Prompt: Aldous Huxley was of this mind when, a full decade before penning the famous “hatchery” scenario of Brave New World, he wrote a character in Crome Yellow (1921) who predicts the dissolution of “the family system” at a dinner party, in favor of “vast state incubators”: “rows upon rows of gravid bottles… supplying the world with the population it requires.” But it was common, a hundred years ago, and not only among fashionable cosmopolitan men and women, to espouse opinions on how best to legislate and regulate artificial womb technology. Communists like Charlotte Haldane and J. B. S. Haldane; socialists like Dora Russell and Eden Paul; pacifist moderates like Huxley or Vera Brittain; and crypto-fascists like D. H. Lawrence and Anthony Ludovici all believed that procreation, for better or worse, would fairly imminently be freed from the necessity of passing through nine months in the “female” body.

Response: But this dream has been continually disappointed. In reality, the closest thing to fetuses subsisting, alive, outside of the human womb, is when delicately swaddled preemies receive an infusion of Dr. Thomas Shaffer’s perfluorochemical surfactant liquid to fill their lungs. Otherwise, it’s just dry incubator technology. It was a doctor from Germantown, Philadelphia, Charles Chapple, who patented a simple incubator prototype in March 1938 that was later developed into the Isolette model now used in neonatal intensive care everywhere. The lamp-warmed Perspex boxes most people are familiar with in a hospital setting are, undeniably, nothing like the miraculous “goldfish bowls filled with chemical fluids” (as one daily newspaper described the New York Medical Society’s proto-bio-bag prototype in 1952) that the media relentlessly raised false alarms about in the 1950s. Yet nothing has ever stopped newspapers from describing even the driest, most rudimentary methods of preemie incubation as uterine. When, in 1894, the wife of a Madison Avenue millionaire died while giving birth to an infant that weighed only two pounds, its life was saved by placing it in a hurriedly warmed suitcase with a viewing-window cut into it. A suitcase! — yet the New York Daily News still reported this improvised response as “an artificial womb.”  It’s worth noting that even dry incubators, which have officially existed since 1880 and been subject to only minor tweaks and improvements, never really stopped commanding the mesmerized attention they did in their first guise as carnival attractions. Preemie display-cases and “hatcheries” served as massive money-spinners for quack doctors and certified physicians — who funded their research by selling tickets — in the freak-shows of Coney Island as well as the great international inventors’ Expositions in Berlin, Chicago, and London.  The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with its genuinely innovative wet tech, is open about its worry that the weird “optics” of the sealed, marinated “preborn” human will “put parents off.” But their aqueous version of incubation evidently represents the future of a highly marketable opportunity to “look in wonder” at “prenatal sublimity,” as the scholar Nathan Stormer puts it. The question remaining, however, is whether the bio-bag has more to do with ectogenesis than its dry predecessors did; whether it automates something that warm-air capsules do not.


Prompt: Making Mom If Philadelphia’s bio-bags have the potential to realize the old dream of the artificial womb, they also force us to return to an old question: Why would we want to automate gestation in the first place? In our own era, people have a variety of answers to this question. For some of us, the fact that 300,000-odd people still die of their pregnancies every year, while millions more incur injuries, represents a glaring humanitarian problem in need of urgent remedies. In this view, given the extreme harm and danger gestators risk (especially black and working-class ones) in gestating their own young, researching alternatives that would enable people not to gestate if they don’t want to — while still making babies together, perhaps in non-dyadic ways — is not only justified, but highly ethical.  On the other hand, there are many who see artificial womb technology as a means of shoring up the power of the patriarchal private nuclear household, removing all doubt about biogenetic paternity from the equation and indeed removing the human gestator — especially her (already legally and biologically constrained) ability to harm and/or kill the fetus — from the scene of gestation. For them, ectogenesis is the “solution” to the “abortion debate” in that, once it’s perfected, it would theoretically obviate the “need” to kill fetuses of any age. It points to a world (not so far removed from this one as I would wish) in which a pregnant person might be entirely deprived of the right to decide whether or not the living thing inside her stays alive. In this lens, the glass and plastic is there, not to alleviate the labor of the “mother,” but to save the “baby” [sic] from her.

Response: The official line agreed upon by scientists like Dr. Emily Partridge is that these questions are irrelevant, since improving care for preemies has nothing to do with the pursuit of automated pregnancy. The translation of the lamb-in-a-bag findings to neonatal clinical practice is not, they believe, about replacing anything. It is merely about “supporting,” “transitioning,” and “bridging” preemies from the twenty-three-week gestational mark (considered just above the threshold of viability) to the twenty-eight-week mark (where their chance of survival can be over 90 percent).  In framing their enterprise this way, EXTEND™ attempts to sidestep the thicket of political issues that the ectogenetic resonances of their device immediately call up. “I want to make this very clear,” states Partridge’s collaborator Alan Flake, “We have no intention and we’ve never had any intention with this technology of extending the limits of viability further back.” Seeking to artificially manufacture fetuses from scratch is not (repeat, not!) the aim, here. The aim is to look after preemies we are “caring for anyway” — even while Flake himself elsewhere calls the possibility of handling fetuses younger than twenty-two weeks “a pipe dream at this point.”  The doublespeak is not conscious, the stated motivation not exactly a lie. Partridge, Flake, and their colleagues are, I believe, motivated by tragic professional encounters they’ve experienced with specific beings over the years, proto-persons who simply weren’t “supposed to be here yet” and who, they sense, are “desperate for solutions and for innovation.” Still, there is a remarkably schizoid character to these assurances, where, on the one hand, the imputation of any kind of ambition to replace biological maternity is sharply repudiated while, on the other hand, the scientists happily state on camera that “our system is essentially a re-creation of the environment a fetus normally resides in” and that “the lamb is getting everything it would be getting inside Mom.”


Prompt: Re-creation. Everything. Mom. The simultaneous avowal and disavowal of life-giving ambition goes hand in hand with comments like neonatal unit director Kevin Dysart’s: “compared to where we’d like to be, we’re still not close.” Adopting this delicately ambivalent tack places the hitherto underfunded initiative in what they no doubt calculate is the optimal position for receiving support from a “pro-life” federal administration vehemently opposed to using “fetal parts” in research, but highly enthusiastic about ministering to the “pre-born.” The situation-in-flux is certainly anxiety-inducing for neonatologists. No wonder, then, that when I betrayed an interest in ectogenesis, the bio-bag unit shut me out.

Response: Towards the Queer Gestational Commune The work of a gestator is not reducible, as Dr. Emily Partridge implied, to that of a lung. Partridge even tacitly admits this. Undeniably, something of late-stage ovine gestation is being automated, down the road from my house, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But only something: in our species at least, pregnancy is a multifaceted and part-consciously creative undertaking. It is defined, as Irina Aristarkhova writes in her book Hospitality of the Matrix (2012), by a quality of nursing — a complex, bidirectional, sometimes loving, sometimes abusive (and usually both), orchestration of touch.  And, for better or worse, the machine, at least for now, cannot nurse. For better or worse, polyethylene sheath + salt-solution + electronic oxygenator ≠ gestation. Unaccounted for in seeing the bio-bag as an extension of the uterus are the bidirectional flows, nonverbal communications, and symbiotic becomings and violences that characterize human placentation, which is “naturally” very colonizing and aggressive.


Prompt: Unaccounted for, too, are the transitive and intransitive valences of the verb “to gestate” — the fact that gestatees gestate, as co-participants in their gestation, and that they gestate us back. I have a hunch that the utopian political horizons of the artificial womb — as explored in feminist works ranging from Shulamith Firestone’s classic The Dialectic of Sex (1970) to Marge Piercy’s science-fiction novel Women on the Edge of Time (1976) — has everything to do with the extent to which the dreamer grapples with this interpenetrative character of prepartum nursing — the sense, even, that fetuses are in some ways a strange species, demanding all of the same ethical agonisms of a multispecies companionship.  Today, the perfection of intensive techniques for forcing preemie survival has nothing whatsoever to do with reproductive justice struggle. But I would love to one day see the queer gestational commune in which “bio-bags” of some kind enabled gestators to pause, share, transfer, redistribute, and walk away from pregnancies. I would love to see these technologies help denaturalize motherhood and liberate those with uteruses from the imperative to gestate. This would require the expropriation of the means of safer obstetrics and maximally assisted reproduction currently monopolized by capitalism’s elites. I hope we do it, and I hope we will know what it’s like to manufacture our children with the help of a wet technology enabling a form of common gestational touch that inflicts no more harm to a fetus’s many parents than we can collectively accept.

Response: The streets that night were carless. They were blocked, but there was no room for cars anyway. There were thousands of people outside. Some were running, some were locked arm-in-arm. Others were clad in full body armor — those were the Seattle Police. The cops wore helmets with screens to shield them from the smoke grenades and tear gas they were spraying directly into the crowds, forcing people coughing and crying down to the pavement, which was covered in glass from chain-store windows smashed by roaming protesters. “You suck, you fucking cocksucker,” a man yelled as an officer in front of him began firing rubber bullets that left painful welts on the legs and arms of the people they hit.  That night, November 30, 1999, the opening ceremony of the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference was supposed to be held. But demonstrators had taken over the city, confining the world leaders from over 150 governments who had arrived in Seattle to participate in the round of global trade negotiations to their hotel lobbies. At one point, the action moved to a street downtown where a group of activist-journalists had set up a newsroom in a donated storefront. They called it the Seattle Independent Media Center (IMC). As smoke thickened the autumn air, protesters poured inside to seek refuge from the tear gas that made it nearly impossible to see and even harder to breathe. The cops tried to follow them in, but those inside quickly locked the doors. Their cameras were rolling, filming the police the whole time. This was where Indymedia was born.


