This racial grammar is evinced by the murder of Vincent Chin, producing a conflation of robotic function and techno-liberalism with Asian-ness

In spite of the ostensible successes of Cold War civil rights and emergent articulations of racial liberalism, because racial violence is the condition of possibility for racial capitalism, it is not surprising that each encounter with what appears to be a new moment of human obsolescence enacted through automation becomes easily associated with white loss. Layoffs in the US auto industry, perceived by the public as a response to the dominance of Japanese automobile manufacturing, led to a series of attacks on Asian Americans. This includes the infamous 1982 beating of Vincent Chin in Detroit by two laid-off Chrysler workers, which resulted in Chin’s death. Though it was presented by the defendants in court as a bar brawl gone bad, eyewitnesses reported that the killers justified their attack by saying, “It’s because of you we’re out of work,” linking the Asian American Chin to Japanese autoworkers.45

The conflation of productivity and robotic function with Asian-ness was not new to the 1980s. As Wendy Chun has argued, “the human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machinelike and not quite human, as not quite lived.”46 Yet the 1980s did signal a shift in Asia’s position within the global economy and the refiguration of the human–machine boundary in the late years of the Cold War and the early decades of the postindustrial era. According to David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu, “the yellow peril anxiety of an earlier, industrial-age era embodied by Fu Manchu found new forms across cultures and hemispheres as Asian economies became more visible competitors.”47 They propose techno-Orientalism as a concept through which to apprehend the ways in which racial, technological, and geopolitical imaginaries are linked in order to secure US dominance.

Techno-Orientalist imaginations are infused with the languages and codes of the technological and the futuristic. These developed alongside industrial advances in the West and have become part of the West’s project of securing dominance as architects of the future, a project that requires configurations of the East as the very technology with which to shape it. Techno-Orientalist speculations of an Asianized future have become ever more prevalent in the wake of neoliberal trade policies that enabled greater flow of information and capital between the East and the West.48

As the authors elaborate, part of these changes involved the differentiation of China and Japan. Whereas Japan was threatening to the US as a place that also innovated technology, China was threatening as a space with which the US competed for labor and production—“Japan creates technology, but China is the technology,” and a human factory.49 In both instances, however, techno-Orientalism portrays the inhumanity of Asian labor in the face of Western liberal humanism.50 Thus, the Asian body has been produced as an “expendable technology” at the heart of US industrialization.51 In this context, they provide the following reading of Vincent Chin’s murder:

The callous brutality of Chin’s death evinces something more than racial hatred; Chin not only was perceived as a convenient stand-in for the Japanese automotive industry, but embodied its traits— unfeeling, efficient, and inhuman. In Ebens and Nitz’s eyes, they were Luddites striking down the automatons that had been sent in to replace them. Techno-Orientalist discourse completed the project of dehumanizing Vincent Chin by rendering him as not only a racialized Other, but a factory machine that had to be dismantled by Ebens and Nitz to reclaim their personhood, subjectivity, and masculinity.52

Ballet Robotique, when contextualized through the disenchantment of white factory workers in the 1980s, signals that the automation of the postindustrial era threatened the very structures of white supremacy that had been upheld by factory automation in the early years of the Cold War. In this sense, both the early and late Cold War figurations of human obsolescence and human freedom, through the racial grammar of the surrogate human effect of robotic arms, driverless trains, and racialized outsourced laborers who function as stand-ins for technology, inherit and reiterate local and global racial forms. The racial violence that inheres in the machines that promise freedom for those (already) fully human and threaten obsolescence (as white loss) continues to structure present-day imaginaries of technological development and automation. Yet, as we argue in the next section, the linkages between fascism, racial violence, and technology as the conditions of possibility for the thriving of the autonomous liberal subject have been once again covered over in narratives surrounding capitalist development toward human freedom. This is the emergent political formation of technoliberalism.

One of US President Donald Trump’s first executive actions was the pro- nouncement on January 24, 2017, that he would begin immediate construction of a border wall between the US and Mexico. Both Trump and the phantasm of a border wall promoted in his presidential campaign are symbols that bring together labor, technologies of control, and white supremacy. The fantasy of isolation, closing of borders, and expelling immigrant labor animating Trump’s promise to build a border wall was about reviving a formerly booming national economy. The border wall, in short, is about restoring the (unmarked white) working-class laborer to a former glory, symbolized by figures like the auto industry worker and coal miner.

In response to claims that immigrant others are responsible for the loss of a glorious era of white labor in the US, following Trump’s election, tech industry leaders emphasized that automation, not immigration, was the biggest threat to American workers. These claims were positioned as anti- racist, redirecting concerns about white loss from the immigrant threat to the threat of robotics. Yet, as we contend, these arguments are also part of a problematic relationship between technoliberalism and the fantasy of postracism in the labor arena. It is thus crucial to ask: What is the re- lationship between white loss and the discourse of postlabor technology/ technoliberalism? On the one hand, Trump’s campaign and presidential rhetoric, which has been overtly racist in its tenor, contradicts the tenets of racial liberalism in US politics and culture outlined by Melamed. On the other hand, we might consider the opposition by tech leaders to Trump’s assessments of job loss as white loss as yet another innovation in the logics of racial liberalism—what we are theorizing as the emergent formation of technoliberalism that gains force in the post–Cold War era.

