorite game to play is Tarn Empire versus Gay Space Communism.</p><p>Yeah. Oh yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Gay space communism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, it’s, it’s, it’s fun. It’s, but anyway,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> yeah, because I think this idea of like Tarn Nash. Anyway, I’ll, I’ll get to it. I continue. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Let me, let me cook. Okay. Okay. So Cyborg Manifesto, because the people must be informed. So the full title of it is a Cyborg Manifesto Science Technology and Socialist Feminism in the late 20th century.</p><p>Donna Haraway. So who is this woman? Who is Donna? What is this fever dream of this poetic [00:09:00] banger poetry masterpiece that Grimes loves and that, that so many people love? Alright, well let’s, let’s start with it. And now I think you’re gonna see how, why and how this all makes sense and, and if not, I will explain to you because a little bit of cultural and locational context is needed.</p><p>So Donna Haraway, sorry, Donna Haraway is a uc Santa Cruz professor, which if, you know, Santa Cruz explains everything instantly she was on</p><p>drugs.</p><p>No, it’s, it’s more than that. So, so to me personally, and I think anyone who knows Santa Cruz will probably agree with me. Santa Cruz epitomizes a culture that is unmoored from history and origin stories, which is kind of a, a core point of her manifesto here of like origin stories.</p><p>Like get rid of them. No. Like what are we even, and anyway and, and here’s the thing is, is. In, in Santa Cruz, especially in California in general, you’ve got modern and historical transplants of people [00:10:00] who repeatedly rejected and importantly forgot the cultures of their homeland. So consider my family’s history by way of California, like twice over.</p><p>I mean, because different, you know, branches, but like one branch moved from like Norway to Germany, to Ireland, to New York, to Chicago, to California, and then multiple locations in California. Every time they’re getting up and moving, they’re kind of reinventing themselves and kind of intentionally unmooring themselves from their, in historical inherited cultures and roots and past.</p><p>They’re like, they’re not trying to bring it with them. Like I think that the Collins family is different. Like your family seems to have really clung to a very strong sense of Yeah, we lived in the same Marriot</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> for seven generations, so my</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> family like very intentionally. Like laundered its self and identity in California as a place in America.</p><p>People need to understand like, you know, we’ve talked about the [00:11:00] role of these foundational cultures, like the Scotts Irish versus the Quakers versus the Cavaliers. What we haven’t really talked about is the, the way that certain behavioral bottlenecks have played in, in forming some, some types of Californian culture and Bay area culture is and that that is to say San Francisco, Silicon Valley Bay area culture is uniquely one of people who have really intentionally kind of a flash bake to themselves so many times that they’ve forgotten where they’ve come from.</p><p>And that makes them a very interesting kind of cultural blank slate that is exactly the kind of cultural blank slate that would produce. This manifesto. So I just, I just wanna, but what makes Santa Cruz unique, even within this ecosystem of people who have like warped and, and, and completely cleaned away multiple times, laundered their, their culture and identity is, it’s also, it it is crunchy.</p><p>Very crunchy. We’re talking like, you [00:12:00] know, you’re wearing socks under Birkenstocks while walking through the redwood forests and then surfing in the morning, et cetera, right? Like, it’s, it, it’s the uc, San Santa Cruz where this woman teach taught and is now an emeritus professor teach, she, she teach she, it, it’s just, it’s, it’s this beautiful university campus that’s just embedded within a road forest with like some partial views of the ocean.</p><p>Like it’s very naturey. And very crunchy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like, yes, there are drugs, but like, not in like a way that people are associated, like typically think of drugs. It’s more just like. Part of life. It’s not a thing you do, it’s, it’s the air you breathe. I don’t know how else to put it, you know?</p><p>It’s just like, so of course your life is gonna be colored by a strange daze. And even if you literally don’t do any drugs, which I never did as a kid, like I still had a very trippy childhood, if that makes sense. Yeah. So that, this is just some context. Okay. So she was born in 1944 in Denver, Colorado.</p><p>And then, you know, sort of herself, you know, [00:13:00] laundered her identity further. ‘cause Denver was already the kind of place that, you know, selected for people who are really running away from their past. You know, it’s like minors and other people who are like very high risk and just like, forget everything that I came from, I’m gonna rebuild.</p><p>And then she came to California as of 2025. Like I said, she, she’s not an active professor anymore. She’s an emerita distinguished professor. Of the history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, UCSC. She looks very much like a Santa Cruz lady. I had, I I, I spent a lot of time in Santa Cruz as a kid because my grandparents and I, I, and, and aunt and cousin were there and, and were, we, we spent tons of, like, all my holidays were there.</p><p>But what’s interesting about her is she trained in biology. She has a PhD in biology from Yale and zoology and philosophy. So she’s kind of like you. And I think this is, you can kind of see, I think some of the most interesting thinkers philosophically have backgrounds in biology like you, like her because they’re able to think in a cross disciplinary [00:14:00] fashion that’s really that challenges a lot of the really trite norms.</p><p>And that is genuinely novel because when people have backgrounds in, in philosophy and then they contribute to philosophy, they’re really just kind of. Copying and pasting with slightly different words, you know? Yeah. Where it’s like someone with biology is gonna come in and be like, well I like, based on the way that like DNA double helixes work.</p><p>You know, like, I think that, you know what? I did not have a background in biology. I’m sorry. But she, she was also deeply influenced by Marxist feminism and science fiction and Catholic symbolism. ‘Cause she grew up I Irish Catholic and post-structuralism. So you just got like the perfect storm of a good manifesto in there.</p><p>And so yeah, we also need to think about the content. Of this piece, because I think a lot of people are like, well, this is amazing, like great poetry. Like, but no, like we have to, she it just to quote one Kamala Harris, or, you know, paraphrase, it didn’t just fall out of a, a coconut tree. You have to consider it within the [00:15:00] context of the world in which it exists.</p><p>So the essay originated in response to a 1983 call from the Socialist Review, which is a west coast leftist journal asking feminists to reflect on the future of socialist feminism amid Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the rise of the new right and the decline of traditional leftist movement in the US and escalating Cold War tensions, including the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars program and, and Harway aimed to revitalize.</p><p>Socialist feminism by addressing what she called the informatics of domination. How new technologies of communication and control and production, which is really what, you know, anyone in Silicon Valley, which is roughly where Sanford Santa Cruz is, is experiencing, we’re reshaping power and labor and gender in, in identities, in ways that older feminist frameworks just couldn’t grasp.</p><p>And so she basically, what happened though, like, just to break it down for you, a Marxist publication wanted feminists to butt hurt about conservatives and [00:16:00] instead she like. Went off the reservation and it was glorious. Like instead of Reagan wants me to become a housewife and spoonfeed jelly beans to my husband, she’s like,</p><p>let’s become cyborgs and farm special groups around our artistic specialist, our autistic special interests.</p><p>I’m just like, yes.