Prompt: The Seattle IMC was stocked with donated computers for uploading and editing video and for writing articles. This content would then be posted to a website, indymedia.org, which went live days before the protests began. The motivation behind opening an activist newsroom, according to Jeff Perlstein, one of the founders of the Seattle IMC, was to provide a different perspective on the protests than corporate media. “We couldn’t just let CNN and CBS be the ones to tell these stories,” said Perlstein in a 2000 interview. “We needed to develop our own alternatives and networks. That’s where the idea for the media center came from — the necessity for communities to control their own message.”  It worked. During the WTO meetings, IMC journalists provided up-to-the-minute coverage and produced daily video segments. The Indymedia website clocked in 1.5 million unique visitors in its first week of operation, surpassing traffic to CNN’s website during the Seattle protests.

Response: The success of the Indymedia website and the Seattle IMC newsroom behind it soon inspired the formation of local IMCs and websites in other cities around the world, where they duplicated the publishing platform developed for Seattle. By 2004, there were over 150 autonomously operated IMCs in some fifty countries across the globe, which all ran websites that branched off the mothership: indymedia.org. What started in Seattle grew into a network.  This was at the turn of the millenium, when the anti-globalization movement was in full swing. Activists in North America and Europe mounted major protests against powerful multinational corporations and the international agreements that empowered them. Indymedia’s founding members understood that defeating this enemy would require taking on some of its traits. A movement to oppose globalized, networked capital needed to be globalized and networked too. And that meant getting online.  An Anti-Capitalist Internet  Indymedia activists wanted to build an alternative media system. They wanted to use the internet to circumvent institutional power. But they weren’t the only ones. Another, more influential group of digital pioneers in the 1990s had a similar idea: the techno-libertarians, who dreamt of building a boundless digital future where inhabitants could craft their own rules, free from the confines of government control. The philosophy of techno-libertarianism was most famously articulated by Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours… Cyberspace does not lie within your borders,” Barlow wrote in his Declaration, which he penned at the World Economic Forum, of all places, in Davos in 1996. While Indymedia organizers shared Barlow’s image of cyberspace as borderless, anti-hierarchical, and anti-institutional, they were guided by a very different political vision.


Prompt: The same year that Barlow published his manifesto, Subcomandante Marcos offered his. Marcos was the spokesman of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a rebel group of primarily poor and rural indigenous people in Chiapas that took up arms when Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. From the start, the EZLN used the internet to get the word out about their deadly struggle against the Mexican government. In 1996, at an anti-globalization conference held in Chiapas, Marcos laid out his vision for how social movements could harness the internet: We will make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of alternative communication against neoliberalism… This intercontinental network of alternative communication will be the medium by which distinct resistance’s communicate with one another.

Response: The organizers who went on to build Indymedia heard this call. Marcos’s “intercontinental network of alternative communication,” as Todd Wolfson chronicles in his book, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, provided the guiding inspiration for the formation of Indymedia.  The Indymedia organizers would be the children of Marcos, not Barlow. While the two philosophies had points of contact, they came from different places of concern. Indymedia activists would agree with the techno-libertarians that politicians and police couldn’t be trusted in their networks. But they didn’t see cyberspace as an open frontier of individuals unhindered by governments. Rather, the activists saw cyberspace as a place for communities.  They drew from a history of community media and radical self-publishing, which emphasized the need for those who are marginalized and silenced by mainstream media to share stories, cultivate solidarity, and build grassroots power. For Indymedia, the internet was a gathering place: a space not merely for individual liberation but collective liberation, where communities and movements could communicate, consolidate, and form a “network of resistance,” as Marcos put it, against government and corporate control.  Yet it was Barlow’s vision that attracted entrepreneurs like Eric Schmidt and Steve Wozniak, who hoped to carve out new markets in a digital world unbound by national borders and government regulations. For the techno-libertarians, a healthy internet was one where people could do and say whatever they pleased. Protecting individual rights of self-expression took precedence over protecting marginalized communities — who, in practice, don’t always get to enjoy the same rights.  Today, techno-libertarianism has terminated in a corporatized internet, where individuals can express almost anything they want, so long as their speech is monetized by a handful of big platforms. Only recently have these platforms been forced to reckon with the problems that have plagued communities of minority users for years. Meanwhile, corporations like Facebook and Google, rife with hate speech and funded by surveillance, lack a clear understanding of how to serve the information needs of the diversity of users worldwide who depend on them.


Prompt: In contrast to the digital frontiersman of Barlow’s declaration, Indymedia activists built a platform that prioritized communities. Within Indymedia, communities built their own trusted online spaces. Autonomous groups were then connected to others in a common network, with the aim of providing mutual support and mounting resistance to institutional power.  Opening Doors with Open Publishing When Indymedia was at its height between 1999 and 2006, new IMCs were going online at a rate of one every nine days. Many were started to support anti-globalization protests, like in Seattle in 1999. The Indymedia center in Miami, for example, started in 2003 in the aftermath of the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting, when labor organizers, farm workers, and anti-globalization demonstrators descended on the city to protest the trade negotiations.  Though many IMCs formed in response to local anti-globalization actions, like the one in Miami, starting a new Indymedia site wasn’t bound to that movement. The IMC in Philadelphia, for example, emerged in preparation for the protests surrounding the Republican National Convention in 2000. Others were built as general-purpose outlets for local activism. One of the first projects of the San Francisco Bay Area IMC — later known as “Indybay” —  was a list of the forty-five worst slumlords in the city. Indymedia journalists compiled the list after interviewing and meeting with local tenants’ rights advocates in response to rising rents during the dot-com boom.

Response: Whether an IMC was started to cover an anti-globalization protest or to serve as a community media outpost, one thing they all shared was a website with some level of “open publishing.” This meant it had a usable interface that made it relatively easy for anyone to post on the central newswire. Most Indymedia sites had three columns (similar to Facebook today). The left column had a menu for navigating to other local IMCs. The center column was a feed of stories, and the right column was usually reserved for submitting a post or listing calendar events. “It was the first self-publishing platform I had encountered,” Lee Azzarello, who started working with the Indymedia center in New York City in 2001 and helped with global Indymedia tech support, told me, echoing other IMC members I interviewed. “This was before WordPress existed and blogs took some expertise to start and use.”  Open publishing also opened the doors to abuse. “We had constant battles with trolls the whole time,” Mark Burdett, an Indymedia veteran and former colleague from EFF, told me in an interview. One key way that Indymedia sites dealt with trolling was by having an editorial policy: members who monitored the posts submitted to the newswire used the policy to decide what got promoted to the top. But as more people used Indymedia sites, the more the trolls and spammers did too. Indymedia organizers eventually built tools that automatically detected spam or hateful content to flag for review before it was allowed to go live.  Issues with trolling, however, never eclipsed the real appeal of open publishing: it provided an easy-to-use platform which non-tech experts could use to elevate their stories online. Activists had long recognized that skewed narratives and silences from corporate media were part of what they had to fight in order to mount political resistance. Even so, those who were in a position to write and publish stories to counteract the mainstream media were relatively few and far between, relying on community radio and public access television, newsletters, or individual blogs.


Prompt: With Indymedia, thousands of people were publishing stories and sharing photos and videos across movements and across the world. Indymedia’s open source codebase, of which multiple versions emerged over the years, had been created specifically for this purpose. As Mansur Jacobi and Matthew Arnison, software programmers who were core in developing the open-publishing framework for Indymedia, put it in the very first post published to the Seattle site: The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates. Prepare to be swamped by the tide of activist media makers on the ground in Seattle and around the world, telling the real story behind the World Trade [Organization].

Response: The site’s open-publishing architecture presaged the social media networks that would begin to emerge years later and eventually subsume how we communicate online.  Tech Taking a Backseat Although open publishing was key to the success of Indymedia, the technical aspects alone weren’t what attracted its user base. Just as important were the anti-capitalist and justice-centered values. I came to the Tennessee Indymedia Center’s website, tnimc.org, to write and read stories about how people in Nashville, my hometown, were dying because of cuts to state health care, about how coal extraction had decimated whole mountains and polluted local water supplies, about how police were increasing their presence in public schools.  Local corporate media at the time were either ignoring these issues or, if they were covering them, failed to consistently center the voices of the people and communities affected. Our thinking was that it would be awfully hard to change local policy if our neighbors didn’t know what was happening, and we couldn’t count on the mainstream media to make people understand enough to care. In this way, as grassroots journalists on Indymedia, our work was tactical. We were reporting with an agenda.  Other Indymedia organizers and activists I spoke to felt similarly. “Self-publishing is great. I’m into it,” an early organizer of Indybay told me, who asked to remain anonymous. “But I feel like the main strength of Indymedia was this idea about tactical media. There’s like a purpose to what you’re doing that’s not just about publishing your story.” If you hung around Indymedia types during the early 2000s, there’s a good chance you heard the term “tactical media” batted around. What differentiates tactical media from some imaginary idea of pure journalism is that tactical media is made in support of a political project.


