Why imagine an absurdist Alice in Interland to enquire humans’ developing integrations with the online?
"A cyborg is a hybrid of social reality and fiction." — Donna Haraway
The boundary between human and machine, physical and digital, organic and synthetic has never been stable.
When Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto, she introduced the cyborg as a creature of contradiction—both a social reality and a fictional myth—one that challenges the dualities that shape our socio-political systems. In contrast, Sherry Turkle suggests that our everyday entanglement with technology—the devices in our pockets, the notifications shaping our emotions, the digital traces of our existence—makes us all cyborgs by default.
If we accept that the cyborgian condition is no longer theoretical, but an everyday lived reality, what does that mean for how we experience selfhood, intimacy, and identity in digital spaces?
To study internet culture and cyberspace is to study the ways we express, construct, and dissolve our sense of being. Our interactions with screenshots, Notes apps, Spotify playlists, Instagram archives—the digital objects that frame our personal narratives—are not passive acts; they are acts of self-making, memory, and emotional archiving.
A Speculative Inquiry Into the Cyborgian Self
Alice in Interland extends this inquiry into a speculative fiction experiment, using satire, absurdism, and immersive storytelling to interrogate:This project is not about forecasting a technological dystopia or utopia. Instead, it builds on conversations, interviews, workshops, and research to explore the entanglements of the organic and technological—to question our sense of self, connection, and meaning-making in the architectures of cyberspace.
Signal - Being Chronically Online
1. Always, consistently online with rising screen times, living, making, breathing the internet.
Refer here, here
Signal - I Found _____ Online
2. We’re and have been, now more than ever, finding partners, friends, jobs, families, therapy, and more online. Moreover, our online live significantly infrom our offline lives. We’re “all” developing personal brands marketable over social media.
Refer here.
Signal - Like ..., Like ..., Like...
3. The internet and our digitally intertwined lives are changing the ways we communicate, and most fundamentally language as we know it.
Refer here, here, and here.