In keeping with this week’s theme — deep uncertainty and an attendant tentativeness — I’d like to make a quick observation that’ll certainly bear reconsideration as soon as I click "Publish." I’m not so sure I agree with much in Haraway’s essay, for many reasons. The first is that, as Jarrod pointed out, the style is unnecessarily mushy. Any call to arms that declares itself a "manifesto" might have been more effective if written more clearly. [It’s possible that Haraway is attempting to avoid the phallogocentricism of most academic arguments, but then she might be essentializing a ‘feminine’ discourse that people like Russ are so intent on satirizing]. At any rate, that’s not the main problem I had with the essay. I wanted to see a more thoughtful examination of how the blurring boundaries Haraway outlines lead to oppositional opportunities as opposed to an unwitting support of transnational capitalism — especially as it concerns the boundary between "animal-human (organism) and machine" (152). When I think of cyborgs in contemporary society, I perhaps incorrectly think of the person walking along with an iPod in one ear and a phone implanted in the other — or maybe those people caressing silvery, fetishized objects upon which they push buttons in order to play some video game as they walk zombified through campus. [I’m a Luddite, of course…]. My point is that the blurring of organism and machine seems to service the economy, in the sense that people don’t use cell phones to foment revolution; they use them because they’re a status device with cool ring tones, and perhaps they can’t bear their own thoughts for the few minutes it takes to get from the parking lot to the classroom (which becomes inevitably dull, unless you sit in the back and play that video game). In short, I’m inclined to believe that the blurred distinction between humans and machines "is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet" rather than "about lived social and bodily realities" (154) — and Haraway hasn’t really given me any reason to believe otherwise.