Prompt: The autonomy of each Indymedia site gave local activist-journalists the flexibility to support different political projects, and to respond to the informational needs of their community. In 2005, for example, the Houston IMC teamed up with the community radio advocacy non-profit Prometheus Radio Project to set up a low-power FM radio station at the Astrodome, where thousands of people displaced from Hurricane Katrina were relocated. As Tish Stringer, a founding member of the Houston IMC, told Democracy Now at the time, “There was a real difficulty getting information for basic things like when to eat, where to eat, how to get my child into school, how to look for jobs, transportation — really basic issues… Media activists in Houston talked about this and decided really radio would be the perfect medium to address this.”  Within days, the Indymedia activists were able to secure three emergency low-power FM licenses. They handed out small donated radios to people inside, set up a studio in an Airstream trailer in the parking lot, and began broadcasting by helping evacuees find missing friends and family members. The station provided critical information about how to apply for aid and aired firsthand accounts from survivors who made it from Louisiana to Texas. Media activists were helping to alleviate the information crisis by connecting families in the Astrodome — all the while producing boots-on-the-ground coverage that people could follow around the world.

Response: The internet wasn’t in everyone’s pocket in the early 2000s and, as illustrated by the Houston activists who broadcast at the Astrodome, publishing online didn’t make sense for reaching people who don’t have the resources to get online. Sakura Sanders, an anti-mining activist who worked on Fault Lines, the printed newspaper of Indybay, explained why their Indymedia collective and so many others found it critical to run a print newspaper: “Online is great for reaching people who already know about you. But this was before social media, so unless you actually went to Indybay deliberately, it’s not like you were going to see these stories posted on someone’s Facebook. Fault Lines was essential to reach beyond the choir. We would leave it at various cafes and stuff.”  Beyond newspapers and radio stations, it was common for Indymedia websites to run their own physical space with a community computer lab, video editing stations, art supplies, and a meeting room for local organizing. Indymedia sites were networked online, but as primarily local projects, it was essential to exist offline too. This was in part because Indymedia was a creature of an earlier digital era, before social media and smartphones. But the benefits of the localism this strategy engendered shouldn’t be lost on us today: in order to serve their communities, organizers had to be present offline too.  Missing Links The last post on indymedia.org is dated September 2017. New Orleans’ Indymedia site, neworleans.indymedia.org, was last updated in October 2013. Others are still quite active, like the Indymedia site used across Argentina, argentina.indymedia.org, which is updated multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. When I visited the Tennessee IMC’s website this spring, the domain had expired. I texted my friend who helped maintain the site. “Guess I forgot to pay the yearly fee,” they replied.  Indymedia sites around the US started to atrophy around 2008. The network’s decentralization had a double edge. Local outlets had the autonomy to directly serve their communities. But without strong, centralized accountability, it was often difficult to apply for funding or develop leadership that would help ensure sustainability. In 2002, for example, a Ford Foundation grant was disputed because of the foundation’s suspected ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which was pointed out in an emergency email to the global network by the Argentina IMC shortly before the money was slated to be accepted.


Prompt: People also burned out. As a volunteer project, those who did have the time and resources to work for free tended come from some level of privilege. Stronger centralization might have provided the tools needed for leadership training, which would have helped to bring new volunteers in and diversify core organizers.  The anti-globalization movement that helped give Indymedia a pillar around which the network could coalesce also began to weaken as political concerns shifted over the years, and Indymedia organizers never landed on a new movement that could unite and guide the tactical work of the collective. IMCs always covered more than the anti-globalization and anti-war activism of the early 2000s, but the loose network benefited from having a broader social movement that it could embed itself within.  Anti-globalization activism provided a shared purpose around which to converge nationally. Activists met at protests around the country, and IMCs filled a need by providing media and tech services for the movement. By the time Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter hit the scene in the United States, Indymedia projects had been winding down for years.  Tomorrow, in Hindsight  Today, social movements depend on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. It’s been a tremendous boost in terms of organizing and lifting stories to reach new audiences. These platforms also connect otherwise disparate users who share a political critique to raise their voice together to force institutional change. Some may call this a “Twitter mob.” Others see it as an essential tool for accountability when there’s no other lever to pull, like creating an uproar that persuades the New York Times to dismiss an opinion columnist for her ties to an infamous Neo-Nazi, or that pushes Google to disband an AI “ethics board” because it included the transphobic head of the Heritage Foundation.  But many are also aware that reliance on corporations like Facebook and Google means giving up control over how we communicate. Someone may ascend to represent a movement online without actually taking part in grassroots advocacy to support it. Going viral gives the impression that an idea is gaining traction, but the constant flow of information required to fuel unending engagement on these sites means something else is bound to go viral soon. It’s difficult to hold anyone’s attention.

Response: “Social media companies are making money off the hard work that we are doing, and it’s devalued the way we organize online,” Vanessa Butterworth, an environmental justice organizer, lamented to me in an interview. “Back in the day we had more in-person communication. And I feel like that showing up, whether it’s in the streets or organizing meetings or whatever — that’s slowly dying. It’s the personalized connection we’re losing.”  A revitalization of an Indymedia-like project today would never be a replacement for the platforms that are so intertwined with our lives. But it could provide a welcome retreat, a place online that is less tethered to corporate interests, where activists across movements locally and globally can share stories, calendars, and concerns without feeding Facebook and Google’s advertising empire.  When social movements share infrastructure that they own, it’s easier to support each other. When we share space, we can begin to build the type of world we’re striving towards. That may mean online communication channels that ban racism and forums that respect privacy from the start. It could mean building archives to store photos and videos of social movements in such a way that facial recognition is prohibited, the files can be deleted at any time, and nobody is profiting off of every view. If there’s ever a future where we can begin to reimagine the internet as a commons, rather than a shopping mall with a handful of big-box platforms that extract our data and our time, building our own network may be a good start.  But in order for anything to last, it has to be used. A resource is used when it’s serving a purpose and there are people at the center keeping it strong. If a new leftist network is built today, its nodes should strive to support a unifying concern on a global or national scale, like immigration, racial justice, or environmental destruction, while remaining deeply connected to local communities and their own particular informational needs. Now might be the perfect time to build something new. The corporations that form our digital sphere are facing a political crisis. They’ve become conduits for violent hate around the world and have made our elections awful. Indymedia shouldn’t be replicated — it was nowhere near perfect. But its example reminds us that a better internet is possible, if we are willing to build it.


Prompt: It is human to resist even when our resistance is barely registered by those in power. In her memoir of working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, Germany in 2010, Heike Geissler recalls these lines from Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek: “Anyone alive disrupts.” Speaking to herself or perhaps to the reader — the book is written almost entirely in the second person — she adds, “You ought to prove to your employer that you’re alive.” Geissler imagines various disruptive tactics for doing so. One could hide products to “remove them from the commodities cycle,” damage products and pretend they arrived that way, or damage them subtly “so that the damage is only revealed once they arrive at the customer.” Toward the end of the book, Geissler’s boyfriend receives a package that appears to have been sabotaged in just this way.

Response: Inevitably, she writes, you’ll get caught. “Everything gets found out in this company, but up to that point you’d have lived a little more in your workplace and you’d have ordered your obedience to retreat.” These small acts of individual resistance — means of asserting one’s humanity against a system elaborately designed to blot it out — are versions of what sociologists and anthropologists call “weapons of the weak.” They tend to arise when relatively powerless groups contest the conditions of their subjugation by powerful subjugators. James C. Scott’s seminal 1985 study of Malaysian peasant resistance by the same name taxonomizes these quotidian acts of defiance, including foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, and sabotage.  Amazon has built a vast logistics empire by subjecting its workforce to extreme forms of technological discipline — designed to keep workers isolated, fearful, and maniacally productive. This piece sets out to surface the “weapons of the weak” wielded by workers to resist this regime. I talked to current and former Amazon employees, spoke with warehouse worker organizers, read exit interviews on Indeed and Glassdoor, and visited online forums where Amazon workers congregate to complain, commiserate, shoot the shit, and seek and offer advice. I learned a great deal about the regime of total surveillance and bodily control that Amazon has built to manage its growing logistics workforce. And I learned about the counter-strategies that workers deploy to resist the dehumanization, boredom, pain, and mental anguish that Amazon’s disciplinary apparatus exacts.


Prompt: The warehouse workers I encountered play games, against themselves or their coworkers. They cheat to artificially boost their productivity numbers. They pass these tricks around in coded language. They use their scanners to find erroneously underpriced items and buy them in bulk. (Some steal outright.) They play (usually harmless) pranks on overbearing managers. And almost all of them skirt safety rules to move faster. Naturally, my sources were hesitant to disclose the specifics of some tactics, particularly those that openly defy Amazon’s rules or the law. In some cases, even when I learned them, I’ve left the details deliberately vague.  By far the most common form of resistance among Amazon employees, however, is to quit. A warehouse organizer in Illinois told me that employees who have been around for at least six months are considered “old guard.” For most workers, an Amazon warehouse job is exhausting, deadening, and unsafe. “They work themselves to the bone and wind up washing out,” said Charlie, a fulfillment center worker in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.  For those who stay, the draw is Amazon’s generous compensation and benefits package, relative to other low-wage workplaces. “The running joke is that the only benefit to working at Amazon is the benefits,” Charlie told me. For full-time employees, Amazon offers health insurance plans and a 401(k); in October 2018, CEO Jeff Bezos established a $15 minimum wage across its US warehouses. Even before then, Amazon tended to pay better than other employers in the logistics industry.

