Interrogating Boundaries against Animals and Machines: Human Speciesism in British Newspapers

Humans favor and venerate their ingroups, while disregarding outgroups to the degree of dehumanizing them. We explore the social construction of such boundaries and its associated speciesism toward two nonhuman outgroups: animals and machines. For this, we analyzed UK newspaper coverages of the binaries Human–Animal and Human–Machine between 1995 and 2010. We quantified if and how tolerance toward ambiguous concepts that challenge and expand definitions of humanness (e.g., nonhuman primates, cyborgs) varied across time as well as with journalist gender, political leaning, and expertise. In this analysis, the ca. 1100 individual journalists stood as proxies for the British public and therefore as a human-ingroup subset. We found more tolerance toward intermediaries in broadsheet newspapers, females, and subject experts, as opposed to tabloids, males, and subject novices. Moreover, ambiguity tolerance hit a low during the year 2000, likely due to Western sociopolitical turbulence—potentially including wider societal stress over the landmark millennium year itself—attesting that ingroups become more closed during stressful times. Compared with the plasticity of the Human–Animal dichotomy, the Human–Machine binary was more rigid, indicating that the relative novelty of IT developments triggers increased caution and anxiety. Our research suggests that cognitive mechanisms facilitating human-ingroup protection are deep-rooted, albeit malleable according to changing socioeconomic conditions

The politics of a smile

In this article, I explore the smile as regulatory mechanism installed in the face to organise a subject's responses to neo-imperial/biopolitical capitalist governmentality. I begin by situating my reading with respect to Sara Ahmed's and Lauren Berlant's work on affective labour before turning to German philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) in order to consider the smile as theory of sovereignty. I propose that these two meanings or deployments of the smile – as (1) act that demonstrates forced enslavement to capitalist culture and (2) as articulation of the sovereign self/state – converge in their joint purpose, which is the elimination of sociality and solidarity. My article thereby contributes to recent scholarship on the face, in particular its function in affective/service labour, which it supplements by drawing on Plessner's work: at stake is not only the worker's subjection to capital but also to a regime obsessed with securing borders

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2

Digital Pygmalion: the symbolic and visual construction of the feminine in CoverDoll online magazine

This study aims to question and problematize the construction of gendered meanings and visual codes in the digital context. Rooted in the theoretical framework of cyberfemism, it analyzes the visual and linguistic content of CoverDoll, a monthly e-zine thematically devoted to sex dolls. The Pygmalion myth is proposed as the symbolic framework of CoverDoll, since the linguistic and pictorial devices that support a simulated subjectivity seem to reproduce its main backdrop: the feminine is constructed as alterity and a product of male desire. The analysis of CoverDoll’s portfolio and fictional discourses suggests the persistence of symbolic and aesthetical conventions despite technological ruptures. The operating mechanisms in the tradition of painting described by John Berger seem resiliently translated into the visual construction of the feminine in CoverDoll: the portrayed feminine figure addresses a masculine voyeur which is absent from the picture. The camera replaces the mirror as a symbolic device of the projected female’s narcissism, as the multiple references to the camera in the fictional discourses forge the idea of female vanity. The images displayed overall eroticize and objectify the artificial female bodies. The fictional narratives mobilize and intertwine a set of stereotypes that associate femininity with futility, seduction and caring

Rights for Robots

Bringing a unique perspective to the burgeoning ethical and legal issues surrounding the presence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, the book uses theory and practice on animal rights and the rights of nature to assess the status of robots.Through extensive philosophical and legal analyses, the book explores how rights can be applied to nonhuman entities. This task is completed by developing a framework useful for determining the kinds of personhood for which a nonhuman entity might be eligible, and a critical environmental ethic that extends moral and legal consideration to nonhumans. The framework and ethic are then applied to two hypothetical situations involving real-world technology—animal-like robot companions and humanoid sex robots. Additionally, the book approaches the subject from multiple perspectives, providing a comparative study of legal cases on animal rights and the rights of nature from around the world and insights from structured interviews with leading experts in the field of robotics. Ending with a call to rethink the concept of rights in the Anthropocene, suggestions for further research are made.An essential read for scholars and students interested in robot, animal and environmental law, as well as those interested in technology more generally, the book is a ground-breaking study of an increasingly relevant topic, as robots become ubiquitous in modern society

Rights for Robots

"Bringing a unique perspective to the burgeoning ethical and legal issues surrounding the presence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, the book uses theory and practice on animal rights and the rights of nature to assess the status of robots. Through extensive philosophical and legal analyses, the book explores how rights can be applied to nonhuman entities. This task is completed by developing a framework useful for determining the kinds of personhood for which a nonhuman entity might be eligible, and a critical environmental ethic that extends moral and legal consideration to nonhumans. The framework and ethic are then applied to two hypothetical situations involving real-world technology—animal-like robot companions and humanoid sex robots. Additionally, the book approaches the subject from multiple perspectives, providing a comparative study of legal cases on animal rights and the rights of nature from around the world and insights from structured interviews with leading experts in the field of robotics. Ending with a call to rethink the concept of rights in the Anthropocene, suggestions for further research are made. An essential read for scholars and students interested in robot, animal and environmental law, as well as those interested in technology more generally, the book is a ground-breaking study of an increasingly relevant topic, as robots become ubiquitous in modern society.