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Go lady. She’s invited to the picnic. I know. She is. She is 100% like my, this is why we get along so well with Grimes. Yes. Because she’s into this shop. She gets</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> it. She gets it. I’m like, the problem, and actually I feel, oh, crap. I’m realizing now like you’re gonna see the whole arc I have for this episode and for the, and for the Cyborg Manifesto.</p><p>The, the CUF that it undergoes is the same CUF of Grimes. And you’re gonna see why.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Okay, go. No, I mean, I’m already seeing why it, it feels like Grimes wrote this to be honest.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> No, but also like the way it played out and was interpreted and was [00:17:00] appropriated is also like the same struggle and unfair treatment that Grimes has undergone.</p><p>Yeah. So, yeah. So, just so, so people understand ‘cause not a lot of our, more than half our audience is outside the us I just wanna make it clear the context of this. It’s the eighties when this was written. It was it was written one year before Malcolm was born, two year, two years before I was born.</p><p>This is the Silicon Valley Bay area at the very beginning of this period of biotech and personal computing, just having an insane upswing. And these are the first people who are smelling it. These are the canaries in the coal mine who are like, oh God. Like the whole world is about to change. And there’s this crisis also at the same time, on the left.</p><p>As the 1960s and seventies, social movements are beginning to fragment. So for example, second wave feminism, which emerged in the 1960s and peaked in the seventies was, was starting to falter it. It was often called the, the Women’s Liberation Movement as well, if that’s how you’ve heard of it more.</p><p>It grew out of [00:18:00] experiences in civil rights and anti-war activism. And, and then by the eighties, it fractured due to what people call the feminist sex wars, which were debates over pornography and sexuality and power. And there were also critiques of white middle class dominance, excluding women of color and lesbians.</p><p>And there were splits between liberal and radical and socialist branches. And, and in her, in her piece, in her manifesto, Haraway explicitly critiqued how taxonomies of feminism policed official women’s experience leading to endless splitting. Like she really, really, really hated identity politics. Unfortunately they’ve won. Right. But so the, also another, another movement that was sort of falling apart, and this is one thing that the, the socialist magazine that prompted this essay wanted to see addressed was the new left. Which was this broad student in youth driven movement encompassing in the anti-Vietnam war protests and free speech campaigns like at Berkeley.</p><p>Like, my dad went to those protests.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> No, my dad went to those too. He was, he was well known. It’s something they bonded</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> over is so sweet. He,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> he, my dad went in [00:19:00] a would, would go in a suit to those protests. Everybody thought he was like the guy in a suit, the very posh guy at the anti-war first. That’s true.</p><p>My</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> dad’s like vandalizing, et cetera. And your dad’s starting up. But it’s funny</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> that he really wanted to go to the war in the beginning. Oh, I</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> know. And that’s so funny that you, oh my gosh, your dad’s the only reason</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> for people to know my dad actually got out of the war by being too eager to go into the war.</p><p>Yeah. Which is he applied really early in the war process. Like before they needed a draft or anything like that. Mm-hmm. So they were actually still incredibly selective with who they were taking. And, this was to during like the ROTC and stuff, but he had a, a, a, a medical issue tied to his leg.</p><p>His knees.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> He said they were rice Krispy knees or something. They snapped, crackled and posh. Well,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> he, he got them broken playing lacrosse as a kid. And oh, freaking</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> posh.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Can you be, I have to posh right? It broke</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> my legs and</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> lacrosse and I go to</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> my protest</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> to go. He tried to go super early into the war while they’re still being really picky and apparently he got like a permanent band from being able to outta the war.</p><p>Perma [00:20:00] band from war. Poor, poor baby. Oh,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> oh my god. No. No. But like truly honorable. I mean, I also appreciate that my dad was out there, you know, vandalizing stuff too. Very toasty. Yeah, now I know where he gets it. Anyway, but then, like basically after, there were a lot of clampdowns on these protests and like there were the Ken State shootings and then the, the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the, the whole movement kind of fragmented into a bunch of sectarian groups and identity based politics again.</p><p>And then of course, then there was the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement in the fifties to the seventies, which also fell apart in the eighties. Because it sort of transitioned in the late 1960s into black power like the Black Panthers, and it emphasized racial separatism and pride. And by the eighties there were all these internal divisions over integration versus nationalism and, and external oppression contributed to a more fragmentation.</p><p>And it was, it just sort of [00:21:00] became like messy. So. How is this piece framed by academics today? Well, they frame it as a canonized, but contested classic, which is telling, because it’s required reading in women’s gender studies and science and technology studies and media studies and literary theory and philosophy and anthropology and art theory.</p><p>It, it’s often paired with Judith Butler’s gender trouble, which I’ve also never read. But it’s considered one of the twin pillars of 1990s anti-essentialist or post-structuralist feminism works. And it, it has like a lot of sort of contradictory interpretations. There are lots of post humanist and transhumanist readings, and they celebrated as this early manifesto for leaving humanity behind.</p><p>Mm-hmm. And then there’s some critical race and, and decolonial scholars who both use and criticize it for its relative silence on race and colonialism. But here’s where worlds collide, right? You’re talking about Mom Donny’s dad. And here we have the, you know, decolonial scholars being [00:22:00] like, well, well, I don’t like that she doesn’t talk about identity politics in her anti identity politics manifesto.</p><p>But it, again, it like, like I sort of going back to the, the premise of this, it is framed as the origin text of cyber feminism and xeno feminism which really rose in the nineties, sort of five years after this was originally published. Okay. We published again in 1991, and then it sort of picked up from there.</p><p>And it has genuinely inspired shifts and course adjustments in various fields. Like in feminist theory, it shifted feminism away from women’s experience or biological essentialism toward constructivist, coalition based affinity politics. Like we don’t need a totality in order to work together from posthumanism and and critical animal studies.</p><p>It was one of the earliest and most poetic arguments. That the boundary between human and non-human is politically constructed and historically contingent. And then when it comes to queer and trans theory, this also really played a foundational role because it prefigure the, [00:23:00] the sort of concept of being non-binary and fluid in, in terms of your understanding of identity.</p><p>Interesting. And, and, and to be clear, Haraway was not herself writing from a an LGBT perspective in 1985, but it, it would be obvious why people who were gender fluid would see what she’s talking about and be like, oh, this can apply to me. Like they, and, and, and I think this is where a lot of people may kind of misunderstand.