Surrogate Humanity: Resistant Art Practices under Technoliberalism

Abstract

This essay reviews the book Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, co-written by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora. In this critical text, Atanasoski and Vora consider the ways in which liberal structures of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation have been ingrained into robotic technologies. By revealing the interwoven relationship between technological development and racial dispossession, Surrogate Humanity searches for alternative models of human-machine interactions that can destabilize social inequalities and their reproductions.