Paper short abstract:

Through a photographic portfolio, I present ATMs from Chile and UK as cyborgs that help to pass on money, suggesting with this ontology brief modifications to some Latin American and European digital policies.

Paper long abstract:

This work is committed with the field call Science, Technology and Society, to think about the sociotechnical gesture of passing money on with ATMs. It presents a portfolio of pictures of ATMs from Santiago in Chile, and Lancaster in the United Kingdom, highlighting how these sites of financial manipulation entail specific interactions with screens and computers. The photographic register of these interactions posits ATM as cyborgs (Haraway 1991), fusing society and technology, culture and nature, human and machine, to read with this ontology some fragments of Latin American and European policies of the digital. In this sense, I discuss differences between ATMs, like crafting them in security booths or building's walls, to compare their public existence in relation to what matters as digital development. I propose then to extend policies for digital development to this phenomena, since it diffuses certain individual distinctions, like male and female, to generate more specific forms of being in the world. With this movement, I make these policies particularly responsible of creating some of the gaps they intend to bridge, but also I recommend ways of imagining how brief textual changes might produce more inclusive forms of passing money on.

Donna Haraway, 1991, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," en Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, editorial Routledge, pp.149-181.