Among the more interesting cyber-manifestos are the Mutant Manifesto, Stelarc's "Cyborg Manifesto," "The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" and most of the publications of the Extropians. These, and dozens more, can be found while wandering on the world wide web. But manifestos are only one type of cyborg writing technology. Constitutions can be considered cyborg technologies just as manifestos are. A constitution depends on a combination of writing technology, legal codes, and human interpretation. Of course common law, the "unwritten constitution" of the United Kingdom, could be seen in the same light but when it comes to preserving rights from the verities of time, new technologies, and political change such a tradition is a much less satisfactory safeguard. In the 1980s there was even a movement in the United Kingdom to establish a written constitution, fueled by just these concerns. Unfortunately, it failed politically.

The U.S. Constitution has proven to be a resilient and effective technology for preserving the structure of a democratic republic in the United States and for safeguarding many basic rights of citizens and others. Certain key amendments have even improved it, starting, of course, with the first ten, the Bill of Rights, and including most notably amendments abolishing slavery and enfranchising African-Americans and women. However, some of the interpretations by the Supreme Court, such as giving corporations the status of individuals, allowing national security to trump individual liberty, and the general dismantling of federalism have severely weakened the Constitution. Technoscientific changes have also raised new issues and, unfortunately, opened the door for new governmental impositions.

Subsequent constitutions borrow from the U.S. version and in some cases improve on it. The current wave of new constitutions, such as the South African one that guarantees electronic privacy, are particularly good examples of this. But more most be done, hence the proposed Cyborg Bill of Rights, below. While this particular Bill of Rights is designed to be amended into the U.S. Constitution, the idea is relevant to all contemporary democracies. All cyborg citizens need their rights defended.

The Cyborg Bill of Rights

So, in the hope of making a modest improvement in the human political condition I propose this 21st Century Bill of Rights....a 2nd Bill of Rights... really a Cyborg Bill of Rights to protect our freedoms as we hurtle into the next millennium...

All amendments must be taken together.

Citizenship Defined. This is the hard one. How old the human must be, and how mentally competent to be a citizen, is an old debate. Cyborg technologies will complexify this confusion incredibly. Now it just isn't how mature the human but how human the cyborg? How machinic can a citizen be? How many voters in a cyborg pod of multiple bodies? How bright the AI? How bright the dog? Whether or not one is mentally competent isn't just an issue applying to injured humans, it covers machines, posthumans, and enhanced beasts. Any aliens that ever visit as well, if you get down to it, although it doesn't seem to be as pressing an issue as cyborg citizenship is, in my opinion. The solution, in case of challenge, as I argue below, is for a double-blind Turing test, aimed at seeing who can participate in the discourse community and who not.

What has to be stressed at this point is that, despite some strange rulings in the past by the U.S. Supreme Court, it must be explicitly stated in this new Bill of Rights that:

Business corporations and other bureaucracies are not citizens, or individuals, nor shall they ever be.

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The actual ten amendments are as follows:

1. Freedom of Travel. Unless the United States of America is in a declared State of War with another political entity then citizens shall have the right to travel to these entities, virtually or in the flesh, at their own risk and expense

2. Freedom of Electronic Speech. Electronic and other nonphysical forms of transmitting information are protected by the Constitution's First Amendment.

3. The Right of Electronic Privacy. Electronic and other nonmaterial forms of property and personhood shall be accorded the protection of the Fourth Amendment.

4. Freedom of Consciousness. The consciousness of the citizen shall be protected by the First, Fourth, and Eighth Amendments. Unreasonable search and seizure in this, the most sacred and private part of an individual citizen, shall be absolutely prohibited. Individuals shall retain all rights to modify their consciousness through psychopharmological, medical, genetic, spiritual and other practices in so far as they do not threaten the fundamental rights of other individuals and citizens and if they do so at their own risk and expense.

5. Right to Life. The body of the citizen shall be protected by the First, Fourth, and Eighth Amendments. Unreasonable search and seizure of this sacred and private part of an individual citizen shall be absolutely prohibited. Individuals shall retain all rights to modify their bodies, at their own risk and expense, through psychopharmological, medical, genetic, spiritual and other practices in so far as they do not threaten the fundamental rights of other individuals and citizens.

6. Right to Death. Every citizen and individual shall have the right to end their life, at their own risk and expense, in the manner of their own choice as long as it does not infringe upon the fundamental rights of other citizens and individuals.