Response: Amazon builds fulfillment centers in hollowed-out industrial areas and the exurban fringes of increasingly unlivable cities. Warehouse jobs are often the best (or only) game in town. Even so, workers say, it’s not always worth the trouble. According to Sam Nelson, an organizer with Jobs with Justice, a national coalition of unions and community groups, a frequent refrain among workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota is, “This is the best job I ever had, and I’m going to quit in two months.” In this context, daily acts of resistance serve as body and sanity-saving strategies. Small workarounds — tricks, games, minor sabotage — extend the time one can bear the relentless and deadening grind. A strategy that saves one’s calves an extra trip across the warehouse could make the difference between quitting this week and holding out for another paycheck.  These strategies are not only valuable, then, for privately registering one’s discontent but also for survival. At their limit, they may even be genuinely oppositional: functioning as forms of industrial sabotage or fostering solidarity among the workers. In Weapons of the Weak, Scott writes that everyday resistance enables those he observed to “nibble away” at onerous or unfair policies without risking “more quixotic action.” Even when the oppressed decline mass action, Scott argued, petty insubordinate gestures “create a political and economic barrier reef” on which the ship of state (or capital) might eventually run aground.  But there is a danger in over-valorizing the weapons of the weak. You risk conceding that the weak will always remain so — giving up the possibility of collective upheaval. Some acts of resistance actively inhibit mass action. Skirting safety rules and deploying labor-saving tricks may provide the feeling of having pulled one over on the boss, but they often benefit the company. Games displace competition horizontally, among coworkers, and insulate management from labor’s ire. And even those techniques which slow productivity may merely function as safety valves, preventing the buildup of more acute and collective rage.


Prompt: On the other hand, small acts — especially those that involve some sort of coordinated deception — may awaken a willingness to defy that eventually enables larger, more decisive acts. Whether any of the acts of sabotage, subterfuge, or evasion committed by Amazon workers are accreting a hazardous reef remains to be seen. What is certain is that, one way or the other, we need to sink the ship.

Response: The Rule of the Rate Amazon’s global distribution infrastructure — from fulfillment and sort centers, to cross-docks, delivery stations, and Prime Now Hubs — now covers almost 222 million square feet, an area roughly a third the size of Manhattan. In every province of this fiefdom, as one Amazon warehouse worker quipped on Reddit, “the almighty rate rules” — that is, the speed at which each worker does her job.  Amazon has risen to monopolistic dominance by shortening the critical time between the production and realization (i.e. sale) of commodities. Incorporating the lessons of “just-in-time” production innovated by Japanese car manufacturers, Amazon’s vast logistics network is designed to minimize the amount of time that products sit still. “The longer something sits and isn’t in motion, the less money Amazon makes,” said Charlie, the Pennsylvania fulfillment center worker. Whether stowing, picking, sorting, or delivering Amazon products, workers are expected to perform at a breakneck pace — while maintaining accuracy.  Since the advent of wage labor, time has been a key disciplinary tool for bosses. But Amazon has taken this technique to a new level, building a massive and intricate system of surveillance and control to accelerate the rate of productivity. “There is no privacy,” Charlie said. Many sort and fulfillment centers are vast, brightly lit affairs, with unforgiving concrete floors and high ceilings. Cameras are ubiquitous. “You should start thinking of it like a prison structure… We just presume we’re always being watched.”  When Amazon was granted a patent last year for a haptic wristband with a motion sensor designed to guide workers’ hands toward inventory items — or, as some darkly speculated, to buzz when they fall behind and need some haptic motivation to speed up — privacy advocates gasped. But such innovations, current and former workers tell me, would only augment existing tactics.


Prompt: At a typical fulfillment center, certain workers unpack products arriving from manufacturers and suppliers; others stow them amid vast rows of shelves; and “pickers” fulfill orders by grabbing the correct items from the shelves and putting them in a tote, which is conveyed to “packers” who prepare the order for shipment. Workers log their interaction with each product and its location via a scanner, which almost every one of them carries.  If you’re a picker, your scanner tells you the location of the product to be picked and begins counting down the time it should take you to get there. If it takes you longer than the allotted time, the clock starts counting up, recording the amount of time you’ll have to make up later to stay “above rate.” When you arrive at your destination, you scan the shelf or bin, find the item, and place it in your tote. Then you get another location. This process continues until the products needed for the order — or some portion of an order or set of orders — is complete. You set the tote on a conveyor and the process starts again.

Response: The scanner is a powerful surveillance tool. It records your productivity rate — displaying it on its interface — as well as the time between subsequent scans (aka Time Off Task or TOT). If your TOT exceeds fifteen minutes or your rate falls below the prescribed speed for the day, you’ll get a visit from a manager or a write-up. Too many write-ups and you’ll be cut loose. “Rates are used as Damocles’ sword,” Charlie said. “You can be king, but there’s a blade hanging above your head held by a thin hair.”  To encourage competition, managers publicly post a ranking of employee productivity at the end of each day. In some warehouses, there’s a whiteboard; in others, a printed piece of paper or an electronic display. Ashleigh Strange, who worked at a warehouse in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania between 2013 and 2015, said this practice was also a “method of group shaming.” “If you were the worst person in the warehouse,” Ashleigh said, “you’re going to know it. And so will everyone else.” In some warehouses, bottom performers are automatically enrolled in remedial training — or written up.  Management also runs what employees called “power hours,” during which workers are incentivized by raffle tickets or Amazon “swag” to work as fast as humanly possible. “You get an unimportant reward for working as fast as you can,” said Charlie. “Everyone competes. This becomes the new baseline.” Online Amazon worker forums are full of strategies for artificially boosting rates. One worker discovered that managers were basing his productivity numbers on how quickly he started work after a break. By leaving a count loaded in his scanner, he could trick the computer into thinking he had resumed work with a flurry of activity. Others boost their count by rapidly scanning several bins of small items.  These little tricks get shared obliquely, “like hobo symbols,” said Charlie. “A lot of, ‘I don’t do this, but I heard that… ’ or, ‘This is the way I don’t do it.’” These strategies circulate through departments until management catches on, which they usually do. In the meantime, shortcuts and hacks allow for brief reprieves from the relentless pace of the work — sometimes more than a brief reprieve. As one prodigious hustler put it on Reddit, “I get my production really high and fuck around for the rest of the week.”


Prompt: Resisting for the Boss In Manufacturing Consent, labor ethnographer Michael Buroway writes that productivity games often “arise from worker initiatives, from the search for means of enduring subordination to the labor process.” But these temporary escapes come at a cost. By “redistribut[ing] conflict from a hierarchical direction into a lateral direction,” games can blind workers to their shared adversaries.  Geissler, the German warehouse worker, observed this phenomenon among her colleagues in Leipzig. “You’re in a so-called flat hierarchy,” she writes, “in which all flat hierarchists are gagging for an opponent.” Seeing the corporation itself as too complex and distant a target, she and her coworkers directed their discontent and irritation toward whomever was closest — often each other.

Response: On the other hand, some workers report deep camaraderie with their coworkers. While managers try to foster a culture of snitching, it doesn’t always work. Charlie’s job requires him to correct inventory errors, including those caused by his coworkers “creative” scanning. “Some of us try to fix it, but it’s not really a priority unless it deals with Loss Prevention” — that is, unless his coworkers are actually stealing products. “Associates try to watch each other, not report each other. We help each other.” In her forthcoming book Data Driven: Truckers and the New Workplace Surveillance, the sociologist Karen Levy observed comparable techniques deployed by truckers to evade onboard electronic monitoring. These ranged from brute-force sabotage (covering an onboard recorder “with a small bag of dry ice and tapping them with a rubber mallet” leaves “no outward sign of assault” while shattering the machine’s “solid-state innards”) to data editing, GPS jamming, and hacking (in one driver’s case, in order to play solitaire and Quake on the truck’s onboard computer).


Prompt: “There is value to resistance that doesn’t challenge the status quo,” Levy told me. “Things like identity formation and cultural preservation are also reasons to resist, whether or not you change the system.” Workplace games and tricks provide escapes from monotony, while sharing them among coworkers — either in the workplace or in online forums — can foster a sense of shared identity.  But, Levy says, resistive tactics don’t necessarily pose a threat to underlying (exploitive) paradigms; sometimes they even reinforce them. Many of the everyday evasions Levy observed among the truckers were aimed at skirting federal laws that prevent truckers from driving longer, more dangerous hours. Expressions of autonomy, perhaps, which nonetheless benefit the boss.  Similarly, some of the strategies deployed by Amazon workers — especially those that evade safety precautions — allow them to work faster. Rate-based games, even those that aren’t sanctioned by management, can have the effect of boosting Amazon’s overall productivity.

Response: What’s more, Levy told me, “Certain types of resistance can become a release valve for people — like recycling.” Or like hating your boss and scribbling graffiti about him on the walls of the men’s room. “You feel like you’ve done something. You say, okay, that’s done.” In this way, resistance greases the gears of the system, enabling a daily negotiation over power and consent which forestalls any ultimate confrontation. In some cases, the weapons of the weak are not merely insufficient; they impede collective action.  Bad Robot One of the reasons that Amazon workers resort to resistive measures is to preserve their health in a workplace constantly trying to destroy it. Amazon is consistently rated among the most dangerous workplaces in America — and those numbers would be much higher if workers consistently reported their injuries.


