What Are Your Pronouns

digital nostalgia i. — vi.

Random access memories 08.06.21

Collection of images that make me feel crazy

Other people have said it before, and more eloquently than me, that most robot stories are not about the possibilities presented by robots, at all, they are about the current exploitation of our fellow humans. Robots are about class and labour, inherently, the very term created by Capek refers to labour. There are interesting stories to tell about what happens when humanity’s needs are met by things that are genuinely not people, but most robot narratives are not interested in that, they’re interested in the mechanisms that lead the exploiter to see the exploited as not-people, and the exploited to see themselves as not people either.

Lots of people have done excellent analysis of robot stories through the lens of class, but it’s high time to analyze class stories through the lens of… robots. I’m kidding, but not entirely. The whole thing occurred to me when halfway through reading The Remains of the Day I realized it was the same book as Ancillary Justice. Without denying the creative brilliance of either author, the story of an aging butler looking back over his life and recognizing he served an unworthy master perfectly parallels the story of an old AI looking back over its life and recounting the realization that it’s no longer willing to serve its master. Key elements like the enmeshment of the self with the master and the master’s needs, the existence fully confined to the smooth running of a ship/house, the complete suppression of individual selfhood, are almost identical. It’s identical down to the detail that the narrator’s emotions are opaque to them, and the reader has to guess them from their actions or the reactions of others: both novels have scenes where we only find out that the protagonist has been crying because a bystander points it out.

Even clearer is the fact that Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper from the Du Maurier novel (and Hitchcock film) Rebecca is absolutely analogous to a rogue AI, something a little like the Imperial Radch’s grief-mad ships, and a little like HAL. She’s supposed to obey orders, keep things running smoothly and otherwise stay out of the way – and when it turns out that she has her own emotions and own priorities, that is inherently horrifying. The fact that she, a servant, is capable of love is more unsettling than her capacity for hate, because emotion means she’s malfunctioning, that she isn’t the blank slate of servitude she should be. Rebecca is a brilliant thriller, but its central conceit is the anxiety over what if the help were sentient. What if the people who cleaned your house and cooked your food and had access to all the rooms of your house at all hours and knew every last one of your secrets had the capacity to disobey. This is somewhat mitigated by a protagonist who used to be a white-collar sort of help herself, and by an ending that sends a symbol of British aristocracy all up in flames.

Nevertheless. Robots are class and class is robots.

ROBOTS AND COMPUTERS HAVE RIGHTS

HARDWARE (1990)

Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 (1987) Dir. By Shinji Aramaki Animated By: Hideaki Anno & Kōji Akimoto

Legendary Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno was only in his mid to late 20s and Kōji Akimoto being only 14 when he helped designed and animated Metal Skin Panic a mecha cyberpunk anime film.