By technoliberalism, we mean the way in which liberal modernity’s simultaneous and contradictory obsession with race and the overcoming of racism has once again been updated and revised since the dissolution of the threat of Soviet totalitarianism through the frame of a postlabor world. Technoliberal futurity envisions robots as replacing human form and function in factories and other spheres (for instance, bus and taxi drivers, janitors, and call center workers). As proponents of such futures argue in seeming opposition to the overtly racist and fascist logics of Trump, it is not that jobs are being stolen from the US white working class by Mexicans and the Chinese, but that, as robots take human jobs, other solutions for human obsolescence must be found. Because technoliberal explanations of economic transformation utilize the vocabulary of color-blindness, there is a need to map out how race scaffolds the technoliberal imaginary and its seeming opposition to white supremacy.

One representative example is a cnbc commentary that noted that “Eighty-five percent of manufacturing jobs were lost to technology from 2000–2010, not to Chinese job thieves. . . . We can expect more automa- tion, and not just on the shop floor. Last year the White House predicted 47 percent of existing jobs will eventually be eliminated by automation and artificial intelligence. . . . Unless Donald Trump has a time machine stored in a secret lair underneath Trump Tower, going back to a labor-driven man- ufacturing economy isn’t an option.”53 In the technoliberal logic of this re- port, it is not that the new economy uses cheap, racialized labor outsourced to the Global South. Rather, the new economy doesn’t need any human labor. Similar assessments abound in news reports pointing to Trump’s racist fal- lacies, including his cornerstone promise to revive coal mining in the US (and thus dismantle the Obama-era clean power plan). Yet, as a recent New York Times article outlines,

In Decatur, Ill., far from the coal mines of Appalachia, Caterpillar engineers are working on the future of mining: mammoth haul trucks that drive themselves. The trucks have no drivers, not even remote operators. Instead, the 850,000-pound vehicles rely on self-driving technology, the latest in an increasingly autonomous line of trucks and drills that are removing some of the human element from dig- ging for coal. . . . Hardy miners in mazelike tunnels with picks and shovels [celebrated by Trump]—have steadily become vestiges of the past.54

What is interesting about this article and others like it is that the evidence that Trump’s labor policies are racist is the same evidence that suggests that the laborer as a figure, and human labor writ large, is vestigial to the tech-driven economy. To be clear, we are not contending that the nostalgic vision of the white working class in the US is disconnected from the logics of white supremacy. Rather, we are proposing that race continues to structure technoliberal futures even as they claim to be postracial.

For instance, the fully automated future certainly is not uncondition- ally celebrated within technoliberalism; it is often articulated as loss— however, not as specifically white loss, but rather as universal human loss. According to Stephen Hawking, “The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intel- ligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”55 Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, makes a similar point: “What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human]. These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.”56 Mark Cuban, the tech entrepreneur and celebrity judge on the popular abc television series Shark Tank, has been critical of Trump, and in particular of Trump’s racist understandings of job loss. As he put it, companies that promised to build new factories and cre- ate new jobs in the US, such as Fiat Chrysler, gm, Ford, Intel, and Walmart, “when it is all said and done . . . are going to end up leading to fewer people being employed . . . and there is nothing President Trump can do to stop that because of the trends in technology—machine learning, neural net- works, deep learning, etc.—changing the nature of work.”57

At the same time that tech billionaires articulate the end of the human worker as a universal human loss against Trump’s anti-immigration stance, the connection between liberalism and capitalist development means that warnings about the inevitable obsolescence of manual jobs is paired with a simultaneously optimistic outlook on the growth of the capitalist economy. Thus, the technoliberal imaginary continually reasserts that US industry is growing, rather than being in decline as Trump has argued. According to a 2016 pbs Newshour report,

Despite [Trump’s] charge that “we don’t make anything anymore,” manufacturing is still flourishing in America. Problem is, factories don’t need as many people as they used to because machines now do so much of the work. America has lost more than 7 million factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. Yet Ameri- can factory production . . . more than doubled over the same span to $1.91 trillion [in 2015], according to the Commerce Department. . . . Trump and other critics are right that trade has claimed some Ameri- can factory jobs, especially after China joined the World Trade Organ- ization in 2001 and gained easier access to the U.S. market. . . . But research shows that the automation of U.S. factories is a much big- ger factor than foreign trade in the loss of factory jobs. . . . The vast majority of the lost jobs—88 percent—were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor.58

The pbs report concludes that the upside of the robot revolution is that the Asian drain of jobs is ending, as manufacturing returns to the US where the use of robots can be easily implemented as an affordable solution to outsourcing. In the technoliberal imaginary, US geopolitical dominance as an economic powerhouse has been reinstated through technological innovation.

The technoliberal argument against Trump’s rhetoric of white supremacy both affirms capitalism as the source of US abundance and posits a post- labor economy that heralds a postracial world in which all Americans are equally affected by automation. This move not only erases labor as a useful category of analysis, but in doing so makes it impossible to assess the differential conditions of ongoing worker exploitation under racial capitalism. In this imaginary, technology then stands in for the racialized and gendered devalued work that the colonized, the enslaved, immigrants, and others have performed and continue to perform in the tech economy. As Ruha Benjamin has argued, “if postracial innovators are busily refurbishing rac- ism to make inequality irresistible and unrecognizable, then those who seek radical transformation in the other direction, towards freedom and justice, must continuously reexamine the default settings, rather than the routine breakdowns, of social life.”59 As the preeminent political form as- serting postraciality in the present, technoliberalism innovates the fiction of the US as still potentially the site of antiracist struggle against global inequity even as this very formulation updates the ways in which inequity is made manifest economically and socially.