Soft Cyborgs: Technological Collapse and the Attrition of Human Consciousness in Delillo’s The Silence

Abstract

This study explores Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020) as a fictional prediction of humanity’s cognitive and psychological conversion into machines under digital dependency. While previous researches have widely examined how technology shapes communication and identity, this paper sheds light on how DeLillo’s characters (Jim, Tessa, Diane, Ax and Martin) depict a condition terms “soft cyborgs”, humans who, without physically turning into machines, have gradually becomes machines, picking up the patterns of machine-like thoughts, speech, and emotional collapse through digital blackout. Unlike Cyborgs defined by bodily strength and advancement, soft cyborgs represent an internal erosion of language, effect and selfhood that emerges only when technological structure is no longer supportive. Drawing on Haraway’s Cyborg theory, Jean Baudrillard simulation and hyperreality, Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology, and Jaan Tallin’s Intelligence Stairway model, this paper analyses how the sudden global collapse of technology acts as diagnostic device, exposing pre-existing threat of human erasure rather than creating it. The analysis highlights how authentic linguistic and emotional decay caused by over technological dependency. Technological silence brings out the internal silences hidden already in human consciousness. The study contributes to post humanist literary criticism recreating the human- machine boundary which is not physical transformation but of thought and connection.