Steve Mann is a computer engineer, an inventor, a performance artist, a social activist, a cognitive philosopher, a self-proclaimed geek and a futurist. He is also a cyborg. For the past 15 years or so, he has lived much of his life with a computer strapped to his body that mediates his experience of the world.

This computational prosthesis (that he calls WearComp) consists of a portable array of sensory pads, tiny eye-cameras, computer circuits and antennae. Since receiving his PhD several years ago from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a student in the prestigious Media Lab under the direction of Nicholas Negroponte, he has been building a community of cyborgs at the University of Toronto. With articles written about him in Wired magazine, Newsweek, Time and even the National Enquirer, Mann has become no stranger to fame and controversy. Cyborg; Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer is his first book.

Cyborg chronicles Mann's life, his theories, his experiences and his social activism. In person, even without his WearComp apparatus, Mann has a slightly distracted demeanour that comes from living perpetually in a multi-tasking, digital, live-to-Web existence. We are all used to watching the momentary distraction of news anchors as they host live television events, their earphones connected to their producers. But when Mann is wired, most of his visual field, not to mention his consciousness, is also split. With his WearComp apparatus strapped on, he can block out unwanted visual images, sense people behind him with a chest-mounted proximity alert vibrating pad, broadcast his real-time view directly to the Web, read E-mail while strolling down the street, and recalibrate his eye-cams to "see" normally invisible portions of reality. In short, Steve Mann inhabits a different world than you or I, a "cyborgspace" that he claims is inevitable for all of us.

Despite war, the unequal distribution of global resources and the endless human capacity for stupidity, I am convinced we will continue to transform ourselves with technology. There maybe setbacks of the Sept. 11 variety, but eventually our destiny will transcend natural selection and we will begin our self-guided evolution.

This epoch that we are only just now entering -- a transitional period between the human and the post-human era -- is being referred to among some futurists as the "transhuman" era. It is a strange but not necessarily frightening time. The goal of transhumanism is to surpass the biological limitations of our bodies, be they our lifespans or the capabilities of our brains. Part of this transformation, if Steve Mann is correct, will involve the union of humans and machines.

The term "cyborg," derived by combining the words cybernetic and organism, was first used by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline 31 years ago in an article they jointly authored called Cyborgs and Space, in which they theorized that long-distance space travel would require astronauts to be physically adapted -- wedding flesh and machine -- to their new environment. It didn't take long for this cool, technologically luscious concept to be discovered by the science-fiction community, and cyborgs began their long, gruesome pilgrimage to Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they became known as "The Borg," a race of Frankensteinian soul-vampires who have lost their identity to machines.

Today the term cyborg has a frightening and horrific aura. Accordingly, when Steve Mann uses the term to describe himself, when he peels back the layers of his digital clothing for airport security guards or reveals his bifurcated visual system to onlookers, there is a visceral, often hostile response. That Mann has adopted this moniker, with its frontal, campy and somewhat macabre associations, imbues his mission with an undercurrent of aggression. As a result, there is an confrontational gestalt, à la Marilyn Manson, implicit in his appearance and behaviour when in full cyborg drag. This effect is not entirely without reason.

Amid his busy schedule of lectures and research, Mann takes the time to conduct one-man, guerrilla street-theatre performances which probe the burgeoning authoritarian reality of our surveillance society. He dons an early prototype of his WearComp system, (a helmet with cameras attached to it) or some other outlandish cyborg costume, and then enters a retail area that has surveillance cameras. Using himself as bait, he stands in front of a security camera and waits for the "invisible" agents of enforcement to appear, which they invariably do. His situationist confrontations with store managers, gas-station attendants and security officers at airports are not only humorous, they are lucid examples of how our complicity with the surveillance society can be reversed by simply turning the tables, by watching the watchers. He has been slugged by an airport security attendant and he has been unlawfully detained at a gas station. He is a geek with balls.

We learn in Cyborg that Steve Mann has always been an outsider and that his political agenda has deep psychological roots. In an autobiographical section, he reveals the paranoid origins of his use of observation technology. Apparently he and his brother used to spy on his parents, bugging the parents' room in order eavesdrop on what they were saying about the boys. This act of espionage initiated the beginning of a life-long obsession with authority and a concomitant, slightly paranoid relation to the unconscious complicity of society at large and its perceived (and actual) hostility toward him.

