Steve Mann, right, with graduate student Chris Aimone, believes that wearing computers and cameras will give people more power to protect their privacy and individuality. Photo: Aaron Harris/CP. Associated Press

And in a world of ever-increasing surveillance cameras for security, and strong database-mining software for government intelligence and corporate marketing, Mann believes regular people ought to have cameras and powerful computers on them, too. It's all about leveling the power dynamic.

A cyborg could, say, take pictures of hostile police officers during a political demonstration and instantly post them on the Web -- to spur others to join in the protest, perhaps, or to simply provide alternative documentation of the scene. Prof. Mann calls such postings 'glogs' -- short for 'cyborg blogs' ('blogs,' of course, is itself shorthand for 'Web logs').

For example, he has created performance art by shooting video in stores that prohibit it, using handheld cameras more noticeable than the 'EyeTap' ocular computing system he normally wears. When employees tell him filming is not allowed, Mann points to the stores' own surveillance cameras behind darkened domes in the ceiling.

Then he tells the employees that 'his manager' makes him film public places for his security -- how does he know, he tells them, that the fire exits aren't chained shut? -- and that they'll have to talk to his manager.

But don't try telling Prof. Mann that the complaining employees are just doing their jobs, and that his real beef is with executives who make store policy. He believes everyone should fight The System, those powerful institutions lurking behind the one-way mirrors.

"Clerks should be confronted with their clerkiness," he says one afternoon in the DECONism Gallery, an electronic-art studio he runs near a Chinese district in Toronto.