We are not ready. But we never have been;

in fact, you could say that while we are not ready, we also cannot wait. We were not ready for the industrial age, nor for the information age; we were not ready for the collapse of enormous empires, nor the emergence of nations. And yet, for the most part, we cannot imagine going back. Human beings persevere, and evolve, too. ¶ But it is the exponential acceleration which we are in the middle of which is perhaps the hardest for us to imagine: a world where humans and our technology collide in ways which make the piercing of skin and the passing-through of our bodies not the traumatic, rare experiences of accidents and hospitals, but the path to 'upgrades,' a time where almost all information is available almost all the time. In this coming cyborg age, and the time which might supersede it, a posthuman age of the so-called 'singularity,' we have many of the same tensions of today to contend with. Like technologies before them, these cyborgian technologies have the ability to erase class difference and lessen suffering for almost everyone. But human beings have perhaps always had the ability to diminish the 'power-over' states which cause suffering amongst us. As we have become increasingly divorced from the impacts of our negative actions through globalization (or the source of them, if you are on the other side of a divide of privilege of haves and have-nots,) it is sometimes hard to see the shadow of our technologies. Unconfronted by the small injustices of long workdays and cramped quarters or the horrors of modern-day slavery and ecological destruction, the call to act in service of our fellow humans might sometimes be missing. ¶ This new technological layer, however, has done something which previous technological accelerations perhaps have not: as capitalism has invited every business to be digital and the race to the lowest possible cost for information technology has also resulted in lower and lower barriers to entry into the technological revolution, the raw tools to become rich (or connected, safe and privileged) are in some senses available to all but the poorest, as well. For all the talk of 'tech company bubbles' and 'startup fads,' there is some truth to the claims of the 'disruptive' startup: the blip of a company that was Google has unseated vast monuments to the industrial age in a matter of just a few short years. And the startups which have built upon its platforms (or been purchased by it) have also been chipping away steadily at the base of the castle walls of the rich's claims to entitlement even if enriching them in the short term. Startups needn't even be companies--they can be the Occupy movement, Anonymous or any number of rising tribes of self-educated and self-organizing people, like the Citizen Science movement or guilds of video gamers. Riches in the coming age will not be measured in things alone (though food, water, energy and other basic resources will likely remain contested for the near future) but in information, access and ingenuity. The age of the cyborg will be built upon the rising tide of the information age, and the keys to the kingdom will be cloned over and over until they are no longer relevant.¶ Enter the Cyborg, within the Biome ¶ (Not) long ago, in a past century, a brilliant woman named Dr. Donna Haraway wrote the Cyborg Manifesto. This rich--and dense--treatise on the beautiful, trainwreck future of feminism, technology, patriarchy and the notion of the individual sparked a small but vocal set of social scientists, artists and future-thinkers to conceive of ourselves not just as individuals and our technological tools, but a messier, more intertwined and organic merging of our selves, our tribes, our tools and our data. This concept, the Cyborg, is perhaps a more accurate way of seeing the world, because few among us are able to forage for our own food any more, or diagnose illness, do advanced math or any number of other things as well without technology and networks as we do with it. ¶ If one accepts the cyborg, though, one also is accepting that the Western idea of the individual, an island of self-reliance, is not so much an inviolable truth, but a sometimes-useful motivator for a strong work ethic. Interdependence and interreliance is more true now than it ever was. Unprecedented levels of globalization mean that a water shortage in California affects food supplies on the East Coast, earthquakes in Asia affect phone sales and global currencies can be markedly affected by an unwise social media post. There is no pure individual. Nor is there any one 'us.' ¶ The concept of the cyborg is perhaps best understood alongside the idea of the biome. Biomes are environments of species, weather, resources, geographies and more which have their own unique set of characteristics and deep interrelationships. There are global biomes in the sense of the strict science of biology, geology and a thousand other -ologies, perhaps better described by Wikipedia or a pithy and highly-visual TED talk. But there are also the smaller biomes, micobiomes, in small valleys, tidal pools, or the bacteria of our gut, for example. Seemingly tiny imbalances in those environments can radically change how well that biome functions or how it evolves. ¶ Our technological selves exist in their own biomes and micro-biomes. The biome of the English world wide web is so broad as to seem difficult to see as an entity, but it is highly affected by the search engines which index it, the networks it travel along, the viral tides of content shared by its many users, the data dumped into it by sentient humans and churning algorithms alike. The same set of data can be seen in overlap with other biomes or lenses, though, as the idea of the biome of the United States, stitched together with a construction of 'a' national identity, the plurality of its people, its rules and laws (DNA), cultural norms (somewhat akin to instincts), core functions (organs), its management of waste, et cetera. And it is here where the concept of the biological biome has to evolve, because unlike the biomes in the now-antique Encyclopedia Britannica, the biomes described in the Wikiverse our children will are learning from will start to describe overlaps not just at the edge of the land and the ocean, or the touching tips of continents, but the oddly distributed biomes and cultures of gaming societies, global energy grids, international manufacturing and more.