slaves and robots

a lot of the literature i’m encountering in studying human relations in the context of digital/internet technologies leads to the relation of race as social technology, master/slave connotation and the origins of the robot as a task-machine to enforce the will of the dominant power — the robot as slave, the human labourer as robot, the modern treatment of racialised bodies as another form of slavery.

Mentions

• “an autonomous device meant to obey its master: ‘robot,’ from the 1923 translation of Karel Capek’s 1921 play ‘R.U.R.’ ((the word robot having been derived from a Czech word for slave, ‘robotnik’” - Broken Metaphor#^e5d58a