The Death of the Legal Subject

The law is often engaged in prediction. In the calculation of tort damages, for example, a judge will consider what the tort victim’s likely future earnings would have been, but for their particular injury. Similarly, when considering injunctive relief, a judge will assess whether the plaintiff is likely to suffer irreparable harm if a preliminary injunction is not granted. And for the purposes of a child custody evaluation, a judge will consider which parent will provide an environment that is in the best interests of the child. Relative to other areas of law, criminal law is oversaturated with prediction. Almost every decision node in the criminal justice system demands a prediction of individual behavior: does the accused present a flight risk, or a danger to the public (pre-trial detention); is the defendant likely to recidivate (sentencing); and will the defendant successfully reenter society (parole)? Increasingly, these predictions are made by algorithms, many of which display racial bias, and are hidden from public view. Existing scholarship has focused on de-biasing and disclosing algorithmic models, but this Article argues that even a transparent and unbiased algorithm may undermine the epistemic legitimacy of a judicial decision. Law has historically generated truth claims through discursive and dialogic practices, using shared linguistic tools, in an environment characterized by proximity and reciprocity. In contrast, the truth claims of data science are generated from data processing of such scale and complexity that it is not commensurable with, or reversible to, human reasoning. Data science excludes the individual from the production of knowledge about themselves on the basis that “unmediated” behavioral data (not self-reported or otherwise subject to conscious manipulation by the data subject) offers unrivaled predictive accuracy. Accordingly, data science discounts the first-person view of reality that has traditionally underwritten legal processes of truth-making, such as individual testimony. As judges turn to algorithms to guide their decision making, knowledge about the legal subject is increasingly algorithmically produced. Statistical predictions about the legal subject displace qualitative knowledge about their intentions, motivations, and moral capabilities. The reasons why a particular defendant might refrain from recidivism, for example, become less important than the statistical features they share with historical recidivists. This displacement of individual knowledge with algorithmic predictions diminishes the participation of the legal subject in the epistemic processes that determine their fundamental liberties. This produces the death of the legal subject, or the emergence of new, algorithmic practices of signification that no longer require the input of the underlying individual

Situating documentary film in a speculative future: an exploration in multi species entanglements

This practice-based research is a formal experiment in situating documentary film in an immanent future and, by doing so, puts forward propositions on what it means to be human in an entangled multispecies world. The research consists of A Terrible Beauty, a feature length documentary, and this dissertation. The film was largely shot in Yiwu, home to one of the largest wholesale markets in the world and an important node in the New Silk Road. Set in the world of anthropomorphic goods and objects, including dolls, mannequins and androids, the film follows two timetravellers as they confront questions of time, mortality and what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. The dissertation describes the practice methodology that I developed in the course of the research and reflects on the propositions that the film offers for the future. The research poses the question of how documentary film practice may be situated in a quotidian future and what the value of such a future orientation may be. At the methodological level, I suggest that there are extremely productive overlaps between science fiction and documentary film, and the dissertation reflects on the conceptual journey and experimental routes that I took to arrive at the idea of “speculative fictioning” as a method for documentary practice. The research is in conversation with – and also contributes to – critical concepts from science and technology studies. In particular, I draw on the work of Donna Haraway and extend her insights on human-animal relationalities (“companion species”) to the world of anthropomorphic objects and develop the idea of “companion copies” as a way of rethinking human-nonhuman interactions. If to be human has always entailed being human with other species, I ask what would it mean to discover our humanity with our companion copies such as robots and androids? The research serves as an invitation to think about how an ontological regard for things may allow us to cultivate a better regard for fellow humans as well

animal/machine: Technology, Subjectivity, and Species in Postwar Literature and Culture, 1945-1970

Emerging work in animal studies and posthumanist theory has revealed the species boundary to be a site of contestation, where species identities are dissolved and refashioned according to the pressures of historical contingency. Cold War cultural criticism has shown that the years following the Second World War were marked by anxieties concerning the hegemony of technological reason, and in particular the new potential for mass death made possible by the technological militarism of the Cold War states. This period might be understood as a transition to ‘late modernity’, where the classical subject of humanism is everywhere being put under erasure by the emergence of technological forces which appear to diminish human agency and autonomy. For postwar critics of technology, these new forces threaten to bestialise the human, and I aim to show how figures of animality are central to the cultural work of respecifying human subjectivity in response to its dispersal by technology. This thesis traces the points of connection between the discourses of animal studies and Cold War criticism. Animal studies provides an account of the formation of the humanist subject of modernity through its abjection or transcendence of animality. I contend that this analysis must be supplemented by a closer attention to the culture of the postwar decades, where the more confident humanism of ‘high’ modernity is placed into crisis by the dominance of technological reason. At the same time, I aim to contribute to Cold War criticism through my contention that its key preoccupations—including individualism and mass culture, social conformism, technological anxieties and nuclear conflict—are articulated through a discourse of species that has remained largely unexamined. This thesis covers a range of materials including mid-century farm fictions, science fiction critiques of mass culture, critical-theoretical indictments of instrumental reason, and the military discourses of nuclear strategists. I argue that in all of these textual locations human subjectivity is revealed as precarious, threatened by the dual pressures of technological development and imperfectly transcended animality