“White Voice at all times here”: The Portrayal of Telemarketing under Racial Capitalism in Sorry to Bother You

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“White Voice at all times here”

The Portrayal of Telemarketing under Racial Capitalism in

Sorry to

Bother You

Eliane Castelar Streater

10889841

Comparative Cultural Analysis

Master’s Thesis

University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dr. Niall Martin

Second Reader: Dr. Joost de Bloois

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Introduction

In 2018 Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the film Sorry to Bother You (henceforth STBY). Frontman of the radical political hip hop group The Coup, Riley wrote the film script in 2012, but unable to fund its production at first, filming only started in 2017. STBY follows the story of Cassius Green, a young black man living in Oakland, California, as he is employed at the telemarketing company RegalView. Poverty stricken – Cassius is living in his uncle’s garage and can only afford 41 cents of gasoline in his “bucket” of a car – his initial failure at making sales is discouraging. However, a senior call centre worker (Danny Glover) offers the protagonist an invaluable piece of advice, telling him to use his “white voice”. As Glover tells Cassius, the white voice carries the assurance of ease and wealth, the stability and security that comes with being in the world from a position of privilege (e.g. he has never been fired, only laid off). This voice should cajole potential customers, lulling them into confiding in it, and obscuring how much this sale matters to Cassius as his sole source of income. The undertones of the white voice must suggest that after getting off this phone call, Cassius will hop into his luxury car to go play tennis, as Glover continues to explain. Most importantly, the whiteness of the white voice is always a construction, as it is not how white people actually sound, but what they imagine or how they would like their voices to sound. Thus, a performative whiteness, with its assurance, implied un-dangerousness and innocuousness, and carrying the promise of luxurious lifestyles, is what Cassius needs to portray in order to become a successful salesman. In the film, the white voice aurally stands out as an exaggeratedly nasal dubbed voice played over the image of the actors’ moving mouths. The imperfectly synced audio and image further casts a feeling of unease and discomfort, the literal performativity of the white voice is laid bare. The telemarketer must also perform affective labour, that is, the creation of an atmosphere prone to make a sale over the phone.

The premise of the “white voice”, which gives Cassius a leg up the corporate ladder, ends up being one element out of many interlocking themes that Riley has crafted into a robust critique of current racial capitalism, bringing together ideas on race, technology, affective labour, and unionizing. As communist collective Kolinko emphasized in their reasoning behind their workers’ inquiry into call centres, “it is only from the struggles that develop within this material context and the daily experiences of the proletariat that another world can arise”. It is for this reason that STBY provides such a productive site from which to explore some of the complex questions arising from racial fragmentation and digital capitalism. A remarkable conscious effect of this film is the attention given to the process of unionizing and striking for worker rights within a company. As Boots Riley has himself mentioned in interviews, Hollywood filmic narratives often emphasize the lone hero who has to overcome an unfair system and manages to make it. Despite the fact that Cassius’ initial telemarketing success teases the viewer with the prospect that the film may follow this conventional narrative, there is a considerable focus on the workers’ organizing and ultimately it is shown as the way forward.

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The white voice is first heard coming from Glover, set against the slightly sordid retro workplace aesthetics of RegalView. A photocopying room frequently frames the background of the telemarketing office, with a chaotic jumble of papers flying out of the scanner around a hysterical worker, giving the workplace an air of absurdity (see fig. 1). The absurd seems to unfold throughout the film’s scenography, as contemporary labour spaces harbour contradictory tensions: from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy to the incongruous management styles of different bosses. The need to constantly perform affective labour, put on a white voice, and deal with the dissonance of the workplace affects Cassius, leading to a sense of fragmentation.

Fig. 1. Cassius at the telemarketing office (11:36)

The mental health epidemic stemming from contemporary capitalism can be seen as forming the backdrop to STBY. Cassius is portrayed as ridden by existential angst and a deep feeling of worthlessness, not having anything to base his self-worth on. His existential musings start to be challenged by his call centre job, as he finds that he has a knack for performing a white voice and making sales. Feeling appreciated for the first time in his life – the managers hug him and high-five him in ecstatic excitement – he feels compelled to accept a promotion to become a Power Caller on the coveted top floor. However, issues arise from his acceptance of becoming a Power Caller as it comes at the cost of leaving his striking friends, who are demanding fair wages, behind. As a Power Caller Cassius starts selling an array of dubious commodities of which the most notorious is the labour of life-long contracted workers of the company WorryFree: slave labour.

