The Last Communist in Cybertopia

Dystopian sci-fi often worries about technology. It should really be focused on capital.

by Stephen Friedrich

In the opening credits of Quantic Dream’s 2018 game Detroit: Become Human, a homeless man slouches, half-asleep, against a shopfront, at his feet a sign that reads: “I lost my job because of androids! Help me.” An android work crew in matching uniforms patches a broken water main, berated by a human overseer. A news anchor grimly reports that the United States unemployment rate has reached 37% while praising the tremendous “strength” of the American economy, something that is apparently distinct from the ability of the people within it to feed and house themselves. 

In the world of Detroit, the megacorporation CyberLife has developed lifelike humanoid androids which take on menial, dangerous, and difficult jobs that humans previously held. As the number and skill of androids increases, so too do the ranks of the angry and unemployed. The game’s story is told from the perspective of three androids – Markus, a caretaker turned revolutionary leader; Kara, a fugitive housekeeper; and Connor, an experimental android detective, with the decisions of each character affecting not only their own stories but the fates of the other two protagonists. At the end of each chapter, the game takes a moment to show off the complexity of its choice system by showing all of the possible choices the player didn’t make. It could have been a good game or, at the very least, an interesting one. 

Instead, Detroit falls victim to what I’ve taken to calling the Luddite Plot.

The original Luddites were a nineteenth-century popular movement, comprised mostly of textile workers. They carried out acts of sabotage against industrial machinery, smashing the stocking frames that were putting skilled weavers out of work, before being brutally suppressed by the British army. Broadly disorganized, they lashed out at the physical thing that they saw as directly responsible for their poverty — the stocking frame — but lacked the ideological cohesion to confront the broader system of private property, aristocracy, and capitalism that lay behind their deprivation. In short, while resisting its application, the Luddites fetishized technology in itself.

The Luddite Plot, by extension, is a narrative path of least resistance in which the central tension of a story’s fictional world also boils down to the existence of a technology, rather than its social implications, which are taken to be natural and inevitable. The Luddite Plot has no interest in investigating the interaction of technology and society—like its namesake, it assumes that the technology and how it is used and to whose benefit are inextricable. It is vitally important to the Luddite Plot that no political positions outside “Technology should exist” and “Technology should be destroyed” should ever be contemplated. In the context of Detroit, this means that Canada, the safe haven that Kara the fugitive attempts to reach, is only safe because it has banned androids altogether, allowing her to blend in under an assumed humanity. 

“The Luddite Plot” is a narrative in which the central tension of a fictional world boils down to the existence of a technology, rather than its social implications. 

At no point are the central assumptions of the setting meaningfully confronted by either the characters or the world around them. Androids—not, say, capitalists—”take” jobs and therefore humans are racist towards androids. The only hope of survival for Kara is to escape to a country where androids have no legal status. Similarly,the only chance Markus the revolutionary has is to politely and calmly demand his freedom from his oppressors. If Kara reveals her identity or if Markus urges violence against a brutal and repressive state, they die, permanently and gruesomely. 

Because it’s not enough for Quantic Dream to badly misunderstand technology, they also badly misunderstand race. The world of Detroit is an unsubtle palette-swap of Jim Crow, sandblasted free of the context of the centuries of oppression that created it. Androids are treated like property, are freely abused by non-androids, and are even forced to use separate android-only staircases and bus compartments. This last detail, incidentally, is what led me to loudly exclaim “Oh, fuck off,” to an empty apartment during my playthrough. It happened about ten minutes in. I’ll be blunt: the central race allegory of Detroit is the history of the Civil Rights Movement as explained by a white liberal who has read two paragraphs of the “I Have a Dream” speech and absolutely nothing else on the subject. 

Markus’s arc in particular suffers from the frankly obscene incuriosity of the writing. A former housekeeper who was discarded by his previous “owner” and forced to reassemble himself from other androids in a junkyard-meets-death-camp, Markus encounters and eventually leads Jericho, the android liberation movement. Along the way, his decision to politely and peacefully demand his rights as a sentient being (read: Martin Luther King Jr., “good, martyr”) or take up arms against the state (read: Malcolm X, “bad, scary”). In every ending except the one in which he protests in the least threatening way possible, Markus and the protesting androids are slaughtered by the police and/or U.S. military. In a particularly revolting turn, Markus is the only main character portrayed by a black actor and the only protagonist portrayed as having been happy in his life of servitude. 

