“Clear” has two versions. One was recorded in 1982 by Detroit’s Juan Atkins, and one was remixed in 1983 by New York City’s Jose “Animal” Diaz. The original recording is much closer to what would become Detroit techno; the remix is much closer to the electro funk sound that formed hip-hop’s bridge between disco (“Rapper’s Delight”) and the birth of boom bap (“It’s Yours”). Diaz’s remix, which became the version on Cybotron’s album Enter, impressed Atkins so much that he correctly considered Diaz “a co-producer on the track rather than a remixer.” For more on this crucial collaboration, for both techno and hip-hop, read Craft Recordings’ “Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Cybotron’s Foundational Techno Classic Enter with a Deluxe Digital Reissue” →.
The key point in Thomas J. Sugrue’s indispensable The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 2014) is that the deindustrialization of Detroit did not begin in the 1970s, as many popular and academic cultural commentators believe and assert, but actually at the peak of the city’s economic greatness, the second half of the 1940s. Around this time, the Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler) began to relocate factories from the city to the suburbs and other states where labor was cheaper and unions weaker. Sugrue writes: “Motown lost more than 300,000 auto industry jobs, beginning in the late 1940s. The process of deindustrialization … occurred steadily and relentlessly, following a path that led to the suburbs, to the rural Midwest, to the Sunbelt, to Canada and Mexico, and also overseas, as car manufacturers and suppliers searched for cheap labor, low taxes, and lax regulations” (xvi). The problem for executives at the Big Three was militant labor unions, one of which, UAW Local 600, had become so radical that it racially integrated its members. That was far enough.
There were (and still are) two weapons against union power: capital mobility and automation. The former leads to globalization, the latter to what many mistake as historical progress. See Mudede, “Which Angel of Death Appears in Afrofuturist Visions of Hi-Tech Black Societies?” e-flux journal, no. 106 (February 2020) →.
This is what makes the robots on HBO’s reboot of Westworld so troublesome. They can’t stop forgetting. Their minds cannot be cleared.
The key line in “Clear” is “Clear (your behind).” It means both clear the past and free your body, or, more precisely, booty. This insistence deserves an essay of its own, as rhythm and dancing are fundamental components of Black culture. Nothing survives in “Clear.” The tools of oppression and those of resistance (Black history and music) all go under. Though the line “Clear (your behind)” recalls a line from by Funkadelic (“Free your mind and your ass will follow”), the former is not about opening the mind but deleting all of its content, including its behind.
The group’s top hit is, of course, “Jam on It.” Second is “Jam-On Revenge.” Both are classics of electro funk.
M.B. Cenac (writer), “Computer Age (Push The Button),” track A on Newcleus, Computer Age (Push the Button), Sunnyview, 1984, 45 rpm.
In the 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica, the robots, Cyclons, created by humanoids on an earth-like planet to meet the needs of their makers achieve self-recognition and not only (and predictably) declare war on the humanoids (nuking their entire planet), but are far more religious than their makers. The humanoids are fundamentally secular; their former robots are obsessed with God. This, I think, is the TV show’s most original contribution to science fiction, as it points to the key difference between a Christianity that, in the West, has the experience of slavery as its root and one that has the experience of the “slave driver.” Think only of Rastafarianism. This faith is very close to the Cyclons’ commitment to all that is not human, that is not Babylon.
Newcleus’s line “While we’re less men than ever” complicates matters even further. It implies that what made us cursed humans special, our God-blessed human soul, has been surrendered to machines. So, our only path to redemption is now possessed by machines, by robots, by AI.
The power of Blade Runner’s most vivid scene—robot rebel Roy Batty killing his maker, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, by crushing his eyes—is precisely found in this realization.
This revelation is similar to the groundbreaking Wöhler Synthesis of 1828. The German chemist Friedrich Wöhler showed the world that urea can be synthesized in a lab. Urine, a key biological product, was not special stuff. It was made of known, and therefore ordinary, elements. Humans were not all that. AI might cause a similar revelation in the twenty-first century.
In Pixar’s WALL-E, there are only consumer robots. And one of them, WALL-E, is basically a Roomba for the whole earth.
I leave science fiction novels to the great philosopher Steven Shaviro. My exposure to this genre is almost exclusively cinematic.
As AI researcher Dr. Joy Buolamwini explains in Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines (Random House, 2023): “A chatbot confidently responding with made-up information is referred to … as a ‘hallucination … Author and cultural critic Naomi Klein observes that the term ‘hallucination’ is a clever way to market product failures. It sounds better than saying the system makes factual mistakes” (59).
Without a wage, you have to beg for food; without a wage, you have to live on the streets. The fear of robots has this as its primal/primary cause. We do not get a sharp sense of this fear from domestic robots or robots of convenience, which generate profits not by displacing workers in an overt sense but by inventing new needs. The robot in the factory was never about consumer leisure (and this opens the door to the limits of luxury communism—see →) but rather about the struggle between capital and labor. But the robots in The Creator do not come from a factory. They come from domestic service. The same goes for the robots in I, Robot and “Push the Button.”
Mudede, “Imagining the Past and Remembering the Future in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer,” e-flux Film, June 2021 →.
Blade Runner, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Bros., 1982).
Voltaire, Candide: Or Optimism, trans. John Butt (Penguin, 1947), 84.
In 2020, a Black man, Robert Williams of Detroit, was arrested because AI misidentified him as a robber who stole “thousands of dollars of watches.” Johana Bhuiyan, “First Man Wrongfully Arrested Because of Facial Recognition Testifies as California Weighs New Bills,” The Guardian, April 27, 2023 →.
Unmasking AI, xix.
In one of the most startling passages in Unmasking AI, Buolamwini actually suggests that if AI surpassed the present cultural limitations of humans, it could pose a real threat to those in power, those who ultimately benefit from racism, sexism, homophobia, and what Fela Kuti famous called “colonial mentality.” She writes that, according to the viewpoint called “longtermism,” “we have an imperative to be good ancestors, to think through what we owe the future and act accordingly. This view collides directly with the advancement of artificial intelligence. Sure, there could be near-term harms from algorithmic bias like what was uncovered with the ‘Gender Shades’ paper, but an even greater problem for longtermists is looking to the future and thinking about existential threats AI poses to hypothetical people who do not yet exist. In other words, longtermists are concerned with the future risk that AI systems might outsmart the humans in charge of economic and political systems and have adverse impacts on billions of people. This rise of the machines could be the fall of man, and thus it represents an existential threat we must prepare for now, or so the reasoning goes. I wonder if the threat is really that more people are going to be harmed or if those with power now fear becoming marginalized by advanced technology” (150).