As a youth, Steve Mann fantasized about repairing televisions and radios. The world of the senses, of physical touch, of non-technological interaction – the so-called real experiences of stars at night, rosy sunsets, or leaves swirling in the breeze – did not spark his imagination. Cyborg is a fascinating biographical chronicle of Mann’s lifelong bio-engineering experiment to recreate himself, essentially, as a very cool Internet appliance, albeit one with an artist’s uncompromising sensibility for discerning what makes us human, or not.

As the inventor of what he calls the “wearable computer,” Mann, a professor in the electrical and engineering faculty at University of Toronto, is one of Canada’s most controversial and PR-savvy philosopher-geeks. A PhD graduate from MIT’s famed Media Lab, Mann has spent much of his adult life grafted to prosthetic devices that allow him to alter, edit, and manipulate visual imagery (what his eyes see) and to broadcast his viewpoint live to the Internet. Mann is the man-machine interface personified. His systems block out billboards and other unwanted visual stimuli, and enable his wife to inspect vegetables at the grocery store through pictures sent to her, by him, via wired-up sunglasses connected to his wearable computer.

Cyborg was written with Toronto cultural commentator and novelist Hal Niedzviecki. The book resolutely moves forward with cyborg-like strength and efficiency through a plotline that evokes Frankenstein and Edward Scissorhands. The storytelling is straightforward and the prose muscular, if sometimes lacking reader-friendly warmth (or what a cyborg might describe as “emotional bandwidth”).

But Cyborg documents much more than the life of a boy wonder who cross-dresses as a computer. Mann argues that we are already mutating toward a cyborg destiny, since we are already physiologically dependent on mechanical and electronic devices: “The Cyborg age is upon us now, and is no longer some science fiction fantasy. The question is not: …Will we become cyborgs? The question is: What kind of cyborgs are we now?” Not very progressive ones, yet. Mann asserts that totalitarian-like surveillance technologies and corporate media will continue to eradicate our sense of self and community by vapidly stimulating consumer fantasies, controlling behaviours, and eliminating privacy.

Some of Mann’s contextual rant falls into the category of Fear of Big Brother 101, but with a novel twist. Mann believes that to maintain our civil liberties, and reclaim our media spaces for the benefit of everyone, we should consider turning ourselves into cyborgs, and immerse ourselves in self-produced media experiences. We must become active, rather than passive, consumers of information. The alternative is to become pawns of the industrial-military complex, allowing corporations to gain greater and greater access to our lives through a widening digital window.

Mann also envisages a future of enlightened fellow cyborgs, blinkered down in web-enabled headsets, communing with each other to save the world from corporate oppression and government mind control. Radical thinkers can be excused their conspiracy theories and intriguing prescriptions for utopia. The benefit in reading Mann is that he’s a provocative, deeply ironical observer from the edgier precincts of media studies.

At times, the whiff of the shilling huckster and undisguised inventor’s hubris mute the force of Mann’s arguments. He admits to wanting to make his wearable computers available to the mass market. The book’s many references to his WearComp system feel like a branding strategy out of control, a not-too-subtle plea to venture capitalists and corporate investors who could take his product ideas to market.

This is a minor annoyance. Mann may, on a purely visceral level, come across as an alien better suited to a role in the director’s cut ofBlade Runner, but he is a far more authentic commentator on digital culture than the many management-consultant types with their earnest self-help books on how to web-enable your smile and turn your fantasies into a dotcom business plan.

By experimenting so relentlessly on himself in such an uncompromising way through his cyborg endeavours, Mann speaks from an experience that reflects the profound risks he’s taken with his life by wedding it to cyberspace. There is a searching, plaintive honesty in his voice that speaks uniquely to the pivotal issues of the wired world.