N. Katherine Hayles — How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999)
Hayles tracks three “waves” of cybernetics — from Norbert Wiener’s homeostatic systems through second-order cybernetics (autopoiesis, self-referential systems) to the emergence of artificial life — and argues that this history constitutes a slow dismantling of the liberal humanist subject. The posthuman, as Hayles defines it, is not the fantasy of mind uploaded into silicon, but something more unsettling: the recognition that human cognition was always distributed, embodied, and co-constituted with its material and informatic environment. “Conscious agency has never been in control.”
Hayles moves between scientific texts and literary fiction to show how the same conceptual moves play out across domains: Wiener’s anti-entropic information, Bateson’s difference that makes a difference, Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis, and the emergent organisms of artificial life all converge on a picture of cognition as inherently distributed, non-centralized, and context-dependent.
For OM: the book provides the theoretical foundation for treating Ethereum as “posthuman infrastructure” — a platform that, by being permissionless and ontologically agnostic, can host cognitive agents that do not fit the humanist model: DAOs, egregores, zoological agents, collective intelligences.