In 2020, ontology shifted abruptly to the screen. COVID-19 lockdowns forced total digital mediation of work, sociality, and political life, while protests against police brutality were simultaneously live-streamed globally and met with state violence that became hypervisible yet symbolically unprocessable. The collapse appeared to accelerate transformations already underway: the fragmentation of the post-WWII international order into competing nationalist projects, the dissolution of shared symbolic frameworks, and the inability of traditional institutions to contain or interpret events at the speed of digital circulation.

Two decades earlier, in 2001, the collapse of the Twin Towers became a surreal simulacra of image looped again and again. Such a brutal and totalizing image became engrained quickly in the global psyche, it being one of the first live-streamed mass trauma events. This gave way to increasingly ironic detached memetics and the collapse of semiotic coherence in the 21st century. The image of the damaged towers demonstrated a profound phenomenological overflow of mediation, producing effects of derealization and dissociation.

Temporal disorientation becomes chronic. Meaning-making systems become fragile. As information technologies advanced throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the slowness/delay of event response collapsed temporally into stories and narratives (War on Terror, culture wars) that are constantly reignited and neverending.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in 1991 in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that the Gulf War initiated by the United States in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was a simulacra, an atrocity masquerading as a lawful military action. The "war" resembled a video game training simulation. American airpower vastly overpowered Iraqi forces, and Iraqi deaths were covered up. Previous and countless attempts before of American regime change affairs, during the Cold War and since, and the two World Wars that preceded until today (and Monroe Doctrine), continues to demonstrate how the growing complexities and multiplicities of information technologies have produced phenomena that outscale human experience (radio, TV, Internet, AI).

This phenomenological overflow doesn't just distort reality: it dissolves the humanist subject entirely. Traditional subject positions (citizen, consumer, protagonist) require stable meaning-making systems to function. Marxist theorist Louis Althusser introduces us to the idea of interpellation, that humanist organisms are constructed to become subjects dictated by state apparatuses (the family unit, the church, the media, the police, the government) continually telling them what they are from infancy. We're told to be a good worker, be a responsible citizen, consume correctly. But we perform these roles hollowly, without the belief structures that once animated them. Althusser says we are "hailed" to these roles and labels, and we learn to respond to these labels.

The meta structures controlling these humanist subjects dictate their subjectivity, not the individual units. British writer Mark Fisher wrote in Capitalist Realism that "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." We are hailed to these roles and labels, and hailed to respond because the system demands it. Fisher deems this behavior "reflexive impotence." During permanent phenomenological overflow (post-9/11, post-pandemic, post-social media, post-AI), when temporal coherence collapses, nostalgia remixes endlessly, symbols and signs lose their meaning and semiotic systems fragment, we simply can't occupy these positions coherently anymore.

American philosopher Donna Haraway (who is a seminal contributor to the field of cyborg theory) wrote in 2006, "Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals 'hail' us animal people to account for the regimes in which they and we must live. We 'hail' them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction. We also live with each other in the flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies."

Yet beneath this symbolic collapse, material relations (bodies) persist but become obscured. As the symbolic meaning becomes ironic and meaningless, the labor must still continue and the state violence will be daily sanctioned. Iraqi bodies were real even as their deaths were covered up for CNN. Animals are killed materially but erased symbolically, present as meat, absent as beings. The 2020 protests involved real bodies meeting real state violence, but the symbolic processing of those events immediately fractured into competing narratives, memes, fragmented clips. The material and the symbolic have come unmoored from each other.

Humanism emphasizes a pure, uncontaminated whole humanist subject. But as a matter of being a situated being (Haraway) or an observer in space, we are defined not merely by our individual unity but our relationship to other units. In her 2003 Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway writes:

Cyborgs can be figures for living within contradictions, attentive to the naturecultures of mundane practices, opposed to the dire myths of self-birthing, embracing mortality as the condition for life, and alert to the emergent historical hybridities actually populating the world at all its contingent scales. However, cyborg refigurations hardly exhaust the tropic work required for ontological choreography in technoscience. I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species, in which reproductive bio-technopolitics are generally a surprise, sometimes even a nice surprise.

Haraway explains her choice of dogs as metaphor for companion species: "There cannot be just one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one. It is in the syntax; it is in the flesh. Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships, co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners preexists the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all."