7. Right to Political Equality. The political power of every citizen should be determined by the quality of their arguments, example, energy, and single vote, not based on their economic holdings or social standing. Congress shall permit no electoral system that favors wealth, coercion, or criminal behavior to the detriment of political equality.

8. Freedom of Information. Citizens shall have access to all information held on them by governments or other bureaucracies. Citizens shall have the right to correct all information held on them by governments and other bureaucracies at the expense of these bureaucracies. Institutional and corporate use of information to coerce or otherwise illegally manipulate or act upon citizens shall be absolutely forbidden.

9. Freedom of Family, Sexuality and Gender. Citizens and individuals have the right to determine their own sexual and gender orientations, at their own risk and expense, including matrimonial and other forms of alliance. Congress shall make no law arbitrarily restricting the definition of the family, of marriage, or of parenthood based on religious or other subjective criteria. Consent of the participants as well as real psychological, sexual, physiological, and genetic relationships shall be the basis of any governmental interference in family choices of citizens and individuals unless the fundamental rights of other citizens and individuals are being severely threatened.

10. Right to Peace. Citizens and individuals have a right to freedom from war and violence. War shall be a last resort and must be declared by a two thirds vote of Congress when proposed by the president. The Third Amendment shall not be construed as permitting citizens and individuals to own all types of weapons. Freedom from governmental tyranny will not be safeguarded through local militia or individual violence. Only solidarity, tolerance, sacrifice and an equitable political system will guarantee freedom. None the less, citizens and individuals shall have the right to defend themselves with deadly force, at their own risk and expense, if their fundamental rights are being abridged.

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These amendments are important. We need new political technologies to protect our rights from the relentless changes the march of cyborgian technoscience produces. But these changes are not only destabilizing the rights of citizens, they are destabilizing the very idea of the citizen itself. Perhaps the most important question we have to ask is:

Who, or What, is a Citizen?

So how do we decide what entities are entitled to citizenship? Today it depends on the "soft police," the psychologists, the social workers, and the judges. Science and justice are supposed to enter into it, of course, but instead of experiment and a trial by one's peers actual decisions are based on the opinions and prejudices of experts, nothing more. Better it should a process of replicable experiment and common sense then another game played by elites with momentous effects on the judged. Is there such a test that can directly evaluate, without experts, who can operate as a citizen, who can take part in the discourse, who can be part of the ongoing conversation we call politics? Yes, I think there is.

The best solution is a Cyborg Citizen Turing test to see which entities can actually operate in our discourse community, and which cannot.

The Turing test has long been a major theme of scientists and writers trying to figure out how to determine if a computer is intelligent. It is a very pragmatic sort of exercise. The test was first proposed by Alan Turing, the homosexual English computer scientist who died mysteriously in the 1950s after apparently biting a poisoned apple. Turing, who played a fundamental role in inventing the computer as we now know it while he was developing code-breaking machines during World War II, based his test on a party game he had apparently witnessed (Turing 1950).

It was called the imitation game, and it actually can be great fun and quite revealing. In the original "party" version two people, a man and a woman go off into a room and questions are passed to them via a piece of paper or a telephone. One of them replies on a typed sheet and the party guests try and guess if it is the man or the woman who replies.

Turing proposed that a machine be substituted for one of the humans, and then argued that since intelligence was a pragmatic idea, not an absolute, the best way to judge it was by seeing if the entity in question could carry on an intelligent conversation with an intelligent human for a serious length of time. If it could, then even if it was a machine, we could say that the entity was intelligent, at least as intelligent as many humans. Now there are many problems with the Turing test. It depends on deception, for example and even though many intelligent people are liars, not all are. And it offers the chance that the human subjects in the test won't pass themselves, which has actually happened in some of the modified tests conducted annually by the Boston Computer Museum. These tests, by the way, indicate that the chances of a machine passing Turing's actual test (of five minutes) anytime soon are actually very small.