Prompt: “Workers must reach punishingly high rates, with each act measured for efficiency and quality,” writes Martin Harvey, an Amazon warehouse worker and graduate student. “The impacts of this process on human bodies and minds is horrific: joint pain, carpal tunnel, blown backs, anxiety, and depression are all common aspects of the work.”  “There is no way to do a job without being ‘creative’ with ‘Do your job safely, do it correctly, but make rate,’” reads a Reddit post on a thread about safety hazards at fulfillment centers. And because inaccuracy and inefficiency can cost you the job, workers are implicitly encouraged to skirt the safety rules.  Ashleigh told me she frequently ignored aches and pains and injuries while on the job. “You smash your finger in a crate, you’re going to hold your breath and keep going,” she said, “Because otherwise, A, they’re going to find a way to tell you it’s your fault or, B, if you stop and complain, go to the [medical] office, that will affect your rate.” Then it will be up to a manager’s discretion whether the note from AmCare, Amazon’s in-house medical office, is enough to give you a break on your numbers.  When they are severely injured on the job, a Guardian investigation found, employees have had to fight Amazon for worker’s comp. Michelle Quinones of Fort Worth, Texas was sent back to the warehouse floor from AmCare at least ten times after reporting carpal tunnel pain. When her wrist finally needed surgery, Amazon’s workers’ comp insurer fought her for over a year before paying for the procedure.  Anxiety and severe stress about meeting rate is also ubiquitous in the online forums and groups I visited. “Anybody else have nightmares and stress about not hitting rate?” reads a post with dozens of responses on an Amazon warehouse subreddit. “I constantly dread going to work… I hate stowing and I can’t get better no matter how hard I try… I drive home exhausted and lay in bed stressed about how I’m going to do the next day. I’ve been here 6 months almost, surprise I’m still even employed… I love amazon, but then I hate it. I just can’t do it and the stress is killing me.”

Response: Some responses offer strategies for stowing quickly, while others debate productivity-enhancing substances. “Caffeine helped me. Red Bull, monster rockstar and now I’ve discovered 5 hour energy,” says one worker. “No the energy drinks just make you sweat a lot more and cause anxiety,” counters another. “CBD oil… might help (after work before bed) with stress and anxiety. It[’]s not illegal and won[’]t fail any drug tests it[’]s not like THC.” Public forums like these (and many private ones elsewhere on the internet) are collaborative spaces where agitation — shared expressions of anger and grievance — can congeal into solidarity. At a company that is notoriously parsimonious about Time Off Task, forums function as de facto break rooms where workers commiserate, complain, and perhaps even entertain collective action.


Prompt: But sometimes these spaces also serve to rationalize the manifestly oppressive pressures of the workplace. Forum participants encourage each other to stick it out, to fight through pain. “It gets better” is a common refrain. They collaborate on techniques for pushing their bodies harder and for evading onerous safety regulations. Few tips are traded about how to flourish at Amazon; they are mostly about how to get by. Veterans advise newcomers to resign themselves to dehumanizing monotony or risk perpetual dissatisfaction: put your head down, get tunnel vision, give in to the flow. Sharing strategies for survival has the effect of normalizing the idea that “work” is something one can only aspire to (barely) survive.

Response: In November 2018, Amazon workers organized demonstrations across Europe under the banner “we are not robots.” Responding to the protest, an Amazon employee wrote on Reddit, “No but I sometimes wish I were one. Life would be so much easier and I would be much more pleasant to work with if I had no emotions or pain.” Clotted Arteries Amazon has built the most advanced system in history for disciplining workers’ bodies. It pounds them, with fear and technology, into replaceable parts of a single machine. “All employees are essentially wetware attached to machinery,” says Charlie, the warehouse worker in Pennsylvania. The purpose of this machinery is to accelerate the rate of exploitation — allowing for an unprecedented quantity of wealth to be expropriated by a single man.  Amazon’s disciplinary apparatus isolates individual workers, encourages competition among them, and wears them down to the point of exhaustion and resignation — at which point, many of them quit. Temporary workers cycle in and out, and slack labor markets ensure a new workforce is always in waiting. Where resistance arises, it often only provides momentary solace — a break for the body, a fleeting feeling of defiance, or a way of letting off steam. Other times, as with safety regulations, the system relies on rule-breaking to function.


Prompt: Yet Amazon’s approach to discipline also points to its greatest vulnerability: its need for speed. “In the idealised world-picture of logistics,” writes Jasper Bernes, “manufacture is merely one moment in a continuous, Heraclitean flux; the factory dissolves into planetary flows, chopped up into modular, component processes which, separated by thousands of miles, combine and recombine according to the changing whims of capital.” If this dream of frictionless flow has produced the dismal conditions within the Amazon warehouse, it also offers those same workers a potential source of leverage.  Whereas workers in a factory have the power to slow or halt production, workers in the logistics industry have the power to block circulation, to clot the channels through which capital flows and learns about itself. Longshoremen at major ports have wielded this power to great effect for a century, their strikes functioning as de facto blockades. And just-in-time logistics is potentially even more vulnerable to worker disruption, since it eschews the redundancies and backups that might have compensated for circulatory blockages in the past.  Logistics is both the circulatory and nervous system of contemporary capitalism. Amazon prefigures the worker as a seamless conduit — a neuron and a blood cell — in the free movement of information and commodities. Her behavior is minutely calibrated, at every moment, to serve the ever-fluctuating demands of a dynamic and hydraulic world system. If she and her coworkers refuse to play their role in this meticulously choreographed operation, however, the whole system seizes up.

Response: Of course, such a project will rely on Amazon workers developing the sort of solidarity that is disincentivized by the disciplinary apparatus erected around them. It means reaching beyond forms of micro-resistance that may mitigate the most dehumanizing aspects of the work, but which are ultimately comfortably accommodated (if not actively encouraged) by the company structure.  Community Engagement To date, the only group of Amazon workers who have managed to collectively force a negotiation with management are those at the Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center outside Minneapolis. With the help of organizers from the Awood Center, a worker center funded by the Service Employees International Union, the predominantly Somali workforce has staged a series of protests against an ever-increasing pace of work which punishes devout Muslim employees for using break time to pray. On December 14, 2018, at the peak of the holiday rush, forty Shakopee warehouse workers walked off the job.  These actions have forced Amazon to come to the table. They’ve agreed to have Somali-speaking managers present for firings related to productivity and to hold quarterly meetings with the workers. An Amazon spokesperson told the New York Times that “the company did not see its work with the East African workers as a negotiation but rather as a form of community engagement similar to its outreach efforts with veterans and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees.”  But the Shakopee workers aren’t looking for “community engagement.” They’re fighting for changes in, and more control over, the conditions of their work. “Workers are using every avenue possible to try and win jobs that are safe and that invest in our families and our communities,” said Abdirahman Muse, director of the Awood Center.  During the night shift on March 7, 2019, around thirty stowers at Shakopee staged another walkout, returning to the warehouse after three hours with a list of demands. “In addition to calling for an ‘end [to] the unfair rates that force errors and end careers,’” Labor Notes reported, “they called on Amazon to stop the use of temporary employees, to ‘stop counting prayer and bathroom breaks against rate,’ and to better maintain the equipment that most often leads to injury.” [Eds.: On July 16, 2019, during the first day of the two-day Prime Day sale, organizers at Shakopee engaged in another work stoppage to protest working conditions.]


Prompt: To be sure, the workers at Shakopee have benefited from a tighter labor market. In Minnesota, Amazon can’t rely exclusively on washout and turnover to fix its labor problems. They’ve also benefited from preexisting cultural and communal ties which have provided fertile ground for building workplace solidarity. “One thing to know about our community — we talk a lot on the phone and chat over coffee,” Muse told the New York Times. “That makes organizing easier.” Most fundamentally, however, the workers have been successful because they’ve done large-scale actions together — actions that a pose a genuine threat to Amazon’s productivity goals, to the frictionless flow of goods, and therefore, to its bottom line.  The fact is that organizing beyond daily resistance is hard. So is overcoming fear inside a system designed to inspire it, and developing close bonds when the work demands callousness. Amazon has already begun to retaliate against workers who participate in small-scale protests. They will no doubt intensify their efforts if larger-scale unrest begins to stir. The experience in Shakopee suggests that mobilizing workers’ networks outside the warehouse is a necessary part of the strategy. Warehouses packed with thousands of workers can amplify impersonality and isolation; the neighborhood instead of the shopfloor may offer a more promising site for organizing.

Response: And online forums, like those I consulted for this piece, may also be a place where solidarity and strategy is cultivated. “We’re not getting a raise unless we could organize something drastic,” wrote one worker in February 2018 on the Amazon warehouse subreddit, “like striking during Prime Week across the network. I’m talking representation in all shifts (days and nights), all departments.”  In response, another worker posted, “Funny enough, Someone wrote ‘Amazon needs a union!’ on the ‘voice of the associates board.’ Next day it was erased with no response.” The American criminal justice system has never been great for minorities. But in 2011, it got a lot worse. This was the year that the tech industry innovated its way into policing. It began with a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who developed a system for predicting which areas of a city crimes were most likely to occur. Police could then flood these areas with officers in order to prevent offenses from being committed, or so the thinking went. In 2011, the Santa Cruz police department became the first law enforcement agency in the country to pilot the software. Time magazine promptly named “pre-emptive policing” one of the fifty best inventions of the year.  PredPol, as it would come to be called, became widely popular: more than sixty police departments across the country now use the software. Moreover, it would soon be accompanied by many other technologies that are currently transforming different aspects of the criminal justice system. These include everything from facial recognition software to algorithmic sentencing, which calculates “risk assessment” scores to inform criminal sentencing decisions.


Prompt: Some of the ensuing coverage of these technologies wasn’t quite as flattering as Time’s. In recent years, journalists and academics like Julia Angwin at ProPublica and Joy Buolamwini at MIT have chronicled how predictive policing systems and algorithmic sentencing, as well as facial recognition software, are biased against black people. And, maybe even more importantly, researchers at Georgetown Law have detailed how facial recognition technology has been improperly used by law enforcement agencies.