This psychological motivation has been a useful catalyst for Mann, and he has turned it into a political asset. He is an impassioned activist, campaigning against the digital erosion of individual rights and freedoms. He rails against technological bullying and the unholy marriage of secrecy and authority that characterize so much of today's world. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, we cannot be blamed for remitting some of our privacy if it translates into a safer society, but Mann's book sounds an important, if untimely, counterpoint.

Cyborg is part manifesto, part tirade, part biography, part journal, part technical explanation and part philosophical speculation on the nature of our new reality. It is packed with extraordinary insights into the relation between power, culture and technology, and the complex perceptual and cognitive reality that is quickly emerging on the threshold of the transhuman epoch. Despite Hal Niedzviecki's excellent grooming as co-writer, Cyborg can be demanding and sometimes self-indulgent; nevertheless, it is essential reading for anyone truly interested in the ongoing debate about our society's values and principles -- indeed, on what our future may hold.

Cyborg does not compute
Charles Mandel
Calgary Herald
January 12, 2002

Once you meet Steve Mann, driving with a cellphone doesn't seem like much of a hazard. A member of the University of Toronto's electrical and computer engineering faculty and an author, Mann declares himself a cyborg. He "mediates" reality by donning a sophisticated computer rig he calls WearComp. As he breathes, he is constantly computing, combining the real world with the technological. Mann admits living simultaneously in two worlds is not easy, that he often appears distracted during conversations and sometimes walks into walls.

WearComp integrates a number of technological functions directly into Mann's physical being. For instance, he views the world once removed through a device he calls EyeTap. EyeTap lets the user "see" through miniature cameras. The images are filtered through a computer before they're projected into the eye. In this way, Mann can surf the Web or read e-mails even as he looks at the outside world.

Sounds strange? Mann's been steadily turning himself into a cyborg since he was 14, inventing and updating more than 100 kinds of wearable computer systems. In his new book Cyborg (Doubleday Canada, 288 pages, $34.95), co-authored with Hal Niedzviecki , (who has shown himself a shallow thinker in the past with his lightweight book, We Want Some Too, Underground Desire and the Re-Invention of Mass Culture, essentially a re-writing of Dick Hebdige's ground-breaking Subculture: The Meaning of Style), Mann argues that not only will all ofus become cyborgs, but that it is inevitable.

The reason stems mostly from the fact that technological progress, aided by the likes of Mann, will not allow us to remain mere flesh-and-blood humans.

Cyborg is a manifesto and, like most manifestos, is strident. It is in no way aided by its author, who writes like a paranoid megalomaniac and is convinced his peculiar vision of the world will come to pass.

Mann's lifestyle is unnerving, to say the least. As he relates, he's "functioned repeatedly as my own primary test subject. My work and life have merged, leaving me to wonder where humanity begins and machinery ends."

Although today, Mann's technological garb is much more manageable and less noticeable, he spent his earlier days wired into conspicuous rigs. This led to insults and even physical assaults, as Mann challenged authorities ranging from store employees to airport security staff that were understandably not too happy about his get-up.

In fact, after some time, Mann could not easily remove his gear; he'd become so accustomed to wearing it, removal could cause flashbacks and visual confusion.

At his most extreme, in the 1980s, Mann grew his hair through a fine mesh in a skullcap, then "locked" it in place by teasing it with beeswax. This was in response to demands he remove his WearComp system.

Mann is a troublemaker. His reflexive challenges of authority prove to be both the high points and pitfalls of the book.

As a spokesperson for technology, Mann is a disaster. In a pseudo-academic style, he rambles on about the future of wearable technology and, largely, how this form of uber-personal computing will enable people to take control of technology rather than vice-versa.

Even as he advocates a form of computing that will allow people to become their own computer and, he postulates, let others access what they see (among other things), Mann rails against surveillance cameras.

His solution? Mann believes T-shirts with embedded screens that warn you may or may not be under surveillance is the way to go. Suddenly, everyone is potentially equipped with cameras and watching each other.

