Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski*
Tesla Optimus robot performing household tasks, from “Can the Tesla Robot Do Dishes?” Source: https://www.sparklymaidmiami.com/blog/can-the-tesla-robot-do-dishes.
Notes
1
Wes Davis, “The Optimus Robots at Tesla’s Cybercab Event Were Humans in Disguise,” The Verge, October 13, 2024 →.
2
Boone Ashworth, “Wear This AI Friend Around Your Neck,” Wired, July 30, 2024 →.
3
Amy X. Wang, “Everyone Hates ‘Friend,’ the AI Necklace. But the AI Isn’t the Problem,” New York Times, November 3, 2025, emphasis added.
4
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1969).
5
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, rev. Dirk J. Struik (Progress Publishers, 1959).
6
A recent ICI Berlin workshop on operativism tied operativism’s genealogy (from Soviet materialist visions through later practices such as Harun Farocki’s attention to machine vision) to the optimization of the working body, and to automation as a social phenomenon rather than merely a technical one →.
7
Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 4.
8
Matteo Pasquinelli, “The Automation of General Intelligence,” e-flux journal, no. 141 (December 2023) →.
9
See Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke University Press, 2019).
10
Jess Weatherbed, “Tesla Is Hiring People to Do the Robot,” The Verge, August 19, 2024 →.
11
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 7.
12
Angela Y. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Blackwell, 1998); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); Grace Hong, “Existential Surplus: Women of Colour, Feminism and the New Crisis of Capitalism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, no. 18 (2012); Jennifer Morgan, Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
13
In this sense “style” reflects a map of the division of labor. See Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
14
Ashworth, “Wear This AI Friend.” As of February 16, 2026, the company’s website says: “Friends are digital beings hosted by friend.com. You can chat with them anywhere—on your phone or laptop—and with their impressive memory they will remember everything you say.”
15
Wang, “Everyone Hates ‘Friend.’”
16
Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 19.
17
Matteo Wong, “The Most Reviled Tech CEO in New York Confronts His Haters,” The Atlantic, October 6, 2025 →.
18
Clio Chang, “The Year of Subway Slop,” Curbed, December 29, 2025 →.
19
Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison, “I Hate my Friend,” Wired, September 8, 2025 →.
20
“OpenAI’s use of Scarlett Johansson-like voice in ChatGPT exposed gaps in the law,” American Bar Association, November 21, 2024 →.
21
“OpenAI v. Scarlett Johansson? Georgetown Law Professor Answers Legal Questions on AI-Generated Content,” News, Georgetown University, June 4, 2024 →.
22
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Hill and Wang, 1977), 188.
26
For “bodymind,” see Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Duke University Press, 2017); and Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (2015).
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