ABSTRACT
Inspiration springs from unexpected pursuits. What Sabrina Weiss started as a personal narrative about passing as a generic (male) player in online interactions grew into an exploration of Donna Haraway’s critique of the “modest witness” ideal in the realm of the sciences. The original questions of “why” and “how” one would project an online persona different from their offline identity mutated into an answer to Haraway’s call for a “mutated modest witness“ (Haraway 1997: 268) who could transcend the boundaries of politics and technoscience-a “modest cyborg.” This being has two components that when brought together derive a meaning greater than their sum-the idea of modesty and the identity of a cyborg. Ironically, the primary inspiration for the cyborg side of this entity was Haraway’s own metaphorical being proposed to challenge boundaries and categories. This entity, a hybrid of a hybrid, so to speak, may have the potential to surpass the limitations of the “modest witness” by changing not only the relationship of people to science but of science to people.