</p><p>Like grime stance vis-a-vis like trans and everything. It’s not about identity politics. I think it more rhymes with I’m not gonna put words in her mouth though, but like, I just feel like she, she more has the, the, this manifesto in her heart than like any particular, like, I like this group, I like this group.</p><p>Let’s all do identity. But anyway, let’s, let’s talk about the actual text, which is fascinating. I’m not gonna go into it because it’s, it’s long and poetic and a little convoluted, but the chapters provide a peak, right? So here are the chapters of it. [00:24:00] One first chapter, an ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit.</p><p>And then fractured identities, and then the informatics of domination, and then the homework economy outside the home, and then women in the integrated circuit. And then cyborgs a myth of political identity. Then there’s bibliography, but I have to say it’s starts. Oh God. It starts with this illustration that it’s like, part of me was like, I, I just opened the video.</p><p>Are you sitting it to me? Okay. Yeah. Well, I’ll send you a link. And I will describe it for those who are listening audio only. So don’t worry. My, my description is gonna be highly accurate. So Malcolm, actually, I’m gonna have you listen to, you can tell me how accurate I am and then, and then the audience can either feel comforted or not.</p><p>But I’m just gonna, I’m gonna give my best here. So, oh God. It, it is a picture of a woman who’s sitting in space with her back to a framed grid displaying galaxies and mathematical [00:25:00] equations at a 3D digital map. She is on her head wearing a white, a white. I’m gonna send it, but you get to hear my description first because you can tell the listeners how accurate I am on her head.</p><p>She’s wearing a white glowing tiger cub, and its arms are draped over her shoulders with its arm bones glowing through its ectoplasmic flesh in on her chest. Sits a circuit breaker with green lines emanating from it. And, and they sort of terminate blue nodes and then her fingers are lying on what looked like typewriter keys.</p><p>Maybe like super old school computer keys. Set the top. This is insane. Simon and diorama of an Egyptian desert complete with pyramids in the foreground. There’s a blue mountain range in the background and her face get, get me here ‘cause we’re in the, it’s it’s holiday time over here right now. Her face strikingly resembles that of Neil from the movie The Santa Claus, like the new husband picture, Neil.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Oh yes, I remember him. Yeah. Nerdy. Mm-hmm.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. But, but she has the [00:26:00] coloring and long dark hair of perhaps an indigenous American woman. Okay, so I’ll send you the link now. What the heck</p><p>did</p><p>you have? How I describe it? Tell me how accurate I am.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Tell me how accurate I am. Well, you didn’t describe that.</p><p>It looks like it was drawn by a child. I didn’t say that. No, you didn’t. But I think it looks like bad.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> It looks like it was drawn on a computer in the 1980s with what you had available to you at the time. Okay. But</p><p>okay, okay.</p><p>I’ll buy that. Yeah. I thought she was like on a spaceship, but she’s in a, no, she’s, she’s floating in space.</p><p>There’s stars behind the. Framed image and you see the glowing tiger. She Italian on her head and</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> yeah. Which she does have the thing on her head with the glowing bones and gelatinous supply. I said</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> gelatinous body, I think it’s ectoplasmic, but gelatinous is, is is probably more accurate.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> This is a thing.</p><p>I do love the Native American look. Yeah, I know, but No,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> but her face looks like Neil from a Santa Claus. I’m holding to that. I’m gonna, I’m gonna die on that. I didn’t think</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> her face [00:27:00] looks like a, one of those, a a a grams of like mini women faces to me. No, her,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> her, her eyes are Neil’s eyes. Just no Google image it at some point.</p><p>You are. At any rate, I’m sorry. We’re done with Art Critique Corner. I hope you enjoyed it. The text argues that in the late 20th century, humans have become cyborgs. And we totally are now. I mean, like, of course, like in 1985 we’re they were just getting warmed up. We’re hybrids of organism and machine and our identities and bodies and politics are shaped by information technologies and global capitalism.</p><p>And this could not be more true, especially</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> now. Do you want me to read the first paragraph here for people? I find this fun. Oh, you think</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> it’s, yeah. No, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, we could spend the whole, like, we could spend a month going through just this thing. Yeah. This</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth, faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism.</p><p>Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very [00:28:00] seriously. I know. No better stance to adopt from within the secular, religious, evangelical traditions of the United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism.</p><p>And go, go on. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs creatures, simultaneously, animal and machine who populate worlds ambiguously, natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs. A coupling between organisms and machine each conceived as coded devices in an intimacy and was a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.</p><p>The whole thing. The whole thing is like that. No, what I find funny about this and I really love that we’ve seen this within the conservative movement, is you could see sort of our vision of futurism For a long time, the futurists were really owned by the progressive movement, right? And they build these wide worlds and stuff like you know, star Trek.</p><p>And they really only take time to have conservative [00:29:00] futures when they are making fun of us. Like the mirror world in Star Trek, where the women are forced into skimpy outfits,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Or the come on. Like they aren’t already. Come on. No, wait.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> You should see our star Rek episode. If you haven’t seen our star.</p><p>TK is like a total dystopia. And Starship Troopers is actually a really good universe to live in. But they would only engage with us in like mocking, right? Like in Starship Troopers, that’s how it became like this conservative futurist icon. But now you’ve got stuff like the war hammer sort of wider community, which is clearly like very conservative coded, like we’re gonna be in space, but like a.</p><p>Post Christianity, like, theocratic ship on big you know, like, like, cathedral, like mega ships. Yeah. And, and we represent that inversion of their ideology, but in terms of like cyborg futurism which I love. Let’s get back</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> to the piece though. Let’s get back to the piece. So basically the, the, the cyborg, which is sort of the thing around this, the concept around which all this pi pivots is proposed as this mythic political figure that rejects fixed [00:30:00] essences like woman or nature.</p><p>Again, this is a rejection of identity politics and instead it raises partial and fractured and coalition based identities to build new forms of socialist feminist politics. So Haraway claims that advanced capitalism has shifted from an organic industrial order to an informatics of domination where everything is understood as information coding and systems.</p><p>So in this world, boundaries between body and machine are. Totally blurred. They’re kind of, they don’t matter anymore. Control operates through communication and data flows, and women are deeply integrated and exploited within global circuits of production and reproduction. But honestly, I think she only talks about the, the way in which women experience this because like literally the prompt was like, as a feminist, write this.</p><p>Like, so her essay wouldn’t have been accepted if she didn’t do this through feminist lens.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> It’s something interesting that she seems very interested in bla fing as like a goal, right? Like yeah,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like it sort of like a reference play that’s very Bay area, but also like, keep in mind she was raised a Catholic and she’s [00:31:00] playing with this, you know, oh,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> dun dun dun dun.