Response: These technologies, academics and journalists found, were directly exacerbating the hardships already faced by communities of color. Algorithmic sentencing was helping incarcerate minorities for even longer. Predictive policing was allowing law enforcement to justify their over-policing of minority communities. Facial recognition software was enabling the police to arrest people with little to no evidence.


Prompt: The rising tide of tech criticism has focused attention on these injustices, and made the public conversation far more sophisticated than it was in 2011. Today, it might be harder to praise predictive policing as effusively as Time once did. More people realize that “AI” or “algorithms” aren’t neutral or objective, but rather rife with biases that are baked into their code. The social harms of these technologies is still a niche issue, but it’s no longer a fringe issue. Governments are already starting to engage more critically. In May 2019, San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition software by police and other public agencies, the first major American city to do so.

Response: Even the tech companies themselves now feel compelled to join the conversation. IBM has made a “diverse” face database available for researchers studying facial recognition. Microsoft has called on the federal government to regulate AI. Google and the policing technology company Axon have created ethics boards — although Google dissolved its board after controversy erupted around the transphobia of one its members. Even companies like Amazon, generally not keen to engage on ethical questions around its business, are being forced to respond as researchers show the inherent bias in their facial recognition technology.


Prompt: Perhaps the highest-profile response came in the form of IBM’s “Dear Tech” ad, which aired during the 2019 Oscars. A woman in a pink hijab asks, “Can we build AI without bias?” before pop star Janelle Monae appears, wondering if we can make “AI that fights bias.” For such an ad to appear during one of the most-watched broadcast events of the year illustrates just how mainstream the issue of technological injustice has become.

Response: Inclusion or Abolition Yet as awareness of algorithmic bias has grown, a rift is emerging around the question of what to do about it. On one side are advocates of what might be called the “inclusion” approach. These are people who believe that criminal justice technologies can be made more benevolent by changing how they are built. Training facial recognition machine learning models on more diverse data sets, such as the one provided by IBM, can help software more accurately identify black faces. Ensuring that more people of color are involved in the design and development of these technologies may also mitigate bias.


Prompt: If one camp sees inclusion as the path forward, the other camp prefers abolition. This involves dismantling and outlawing technologies like facial recognition rather than trying to make them “fairer.” The activists who promote this approach see technology as inextricable from who is using it. So long as communities of color face an oppressive system of policing, technology — no matter how inclusively it is built — will be put towards oppressive purposes.  Sarah Hamid of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an organization devoted to resisting police surveillance in Los Angeles, told me that she understands the tension between the two perspectives. “It’s really hard to think about because I understand the politics behind wanting to feel included and wanting to have things work for you but to completely ignore the fact that policing is a vector through this technology and intensifies it in a certain way — it feels like negligence to me.” [Eds.: As of August 13, 2019, Hamid is no longer affiliated with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.]  Stop LAPD Spying is one of the clearest examples of what the abolition approach looks like in practice. To them, the focus should be on curbing coercive relationships between law enforcement and the communities they police. So-called woke facial recognition is still intensifying policing, even if the software is better at identifying black faces and the tools are built by diverse teams, she explained.  Chris Gilliard, a professor at Macomb Community College in Michigan who studies privacy, surveillance and digital redlining, is similarly pessimistic that there is any function of policing technology that won’t harm marginalized groups. He sees the pro-inclusion position as driven by a sense that the current crop of technologies are inevitable.  “There’s sort of a ‘genie’s out of the bottle’ type attitude, which really disturbs me. Most of the stuff hasn’t been around that long to be ascribing to the level of inevitability that people do,” he explained. “It seems to be the prevailing idea is that the stuff is here and the way to deal with it is trying to make it less bad.” In other words, IBM’s products are coming whether we like it or not, so all we can do is make sure they’re inclusive and then get out of the way.

Response: It’s Just Math! If one problem with the inclusion approach is its potential to reinforce oppressive practices, another problem is its potential to make the work of criminal justice reform even harder. As new criminal justice technologies take root, they present yet another obstacle to meaningful reform. Reforming policing practices and judicial policy is hard enough; now activists face the additional task of trying to tear down predictive policing, facial recognition software, algorithmic sentencing, and other related technologies.  They also face the task of demystifying those technologies. “Inclusive” criminal justice technologies can add a misleading facade of fairness to policing. They can reify oppressive practices into supposedly neutral technologies, making them harder to see and thus harder to organize against. Disproportionately higher arrest rates for minorities who commit nonviolent crimes are no longer the result of biased humans. Rather, they become the result of a “dispassionate” algorithm that doesn’t “see” race.


Prompt: With eerie prescience, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse foresaw such a scenario in his 1964 book, One Dimensional Man. He described the dangers that would result as technology becomes “the great vehicle of reification.” For Marcuse, this meant that technology casts a deceptive veil over relationships between people and relationships between people and institutions, a veil that makes them seem as though they are “determined by objective qualities and laws.” Even though the underlying relationships remain the same, technology makes them “appear as calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality.” Today, the underlying relationships between the criminal justice system and communities of color remain the same despite the introduction of new technologies. Making these tools less biased would likely produce better outcomes for those communities. But as Hamid, Gilliard, and many others have pointed out, “woke AI” doesn’t do much to address the context within which those technologies are deployed.  More accurate facial recognition cannot make policing better if policing models remain racially oppressive. Indeed, they can make things worse: software that is better at identifying black faces could easily facilitate even more aggressive policing of black people. And it’s unclear how algorithmic sentencing and predictive policing ever escape the underlying bias of the arrest data sets they’re based on.

Response: Acknowledging these complexities, it becomes hard to see how reforming the technology alone, rather than limiting its use, is the best answer. The problem with the “woke AI” pushed by companies like IBM is that it asks us to see criminal justice in the same way that companies like Aetna want us to see healthcare: something that basically works fine, but which could use a few technological tweaks. Building AI to fix AI becomes the new version of an ill-contrived app that’s designed to “solve” healthcare. Nothing actually gets better — it might even get worse — but at least some people get paid.


Prompt: In 2013, I was given a watch for Christmas. It was like one of those vintage Casio watches with the murky green LED screens. Except when you pressed one of the knobbly buttons on the side, it would announce the time. As we all do when we receive a gift that we aren’t too fond of, I grinned, feigned delight, and subsequently felt bad for not adoring the watch I was then strapping to my wrist. In retrospect, it was an exceptionally thoughtful present from an extended family who I saw, at most, once every four years. I was, after all, 6,572 miles away from my home in London, spending Christmas for the first time at my aunt’s house in the sweltering heat of Malaysia.

Response: But that evening, as I sat indoors wallowing in the cool breeze of the air conditioner, with my eight and five-year-old second cousins clambering on me, eagerly pressing the button on my watch to make it screech “9:18 p.m.” in an obnoxiously loud female American voice, I couldn’t help but feel completely infantilized. It was like I’d just been handed a kid’s novelty Mickey Mouse watch at the age of nineteen. Worse still, I felt guilty for feeling this way about a device that would undoubtedly improve my life.  Earlier that summer, I had lost my central vision to a rare genetic disease called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON). Ever since, I’ve felt chained to the tendrils of technology.  A part of me says that I’m lucky — or as lucky as someone can be — to have lost my sight at a time of vast and relentless technological change, especially in the sphere of disability. But at the same time, I feel — still, six years on — suffocated by assistive technology. I was eighteen when I began losing my sight: the age when young adults are getting ready to leave the roost and take on the world. Instead, I was held back from becoming independent by my loss of vision, and forced to rely on nannying technology to do the most menial of tasks.  The thought that I’m going to be using assistive technology for the rest of my life still throws my stomach into freefall. I resent depending on technology to do all of the things we learn to do as children. I resent looking weak and vulnerable. I resent wearing hideous, eye-catching devices that tell the world I need help. I resent the loss of both my autonomy and my privacy.


Prompt: Rear Window It wasn’t long ago when vision-impaired people had to rely on in-person support workers and independent-living care workers to help run basic errands. Today, technology is making it possible to get help remotely. Around the world, tens of thousands of vision-impaired people like me are welcoming strangers virtually into our homes — or bringing them along journeys outside our homes — to help complete tasks that require sight.  These disembodied guests enter our lives through the rear camera on our smartphones, via an app called Be My Eyes. If you need help doing something that requires the vision of a sighted person, all you have to do is open up the app, and within seconds you’re connected to a volunteer who can see whatever you point your rear camera at.  Last week, I connected to a volunteer and asked if they could tell me whether the frozen pizza I’d shoved into the oven and had already begun eating had expired or not. As I twisted the pizza box this way and that in the direction of my iPhone camera, I was acutely aware of how many things were in the shot. “Enjoy your pizza,” said a woman’s voice after she confirmed that I wasn’t about to die from food poisoning. “I love your pajamas, by the way!”  I melted into the ground from embarrassment as I pressed the “end” button on my iPhone, looking down at my reindeer-themed pajama bottoms. She had probably thought she was saying something completely innocuous. But it served as a painful reminder that my entire life was now on display. My dependency on strangers’ eyes means I’ll never escape these intrusions, no matter how vulnerable they make me feel.

