Enter the Cyborgs: Health and Human Rights in the Digital Age

In Donna Haraway's 1992 A Cyborg Manifesto, the medical anthropologist describes the cyborg as a "hybrid of machine and organism" living "on the boundary between fact and fiction": "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism." In 2020, the world that Haraway imagined has arrived, accelerated by the isolation and surveillance enforced in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this special section, contributors explore the role of big data, technology, and artificial intelligence in the prevention, detection, tracing, and treatment of COVID-19 in a world being rapidly reshaped by this pandemic. In 1992, Haraway observed that medicine was already witnessing the growth of people's dependency on computers or other machinery. But as of late 2020, the computer and the mobile phone have moved fully into the center of our lives. In order to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 transmission, a significant portion of the world's population now works, socializes, shops, and seeks entertainment and love online.