The development of technology relies on racialized structures of power and representation of Blackness as fungible which perpetuates a disembodied universality that benefits whiteness.

The Surrogate Human Effect Like the “others” of the (white) liberal subject analyzed by decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, the surrogate human effect of technology functions first to consolidate something as “the human,” and second to colonize “the human” by advancing the post-Enlightenment liberal subject of modernity as universal.8 The concept of the surrogate brings together technoliberal claims that technological objects and platforms are increasingly standing in for what the human does, thus rendering the human obsolete, while also foregrounding the history of racial unfreedom that is overwritten by claims of a postrace and postgender future generated by that obsolescence. In our usage, the longer history of the surrogate human effect in post-Enlightenment modernity stretches from the disappearance of native bodies necessary for the production of the fully human, through the production of the fungibility of the slave’s body as standing in for the master, and therefore also into the structures of racial oppression that continue into the postslavery and post–Jim Crow periods, and into the disavowal of gendered and racialized labor supporting outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and sharing economy platforms. Framing technologies through the lens of the surrogate effect brings a feminist and critical race perspective to bear on notions of technological development, especially in the design and imagination of techno-objects and platforms that claim a stand-in role for undesirable human tasks. As part of the surrogate effect, the surrogate is a racialized and gendered form defining the limits of human consciousness and autonomy. Saidiya Hartman conceptualizes the surrogate by citing Toni Morrison’s formulation of slaves as “surrogate selves for the meditation on the problems of human freedom.”9 Hartman proposes that “the value of blackness resided in its metaphorical aptitude, whether literally understood as the fungibility of the commodity or understood as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the nation came to understand themselves.”10 The slave, the racialized fungible body, also acts as a “surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and domination.”11 As Hartman elaborates, these racialized structures of the surrogate did not simply disappear after emancipation. Rather, “the absolute dominion of the master, predicated on the annexation of the captive body, yielded to an economy of bodies, yoked and harnessed, through the exercise of autonomy, self-interest, and consent. . . . Although no longer the extension and instrument of the master’s absolute right or dominion, the laboring black body remained a medium of others’ power and representation.”12 While Hartman is referencing the rise of new modes of bonded labor following emancipation that were encapsulated by the liberal formalities of contract, consent, and rights, her theorization of surrogacy as a racialized and gendered arrangement producing autonomy and universality of and for the master is useful for thinking about the contemporary desire for technology to perform the surrogate human effect. The racialized and gendered scaffolding of the surrogate effect continues to assert a “disembodied universality” that actually offers the position of “human” to limited human actors, thereby guaranteeing power and domination through defining the limits of work, violence, use, and even who or what can be visible labor and laboring subjects. Tracking the endurance of the racial form of slavery as the (not so) repressed or spectral frame for the imaginary of what surrogate technologies do, or who or what they are meant to replace, we insist throughout this book that human emancipation (from work, violence, and oppressive social relations) is a racialized aspiration for proper humanity in the postEnlightenment era. In the US context, reading technologies as they reflect the dominant imagination of what it means to be a human thus means that they are situated in social relations of race, gender, and sexuality, as these derive from embodied histories of labor, Atlantic chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and European and US imperialism, to name the most dominant. The preeminent questions of the politics of the subject, and the derivative politics of difference that consume critical theory—questions that are about political consciousness, autonomy with its attendant concepts of freedom and unfreedom, and the problem of recognition—also drive the preeminent questions we must ask of technologies that perform the surrogate human effect. The surrogate effect of technological objects inherits the simultaneously seeming irrelevance yet all-encompassing centrality of race and histories of enslavement and indenture against which the liberal subject is defined. As Lisa Lowe writes: During the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, liberal colonial discourses improvised racial terms for the non-European peoples whom settlers, traders, and colonial personnel encountered. We can link the emergence of liberties defined in the abstract terms of citizenship, rights, wage labor, free trade, and sovereignty with the attribution of racial difference to those subjects, regions, and populations that liberal doctrine describes as unfit for liberty or incapable of civilization, placed at the margins of liberal humanity.13 Lowe explains that while it is tempting to read the history of emancipation from slave labor as a progress narrative of liberal development toward individual rights and universal citizenship, in fact, “to the contrary, this linear conception of historical progress—in which the slavery of the past would be overcome and replaced by modern freedom—concealed the persistence of enslavement and dispossession for the enslaved and indentured” and racialized populations necessary to the new British-led imperial forms of trade and governance “expanding across Asia, Africa, and the Americas under the liberal rubric of free trade.”14 Moreover, according to Lowe, “the liberal experiment that began with abolition and emancipation continued with the development of free wage labor as a utilitarian discipline for freed slaves and contract laborers in the colonies, as well as the English workforce at home, and then the expanded British Empire through opening free trade and the development of liberal government.”15 While the history of capitalism tends to be written as the overcoming of serf, slave, and indentured labor through free contract and wage labor, that is, as freedom overcoming unfreedom, as Lowe demonstrates, it is actually the racialized coupling of freedom and unfreedom that undergird and justify capitalist and imperial expansionism.