But the value of Turing's test, and it's use for determining cyborg citizenship, is his insight that intelligence, like citizenship, is a working idea, not an abstract universal value. The idea of citizenship, which has been expanding for two hundred years to include more genders, races, and people in general, is based on assumptions about the consent of the governed, the relationship between responsibility and rights, and the autonomy of individuals. Tests for citizenship have ranged from gender and class, through literacy, to the current situation where birthright assumes eventual citizenship unless it is abrogated through misdeeds. But beneath these shifting systems one can discern that the idea of a discourse community has always been the basic ground. Now this community may have been limited in earlier days by political goals of racial, gender, or class domination but among the citizens the ideal was equal discourse. The polis is a discourse community, after all, and every historical expansion of it has been predicated on arguments about the participation of new individuals in that discourse. Now, as we are faced with a whole range of complex and difficult decisions about who should be, and who can be, citizens it seems wise to stay within this framework.

Currently, judgments about the suitability of individual humans and cyborgs being citizens are made on the grounds of their ability to take part in the discourse of the polis, either by assumptions about age or by the use of experts to determine if the entity can participate. Many of the more difficult cases are of actual cyborgs, humans linked to machines that keep them alive or of humans maintaining autonomy only through drugs and other techno-interventions. But instead of a jury of one's peers, the decision usually comes down to a negotiation between doctors, social workers, and lawyer/judges.

It is time to take such power away from the "soft" police and return it to the polis at large, in the form of juries of peers conducting their own rough Turing tests. If the entity can convince a majority of twelve other citizens that it can be part of their discourse, well and good. The beauty of the Turing test is that is escapes the straitjacket of arbitrary standards and static definitions. It is an operational standard, nothing more or less. Flexible though it is, it doesn't cast out all values, instead it focuses in on the core of politics, communication, and enshrines that as the ultimate hypervalue. Also it implies strongly that citizenship is embodied, whether the body is hyper or not, ambiguous or not, constructed or not.

Hypervalues for Excessive Bodies

Of course all lived bodies require ambiguous values and even the most human of bodies is constructed in many senses. What I have tried to show here is that cyborg bodies are hyperbodies, excessive and more than normal, when it comes to their social construction and as such they need hypervalues, new working values, instantiated in technologies such as constitutions and operational tests of citizenship. Hypervalues in the sense that even more protection, hyper-protection, is needed for the individual in this age of new powerful technosciences and the systems they make possible. Without such protection the corporations, the parties, the bureaus of police and regulators, the wealthy families, all these institutions will achieve hegemony and the embodied individuals, the vast majority of us, will lose all political power.

And citizenship will probably always be embodied in some sense, although not necessarily in living flesh. Many computer scientists think intelligence itself must be embodied (Winograd and Flores, 1986). A decentered intelligence, if it was even possible, might very well not be interested in our citizenship in any case. Our political system is based on embodiment.

It was feminist philosophy that has made this argument undeniable in the postmodern era, through an examination of the dangers of disembodied philosophies and many case studies of the role of bodies in real politics. For example, Elaine Scarry's Bodies in Pain details how bodies are the ground for both war and the coercive power of government. But she goes on to show that not only are bodies the ground of politics, but that they are an intimate part of political creation as well. Which makes sense, and explains the crucial importance of cyborgs politically. As Haraway has observed, now the "cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics." (1985, p. 66)

Haraway also points out that these politics are not inevitably liberatory. Far from it. There is a chance for keeping, and even extending democracy, and there is just as real a chance that cyborg politics will become the ultimate in oppression, especially if we ascribe to illusions of "total theory," "pure information" and "perfect communication" and deny the messy reality of bodies, machinic and organic.

An example of where such illusions might lead can be found in Bruno Latour's political thinking, especially in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993). On the surface it might seem that his argument parallels the one in this article. He does denounce totalitarian Enlightenment narratives and urge a reconciliation between nature and technology. But as with Channel's bionic ethics, Latour's advocacy of a "Parliament of Things" is profoundly distorted on several levels. First, the whole argument is couched in abstract and symbolic terms. Secondly, it is based on a series of over-simplified dichotomies, rejected in his case, such as that alienation of modernism from nature and the domination of human(ism) over the rest of reality. Finally, it is based on serious illusions about agency and causality that in actuality would make working politics impossible.

That artifacts have politics does not mean that they have agency. Certainly, cyborgs (or hybrids in Latour's formulation) demonstrate that organic embodiment isn't the final arbitrator of agency, but that doesn't mean that anything can be an actor (actant for Latour). That we can see all as systems in systems doesn't mean systems can think, or act, or exercise politics in any subjective way.

The dangers of Latour's schema become apparent when one looks closely at his Parliament of Things.