</p><p>Yeah, no, she like, this is</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> one of her big influences also. So was the influence of Grimes, right? By way wasn’t Grimes raised Catholic? I think, yeah, she was raised Catholic too. So anyway, yeah, I just feel like all this rhymes with her, her sort of struggle and legacy. So communications technologies and bio technologies are, are framed and seen in this piece as, as tools that both enforce domination but also open new possibilities for resistance.</p><p>And I think it very much like we, we would endorse that like it’s, you know, this can be used against you absolutely, but you can 100% and must 100% use this. To move forward and you can’t pretend they’re not there. And in Haraway urges found us to appropriate the Cyborg figure to imagine non-natural, non totalizing political unities and alliances based on affinity and shared projects, rather than on a supposedly universal female nature.</p><p>And as I’m reading this, I as like a. I think she’s just saying, can we get over feminism please? And like just identity [00:32:00] politics in general. And she sees Yeah, it’s</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> really an anti identity politics piece. Yes. Saying that the world of the cyborg is the world of, of yeah. Like it’s over now.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Like we, we have, there is, there are more options now.</p><p>Like, and this freaked</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> out a lot of people is where</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> black cyber feminism comes from. Well, no, you’ll, you’ll see. Yeah. So in terms of like where, where I’m here, like how, how, where I step away from this haraway calls for quote pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility and their construction.</p><p>And I absolutely love that. Like it hints to a strong move away from identity politics. Like who cares if you’re a man or a woman or whatever, just do your thing. And we talk about that a lot. And she’s kind of arguing for four chan before four chan. Like no identities, just just ideas and affinity groups.</p><p>And that is capable of organizing. People to do amazing things. Like I was just rewatching some of the internet historian recaps of like what four chan did with shy above some various projects.</p><p>That is great.</p><p>And with polls online like Buddy Mcot face and, and [00:33:00] sending you know, Taylor Swift and all sorts of wonderful things.</p><p>Go watch all of internet historians videos if you don’t know his stuff already. Who everyone knows his stuff, but who knows? But yeah, I mean, I, I, I like this, but I’m also really amused that people invoke the name of this manifesto and the creation of a new identity groups rather than affinity groups, which is like the complete opposite of what the manifesto calls.</p><p>On re-listening to this for editing and getting a chance to think through it. I think Simone might actually be missing something here, which is to say that the modern feminists and progressive and awoke movement has actually moved in the direction that this piece predicted. They just have moved so holistically towards affinity groups rather than identity groups that they now see affinities as identity.</p><p>, If you look at the debate between the two cutes and the . Or where they called the true scum in the trans community. The trans people who thought that transness was just whenever, whatever you felt like in the moment and you could just claim anything you wanted. And the group that thought that you needed [00:34:00] to be like a dia, like officially diagnosed something, the officially diagnosed group lost completely.</p><p>, And are generally seen as like adjacent to T these days. So. Wiz, one of the core progressive identities. , And, and many of them, the various iterations of queer being largely opt in, , are they not now affinity groups? It’s just considered offensive to point that out.</p><p>And more broadly, they identify so holistically with their affinity, whether that affinity be the things that turn them on because what are the things that turn you on but your affinity, or you know, what they feel like in the moment that they now see their affinity as the most important part of their identity.</p><p>You see in Simone’s head when she’s reading this, and when I first heard it from her, what I heard was the world from my perspective, which is identities don’t really matter that much anymore. , Therefore you should disregard them and [00:35:00] focus on. Larger sort of intellectual goal-based affinities. , And that’s how you should define yourself an identity when what’s actually being said here is that you should focus on more basal affinities, like the things that arouse you, like if you’re aroused by same sex.</p><p>, Individuals, then that is the most important thing about you. Or if you conceptualize yourself as a woman, that is the most important thing about you. Whereas when we do the same cyber or sort of breaking apart of the individual within our world framework, we say the most important thing about you is your goals for human civilization, your life, what you find purpose in, et cetera, not basal arousal patterns or self conceptualizations.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> So, so then how, how can this give birth to new forms of feminism at all? Is kind of was my first question after just reading about the manifesto and looking at the manifesto and then what are cyber [00:36:00] feminism and xeno feminism. So let’s get into that. Cyber feminism is a strand of feminist thought and activism that focuses on the relationship between gender and digital technologies, especially the internet networked media.</p><p>It looks at how technology can both reinforce existing power structures and be used to challenge patriarchy and create new possibilities for identity, embodiment and political action. So it treats cyberspace. Which we got, we should bring back that word. And information technology is not as neutral or inherently male domains, but is contested terrains where gender, race, and power are negotiated.</p><p>So immediately the people who, who built on on this, this concept, brought back an identity. They’re like, nah, like this isn’t, you know, forget origin stories. No. Like, we’re still women and, and yeah, the internet changes everything, but now we have to own it. We have to own the internet. Like the, we, we are legion, we are Tumblr.</p><p>And it just. It really bothers me. Cyber feminists also aim to [00:37:00] understand and intervene in how technologies are designed and who controls them and how they shape everyday life from like work to surveillance to sexuality and social connection. And they explore how online platforms support resistance and network activism and, and alternative forms of community that disrupt rigid gender norms.</p><p>So in practice, cyber feminism has included digital art and hacking and code-based interventions and online collectives and analyses of social media movements and hashtag campaigns against harassment. So while FF like cyber feminism isn’t exactly like it, it is not, he’s being responsible for me too. No, this is like, this is like, it’s basically responsible for me too.</p><p>Hashtag me too.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Well, me Too. Wasn’t that bad compared to Anita Esei. And she, it’s also,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> yeah, it’s, it’s also kind of behind Gamergate, like all basically like the premise of cyber feminism is what produced Gamergate. And I’m like, oh my God. Like how can you take, how can you take the Cyborg [00:38:00] Manifesto and screw it up this badly?</p><p>Right. Ugh. Ugh. But it gets worse. It gets worse. Worse. Why? Wanna hear</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> more about the Zeno feminism and black femini it cyber feminism.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. So, so while, okay. So cyber feminism is, is linked to third wave feminism, which I had heard of before. It, it just extends earlier struggles over rights and repression into digital environments.</p><p>That’s basically all it became. Like they just completely forgot about what hero was. Haraway was actually arguing in most recent currents. Such as xeno, feminism and black feminism sort of build on the critique in very different ways. But the, the, the focus is, is on, on centering intersectionality and queerness and global inequalities and how technologies are built and used.