Cyberpunk's Commodification of Bodies

Schmeink, Lars. "A Future of Exterminism: Cyberpunk’s Commodification of Bodies." SFRA Review 327 (Winter 2019): 25-29.

Important "lens" (our term) for this essay: Peter Frase, “Four Futures,” Jacobin, 13 December 2011, <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/>; Four Futures. Verso, 2017.

Now, taking into consideration the depiction of futures in science fiction, especially in the subgenre of cyberpunk, one could argue that an oft depicted and not quite so unlikely scenario is the one described by Frase as “exterminism,” in which workers are no longer needed, as they are replaced by automated processes. But since the scarcity of resources limits the ability for all humans to be wealthy, those with money will face more and more people that cannot participate in society. Frase poignantly calls these people “superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite” (“Four Futures” n.p.).

In this, he echoes Zygmunt Bauman, who argued that the progression of the capitalist economy—meaning, for example, automatization and globalization—produces “surplus population” (37), people that are no longer needed in economic production. (p. 26)

Deals with "exterminism" in Neil Bloomkamp's ELYSIUM (2013),[1] starting with a powerful sequence in which Max, the protagonist, does manual labor in a factory producing robots — "the irony of manually producing automated labor is" clear — and when a the process is halted because of an equipment blockage, Max's "precarious job position does not allow him to refuse an order [to] retrieve the piece from the radiation chamber. He goes in, gets locked in the mechanism and receives a fatal dose of radiation. When he wakes up, a robot is standing over him, informing him in a mechanical voice that he has been lethally poisoned and will die in five days" (p. 26; cf. and strongly contrast Charles Chaplin's Charlie trapped in a giant machine in MODERN TIMES).

RDE, finishing, 7Aug20