IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2017 - 45

celebration, celebrity endorsements, and actual innovation obscures our ability to identify ideology or how
this technology is used to frame an artificial trans human future.
The question over whether citizens will actually wear
exoskeletons in the future has not been discussed.
What has been discussed is how we have been asked to
imagine ourselves wearing them through the interplay
of three mainstreams discourses that rely upon each
other to supply the imaginary logistics for such a scenario. The result is the increasing accommodation of military inventions celebrated within everyday culture
contributing to militarism. We also identified four
themes that constitute transhumanist rhetoric as a
model in order to reveal how transhumanism, an ideology, distorts beliefs about high tech inventions, in this
case, beliefs about exoskeletons.

Acknowledgment
The authors thank the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada for funding support.

Author Information
Isabel Pedersen is Canada Research Chair in Digital Life,
Media, and Culture, and Director of Decimal: Digital Culture and Media Lab at the University of Ontario Institute
of Technology, Canada.
Tanner Mirrlees is Assistant Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada.

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