This thesis problematizes early cyberfeminist claims that heralded the Internet as a liberating space for women. Cyberfeminism emerged in the early 1990s, at the dawn of the “Internet Age,” and is heavily influenced by Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway theorized a new way of looking at the nature of female identity, using the figure of the cyborg found in science fiction literature and films. Traditionally, women have been explained in terms of sexual difference and have been forced to uphold a gender binary that privileges men. By contrast, Haraway argues that the cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine, escapes binary logic, thereby resisting categories and hierarchies, and embraces a more fluid understanding of identity. This model contains powerful ramifications for women. Every day, we become more like Haraway’s cyborgs as our physical bodies become increasingly intertwined with modern technologies, specifically in our ever-growing relationship with the Internet. In online interactions, users are no longer confined to their physical bodies and are free to play with identity. Early cyberfeminists believe that this leads to a more fluid understanding of identity and, more importantly, allows for the deconstruction of gender. These claims, however, do not apply in practice as well as they do in theory. From the anonymous text-based spaces that early cyberfeminists describe to social networking sites like Facebook, Internet spaces tend to polarize the gender binary rather than blur it, and women are now colonized on a new front. This becomes increasingly dangerous as the boundaries between our virtual and real lives continue to blur.

This paper examines the ‘robotic moment’, as defined by Sherry Turkle (2011), in the light of general theories of human-technology relations, notably the theoretical framework founded by Jacques Ellul (1954). Potential psychological, cultural, and technical consequences of human-technology interaction, especially human interaction with so-called ‘social-robots’, are explored. It is demonstrated that the ‘robotic moment’ may reasonably be understood as a result of the formation of pseudo-social anthropo-technological circuits, and as a result of cultural disintegration and an increasingly prevalent societal impulse to incorporate everything that is commonly not understood to be technological (i.e. even the biological, the social, and the spiritual) into the technological order. It is demonstrated that the category ‘social robot’ may reasonably be understood, depending on how the robot is used, as a technique humaine, as a magical practice, or as a complex hybrid practice. Assumptions concerning the nature of technologies, the extent to which technologies are useful, and the impact of technologies on society are questioned. The extent to which a society’s worldview may determine or influence how its inhabitants relate to technologies is explored. It is suggested that, as societies demystify the universe and develop mature techno-secular worldviews, means-to-ends (i.e. technologies) are being mystified; the ensuing quasi-religious techno-secular worldviews, which fail to recognise the limitations of technologies, may in turn be responsible for much of the irrational use of technologies in technological societies. The essay suggests that the ‘robotic moment’ can be explained not only in terms of vulnerabilities inherent in human nature and in terms of properties inherent in technological society, but also in terms of the notions of the sacred that prevail in technically advanced societies and a society’s practice of science, engineering, magic, and faith.