Joseba Gabilondo "Postcolonial Cyborgs" in The Cyborg Handbook; edited by Chris Hables Gray, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor; New York: Routledge, 1995 (pp. 423-32) Joseba Gabilondo analyzes the political economy of cyborg representations and their local specificity in the context of the digital divide. Rather than praising the multiplicity of the cyborg, therefore, Gabilondo historicizes and contextualizes this postmodern fetish for the cyborg in a political, economic, and geographic setting. Accordingly, Gabilondo argues that the cyborg represents the new hegemonic subject position of late capitalist empires, effectively distinguishing the divide between 'First' and 'Third' world nation states: "Postcolonial subject positions are necessary in order to create the outsideness that cyberspace and consumer culture need to constitute themselves as the new hegemonic inner spaces of postmodernism." In this way, Gabilondo identifies cyborg subjectivity with multinational capitalism, privatization of social spaces, and geographically 'interior' to Europe and Japan. In this strike against the major multinational nation-states and the 'First world,' Gabilondo generalizes hegemonic powers into singular and monolithic forces which she calls 'Ideological Global Apparatuses.' Within this category, Gabilondo envelops all mass media, 'mass culture,' and 'cyberspace.' Without focusing on the material specificity of a particular medium, these arguments work as general criticisms of the digital divide, Euro-American economic hegemony, and neocolonial capitalism. Nevertheless, Gabilondo does not simplify the global political structures, but rather advocates for a more precise political economy of cyborgs, cyberspace, and postmodern politics. She concludes the essay by arguing against both nostalgic politics and libertarian technophilia: "both are ideological tendencies that block any possibility for progressive politics." L.E. Fazen