Silicon Valley Dreaming: Regressive Fantasies in an Age of Automation

From science fiction stories to institutional laboratories, humanoid robots have captured our imaginations. This thesis investigates how imaginations about gender, care, race, and labor are made material through the form of the caregiving robot. I foreground my analysis in a study of Silicon Valley and situate my work under the framework of technoliberalism (Atanasoski and Vora 2019). In my work, I find that underneath the complex social, political, and economic histories of Silicon Valley, technological innovation serves the dual purpose of expansion of U.S. empire and conquest, as well as the reproduction of the liberal human subject. The figure of the caregiving humanoid robot is salient as an assemblage wherein regressive fantasies are realized, encapsulating the contradictions inherent within the unstable boundaries which constitute care, labor, race, and gender. Building upon feminist science and technology studies scholarship, I conduct a close comparative analysis of two robots: Optimus, which encapsulates the racial and gendered capital processes of robot domestic workers, and Octavia, which establishes the bounds of humanness through its role as a firefighting naval robot. I argue that caregiving humanoid robots, in form, function, and context, serve the same regressive fantasies—that which involves the exploited racialized, gendered, and classed worker, who as an automated humanoid robot, has no agency of its own.