Evidence of harm from social media alone is, in fact, unclear. But King (author of On Offence: The politics of indignation [2013], with an MA in cultural discourse) discusses such things as rising rates of depression and studies showing loss of empathy and authentic, non-transactional communication. While he naturally marshals evidence that suits his thesis, it’s a compelling one: instead of ‘trying to build societies that engender happier human beings’, the techno-capitalists want to ‘design human beings that fit into the society which has emerged on its watch’, one that prioritises individuality and frames freedom largely as consumer choice; a society flirting with technological ‘enhancements’ beyond cosmetic surgery and airbrushed Instagram photos to brain-boosting drugs and implants, designer babies, and ‘trans-humanism’ – all in the service of some unhuman ideal of perfection. Others have critiqued the techno-capitalist model, but King goes further than most. For him, it risks transforming us into something so different from the communal, diverse humans evolution produced that ‘we become uncanny to ourselves and one another’ – just like Frankenstein’s ‘monster’.

This is a bleak view compared with, say, Saul Griffith’s argument (The Wires That Bind [2023]) that Australians still have a community-based culture, which could help us pioneer community-based ‘green’ solutions to climate change. King agrees with local climate solutions and hopes for future public ownership of many key technologies. Meantime, he wants a ‘radical humanism’ that pushes back against the idea of people ‘as machines to be rewired or recalibrated in line with the dominant ideological world view’. Currently, this is a reductionist ideology, he argues, illustrated also by the self-help boom and the pharmacological approach to depression: treat (and monetise) the individual and their brain, not society.

He is well aware, however, of 1980s cyborg feminism and today’s xenofeminism, which theorises a liberating tech-enhanced alienness that erases biological determinism, seeking gender fluidity and an end to gendered power imbalances. He agrees that our ability to use tools has always shaped the way we have evolved and the societies we have created. But ‘black box’ technology that externally automates physical and mental labour takes away our agency, and emphasising tech over social solutions betrays too much faith in ‘progress’ (an argument that King also directs against those who see technology as the solution to climate change.)

The issue of agency and de-skilling is critical. Perhaps, though, the term ‘technoscience’ is misleading, a proxy for what’s wrong with our current form of capitalism. Experience taught me that science itself is not the alien, purely reductive enterprise I had feared, especially when done with a feminist and post-colonial awareness. (Which is King’s point, really, as it was for those early feminist critics: we need to critically understand not just science’s discoveries but their socio-political context.) Perhaps current fears of ‘black box’ tech such as artificial general intelligence will also prove too alarmist. Some insiders already say yes. King, too, believes it’s not so much rogue AI we should fear; rather, it’s thinking of ourselves as like smart machines, as things ripe for redesigning by techno-capitalists, that is ‘monstrous’.

It is an intriguing thesis. Either way, King is right to urge readers to think techno-critically about how much tech we really need – and he does so with such breadth, brio, and audacious wit that Here Be Monsters is not just challenging and thought-provoking, it’s entertaining, too.