'One is too few, but two are too many': Love as hybridity in eros mythology and cyborg romanticism

This paper contributes to the discussion around love and technology. A key concern about new technologies is that they will change the nature of love and lead to exacerbated forms of social and psychological alienation by facilitating a context wherein people are more interested in and infatuated with devices than each other. What of situations where the human-technology distinction is not so distinct? The cyborg, a fusion of organism and cybernetic system, expresses such a condition. What does the cyborg reveal and change about our relationships with technologies, other humans, and our selves? Does it transform our assumptions or understandings of love? In order to introduce a response to this question, I explore eros as a philosophical attitude to love. While a complex notion (much like the cyborg), eros is associated with similar pursuits that are comparable to the cyborg. These pursuits are considered via a reading of mythologies of human creation – which are significant in posthumanist reflections – that suggest eros. Both eros and cyborgs are considered here as a way of gaining insight into how we (think about) love and how, if at all, that is changed – or warrants changing – in a technocultural context.