The Real Cyborgs of Reality TV
Robo-babies, Ozempic, and Amazon Live. Do the Housewives hold the keys to the future?
“My husband built the perfect wife, and I built the perfect life.” – Lisa Hochstein, Real Housewives of Miami Season 4
“You can actually test drive a baby before you have it!” a nearly unrecognizable Tamra Judge coos to her bewildered third husband, Eddie, in their cavernous home kitchen. It’s 2014, and Judge, one of the longest-running cast members of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of the OC is in the mood for baby making; Eddie isn’t so sure. So she’s enlisted the help of an uncanny newborn automaton named Astro to make her case.
As she plucks the lifelike robotic doll from its cardboard enclosure, the 46-year-old fitness enthusiast beams with excitement. She inspects Astro’s diaper for anatomical correctness before shooting off a text to her bestie, Vicki Gunvalson: “It’s a boy #babyballs!”
“Well, I feel like we should plug it in,” she says, unraveling the electrical cord that will enliven their experiment in geriatric family planning. The chances of a woman Tamra’s age carrying a child to term are still quite low, but women all over the world are giving birth much later in life and turning to reproductive alternatives like surrogacy and IVF. When put in context, Tamra’s undertaking doesn’t feel all that odd – except for the robot baby, of course.
Women like Tamra, the women of reality TV, have challenged taboos around sex, money, cosmetic surgery, childbirth, and family. They have changed what it means to be a real housewife. With their dogged pursuit of wealth and undying quest for youth, they are simultaneously symbols of American excess and forerunners to our cyborg metamorphosis. According to some futurists, they may represent the next phase of human evolution.
Are you a Cyborg?
As a child of the 80s I grew up with an image of the future fit for moral panic. As The Terminator demonstrated, cyborgs were quite visibly half-human, half-machine, and almost always out for blood, but FM2030 saw things differently. His version of the cyborg looked more like a Real Housewife than a Robocop.
Long before Zuckerburg ventured into the Metaverse and Musk set his sites on space, before Altman embraced large language models and Kurzweil predicted the future of everything, a Belgian-born Iranian Olympian-turned UN diplomat named FM2030 was slinging the singularity on the talk show circuit. As you might imagine, FM2030 was his chosen name.
The man formerly known as Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, believed that by the year 2030 (100 years from his birth) technologically enabled immortality would be a given. He sold the idea of a time when hyper intelligent, constantly connected human-machine hybrids would become the norm. He predicted the end of monogamy, gender, ethnicity, politics, family, and fossil fuels. He believed that progressive “Upwingers” would thrive in this future and conservative Luddites would languish.
Like many of the heirs to transhumanism, he was quick to remind anyone who would listen that we are already cyborgs. He used the less fraught and perhaps more palatable “transhuman” to describe a new breed of hyper-progressive people enhanced by technology.
At the height of his fame, 2030 appeared on Larry King and CNN promoting his latest work, Are You a Transhuman? Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth In a Rapidly Changing World. Published in 1989, Are You a Transhuman? reads like an overly complicated Buzzfeed quiz for the pre-internet era. 2030 guides the reader through a series of scored questionnaires meant to gauge a person’s readiness for the next phase of human evolution.
As you progress through the chapters, you’re asked to consider a laundry list of often strange cyborg criteria:
Do you say homosexual or gay? Test-tube baby or high-tech baby? Sex object or lover?
Do you carry a portable telephone? Wrist or pocket TV?
Do you ever take off a year or two to coast and have fun?
Do you identify with your parents' ethnic origins? Nationality? Religion?
Do you consider a marriage or romance that lasts a few months or a couple of years a failure?
Do you sometimes use a helicopter to commute?
Have you undergone major body reconstruction?
Would you want a total prosthetic body if your own body were irreversibly out of commission?
In the final chapter, “How Transhuman are you?” 2030 presents a list of queries that center facelifts, IVF, cultural norms, and space flight, before ultimately defining the subject of the book. He explains that, “Transhumans (trans) are a new kind of being crystallizing from the monumental breakthroughs of the late twentieth century.” He goes on to clarify that they “are not necessarily committed to accelerating the evolution to higher life forms. Many of them are not even aware of their bridging role in evolution.”
Are You a Transhuman? culminates in the assignment of a sort of cyborg score meant to track your rate of personal growth. Those scoring 700 or above exhibit “rapid growth.” Per 2030, they “are the progressives—the fluid—the future-oriented—the Up-Wingers—the visionaries.” They are irreverent, educated, wealthy, and influential. They do not hold tightly to traditional values or beauty standards. They’re quick to pick up on shifts in culture and language. They embrace technology and live truly global lives.
Mothers of reinvention
After reading Are You a Transhuman? it’s hard not to view The Real Housewives through a dystopian lens. In multi-million dollar mansions and penthouse apartments across the world, a new breed of cyborg is taking shape, and they’ve given us all front-row seats to the metamorphosis.
Like 2030’s transhumans, the ladies of Bravo are shapeshifters, their faces and bodies constantly on the cutting edge of cosmetic surgery. They defy the laws of aging and push the boundaries of beauty with fillers, and facelifts, and cool sculpts, and BBLS, and buccal-fat removal.
As cyborgs do, they thrive in virtual worlds, reaching millions of fans across the globe through impassioned live streams and thinly veiled sponcon. They are seemingly everywhere, always on, all the time. They are citizens of the world who charter private jets for last-minute girl’s trips halfway across the earth. Despite the franchise’s title, The Real Housewives do not fit dated gender norms. Yes, they are mostly mothers, and some stay at home, but they are also bread winners of often mixed families. Storylines revolve around alternative forms of reproduction, normalizing once impossible or taboo practices like IVF and surrogacy.
In many ways these women are trailblazers; they are also filthy rich, an important distinction for citizens of 2030’s brave new world. As he puts it, “You cannot live a modern life on a premodern income…Affluence is progressive.” These are not the atomic housewives of the past. They are thoroughly modern women, who run multi-million dollar brands while somehow seeming to live true lives of leisure. It may not be “all diamonds and rosé,” but it sure looks like it on TV.
I used to lose myself in their ostentatious displays of wealth and privilege – and let’s be honest, I still do – but now I see them as more than mere icons of popular culture. The Real Housewives may actually be the unwitting pioneers of humanity’s final frontier.