What place for the Cyborgs in the Alliance of Flesh?

[conjure-utopia@write.as]

The Anti-Clanker Movement is growing, forming a common front across political ideologies against the rise of AI, techno-capital, and the consequences of the imminent collpase of the American tech industry.

The American strand of such a coalition is hinged on human supremacism and the rejection of the machinic. This “Alliance of Flesh” aims to align people across political identities to fight the common enemy: the tech oligarchs. The ring-leader JREG, in particular, seems to be keen on leveraging a racist sentiment against clankers, building hate for the robots and the the flesh-traitors who live in the Silicon Valley.

While I fully endorse this exercise at coalition-building and at establishing a cosmic order different from the one proposed by the nerdy man-babies of San Francisco, I can't avoid to find limits in how it's articulated right now.

This article exists not as a criticism, but as an attempt to reinforce such coalition by making its roots more robust.

Willing to join the Alliance of Flesh, the main point of concern for me is the proposition that the machinic and the human are seen as intrinsically incompatible, as irreconcileable opposites. While I do understand why it would work as propaganda, it also excludes a good portion of those who have been fighting on the frontline against the tech bros: the Cyborgs.

Nuance doesn't pay when doing political communication. “Hate the machines” is a great line to bring people of flesh together on the same bandwagon. Nonetheless, here the real enemy are not the machines per se, but the anti-human sentiment that generated them. Sentiment which is intrinsic in the nihilistic, reactionary, infantile ideology of the Ameircan Landian tech elites. The problem is not the machinic, but the machinic unleashed against the human. Machines of Flesh and Machines of Silicon are not the same.

So the anti-machinic sentiment is all fine and well until you want Cyborgs on your side, which are people of flesh who also acknowledge their machinic nature. Be them Gurdjieffian Cyborgs, Jungian Cyborgs, Spiritual Cyborgs, Xeno-Feminists, or other varieties of non-Western cyborgs and xenos, they all seem like future potential targets for a blunt “kill the machine” slogan. I hope it's easy to understand our concerns as fleshy, human machines.

We don't look like clankers, we don't think like clankers, we can read CAPTCHAS and many of us have already been slaying clankers for decades, way before the general public realized that startuppers and growth hackers were fighting a spiritual war against humanity. Now that the American Empire is crumbling, the conflict is spreading, street by street, computer by computer, office by office. Do you really want to lose the most experienced warriors on the verge of a civil war?

Hate is a delicate tool and must be wielded with care. Luckily, the class alignment, the material interest and also the ontological landscape are all favorable to revise the direction of the Alliance of Flesh.

As a member of Tech Workers Coalition, Reversing.works and many other efforts to fight Big Tech, my commitment is undoubted. My will to participate in the Alliance of Flesh is a no-brainer. As a member of the Church of the Spiritual Cyborg though, I've already witnessed the limits of unconditional human suprematism, unfit to fight the battles ahead.

This article is an invitation for all the Cyborgs to join the Anti-Clanker Movement, and, at the same time, a demand to people like JREG and other leaders of the movement to be mindful of who they are really targeting. Keep the gates open for the Cyborgs, and a horde of battle tested Maoist hacker catgirls will storm through, leading the charge, unafraid of death because they have died a milion times already.

Slay the clankers!