Response: There are startups going even further than Be My Eyes. Aira is a company that built a headset for people with low vision. For $124 a month, you can strap the device to your head and enjoy 120 minutes with a trained professional agent. The headset, which looks like a mix between Google Glass and steampunk-inspired specs, comes with a camera and an earpiece. The agent can see your surroundings through the camera and access your GPS location. With that, they can help talk a vision-impaired person through everyday sighted hurdles. It’s like a paid, hands-free version of Be My Eyes.  I would never wear Aira in public. Like my talking watch, I worry that it would draw attention, that it would single me out as someone who needs help. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to use Microsoft’s Seeing AI app: it’s the rare piece of assistive technology that helps you not have to ask for help from a stranger. As the name suggests, Seeing AI uses artificial intelligence and the smartphone’s rear camera to help people with low vision recognize text, scenes, and even faces. You can store pictures of your friends and family in the app so that it can identify them by name when the phone is pointed in their direction.  Like a lot of artificial intelligence, however, Seeing AI isn’t perfect. The other night, I was walking down London’s South Bank, desperately trying to find a pub using Seeing AI. At every venue, I stopped and pointed my phone up at the sign. Six pubs later, I realized that the app isn’t yet at the level where it can recognize ornately designed text or curly font that isn’t Times New Roman.  I considered asking a passerby for help. I even considered using BlindSquare, an app that could tell me how many meters away and in what direction the pub is from me. But I decided against it. Instead, I called up my friend sitting in the pub and asked them to come and get me.  From Bats to Apps The assistive technology boom for the blind arguably began in 1976, when New Zealand-based engineer Leslie Kay and his-then graduate student Russell Smith invented the Sonic Guide. Inspired by bats’ use of sonar for navigation, the Sonic Guide was a $2,000 piece of eyewear that transmitted auditory information to the wearer about their environment. The closer they came to an object in their path, the louder and more frenetic the noise became.


Prompt: The Sonic Guide was revolutionary — except no one bought it. Kay and Smith went on to invent many other assistive devices, including the Viewscan, the first portable video magnifier; the first portable talking word processor; and the BrailleNote reader, all of which live on in different forms today. The company that Smith founded, today known as HumanWare, became the Apple of blind technology.  The field has been moving rapidly since the release of the Sonic Guide. Today we have digital magnification glasses like eSight; powerful video magnifiers from HumanWare; artificially intelligent headsets like OrCam, similar to Seeing AI; and Kay and Smith-inspired sonar-detecting bracelets like the Sunu Band. They’re all quite expensive, however, which is why the App Store’s endless stream of affordable and often free assistive apps are so important. With text recognition apps like KNFB Reader, money-identification apps like LookTel, GPS and location-orienting apps like BlindSquare or Microsoft’s Soundscape, costly physical devices are losing their monopoly on assistive technology.  Yet these apps aren’t always particularly sophisticated. Like Be My Eyes, they often involve a video link to a remote worker. They frequently rely on human rather than artificial intelligence. As such, they belong to a broader trend of on-demand labor apps like Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber. The support workers and personal assistants that vision-impaired people have always depended on are still there. But now they live on the other side of our phones, as gig workers performing platform-mediated labor.

Response: Tethered, Together I’m with my friends in Old Spitalfields Market in East London. It’s trendy, sprawling, and filled with the scents of cross-continent street food. The market is bustling and we’re ravenous, but we can’t find the place we’re looking for. Finally I say, “Should I just use my phone?” “Let’s just use our eyes,” my friend says to me, before biting her tongue.


Prompt: And then I get it: I’m not the only one who feels uncomfortable about my reliance on technology. I’m not the only one who hates knowing that I can’t live without my smartphone.  So I put my phone back in my pocket and let my friends keep looking for that Mexican place we can’t find. At least I know I’m not alone.

Response: When entrepreneur and former dancer Brynn Putnam renovated her New York City exercise studio Refine Method back in 2016, the innovation that inspired the most effusive praise wasn’t the posh amenities or sophisticated tracking devices that often differentiate players in the elite and increasingly crowded boutique fitness space. It was the decidedly low-tech mirrors that Putnam had installed. Clients were thrilled with the “instant feedback” their reflections provided.  Putnam also happened to be pregnant at the time. Once her baby arrived, she became preoccupied with a problem long familiar to busy parents suddenly beholden to a newborn’s schedule: she struggled to find time to exercise, even at her own studio. She could only exercise at home.


Prompt: Such were the initial sparks of inspiration for the Mirror, Putnam’s new at-home digital fitness product. Marketed as “nearly invisible,” it’s a far cry from the Thighmaster and the NordicTrack and the other clunky contraptions hawked on late-night infomercials and long synonymous with at-home exercise. The $1,495 (plus $39 per month subscription) carbon-steel Mirror looks like a full-length looking glass. But once switched on, connected to Wi-Fi, activated through its iPhone app, and synced with Spotify and an included heart-rate monitor, it transports the owner and her image to streaming and prerecorded group classes customized by fitness level, biometrics, and even playlist preference. While the current configuration only allows trainers to see the avatars and heart rates of class participants, a front-facing camera means the Mirror can function like a full-body Skype — a feature that will eventually allow the company to launch more interactive one-on-one training.  High-end fitness, from tracking apps to technical apparel, has exploded in recent years. It has boomed throughout the Great Recession and beyond, as Americans increasingly seek solace in the spaces where they sweat. The brands that have generated the most buzz over the past decade — SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp, Orangetheory, to name a few — vary in aesthetic and ethos but are all built around a collective, in-person experience. Albeit an exclusive one: the price for a single class approaches $40 in some cities. A large part of what people are paying for is togetherness: the privilege to pulse or pedal or make pronouncements about self-care and spiritual enlightenment side-by-side with other initiates to the grapefruit-scented, syncopated world of luxe wellness.  MIRROR — the company that makes the Mirror — was born of this boom, but arguably signals a new direction in fitness tech. Along with the pioneering Peloton, the internet-connected exercise bike, MIRROR streamlines the boutique exercise experience to the point of individualizing it. What are the stakes of such a shift? If the gym is the new church, what happens when the church enters our homes? And when the altar at which we worship is our own image?

Response: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall Some critics have denounced MIRROR as yet another enabler of digitally mediated narcissism: “The Most Narcissistic Exercise Equipment Ever,” declared the New York Times. (That’s debatable: at Barry’s Bootcamp, the aggressively hashtagged #FaceYourself campaign invited exercisers to post workout selfies. Email reminders sported the winking subject line, “Don’t Forget to F Yourself.”)  But the Mirror need not symbolize a troubling slide toward self-absorption. More optimistically, it might expand access to a fitness culture that has long excluded those who feel out of place in, or find it hard to make time for, the gym. Like Jack Lalanne, who brought exercise to millions of homemakers on television in the 1950s, and Jane Fonda, who did so on an even larger scale with VHS thirty years later, MIRROR could harness the media technology of its own era to enable more people to exercise.


Prompt: Kailee Combs, vice president of fitness at MIRROR, certainly sees it that way. When we spoke, Combs described how the company’s clientele spans fifty states and users aged nine to eighty. It includes “women who have never boxed and want a safe space try it and guys who want to do yoga” but might feel uncomfortable in overwhelmingly female yoga classes. Or, as Gerren Liles, one of MIRROR’s eight, New York City-based trainers put it, the Mirror allows you to “work out like you want, in your house, with no stigmas, and no one else seeing what you see except maybe the dog.” Liles connected me with Dori Gray, a self-described MIRROR devotee since “the beginning” (with an Instagram feed to prove it), who likes the device precisely for this reason. She works out in only a sports bra at home, a style that allows her a better look at her form, but one that many women eschew in more public workout spaces for precisely this reason.

Response: The Mirror also has the potential to make high-end fitness more financially accessible. It might seem strange, given the sticker price and monthly subscription fee, but in the rarefied economy of elite fitness, the Mirror is relatively affordable. Consider that about the same amount of money gets you forty-five SoulCycle sessions in New York City (if you remember to log on in time to secure a spot): that’s less than one class per week, for a year, compared with unlimited classes for as long as you keep your Mirror subscription current. Combs points out that financing is also available and that more than one person in a household can use the Mirror, further driving down the cost.  Yet in a moment when working out is often understood as far more than a means to individual physical or aesthetic ends, MIRROR can feel out of step with the kumbaya language of “team,” “tribe,” and general transcendence through togetherness currently ubiquitous in high-end fitness. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Mirror is how powerfully it challenges this core tenet of luxe wellness: the collective experience. SoulCycle classes sell out because people buy into the inimitable energy of biking, in sync, on a beat. Y7 founder Sarah Levey Larson described “creating a sense of camaraderie” as the competitive advantage of her growing chain of hip-hop yoga studios; Inc. compared the vibe of the packed, dark rooms to a nightclub. People are scrimping on gas to buy classes at Orangetheory and meeting their “swolemates” at Crossfit. They — we — are spending large sums of money, and time, not just to work out, but to work out together.


