Seven. After seven years of publication, the cyborg closes. No one is going to ask us "and what did you understand?" - but we can ask ourselves that. And answer it publicly - in part.

Publishing steadily, every four months, a cinematic periodical with such thematic content in a society that most likely no longer knows what (generally speaking) the previous capitalist technological revolutions were, is not an easy endeavor. Many would prefer to believe that cyborg is a magazine of the kind "about cars" or "about cooking": with a specialized audience.

The opposite is true, and from there we learned certain ominous things that were confirmed with a bang over the past 16 months, during the hygienic terror campaign. The "common people," those who do not have particular education in any of the technologies called "new" (even though not all of them are that new), prefer to remain indifferent and ignore. Mainly: they have acquired an obstacle that is evolving into a structural one. They cannot concentrate to carefully read lines whose content surpasses the trivial; and they refuse to engage in the persistent effort to learn things they don't know (except, of course, if an employer forces them to...).

This is the result of the dominance of the "information culture." We refer to those minimal "pieces" (usually manipulated) of reality that can parade everywhere. From the old one-way media to the new two-way ones. In a discontinuous, paranoid choreography, with the only "binding substance" increasingly being what V. Reich had called emotional plague.

What was once called the thread (of thought), the sequence of reasoning, seems to collapse under the bombardment of "information" that usually consists of impressions. Combined with the evolving collapse of memory (by the word "memory" we do not mean... recollections, but the awareness of the historicity of social time), writing and reading tend to become "luxuries." It is extremely doubtful whether under these conditions there can be what has been called critical thinking; let alone action equally critical...

Therefore, cyborg is NOT read by those to whom it is addressed. Because they consider it "difficult," because "they don't have time" (yet there is always time for TV series...), because "why should I bother with this?" Cloud? Artificial intelligence? Internet of Things? Internet of Feelings? New materials? Genetic engineering? Augmentation? Digital currencies? Upheavals in social relations? Reorganization of labor? "Virtual sex"? Oh wow! "Let's not deal with this nonsense"!!! Unfortunately, the bosses of capitalist restructuring are dealing with all of us; with the violence and intensity that "fits" such Model Changes regarding the extraction of labor and the disciplining of life.

In other times, the working class used to ignore many things and, above all, the "mechanisms" turned against it. However, it was conscious of its ignorance and interested, to the extent it was given the opportunity, to learn. Therefore, it learned. The qualitatively new element at the beginning of the 4th industrial revolution, in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, is that the ignorants not only ignore that they don't know, not only seem to resent the effort of learning what they ignore, but additionally possess enough egoism/narcissism to think they "know"... Idly watching the parade of "information," which obviously includes difficulty distinguishing which are fabricated and which, at least, authentic.

Somewhere there, the tyranny of the "experts" of technocracy sprouts, who need no other credentials except their proximity to power structures. Usually, they are so specialized that, if judged across the full range of important issues in public and individual life, they are worse than idiots. Nevertheless, they offer this distorted social role: the consumption of their given authority by an audience that wants "ready-made recipes," quick answers...

The orientation of cyborg was and remains exactly the opposite. Militantly opposite! A large part of the mystified "knowledge" of the power's technical apparatus must become a target of grassroots critique. It must and can - we say - be done in the sense that the contemporary working class has (theoretically...) many possibilities for self-formation. It suffices, of course, to work for it. The Prometheuses of the future will be workers and laborers, the "class for itself"; and they won't sit chained!!!

Yet, after seven years, this remains a marginal position. Modern citizens still prefer to ignore even the most basic things, for example, about their bodies and their health, and hang on to every small or big charlatan who will "certify" and "approve" them... They consume power technicians while still ignoring even this: that they are consuming...
In no historical phase of capitalist sovereignty was the war for knowledge outside any class struggle - the opposite. In this historical phase, however, it hasn't even been declared; and this reeks of intellectual, moral, and emotional subjugation and servitude. Even moral exhaustion.

So cyborg will continue within this "contradiction": attempting working-class critique and counter-information on the techno-political spearheads of sovereignty in a historical phase where this is generally considered from taboo to highly questionable...
Ignorance, however, will save no one! And that "blessed are the poor in spirit" was the definition of manipulation... Wasn't it?

Ziggy Stardust