Mann proposes wearable WebCams could prevent human rights violations and abuses of authority. "Those in authority tempted to break the law will have to be aware that there is very little in the public sphere that will happen free from the prying eyes of a potentially public broadcast. At the same time, anyone who commits a criminal act against another individual will be aware that their visage could be not just recorded, but instantly transmitted to a remote location they are unable to destroy." Talk about curtailing personal freedom.

That's just one example where Mann's ideas fall down. Despite the inherent interest of his devices, it's hard not to write Mann off as a crackpot. He constantly complains about the authorities and grinds axes over companies such as Microsoft, but then in the next breath hints about how he wouldn't mind commercializing some of his inventions. He dismisses the concerns of intellectual property advocates, but doesn't say how he'd feel if photocopied versions of Cyborg suddenly appeared everywhere.

While Mann fails dismally as a technological prophet, his real calling might be as a performance artist. Many of his challenges to authority are hilarious. In one piece, he appears in department stores wearing a helmet equipped with a video camera, safety glasses, ear protection and a magnetic stripe card reader. A list of instructions informs store managers: "I do not talk to strangers. Therefore, you must slide a government-issued ID card through the slot on my head if you want to talk to me. If you would like to try to sell me a new product, press 1."

Mann should stick to art. It at least shows a sense of humour. Overall, Cyborg's fuzzy logic (perhaps partly Niedzviecki's fault) does not compute.

Is the life of a cyborg our path to liberation?
Pauline Tam
Ottawa Citizen

The first thing Steve Mann does after rushing into the lecture hall is remove his Ray Charles-style sunglasses, and set them gingerly on his head. The glasses, you see, hide a tiny homemade computer system, complete with its own display screen, camera, microphone, and Internet address.

Mann blinks, looking lost for a moment, then flashes a boyish grin at the 50 faces staring at him. For a late Friday afternoon, this engineering class is remarkably well attended. Outside the classroom, a sound system is blasting at full volume, but inside, no one seems distracted. Mann launches into a primer on how to break open a credit-card reader. The scanners read the magnetic stripes on the back of credit cards, and Mann wants his class to understand how they work. He empties a bag crammed with scanners -- all salvaged parts he haggled from an electronics surplus store. The students seem amused when Mann tells them this. He then invites them to take a scanner home and play around with it. "I'm hoping everyone will have some fun with this lab." He flashes another grin.

This is Introduction to Microprocessors, a third-year electrical engineering course at the University of Toronto. For the time being, Mann's students are learning basic signal transmission, but in a few weeks, they'll know enough to build their own processor. "The nice thing about this course is that you can build a device that doesn't exist, and hook it up to your operating system," Mann tells them. As an example, he holds up one of his own creations -- a bewildering headset that looks utterly impractical. It contains a video camera for the head, opaque safety glasses for the eyes, a touch-tone telephone pad that obscures the face, and yes, a magnetic card reader for the forehead. Mann calls the contraption "Please Wait." "You wear this and people have to slide their credit card through the slot in your head if they want to talk to you," he explains, prompting hearty chuckles from the class.

By now, Mann's students have come to know a thing or two about their professor. One is that he rarely invents anything for profit or practicality, preferring, instead, to make a statement. Another is that Mann's work attracts attention. He is a cult figure among supergeeks and new-media artists alike.

Twenty years ago, when he was not much older than his students, Mann began designing wearable computers, and testing the prototypes on himself. He got so used to wearing them in front of his face that he decided to stay hardwired permanently. Nowadays, he's almost always jacked in to the network concealed behind his glasses, which he calls the Eyetap. It is wired to a battery he carries in a fanny pack, and controlled by a push-button switch he keeps in his pocket. The Eyetap isn't waterproof so Mann won't shower or swim with it. He also logs off when he goes to sleep. Occasionally, he'll take off the glasses when he's teaching or meeting someone face-to-face, but even then, he is never fully unplugged. Send him an e-mail and the Web server on his body will continue to receive it. Go to his Web site and you might catch glimpses of the world as he sees it: as an endless parade of images enhanced by laser light.

