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In the decades following the invention of the electronic digital computing machine, slavery was used with remarkable frequency as a means of rhetorically amplifying automation’s promises and threats. The rhetorical uses  of slavery in this period have two signal features: the near-total absence of references to racialized Atlantic slavery; and  the number of directions in which the analogy moved. In writings by engineers, scientists, politicians, and philosophers, from the 1940s to the present, it is possible to find references to machines as slaves, ‘free’ labourers as slaves to machines, ‘free’ labourers as slaves to non-mechanized work processes, and machines as emancipators of those ‘enslaved’ workers. In this talk, I argue that mechanical slavery is more than an imprecise metaphor, and that close readings of its appearances can make legible the dense structural entanglement of labour, machinery, and race.

 

is Reader in Literature, Media and Theory at King’s College London. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015) and The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (2021).