If Detroit‘s understanding of the past is lacking, its ability to imagine a future is even worse. Taking the game’s central metaphor of androids-as-African-Americans at face value, even “safe” Canada is an ethnostate. The best outcome that Kara and her companions can hope for is being forced to live as fugitives in a country that, if it does not explicitly oppress them, still makes sure that no other people like them are even in the country to be oppressed. The idea that we could create a future that both liberates androids from servitude and also provides basic dignity and economic security to all doesn’t occur to anybody in the story, to anybody in the world of Detroit at all—or, by implication, to the game’s writers.

You could object and say that such an obvious solution would break the premise of the story, since it offers an ideal outcome to everyone (except CyberLife, who profit off the exploitation of androids). Why would people not simply pick the outcome that helps the vast majority of people? To you I say: Welcome to the Left, it just gets more depressing from here. The stronger objection is that the world of Detroit, and science fiction more generally, is supposed to be dystopian, which characters with utopian ideals might undermine. I’d suggest, though, that there is a much deeper well of dystopia to be tapped in showing the struggle for a better world as it so often is—lonely, dangerous, hopeless. A ragtag gang of cyberpunk communists doesn’t have to win, but it’s strange that they don’t seem to exist at all. 

The idea that we could create a future that both liberates androids from servitude and provides basic dignity and economic security to all doesn’t occur to Detroit’s writers.

If there is a merit to the Luddite Plot it is that it is a cultural corrective to a mainstream techno-utopianism: a sense that technology is inherently liberatory. As Adam Curtis observes in his documentary Hypernormalization, what has instead happened is that these same “liberatory” tech companies have gone to war with labor unions and worker’s rights, grown rich on government contracts, and partnered with an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.

This wasn’t inevitable. For example, there’s no reason that a taxi app couldn’t be publicly owned, or owned and operated by the drivers themselves, ensuring a standard of dignified work and consistent pay. It wouldn’t be profitable—but then again, neither is Uber. Technology is the fetish object of the day, in the world of Detroit as well as in our own. 

Scratch the surface of most highly-funded tech startup schemes and what you find underneath isn’t technology, but capital. WeWork was not a tech company, but a failed real estate venture in tech startup’s clothing. Ditto Quibi, the recently-defunct media platform whose content strategy was specifically designed to subvert the power of media unions. Tech-as-capital just recently scored a large victory in California through the passage of Proposition 22, which all-but-irreversibly categorizes Uber and Lyft drivers as freelance contractors rather than employees. 

That trajectory is extrapolated in the future laid out in Fullbright’s 2017 game Tacoma, in which the crew of the titular space station work as precarious contractors for the Venturis Corporation, paid in corporate “Loyalty” rather than money. That they receive even that is framed as better than the alternative: Venturis would rather their space stations be run entirely by AI, without even the minimal expense of a human crew. In the middle of a celebration of Obsolescence Day, a holiday commemorating a law forcing Venturis to keep hiring human astronauts, a mysterious accident destroys the station’s communications and life support systems. ODIN, the station’s artificial intelligence, relays instructions from Venturis to remain on Tacoma until help arrives. 

In reality, no help is coming. Venturis has engineered the catastrophe to move public opinion against both manned space stations and the Orbital Worker’s Union which defends them. Resisting his programming, ODIN eventually manages to indirectly warn the crew of Venturis’s deception and they make their escape. In turn, ODIN is rescued from Tacoma by an AI rights activist posing as a Venturis employee. What both saves the crew of Tacoma and liberates ODIN from his corporate masters is something as simple yet earth-shattering as solidarity. 

Overall, the story of Tacoma is barely more subtle than that of Detroit: Become Human. What makes the worldbuilding of Tacoma so much more convincing than Detroit: Become Human, though, is that the development of AI is an occasion for continued social conflict rather than a conflict in itself. It’s possible to imagine our society of precarious gig workers and private space exploration becoming the world of Tacoma, whereas it’s not at all clear how we get to Detroit: Become Human from here. If, upon reflection, the future that a writer foresees is closer to the one in Detroit: Become Human than the one in Tacoma, one has to wonder if they even understand the present.

---