</p><p>And I, I just, oh, like why? But it gets worse because then there’s black cyber feminism and early cyber feminism also often focused on utopian possibilities of the internet for gender subversion. And it was criticized for [00:39:00] centering white western perspectives and overlooking race.</p><p>Like here</p><p>Donna Haraway is, and she’s like, let’s just forget origin stories and let’s just like drop all boundaries and like build a better future.</p><p>And then, and then like other groups are like, that’s so racist. How can you, how can you do that? But black cyber feminism actually didn’t arise until the 2010s. So it’s like quite a while after cyber feminism in the 1990s. And it addresses how racial prejudices persist online and how black women navigate resistant reshape digital spaces.</p><p>And it draws from black feminist traditions like intersectionality and Afrofuturism. And it’s, it’s really just described as an intersectional framework that extends cyber feminism and black feminist thought into digital spaces. And I just, you know, I just, I, yeah, it bothers me, but xeno feminism, I feel like, I feel like I can get on [00:40:00] board with it.</p><p>So it also emerged at the same time that black cyber feminism emerged in the 2010s. And it, it emerged around a, a new manifesto called Xeno Feminism, a Politics for Alienation by the, the collective Laborious C Nik. Niks, it presents itself as a techno materialist feminism and that that treats digital networks, biotech and other technologies as tools that can be re-engineered to undermine patriarchy and capitalism and racism and other entrenched hierarchies.</p><p>Rather than as, and now, now they’re the entrenched</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> hierarchy. And that’s why their own logic.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> That’s where I’m a little concerned. Yeah. ‘cause it, it rejects biological determinism and insists that gender roles and in many so-called natural differences or social constructs, it can be reconfigured and that gender abolition</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> configured if you reconfigured a person’s like genetics.</p><p>I said, that’s what I’m saying is</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like, I think that in like, on, on one hand, Xeno feminism sounds really cool. Like just [00:41:00] forget about gender, screw gender. If biological sex limits you or you have a problem with it, just engineer a solution. Like do whatever you wanna do. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But here’s, here’s where I think our form of cyber feminism or post cyber feminist theo ideology comes from.</p><p>Yeah. So I’ll lay this out. So. We agree with them that you can use technology to change genetics, to change the psychological structure of males and females. Yeah, to change their roles in relationships, to change the way that they interact with each other. However, we then take the secondary position, which is to say, but it turns out that the two roles in society of male and female create homeostatic perfection.</p><p>And by that what I mean is yes, you could hypothetically redesign man and woman to be something other than man and woman, but such a society would be less stable and weaker than a society of men and women. Mm-hmm. [00:42:00] Even. Yeah, no,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> no, no. I that I 100% because pretty explicitly as Xeno feminism argues for a reworked intersectional universalism that can include all who are currently othered, so across gender and race and class and species.</p><p>It doesn’t focus on narrow identity categories, but it also kind of implies this like homogenization, and I’m super against that. And I think like extrapolating out from your male female balance in homeostasis, that’s really valuable. Like more broadly we see variety as the key progenitor to flourishing and homeostasis, but you can’t get that without variety.</p><p>Like you need a diverse ecosystem to create flourishing rather than some kind of slurry. And my concern with Xeno feminism is there’s this. Almost explicit. Perhaps explicit if I dug deeper into it. Desire for homogenization and in some kind of new idealized version that doesn’t have [00:43:00] identity. But I think two problems with, and I still don’t think it honors this spirit of the Cyborg Manifesto because one, it very much has origin stories, like I’m an oppressed, whatever.</p><p>And I need to fix that. And, and also it, it implies homogenization when what she’s really saying is like, I don’t care where you came from. I don’t care what you are, be what you wanna be. And like, let’s organize around interest groups, just autistic ad hocs. And I love that. And I just, it really, I just.</p><p>I love that Donna Haraway realized that biotech and the internet could render gender wars and even identity politics, which politics, which are ultimately not very productive, obsolete. And I love that people found this inspiring and it makes me sad that others were like, eh, like no, let’s, let’s keep identity politics.</p><p>No. They</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> found a way to twist this into keeping identity politics. Yeah. And she’s sort of explicitly arguing that identity [00:44:00] politics don’t matter in the age of the, the, the cyborg. Right. She’s</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> arguing they don’t have to matter. And, and also like the whole point of the prompt for the essay that she’s responding to, like she’s, she’s.</p><p>She’s responding to an essay that’s like, oh man, like what do we do about all these really important like feminism and leftist movements falling apart because of identity politics. And she’s like, here’s my solution to identity politics ruining everything. And people are like, well, what a cool solution.</p><p>And they’re like, oh, but, but identity politics. So it’s like really clear that identity politics have won out. But that’s in the short term because if you look at people like Grimes and like us, we’re above replacement in kids. Yeah. And, and we are super against identity politics and we absolutely love this sort of like, build whatever it is you want for your future.</p><p>We’re building our own culture. We love it when people like like culture craft and culture jam and all that. And, and I think Grimes does too. And I think also sort of like the, the way you’re making me realize this follows very much the arc of, [00:45:00] of her career too, because I love watching people do long commentaries on like her career is that.</p><p>She, she very much sympathizes with a lot of like feminist and trans and Marxist, et cetera, ideologies because like she sees the merit in many of their ideas and champions them. And then they’re like, oh, you’re part of my identity group. And then like as soon as she says something, it slightly deviates from any of them.</p><p>Or like associates with someone who doesn’t identify with some of them or critiques them.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Then they’re like, wait, how could she, how would she possibly like, move around with the palladium crowd or have children with Elon Musk? Like, she’s, she’s bad. And then, but then they feel so conflicted. ‘cause then she comes out with something else brilliant.</p><p>And they wanna, they wanna engage with it. But she’s, she’s said the Remotion thing and we must now reject her. Well,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> she, she’s an out the box thinker, like ala, you know, she, well,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> yeah, no, that, that’s the thing is she, like Donna Haraway totally rejects identity politics in an even origin stories. Like she is, she is her.</p><p>[00:46:00] And, and the funny thing is, again, when I like watch these long YouTube things on her and like, yeah, you’re right. Like when I, when I. Like read commentary on ala too. Like, they all wanna go. They wanna, they wanna shoehorn these people into origin stories. Like Ala grew up in a strict household that abused her, and that’s why she became who she was, you know?</p><p>And, and it’s not like, oh my gosh, like, no. Even you like, you know, people wanna shoehorn you in this. Yeah. Like Steven mulling you and then trying to, you’re, you’re, you’re traumatized by your childhood. You, you have deep scars, you know? I’m like, yeah. Like, sh first shut up about the origin story. Like, and, and all three of you really have, have engineered your own.