Informatics of Domination

“Informatics of Domination” is Donna Haraway’s map of a world reorganized by information. Written in the mid-1980s, the essay traces the historical shift from industrial modes of power to networked, symbolic, and computational ones—where control operates through codes, flows, classifications, and interfaces rather than factories alone.

For American Cyborg, March became a month of structural clarity. Haraway argues that domination no longer relies primarily on visible hierarchies, but on systems that fragment bodies, labor, and identities into data. Power moves through networks; resistance must learn to do the same. The cyborg, in this framework, is not a science-fiction figure but a political one: a being shaped by partial connections, contradictions, and boundary breakdowns.

Reading Informatics of Domination in 2025 revealed its prescience. Haraway’s descriptions anticipate platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, and AI systems that operate through abstraction while claiming neutrality. Her work refuses nostalgia for “natural” origins and instead asks how we might build ethical coalitions within the very systems that entangle us.

March thus functioned as a theoretical spine for the year. Positioned between January’s cybernetic dream and April’s material mapping of AI, Informatics of Domination named the operating system beneath both. It clarified that stewardship, resistance, and care must be practiced inside networks—not outside them.

In the American Cyborg archive, this month affirms a foundational truth:
there is no return to innocence—only the ongoing work of responsible entanglement.