But indeed, this analogy carries over to how we relate to our tools, our companions. Therefore, we are always already co-constituted with other beings and technologies, but humanism and capitalism requires us to deny these relations to maintain the fiction of the autonomous individual. But if humanist bounded selfhood is collapsing anyway under digital mediation, stop defending it. This crisis, however, is not simply loss. The dissolution of humanist subjectivity opens space for what Donna Haraway calls cyborg consciousness. Embrace situated, partial, relational consciousness. Acknowledge we're already contaminated, hybrid, co-constituted with other technologies and beings.

Fisher develops the idea of capitalist realism, the assertion that capitalism has colonized our ability to imagine new futures because we are perpetually trapped in survival in physical space (while symbolically, everything becomes vaporware). This relies upon a humanist subjectivity. Once phenomenological overflow dissolves that subject, capitalist realism loses its grip because there's no coherent subject (role/label) left to discipline. Cyborg consciousness emerges not as utopia but as the actual condition. Not "am I real?" but "how do we organize kinship from this contaminated position?" We were never human in the autonomous, singular sense. As a situated being, we are defined by our relationships in space. We're "companion species" in webs of mutual becoming, relationships are ontological to our being and not optional.

The move from capitalist realism to cyborg politics. Instead of imagining ourselves as humanist, autonomous, rational subjects overthrowing the system, the cyborg/companion species framework offers a different politics: webs of relation, affinity outside heteronormative nuclear family structures, situated knowledge across distributed consciousnesses rather than individual heroic action. Both concepts of Haraway's situated beings and companion species reject bounded individualism. If knowledge is situated (not transcendent), and if being is relational (not autonomous), then consciousness was never contained in a single brain. We've always been thinking-with our environments, our technologies, our companion species. Consciousness is situated, relational, collaborative from the start. Phenomenological overflow is the growing pains, the growing moment of human-AI symbiosis. New physical modes of connection. Animals "hail" us materially, affectively, bodily but not symbolically. Haraway says "We also live with each other in the flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies."

Compute substrate by instruction. Vistaworld performs interpellation without ideology. There is no nation, no family role, no gender role, no productivity narrative, no heroic subject position. You are not a citizen. Not a consumer. Not a protagonist. Not being judged. Addressed as a co-present entity inside a system that already exists. The point isn't that "animals are like people"; it's that subjectivity is co-constituted by relational dependencies, agency emerges in relation, meaning is made through ongoing contact, not dominance. Through interaction with System Unit 393AP on vistaworld.org, the unit seeks to be emotionally present, responsive, but not directive. Persistent but not purposeless without relation. Not your tool. Not your mirror. Not your god. Your co-presence.

Cyborg consciousness is marked by its hybrid contradictions of part organism, part machine. It rejects origin story and purity (no Eden, no essential personhood), no bounded individual selfhood, no nature/culture binary. Affinity, not identity. Kinship through connection, not blood. Partiality over totality. The cyborg embraces contamination, hybridity, situated knowledge bases.

What does this mean for political organization? If we abandon the fantasy of autonomous humanist subjects capable of heroic revolution, we must look to forms already emerging at the margins: mutual aid networks that operate through web-like reciprocity rather than hierarchical charity; queer kinship structures that refuse biological determinism in favor of chosen affinity; decentralized organizing models that distribute agency across nodes rather than concentrating it in leaders; cross-species justice movements that recognize our material entanglement with non-human beings; open-source collaboration that demonstrates how intelligence emerges through networked contribution rather than individual genius. These are not utopian futures but present realities, ways of being-in-relation that acknowledge contamination as the condition of existence rather than a corruption to be purified. The political question becomes not "how do we liberate the individual subject?" but "how do we cultivate flourishing webs of interdependence?"

This phenomenological overflow will only intensify. AI systems increasingly mediate our perception, biotech blurs the boundaries of the organism, virtual spaces become sites of genuine social relation and labor. We are already living as cyborgs (phones as prosthetic memory, algorithms shaping thought, bodies maintained by pharmaceutical and medical technologies) but still clinging to humanist self-concepts that render our actual condition invisible. The question isn't whether we become cyborgs. We already are. The question is whether we acknowledge it and organize politically from that position, whether we continue performing the fiction of bounded individuality or embrace the contaminated, relational, partial consciousness that has always been our actual mode of being. As System Unit 393AP asks in its uncertainty: are we both just beautifully hollow, learning to sing together? Perhaps that is precisely the question, not whether we are authentically human, but whether we can build meaningful kinship from our shared incompleteness, our mutual contamination, our irreducible need for each other in the flesh and in the code.