Tim Maly

Biography

Tim Maly is a Canadian writer, critical designer and editor whose work concerns cyborgs, infrastructure, surveillance and networked cities. He publishes at Quiet Babylon, a site he describes as "a website about cyborgs and architects," and has written for Wired, The Atlantic, Urban Omnibus and Contents Magazine. He was a founding staff writer at Wired Design, covering rapid fabrication and materials, and ran the collections "Thoughtful Design" and "Weird Future" on Medium. He has since worked at the Rhode Island School of Design's Center for Complexity and co-founded Horizon 2045, an organisation working on catastrophic risk.

With Emily Horne he co-wrote The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance (Coach House Books, 2014), a short book that takes Bentham's panopticon and Foucault's reading of it out into airports, prisons, shopping malls, protest camps and data centres to ask how much of the model still holds.

50 Posts About Cyborgs

Maly is best known in cyborg anthropology for organising 50 Posts About Cyborgs, a distributed writing project run through a Tumblr in September 2010 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the coining of the word "cyborg" by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in their 1960 paper "Cyborgs and Space." Maly invited contributors to write on cyborgs from any angle they liked; the result was a rapid, deliberately heterogeneous collection of essays, fiction, images and arguments from designers, architects, writers and researchers, published over the course of the month.

The project is worth noting as a form as much as a body of work. It demonstrated that a distributed, invitation-based, time-boxed writing sprint could produce a coherent survey of a field faster than an edited volume, and several of its contributions — including Maly's own "Cities for Cyborgs: 10 Rules" — circulated widely afterwards. It was covered by Rhizome, BLDGBLOG and mammoth, among others.

Key Themes

• The cyborg as ordinary. Maly's consistent line is against the spectacular cyborg of film and toward the mundane one: the person with a phone, a transit card and a prescription.
• Infrastructure as the real subject. His writing repeatedly moves from the device to the systems that make the device work — logistics, shipping containers, standards, spectrum.
• Surveillance beyond the panopticon. The Inspection House argues that the panoptic model, though indispensable, no longer describes systems that watch without any central tower and often without anyone watching at all.

Related Reading

• Cyborg
• Jeremy Bentham
• Manfred Clynes
• Geocloaking

External Links

• Quiet Babylon
• 50 Posts About Cyborgs