At age 39, Mann lives in such total, constant, and intimate contact with his computer that he has the distinction of being the world's first cyborg -- a walking, talking flesh machine. He is also a harbinger of the future, if we are to believe the companies that are starting to roll out wearable computers similar to those built by Mann. At the very least, he is an interesting research experiment, which is what his life has been for the last two decades. Only recently, however, have Mann's ideas been given broader, more serious consideration. Earlier this year, he was the subject of a feature-length documentary called Cyberman, and this month marks the release of his book, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer (Doubleday Canada).

The book, co-written by journalist Hal Niedzviecki, is a mixture of biography and manifesto, though it is more cautionary tale than a paean to technology. In exhaustive detail, Mann chronicles the rise of "wearables," and argues that most of us already live as flesh machines, inundated as we are with cellphones, wireless pagers, handheld computers, and portable stereos. He draws upon his experiences as a cyborg, and spells out the dangers of an Orwellian world in which computers control us -- monitoring our movements, invading our minds, encroaching on our privacy, and threatening our autonomy. In fact, for someone who is credited with launching the field of wearable computing, Mann is surprisingly wary of a future populated by millions of cyborgs just like him. His fear isn't so much that our lives will change dramatically; it's that the world will look pretty much the same, and most of us won't even notice.

The lecture hall where Mann teaches is on the main floor of the electrical engineering building, about three blocks west of Queen's Park, in the heart of the university campus. Mann has agreed to meet after class so as the students file out, I approach him and introduce myself. He stares, without saying a word. I gawk at the Eyetap perched on his head, and wonder whether it's recording me. The prospect of a hidden camera is disconcerting. To Mann, however, the hidden camera is an equalizer, a potent weapon of self-empowerment. You just have to know how to use it. This is the premise behind not just the Eyetap, but many of Mann's eccentric inventions. He marches out of the room, and I trail after him, followed by a photographer, and a student who wants to consult Mann about a gadget that he plans to build. We head one floor up, through a maze of hallways, and into a corner room that barely fits the four of us. It is piled high with books, spare parts, and all kinds of Mann-made curiosities. This is his office -- a grownup kid's dream of a room. I immediately recognize the assortment of black shirts and handbags hanging from the rafters. There's nothing special about any of the items, except for the bulbous black domes protruding from them. From Mann's book, I know at least some of these domes hide surveillance cameras. They are the kind you would normally find in shopping malls, casinos, and department stores -- if you are sharp enough (or paranoid enough) to pick them out. Mann calls his clothing line the Probably Cameras, and his book includes instructions on how to build one. He even counsels people on where to wear them.

Once, Mann wore one to a music store, only to be stopped by security guards. They demanded to know what was on his shirt. Mann told them he wasn't sure. Instead, he pointed to several opaque domes on the ceiling, and remarked on their similarity. The guards insisted the domes in the store were light fixtures. Mann, of course, knew better. Having been kicked out of countless stores for packing his own surveillance heat, he was used to this kind of double standard.

Inside his office, Mann is still conferring with the student, when he suddenly stops, and addresses me for the first time. "Would you like to see the lab?" His face broadens into a smile. And so, with student and photographer in tow, we troop down the hall to a large room humming with machine activity. Circuits and parts are strewn on lab benches. A row of cubicles occupies one side of the room. Mann strolls by, and introduces four of his graduate students. All of them have a wearable they've built themselves, though none wear their creations full-time as their mentor does. "It's funny," Mann remarks during the tour. "Now that I've started moving away a little bit from wearable computers, they're becoming popular. Twenty years ago, people thought I was crazy. Now, the Art Institute in San Francisco is asking me for an installation about wearable computing."

As a kid growing up in Hamilton, Mann's fascination with electronics bordered on obsession. Even before kindergarten, young Steve was already building circuits alongside his father, Bill, a lifelong tinkerer. In the '70s, as a teenager, Mann and his brother experimented with their first surveillance system by planting motion detectors and microphones around the house, allowing them to monitor their parents. "He was always very inquisitive," Bill Mann explained in the documentary of his son's life. "I don't want to say he drove us nuts."

