The interdisciplinary animal

Abstract

Humanity is responsible, for good or ill, for what happens, and it is rarely good news: ecological crises, economic crises, wars, pandemics. At the same time, conceiving itself more as an open project in the making than as the execution of a transcendent mandate, humanity finds itself engaged in ongoing processes of redefinition concerning rights, gender, society. Organisms evolve in their natural history by selection, and therefore very slowly. But the systematically mechanism-bound organism that is the human being also evolves by technological means, i.e. much more rapidly. The current and most significant chapter of this transformation as it is progressively introduced by technology and the speed of this transformation, with all the shocks and fears it can generate, is the progressive tendency of the system of web automata to take possession of the human skin.