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Abstract

As we enter the fourth industrial revolution and second machine age, we participate in a supposedly posthuman and post-racial present and future in which robots—as workers in domestic service, factories, and the military—free humans from having to perform dull, dirty, repetitive, and degraded tasks. As these tasks become increasingly automated, humans are free to aspire to, as well as perform, their full creative potential. To critically investigate these technoliberal claims, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora ask that we pay attention to how engineering imaginaries and technologies are frighteningly, in Ruha Benjamin’s (2016) terms, metaphors for innovating inequity. Although technoliberalism links technological development to a future-oriented, aspirational humanity in which race, gender, and even labour are transcended, the shiny veneer of this ideology camouflages the way it operates through a hidden racial grammar—what the authors call “the surrogate human effect.” According to Atanasoski and Vora, “technology thus steps into ... a surrogate relation to human spheres of life, labor, and sociality that enables the function and differential formation and consolidation of the liberal subject—a subject whose freedom is possible only through the racial unfreedom of the surrogate” (5). Through surrogate-self relations, the politics of (racialized and gendered) difference undergird the production and deployment of mechanical surrogates as partners or replacements for human surrogates. With a longer history in post-Enlightenment modernity, human surrogates have included “the body of the enslaved standing in for the master, the vanishing native bodies necessary for colonial expansion, [and] invisibilized labor[ers who toil because of] indenture, immigration, and outsourcing” (6). The racialized and gendered form of the surrogate is used to imagine and assemble “the human,” or more precisely “the liberal humanist figure of Man” (Weheliye 2014: 8). By lucidly deconstructing technoliberalism’s narratives, Atanasoski and Vora show us what is at stake in the definition of “the human,” and how the “human essence” is constructed in relation to those who have been deemed nonhuman or not quite human. Attributed with the capacity to (morally) reason and empathize, the fully human liberal subject is granted rights and freedom at the expense of racialized and gendered surrogates who find themselves objectified and enslaved.