</p><p>No, my</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> deep scars crafted me into a tool of military precision.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Well then I, I think I very much epitomize Haraway’s Santa Cruz, California culture, which is like, I just don’t remember my origin story. I’m, it’s very Peter Panes, like you</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> talk about your family’s background all the time. Simone,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like you talk about their background, but like.</p><p>Sort of only in the context of us trying [00:47:00] to create a false myth. I mean, not false myth, but like, you know, Nobo own new origin stories.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Smith. It’s a good one.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I know, it’s a good one. Come on. You know, I jumped onto your family as soon as they welcomed me. But yeah, anyway, I just I, my hope is that this whole post origin story, post identity thing wins out in the long term.</p><p>But unfortunately for the time being this foundational piece, which is, wait,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> did you get to explain what black cyber feminism was?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. It was basically like, no, I, I reject this concept. My identity matters more, woes me. Why</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> they,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> they’re like, I’m privileged. How dare you take away my privilege. Well, no, I mean, they, they just, they just wanna point, I mean like, classic example of like how being a black woman online sucks.</p><p>Okay. Cupid stat. Like, there are plenty of examples and ways Oh yeah. There’s</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> plenty of examples of where you are genuinely disadvantaged as like a black woman. But I</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> think the problem is they’re missing the point is like, you don’t, you don’t have to be a black woman online. [00:48:00] And also, like some of my favorite creators are black women like on YouTube.</p><p>Like I don’t, I don’t see them as necessarily doing really poorly. So I don’t know, like, yeah, I just like, I think they’re a really classic example of this larger dynamic of people really struggling to let go of identity politics, even though there are downfall and they’re like, the last thing that’s gonna help.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Well, I, I think then we need to call. Post cyber feminism and post cyber feminism. Is that Yes. This, well, it’s not gender roles, and gender isn’t entirely a social construct. It’s a social contract based on a biological reality. But that biological reality is alterable in the future. The question is, is are the factions of humanity that attempt to dramatically alter that?</p><p>Are they gonna be able to stay above replacement rate and technologically and economically productive? Mm. And I think if we look at the existing groups that are experimenting with that right now, the [00:49:00] answer is no. So should it be</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> post cyber feminism or hard cyber feminism? Post cyber? See, the problem is like, I don’t like, I don’t like that it’s called cyber feminism at all because feminism, like attaching feminism to it makes it an identity group.</p><p>And again, like I said, like Donna Haraway, like she, yes, she responded to the prompt as a feminist and put like a feminist framing into the piece. But that’s ‘cause it wouldn’t have been published otherwise. Like the piece, she still clearly rejects the concept of. Of identity groups in general. And she’s basically saying like, but</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I, I think you’re missing the point.</p><p>So the, the point of cyber feminism is, the cyber part modifies the feminism part by saying we can promote the interest of women by tearing down gender roles. Well, yeah, I mean, in short, if</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> you love it, let it go though. Like if, if you actually want women to thrive, allow them to become something beyond women,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> right?</p><p>That’s what she’s [00:50:00] saying. Yeah. And we’re saying we agree, but we are post that because we have recognized that tearing down the gender roles is self-destructive. That society ends up disintegrating. I’m going to begin to guess in most groups that do tear apart gender roles, which is to say even if women are no longer birthing of children and men are no longer the, you know, the, they perform that role I still think in a society to have one gender that is optimized around you know, basically being disposable or being super valuable, so you get longer tail distributions.</p><p>Mm. Being slightly more ambitious and aggressive and being more open to militarism and have another group that is more spiritual. Historically, women have always been more spiritual and was in conservative communities. Women stay at higher rates than men do. Surprising fact that a lot of people dunno.</p><p>So a lot of people think that the groups that women are discriminated in with, like, say the conservative [00:51:00] Jews to me feels</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> kind of wrong, Mormon. Just how like that’s like. And I know you’re gonna be like, well, hormonally, that’s not true. But like women were often seen as the more sexually voracious group than men.</p><p>Like,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I don’t, it’s true, but they even, even back then, they were seen as the more spiritual group. Generally speaking, women have been seen as a, I don’t know,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like look at Jewish groups, like men are the ones who get to do the studying and women are the ones who True. I didn’t say</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> religious, I said spiritual.</p><p>Like they’re just more prone to believe this stuff. I</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> would still say that, that, that Jews would be like, well, men, they would know. And our episode on this</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> where we actually go into it, this is why when a large group of people began to deconvert from religions, the men became atheist and agnostics and the women all became like Wiccans and pagans.</p><p>Oh, ‘</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> cause okay. That’s a fair, that’s a fair point. But yeah, we should do an episode on that. At any rate, I will enjoy this conversation with you. Oh no, but</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> hold on, hold on. I’m not done here. And the women are more caregiver. They maybe specialize in child rearing more in larger bureaucratic structures more.</p><p>And you could have a society that’s optimized around that. [00:52:00] I know that some people want to, in our audience, want to try to create societies without women, which is entirely possible. But we’ll see. Maybe, maybe the ones those women survive, maybe they don’t. I can tell you what the all women civilizations are definitely not gonna survive those things.</p><p>See,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> don’t even</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> discuss them. That shows really quickly. Love you to DeSimone Love. You’re a great wife. And thank you for putting together this very informative episode. So fun. No,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I mean, thanks to Grimes for always, always having something great. Okay. Which one I want do you wanna do next?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Of course. Tell me about the oh by the way, for people who, one of the episodes we’re gonna be doing this weekend is on Reddit. ‘cause we learned somehow because I’ve been really bummed about the episodes not doing as well recently, was the new Gemini change. Yeah. And then I see a post on Reddit and I’m like, wait, okay, this is near the top of my feed and it’s a base camp post.</p><p>We don’t have a base camp subreddit, so I go to Reddit and our subreddit is wildly popular, 51 k [00:53:00] weekly visitors, 14 k weekly contributors. So to put that in, in, in, in context there, Hassan Spiker has 6.3 K weekly contributors. Our historians has 160 weekly contributors. That used to be one of my favorite subreddits.