Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

“The point is not just to look between these categories, but to pay closer attention to the surfaces themselves.” (Benjamin, Race After Technology 2019:44). In the movies, the Terminator shows up at the door with a gun. But that’s not how it happened this time. Algorithmic injustice, the concretizing of inequality via surveillance capitalism, seeps in, barely recognizable and we find ourselves already nudged, studied and directed, with little insight into the social control mechanisms that are gathering and moving ever closer to our interiority. No gun was needed, sometimes in the face of the listening, observing, and recording infrastructure of a wired world, we even swoon before the new power that seeks to sell to and direct us. How do we condition ourselves to recognize and resist existing harm and prevent future intrusions into the very stuff of human existence? I have been building epistemological tools to understand this crisis, connect to human rhythms and build collective tactics to redress the unseen powers that seek to concretize inequality. My students and I have developed a method for “peering into” machine/human relations. I introduce and apply that method to a self-check machine and a Paro robot (baby seal that is used in nursing homes) to surface the anti-Black, mysognist and colonizing intentions of the seemingly mundane, and seemingly innocuous machine life to which we are adapting. Using ethnographic tactics related to embodiment and sensory exploration, I compare these two devices to the humans they propose to extend, charm, and nudge.