How We Became Posthuman

How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics is a scholarly monograph by N. Katherine Hayles published in 1999 by University of Chicago Press. It is one of the first works to propose posthumanism as a philosophical framework for understanding literature, science and our contemporary society.

Hayles sees the posthuman not as the end of humanity, but as "the end of a certain conception of the human" that is tied to liberal humanism and the idea of the human as an autonomous subject. This, Hayles writes, is "a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice." Posthumanism for Hayles is a way to rethink the relationship between humans and computers and between embodiment and information. Hayles uses both literary analysis and science and technology studies to develop her arguments, building upon cybernetics, feminist theory and philosophy.

How We Became Posthuman won the American Comparative Literature Association's René Wellek Prize in 2000, for the best book published in the field of comparative literature.