The cyborg is not a distant fantasy — it is already embedded in everyday life. In 2024, the Delhi High Court ruled that a deceased cancer patient’s cryopreserved sperm was inheritable property, allowing his parents to have a child using his genetic material after his death — a process known as posthumous reproduction. A similar case unfolded in China, where a couple killed in a 2013 car accident became parents four years later, after their frozen embryos were carried to term by a surrogate. 

Even ordinary devices like the Fitbit and Apple Watch now turn the body into a running data feed, redefining health as something algorithmically mediated rather than simply lived. Technology, in other words, is no longer just changing how we live — it is beginning to decide who gets to become a parent, and what counts as a body at all. This is the cyborg condition Donna Haraway, the American feminist scholar and longtime University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) professor, first named in her 1985 Cyborg Manifesto: a way of blurring rigid boundaries between nature and culture, human and machine. Today, that boundary hasn’t just blurred — it has disappeared. 

Power, data and the cyborg condition 

The rise of the cyborg is not just a technological shift — it is structured by power. Every interaction with technology, from a fitness app to a social media scroll, produces data that corporations capture and monetize, giving rise to what scholars call surveillance capitalism. The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal made this concrete: Facebook data harvested from millions of users was used to build psychological profiles for political targeting during elections. Human experience itself has become a raw material for profit.

Power also operates through algorithmic bias. In 2018, Amazon scrapped an AI recruiting tool after discovering it systematically downgraded resumes from women, having trained itself on a decade of male-dominated hiring data. In the US criminal justice system, a 2016 ProPublica investigation found that a widely used risk-assessment algorithm rated Black defendants as future reoffenders at nearly twice the rate of white defendants with similar records. In both cases, systems built to appear neutral instead reproduced the inequalities already present in their data.

Algorithms, agency and control 

This is where the cyborg becomes explicitly political. If algorithms mediate our perception, choices and opportunities, then power no longer operates only through traditional institutions like the state. It is embedded in technological systems that are opaque, complex and largely unregulated. The question is not simply who governs society, but who designs and controls the systems through which society is experienced.

In such a context, human agency becomes uncertain. Are we making choices, or are choices being shaped for us? When recommendation systems guide what we watch or read, and predictive algorithms influence decisions about our lives, the distinction between autonomy and manipulation blurs.

The politics of empowerment

This account of surveillance and algorithmic control is not purely dystopian — it also opens new possibilities. Medical technologies save lives. Digital platforms enable new forms of communication and political mobilization. AI is even being applied to predict climate-driven disease outbreaks, helping researchers model how a warming world will reshape public health.

The challenge, therefore, is not to reject technology but to politicize it. Who owns the data our bodies generate? Should corporations have unrestricted access to it? What regulation is needed to ensure transparency and accountability in AI systems? Without answering these questions, the benefits of technological progress will stay unevenly distributed, while the risks keep growing.

Algorithms are also reshaping knowledge itself. When profit-driven systems filter information rather than truth, public discourse becomes vulnerable to manipulation — a quiet but serious threat to democracy. 

Confronting algorithmic power: from domination to freedom

Confronting algorithmic power over knowledge and discourse requires stronger frameworks for digital ethics, data governance and technological accountability. Governments, institutions and civil society must work together to ensure that technology serves human interests, rather than undermining them. Ultimately, the cyborg is not just a fusion of human and machine. It reflects the society we are building.

If profit and control alone drive that society, the cyborg will become a tool of domination. But if principles of justice, transparency and human dignity guide it, the cyborg can become a space for new forms of freedom and possibility.

The cyborg is already here. The real question is whether we will recognize its political nature and act accordingly.

[Ruqaiyya Jhandawala edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.