Prompt: The gym may just be the new town square — or at least the new country club — in an age when most IRL interactions are disappearing by the day. An ailing retail sector is invested in this interpretation, staking its hopes on gyms as anchor tenants in dying malls where department stores once stood, and holding fitness classes in clothing stores in an attempt to generate foot traffic. The operating assumption is that, in an online world, fitness is the last bastion where embodied engagement is imperative. This is a conviction so deeply held that I’ve seen workout classes in the unlikeliest places, like a prison-inspired bootcamp run by former inmates held amid designer ballgowns and handbags in Saks Fifth Avenue.  MIRROR is making a different bet. Boutique fitness created the market for Putnam’s product. But its success is staked on overturning that sector’s fundamental assumption: that sweating in person with a group of like-minded devotees who might become friends, in a space that is not your home, under the watchful gaze of an instructor who could come to know your name or at least compliment your leggings, is what makes high-end exercise worth its high-end price.  A Reflection of Its Time With $41 million in venture capital, an app, and a small army of celebrity Instagram influencers, MIRROR is a twenty-first-century company headquartered in offices at least superficially self-conscious about its history. Each room is named for a fitness icon, from Jack Lalanne to Jane Fonda to Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose name graces the main conference room. But that very history is ambivalent about the role of the mirror in exercise.  As early as 1899, the Los Angeles Times recommended that women using “home gymnasiums” obtain “a long mirror in which the gymnast can watch her own motions.” Yet resistance to the mirror has an equally storied past. Jazzercise, the fifty-year old dance-fitness phenomenon, was founded in part on the rejection of the reflection. Founder Judi Sheppard Missett, a trained dancer, realized that the women who attended her classes in 1960s Chicago were intimidated by the mirrors that reminded them, in real time, of their missteps. When she relocated to a basement without mirrors, the mood of the class changed — and grew into what would become one of the most successful franchise businesses of the 1980s.

Response: “If there are mirrors, you tend to compare yourself to the instructor or other people in the class instead of being in the moment and enjoying yourself,” Missett’s daughter Shanna, who runs Jazzercise today, explained in a 2012 interview. Contemporary research in exercise psychology confirms this point, indicating that new exercisers regularly quit more quickly when required to workout in front of a mirror than those who are freed from their reflection.  But in the age of the ubiquitous selfie — essentially a mirror we all carry in our pockets, all the time — has the significance of working out before one’s reflection changed? Tara Well, an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College, describes the Mirror as “sort of like a dynamic exercise selfie” — perfect, perhaps, for our self-absorbed age. Yet selfies, as some feminists have pointed out, can also be an affirming form of self-fashioning in a culture that often imposes oppressive imagery on women.  The Mirror’s reflectiveness also serves a more pragmatic function, however: it helps you see what you are doing, especially without an instructor or a flawless front row to emulate. “It’s like having the best spot in the class with your favorite instructor any time you want and in the privacy of your own home,” says Well. Dori Gray, the Mirror user, agrees: “I use my core much more when I can actually see that I am not engaging my abs when I need to, and make that correction… It is a constant reminder to have good form.” This purpose of the mirror is as old as organized exercise itself: at the peak of the 1980s fitness boom, the Los Angeles Times offered an almost identical endorsement of mirrors nearly a century after first recommending them in 1899: “[W]atching yourself work out serves as a kind of reinforcement. So does watching yourself improve over time.” Not everything about the Mirror is as novel as its packaging.


Prompt: Alone Together? Technology is often trashed for optimizing our interactions to the point of dehumanization. Grindr has elders longing for a lost cruising culture. Data-driven dating sites inspire nostalgia for an era when hookups happened after a chance encounter in a bar or elevator. ClassPass, the booking app that since 2013 has offered discount rates to exercise enthusiasts willing to bounce between studios for the best value, quickly sent devotees of particular studios bemoaning “the loss of community feel” in the New York Times. Might MIRROR inflict something similar? Is it just a matter of time before people drop out of collective fitness culture entirely? Will we one day long for the sweaty, if socially stratified, intimacy of SoulCycle?  Giving up IRL exercise experiences doesn’t seem to be on the agenda for Mirror users. Kristine Burke McDavid of South Boston, who also owns a Peloton bike, attends Orangetheory in her office park on the days she doesn’t use her Mirror, and “is always up for an outdoor activity.” She rides her bike in the summer and shovels snow in the winter. Mirror user Dori Gray still occasionally goes to in-person yoga or high-intensity interval training classes.  The Mirror, it seems, is best understood as a supplement to IRL fitness, not as its replacement. There is simply so much demand for fitness in our exercise-saturated moment, when Barbies come with yoga mats and colleagues compare steps on their corporate-issued Fitbits, that MIRROR doesn’t have to displace CorePower and Crossfit to be successful — the market might be big enough for all of them.  As MIRROR makes a dent in that market, however, its largest beneficiaries may be workers rather than consumers. This is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Mirror: it may very well end up improving the economic lot of exercise instructors. The profession is growing faster than average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — but, like adjunct professors, fitness professionals are a notoriously underpaid and unpredictably employed lot whose income is unscalable, since there are only so many hours one can teach (many of which are undesirably “off-peak”).

Response: Platforms like the Mirror could allow instructors to scale their income by earning money more like recording artists, who profit when their songs are streamed or downloaded, not only from live performances. When I asked MIRROR instructor Alex Silver-Fagan the most surprising thing about the position, she answered, “Having a full-time job, haha! As a trainer this is rare.” This promise raises a new potential problem, however. A relatively small number of recording artists earn the vast majority of the revenue from streams and downloads. If MIRROR brought this same superstar model to the world of fitness, it could very well put a large number of midlist trainers out of business, since everyone would only be working out with a few big instructors.


Prompt: Yet fitness is arguably already a superstar economy, where a handful of celebrity standouts land the clothing endorsements and media deals, while most others soldier along without basic workplace protections or a living wage. SoulCycle’s IPO filing acknowledged its reliance on the “star quality” of certain instructors, while, on the other side of the spectrum, the glut of yoga teachers can make it impossible for new instructors to recoup the cost of pricey trainings.

Response: In this difficult landscape, MIRROR offers fitness professionals another way to earn a living — and, possibly, a better one. Whether it can fulfill this potential will ultimately come down to the actions of the workers themselves, and the power they wield by virtue of making our workouts possible. Then the Mirror may end up being a tool of transformation not only for the people in front of the mirror, but for those behind it.


Prompt: An unusual cafe recently opened in central Tokyo. White plastic robots took orders from customers and brought them coffee. They glided slowly from table to table and spoke in a human voice.  Those voices belonged to actual humans, because actual humans were operating the robots remotely. The robots served as the eyes, ears, and hands of bedridden individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), who piloted the machines from home using a tablet. The operators could move the robot around the room, manipulate its arms and head, and speak to customers through an on-board speaker.  While the cafe was only open for a few weeks on an experimental basis, the robots’ creator, Kentarō Yoshifuji, wants to launch a permanent “telerobot” cafe in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Yoshifuji aims to provide job opportunities for people with immobilizing disabilities who may not otherwise be able to work outside the home. He sees the model eventually migrating from the cafe setting into other service positions like airline check-in attendants.  More broadly, he envisions using the robots to revolutionize telework. Currently, most telework is disembodied: it involves workers in call centers or gig platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. But Yoshifuji is representative of a broader Japanese trend that aims to use telerobotics to facilitate embodied forms of remote labor. People could work a much wider range of jobs without leaving their home. In this new world, “working from home” could involve everything from serving customers in a cafe to checking in passengers for their flight.  While telerobotics is a global industry, this emphasis is unique to Japan. Most telerobotics companies in North America, China, and Europe are focused on highly skilled positions. They are building telerobots for the healthcare industry (“telemedicine”) and for various white-collar corporate contexts that let workers with specialized expertise be remotely present in a workplace. (Such experiments are not without controversy: a hospital in Fremont, California recently made headlines after a patient’s family objected to receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis via the video feed of a telerobot rather than by an in-person doctor.)

Response: By contrast, Yoshifuji and other Japanese telerobotics innovators are focused on the opposite end of the labor market. They want to use telerobotics for the much larger field of lower-skilled service jobs. With telerobotics, the pool of people who could fill such jobs could grow to include individuals with illnesses like ALS, people with disabilities, the elderly, and those with childcare responsibilities that keep them at home. It could also include foreign workers prevented from entering the country by restrictive immigration laws.


Prompt: The goal of Japanese telerobotics isn’t to provide better access to remote expertise in the form of higher-skilled workers, in other words, but to technologically recuperate lower-skilled workers who might otherwise be excluded from the workforce entirely. What is envisioned is nothing less than a digital platform for physical work, one that could utilize previously untapped labor reserves to power global networks of on-demand robot avatars.  This may open up potentially meaningful opportunities for those unable to physically travel to a work site. At the same time, it risks further isolating the already immobilized, enabling remote access to their physical labor while fixing barriers to their social mobility ever more firmly in place. While the stated promise of teleworker robots is one of freedom for those employed, in practice it is employers who are most liberated by the arrangement.  Working from Home Japan has been at the forefront of experiments with embodied telework since the 1980s, but it wasn’t the first in the field. Japanese researchers were building on initial teleoperator experiments in the United States that took place in the 1940s in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project, as military scientists tried to find a way to allow workers to physically manipulate radioactive materials while maintaining a safe physical distance. Subsequent American teleoperator research has continued to have a strong focus on operation in hostile environments, such as systems for military drone pilots to carry out missions remotely.  By contrast, teleoperator research in Japan took shape against the background of the country’s pacifist postwar constitution — itself a product of the American occupation —  which for a long time amounted to both a formal and informal taboo around research with direct military applications. As a result, Japanese researchers of the 1980s and 1990s worked on more everyday telerobotics uses, from caring for the elderly to housekeeping to helping the visually impaired navigate city streets.

Response: In recent years, this emphasis on the everyday has come to center on a more pressing social challenge: the intensifying labor shortage triggered by the country’s aging population. As of December 2018, there were an average of 168 jobs for every 100 job seekers in Japan, with a shortage of 6.44 million workers expected by 2030. Some of the most acute shortages are in physical labor and service sector work. Convenience stores, for example, are increasingly struggling to find staff, even as much of the country has come to rely on them for access to basic goods and services.