</p><p>The Joe Rogan experience has 7.9 K. So we are and if you’re looking at weekly visitors for Joe Rogan, it’s 273 K versus our 50 K. Right? But that’s like, not that much different from what I’d expect. It’s not, it’s 301 and three. The, the, the only one that comes close to our outsized impact is the red scare of subreddit with 30 K weekly interactions and around it’s a super active subreddit</p><p>.</p><p>The one that really got me was us having as much as one 16th, the weekly visitors as advice animals, and almost twice the weekly contributions of advice animals. Where I proposed to my wife and what I used to think of as the biggest [00:54:00] subreddit.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. Yeah. So why is it us and them? And so that’s what we’ll be going into on that one because</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> yeah, we’re gonna, but</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> we’re starting as gold. We do about as well as un as gold. Oh, well, no, he’s, no, he’s for in terms of contributions, he’s a 13 K contributions. Yeah. But he’s a 356 K weekly visitors, so we, yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Because he’s but not that much bigger,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> like, like three x bigger when like on YouTube, he’s like a hundred x bigger. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Okay.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> We’re gonna give into mine a three x figure. It’s like 10 x bigger, eight x figure. Anyway I wanna hear about the comments on today’s episode.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh gosh. Okay.</p><p>Blanking. They liked it. They, they, one person pointed out, and I think, which this is very astute, this is the episode on the United States new national security strategy that Trump ultimately is doing, like cares more about Europeans than the eu, basically like, as is shown in this strategy, which is basically like, I’m gonna try to go around the EU and talk with the [00:55:00] non elements of these countries and we’ll see what we can do.</p><p>So yeah, people, people really enjoyed that. We, we definitely have also our, our fans of, of de deontological approach in the, in the comments who regularly chime in. I’m concerned about your consequentialist prioritization. I mean, in the end, like if you take any if you take a, a hard unyielding line on either approach, you are going to commit atrocities, like pragmatism reigns supreme.</p><p>But people still are very much team deontology and we’re still team consequentialism.</p><p>Ironically, yesterday we also did an episode on Deontology versus Consequentialism in Santa Claus and lying to children. And some people were like, well, lying is just a bad thing. And I was like, well, you know, whether or not it’s bad depends on the consequences. , And , I think that this is a great encapsulation of my views on Deontology because to me it shows, you know, when I talk about the deontological leader of an army, having to explain [00:56:00] to the.</p><p>You know, mothers and wives of the soldiers, why he let them die instead of doing ambushes and other tricky things to get the enemies. , And fundamentally what I’m pointing out there is that what Deontology also does is outsource the cost of your moral grandstanding. To other individuals. I think Santa is a perfect example of that, saying, I will rob my children.</p><p>The experience and wonder of Christmas and Santa Claus and magic, , so that I can maintain moral, moral purity, , is, is a perfect encapsulation of, . This, , and this is one of the most beautiful parts of childhood, you know, for me, for many other people, is getting to spend part of your life in this magical world, , before you grow up into the dull black and white world of adulthood.</p><p>, To say, no, my kids don’t get that because. I don’t want to ever lie. , The outsourcing, the moral consequences, that’s one of my biggest problems was deontological moral frameworks. I mean, [00:57:00] even if you don’t see this as outsourcing the moral consequences, you have to admit that sometimes you do outsource the moral consequences because if there are cases in which a consequentialist view would lead to less overall negatives, which is fundamentally why you’re a deontologist and not a consequentialist, .</p><p>, You’re saying, okay, yes, but even in those cases, I would choose a deontological moral framing. , And those consequences will not always be born solely by you. So yes, it does universally outsource negatives to other people for individual moral purity.</p><p>For those that struggled with that. I’ll word this another way to make it more clear. It’s a really important point. The core difference between a deontological moral framing and a consequentialist moral framing is I judge morality by the outcomes of an action. An action was good if it led to good outcomes, bad if it led to bad outcomes.</p><p>Deontologists view morality by a list of rules, X type of thing is bad. Y type of thing is good, like lying is bad. , Even if. Through, , lying to somebody you may achieve some, what you perceive as in [00:58:00] the moment, some sort of positive outcome. , The core distinction between these two framings is, would you, , when you have judged an action as usually a bad type of action, like lying, engage in that action when you know it leads to a good outcome?</p><p>, And you can say, no, I, I just wouldn’t do that. Right. You are saying universally through this, is that the core place where these two ideologies conflict is in? That specific question, which means that you are allowing for moral purity of yourself. Sometimes bad outcomes, and the point I’m making here is that those bad outcomes are almost never only shared by you, and thus it is a moral system.</p><p>That is almost to me, the antithetical of morality because it outsources the negative outcomes of your moral purity onto other people’s lives and [00:59:00] existences.</p><p>And you can say, well, actually, if everyone adopted a deontological framework, or if I adopted deontological framework long term, that leads to better outcomes. But if you make this argument for deontological framework, which you’re actually arguing for is a consequentialist framework, just one that looks deontological in nature, because then we are still having the argument about which framework leads to more morality overall.</p><p>And in which case, you’re not a deontologist at. All, you just disagree about how to achieve the most morality. , And then you need to engage with us. Not like lying is wrong, but these are the effects it’s going to have on society if you choose this, this, and this, which then just makes you a consequentialist.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> So,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> but that’s scenario, I mean this is interesting ‘cause we’re entering like the conservative intellectual community. And in the old days, if you look at like the way the political spectrum broke down historically.</p><p>Conservatives were much more likely in use of the intellectual class to be a deontologist, and the intellectual class that was more progressive, was more likely to be consequentialist.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And this has really switched [01:00:00] because the urban monoculture has adopted a deontological moral framing. And so the deontological conservative intellectuals are a little bit more confused, I think, about where they fit in this new framing and structure.</p><p>Yeah. As many of the consequentials have moved to the conservative movement.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Oh, and, and final little anecdote, I, I took the kids to BJ’s our local like big bucks, store this, this morning to do two weeks worth of grocery shopping. And they of course always love encountering the restocking robot that goes by, has two little eyes.</p><p>It makes a little whistling sound. And it checks shelves to see what needs to be restocked. That’s what the robot’s there for though. They just think it’s there for, like, it’s looking towards family. That’s what they’re convinced of. And this time, because this is like a, a store like Costco where you buy huge amounts of things and then show your receipt at the exit, you always have to pass by someone to, you know, prove your purchases at the exit.</p><p>And [01:01:00] this time the guy gave to our kids instead of stickers or stamps, which sometimes they give to the kids, he gave them like coloring book pages of the robot in the store aisles. Because it’s clear that two kids who go to BJ’s, this robot has become so much of the lore of VJ’s. Yeah. It’s like the robot.</p><p>And it’s really not like, it doesn’t look humanoid. It’s just like a stick, like the, the pictures themselves, it, you look at it and if you don’t know what it’s about, you’re like.