While still in his teens, Mann spent much of his spare time in the basement of a TV repair shop, where he astonished the shop owner by fixing sets for free. Mann never liked watching TV, but his fascination with its inner workings prompted him to build his first wearable at the age of 18. At the time, the goal of his project was pretty straightforward. It was to use a combination of artificial lighting and computer imaging techniques to take neat pictures. "I wanted to see the world in a different way," he recalls.

Still, his first wearable was heavy and far from subtle. The system, which featured a mini-screen and antennae mounted to a headset, was cobbled together from salvaged TV parts and an old telephone-switching computer. In function, however, Mann's first wearable was far ahead of its time, rivaling the capabilities of today's digital cameras, handheld computers, and cellphones.

For much of the '80s, Mann continued to refine his creation while studying at McMaster University. In the course of his many modifications, he experimented with lighter, more flexible parts that could be sewn into ordinary fabric. By 1991, when he took his invention to the Massachusetts Institute of Techology, he had honed his wearable computer to a subtle-looking visor.

When Mann thinks back on those early years, he recalls a lonely life. At the time of his first prototype, personal computers were still such an emerging technology that wearable computers could only exist on the lunatic fringe. Indeed, whenever Mann wore his invention in public, people would cross the street to avoid him. Even in the liberal circles of academia, he felt out of place. At McMaster, he became known as Crazy Computer Steve and Medusa Mann. But even MIT -- with its reputation for attracting geekdom's brightest -- turned out to be no better. During his first two years there, Mann found little support for his work. Since he was the only one at the school's famed Media Lab with a wearable computer, both faculty and students considered Mann's research a nuisance. In particular, they objected to his habit of recording everything he saw, then transmitting those images on the Internet.

But despite initial hostilities, academic interest caught up with Mann. In 1995, wearable computing officially became a topic of study at MIT. A year later the governing body of professional engineers sponsored an international conference on the subject. By the time Mann graduated in 1997, he had not only transformed a childhood hobby into a PhD dissertation, but also introduced a new discipline to the world's leading technology school.

Ironically, his years at MIT left Mann with a profound distrust of institutions. This is how he describes that period of his life in the book: "I was rebuffed for as long as possible, but then, suddenly, the system sought to absorb me, turn me into just another nifty product to be used as a plug-and-play entertainment accessory."

Since then, Mann's distrust has moved beyond just a simple reaction against research for profit. He has discovered that the more he lives as a cyborg, the more he can effectively document the degree to which Big Brother uses technology to control our lives. Only by training his Eyetap on the real world does the invisible world of sensors, scanners, cameras, and "smart" devices reveal itself to him. As a cyborg, he advocates another type of monitoring. "The notion of sousveillance, or undersight, is that individuals keep watch over organizations," Mann explains. "Think of it in your everyday world. You get into a taxi cab, you're under surveillance. There's a camera taking pictures of you. If you were to photograph the cab driver, that would be what I call sousveillance. If you walked into a department store and photographed the clerk, that's a form of sousveillance. I argue that what we need is a little bit more sousveillance to balance so much surveillance. Because a surveillance-only society is a totalitarian regime."

In many ways, Mann's life as a cyborg remains a form of radical protest, but his ideas couldn't be more timely. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the issue of surveillance and its implications for personal freedoms is more relevant than ever.

There is a tall steel column in a corner of Mann's lab. Simply by looking at it, there is no way to tell that this is an Internet-connected, sensor-operated shower for six, equipped with the ability to conduct full-body scans, which can then be stored in an online database. During the summer, this "smart" shower system was installed at an art gallery in Toronto. When the exhibit opened, visitors were invited to try the shower. The only hitch was, by using the shower, they were agreeing to have every movement monitored, broadcast, and catalogued. Originally, Mann intended his invention to be a sharp, witty comment on the insidiousness of state surveillance and social control. He even named his invention the Anthrax Decontamination Facility. Then, real-life cases of anthrax swept the U.S.

"It's amazing how satire suddenly becomes reality," he reflects, standing in front of the towering column. "The world has changed so quickly that it frightens me. Our whole cultural baseline has shifted overnight. Now, if I want it to be satire, it will have to be even more extreme."