American culture is ripe with texts that envision the dangers of the digital. At times, these visions of danger stem from how artificial intelligence might surpass that of humans, at times from how data can be used to surveil the individual, and at times from how the individual might be duped by simulated environments. In all these and similar cases, technology constitutes a powerful metaphor for these texts to think about contemporary, (post)modern society. Moreover, in imagining technology as a threat to the individual, these texts implicitly think about what makes a human human, or about what constitutes an individual in the first place. These dystopian texts, in other words comment on the very notion of the individual and on society by talking about technology. In exploring these dystopias, we will thus look at the model of personhood these texts rely on, at the history of this model, and at how this relates to classic categories of difference, such as race, class, and gender. Doing so will allow us to think about the more fundamental politics they (involuntarily?) pursue.
- Trainer/in: Sebastian M. Herrmann