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I, I was a CEO at BJ’s. I would take this to really dress up the store robots, make them look like reindeer in the winter or something.</p><p>Oh no, totally. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Like make and make them look, you know, outlandish and grace. ‘cause then the kids are gonna be like, I wanna go to the robot store. I don’t wanna go to Walmart. I don’t wanna go to whatever. Like, I don’t wanna go to the robot store. No. Like they’re really missing an opportunity there. But though maybe there, it’s starting to dawn on them.</p><p>But I just, I, I think about this and I think about the way that our kids are already relating to robotics and ai and everyone’s like, oh, you can’t [01:02:00] just have AI friends for your kids. And I’m like, dude, like if this isn’t just our kids either. And I’m also looking at recent PEW study results around chatbot usage and youth in the United States today.</p><p>And it’s already so pervasive and I, speaking</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> of R Fab is stable as of today.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah, yeah. Which is really exciting. But I</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> doing bug things, but it’s broadly stable now. And I’m gonna</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> bug No, it, it is amazing. If you haven’t checked out R fab.ai yet, please do check it out. It’s, it’s really fun, even if you’re not into chatbots, but about three in 10 teens say they use AI chatbots every day, including 16% who do so several times a day, or almost constantly 16%.</p><p>So I, I think, yeah, people just don’t really understand the way that, just how, like, I, I think boomers can’t understand a, a generation that sort of grew up online. We and older generations cannot understand.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I can understand it [01:03:00] because, I mean, you did it</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> because you were super into it, right? And like, just like your mom was on TikTok before anyone else, right?</p><p>Like they, it’s not, it’s not your age. Necessarily. It’s just a strong correlation. I think a lot of people are in, including some young people too, who just happen to be similar. An episode</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I really want to do, by the way Yeah. That I’m struggling or not do today, is on how ai, and not just chatbots, but like real girls and stuff they do is AI are going to destroy the OnlyFans business model.</p><p>I’m looking online. Eagle, well, somebody mentioned recently and it really got to me when they pointed this out ‘cause I like it. Hit me, oh my god, this is true.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Hmm.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> You don’t see hot alternative girls working in customer facing positions anymore.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh, hold on though. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There’s this whole new drama that’s been playing out online.</p><p>About GameStop stealing Best Buy’s. Girl, are you kidding? That is where I heard about this. Okay. Then what’s, so the point they were making is the politics, by the way, is there used to be this like [01:04:00] TikTok influencer who worked for Best Buy and everyone just loved her. And then GameStop recently, I think hired her and she like did an ad for them and everyone’s like, oh my God, GameStop steal your girl.</p><p>That’s why. Yeah, that’s, it’s</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> why it’s getting cocked. No, and it shows like, she’s got like a nose ring and everything, but the point I was making was she’s gonna golf. Yeah. Saying that historically. It used to be you would go to your GameStop or you’d go to your hot topic and working the counter would be a cute girl with a nose ring.</p><p>You know, like your cute, you know, whatever girl. They’re like, these girls do not work consumer facing positions anymore because they’re all online doing some sort of sex hustle. Oh,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> right. So they used to be like sweet waitresses or working at the ice cream shop or whatever, and I</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> notice it. Yeah. You don’t see like hot alternative young girls working in customer facing positions anymore.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Alternative. Right. So like maybe in the Midwest you, you’ll still find an ice Christian girl sling an ice cream. Right. But you</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> won’t see nose ring or dyed hair girl. Or not not</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> cute goth girl. Which is [01:05:00] maybe why, maybe this is why GameStop girl is such a like</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Exactly.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh, they’re like, she’s the last one.</p><p>The last, oh</p><p>my</p><p>God, she’s so precious. We must, yeah, she, she’s the new Helen of Troy. The, the last hot goth girl working in retail,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> but she’s not really, she’s an influencer, like all of us, the space</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> that launched a thousand online comments.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Okay,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I’m gonna get into it now. All right. Speaking of cyber feminism God speak speaking of, of hot online girls.</p><p>Let me, let me pull up the outline. Let’s see. Hold on. I have so many freaking tabs open like everyone does. Alright. God. I mean, I have the, the coffee kids do too, but it’s not like gonna kill me. Geez. Alright,</p><p>lemme get it out though. All right, you ready? You don’t [01:06:00] wanna look inattentive or people will think that you’re phoning it in.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Oh yes. Do I get, do I get that complain ever?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Well, one person was like, smell’s bringing it, like step it up Malcolm. Maybe, maybe it’s because you, you, you know, you’re less good at pretending to look engaged when you’re reading Korean romances on the side.</p><p>When I do it,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> stop it because I</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> put, I think that’s it.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Control</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> The thing is you just No, I will, I will tell you the secret Malcolm, you put, you have it on your phone, you need to put it on the screen and then you switch.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I can’t, I can’t. The apps that I use only have UNE</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> doesn’t, yeah, I have to use the phone.</p><p>Oh, that sucks. Sorry. All right. Well anyway, all right, you ready? Because I’m gonna start.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I’m okay. Oh, hey, we have the list now of the good Korean romance, and I don’t know if you found, I know I need to publish.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I haven’t published it yet, but I will. I should do that this weekend. I’ll certainly do it over the, the, our winter [01:07:00] break thing.</p><p>All right, ready? Okay.</p><p><strong>Speaker:</strong> No, but look, she fixed your house. Your house. I wanna break this so I can eat break. I wanna break this. Well, do you wanna put a big, I wanna break this When you want your house to this break? This house apart? No. Yeah. How would you do that? I’m gonna have you work so hard to build it. House I mouth. Well, you should have thought about that.</p><p>We can make a giant finally flipping a whittle like this. What do you think? Like that? Okay. Then we’ll just add this giant roof. Oh my gosh. But the roof might be too big. Titan too big. Let’s find out. Do you think it’s too big? Let’s find out. Let’s find out. Whoa. Whoa. I, I’ll even, I wanna Even taller. Even taller.</p><p>That’s the tallest house there is [01:08:00] Titan. It’ll lose its structural stability and fall over if you make it taller. I bigger. That looks so tall. It looks so tall. It looks so tall. I need bigger, taller, even bigger and taller. You’re demanding girl Titan. Very demanding young lady. Let’s make another a little tent house for you.</p><p>End.</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>