Post-humans Sighted

I’ve exorcised my demons and put them between covers under the title Silicon Simulacra: Post-humans of the Machines Worlds.   If you don’t want to buy, you can download PDF files of individual chapters at www.lenellis.com/books.  An abstract is below. 

Abstract

The assimilation of humans into machines, once science fiction, is a well advanced reality today.  Each of us has virtual versions inside the two great machines of the late modern age.  In the datascape, the vast array of databases in which the details of our daily lives are recorded and analyzed, we appear as profiles.  In cyberspace, the global network of computers in which everyone can connect with everyone, we appear as personas.  Both are part human.  We continually update both machines, passively and actively, and, as we do, our simulacra change in tandem.  Both are part machine.  The profile is a probabilistic portrait, conjured up by others to inform their decision making; it’s an informational output.  The persona is a pattern of connections, created as we present ourselves to and interact with others; it’s a network effect.  Drawing upon humans in near real time but manifested inside machines, neither looks like the continuous, whole and bounded self of the modern tradition.  Rather, these hybrid entities are contingent, relative and open.  Silicon Simulacra describes how these two semblances come to be, how each represents us and what opportunities and challenges each poses and suggests they are the post-human forms of humans assimilated into these machine worlds