Metal and flesh - Ollivier Dyens

For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and
spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling
of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious,
neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and
information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs,
clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information
symbionts.

Ollivier Dyens's Metal and Flesh is about two closely
related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of
the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is
taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century -- which will be
remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and
transformed by technology and culture -- Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and
irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our
lives.