The Cyber-Homunculus: On Race and Labor in Plans for Computation

By culling through a history of computing technologies and racial capitalism from the last 150 years, this paper identifies a trans-historical figuration at work. Following, as case studies, the metaphorical lives and afterlives of the Mechanical Turk—a chess-playing automaton from the nineteenth century—and Maxwell’s Demon—a scientific thought experiment first conceived in 1867— in technical and cultural discourses, it traces the figure of a cyberhomunculus, a tiny science-fictional subject laboring underneath the machinic hood, that animates para-cybernetic discourse and makes computational work palpable. In doing so, it outlines the entangled origins of atomization, automation, and outsourcing, and demonstrates how racialized and classed social relations get miniaturized into the computer, resulting in the simultaneous valuation and erasure of posthuman labor.