Any stretch of time that deserves a name of its own—an age, an era, an epoch—must have at least a few distinct characteristics that make it stand out from the past. The problem is that all the features that the Khannas invoke to emphasize the uniqueness of our era have long been claimed by other commentators for their own unique eras. The Khannas tell us that “technology no longer simply processes our instructions on a one-way street. Instead, it increasingly provides intelligent feedback.” How is that different from Daniel Boorstin’s bombastic pronouncement in 1977 that “the Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world”? And the Khannas’ admonition that “rather than view technology and humanity as two distinct domains, we must increasingly appreciate the dense sociotechnical nexus in which they constantly shape each other”—how is this different from what Ortega y Gasset wrote more eloquently in 1939: “Man without technology ... is not man”?

The idea of hybridity that the Khannas assume to be their sexy and original insight has been with us for a long time—long before social media and biotechnology. While some dismiss such theorists of hybridity as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, who have questioned the epistemological foundations of the modern scientific enterprise, as being on the wrong side of the Science Wars, hybridity is by no means a postmodernist idea. Here is Daniel Callahan—a respected bioethicist who can hardly be accused of PoMo transgressions— writing in 1971: “We have to do away with a false and misleading dualism, one which abstracts man on the one hand and technology on the other, as if the two were quite separate kinds of realities.... Man is by nature a technological animal; to be human is to be technological.... When we speak of technology, this is another way of speaking about man himself in one of his manifestations.”

For modern theorists of technology, hybridity is an ontological—not an emergent—property. They believe, to quote Callahan again, that “to be human is to be technological,” and that it has always been thus. As it turns out, this seemingly innocent assumption about the world can have serious implications for how we think about politics, morality, and law. It inspired Latour’s notion of “distributed agency”—in its crudest form, the idea that neither guns nor people kill people but rather a fleeting, one-off combination of the two. (The entity that shoots is a “gun-man.”) This is not meant to suggest that people no longer have to go to jail for murder. It is only to point out that, if we really want to explain a particular act of shooting, we need to account for factors like the material design of the gun, the marketing considerations of its manufacturers, the severity of anti-gun laws, and so on.

The latest technologies might make us more aware of this hybridity—of the techno-human condition, if you will—but to speak of the Hybrid Age makes as much sense as to speak of the Nature Age: the fact that climate change makes us more aware of the air we breathe or the water we drink does not fundamentally alter the dynamics of our dependence on these resources. To posit that we are moving into the Hybrid Age is to assume that there was once a time—according to the Khannas, it was just a few years ago—when such hybridity was not the case, when man and technology trod their separate paths. It is to believe that human nature changed sometime last year or so. This, of course, is nonsense—even if makes technology companies feel important. As the Dutch philosopher of technology Peter-Paul Verbeek puts it in his fine book Moralizing Technology, “We are as autonomous with regard to technology as we are with regard to language, oxygen, or gravity.”