In Cassius’ initial world the call centre RegalView offers him a much-needed income. The insidious idea that there is no alternative to capitalism haunts the cityscapes of the film, with tent slums littering the sides of Oakland’s roads. Adverts for the company WorryFree are scattered throughout STBY, on the televisions and city’s walls. They promise to solve problems of unemployment and housing by offering life-long contracts to their wage-less workers, in exchange for food and lodging. The psychological impact of neoliberalism and capitalist triumphalism is worthy in itself of a horror film, as Mark Fisher wrote that capitalism obfuscates all other possibilities,

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appearing with no way out (CR). Contrastingly to the grim reality of WorryFree workers, the company’s CEO is the quintessential figure of the young tech boss, encapsulated in the character of Steve Lift. Laid-back, charismatic, and amiable, he does not fit the fascistic threatening imagery of an old authoritative capitalist boss. In response to accusations of having slave labour, Lift emphatically denies this view on television, asserting that he is in fact saving lives.

The themes of capitalism and labour cannot be explored without centring racialisation and slavery, encapsulated more precisely by the concept of racial capitalism. The impetus to not neglect the racial aspect of capitalism drives both theories of Afro-pessimism and the Black Radical Tradition. However, both these theories, epitomized in the figures of Frank B. Wilderson III and Cedric Robinson respectively, harbour notable differences. Whereas an Afro-pessimist view asserts that any concept of humanity automatically implies anti-Blackness and that white and Black people still live in a Master/Slave relation, the Black Radical Tradition seeks to emphasize the collective past of Africans and all the aspects of their lives that escaped slavery. Whether or not these theories are reconcilable they both ultimately assert that the afterlives of slavery and of old and new forms of racialisation carry on into contemporary capitalism. It is this view which informs my reading of STBY. Despite highlighting the constructed-ness of whiteness, I treat the concept of racialisation as denoting the process by which people of colour are constructed as such, as white racialisation most often works by erasing the fact that it is a racialisation. Questions of conceptualisations of race also arise when addressing visions of the future and how race is commonly seen to interact with or hinder technological progress, such as in the telemarketers’ job and in the film’s science fiction plot-twist.

The tone of STBY evolves, as the absurdist elements become more outlandish, taking the film from a comedic political satire into the realm of horrific science fiction. The film pivots around the offer Lift proposes to Cassius: to become a mole in the new workforce. WorryFree’s latest upgrade to make their workers more productive is to modify their DNA and create a human-horse hybrid, the Equisapiens. Cassius’ job role would be to become an insider revolutionary leader, as he would lead the human-horses’ revolt while ultimately working to Lift’s agenda. The shocking Equisapien species – a narrative turn that had been lurking just out of sight throughout the whole film - pushes the film’s realism to the edge. The literal materialization of a human-animal hybrid workforce, forcefully optimized to increase labour productivity is a dark-toned satire of the absurdity and inarticulability of racial capitalism, and the need of capitalism to continuously expand into new frontiers. Its power to shock lies in the fact that it is not that farfetched that it is unthinkable, yet at the same time it appears as deeply grotesque and dystopic. Issues arise surrounding the boundaries of the human, and what humanity means. In addition, for some, the technological upgrade of the new workforce is praiseworthy, despite the ontological experience of violence that the Equisapiens experience, echoing Afro-pessimist enunciations of the slave experience. All in all, my reading of STBY points towards the racialisation of the worker in late capitalism, from the fragmentation of self

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to the experience of violence. I thus foreground the Black worker as a radical positionality from which abolitionist resistance can be put forward to counter the pervasiveness of capitalist realism.

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Chapter One: The Fragmented Self and the Spilling Over

The subject in late capitalism is increasingly racialised and fragmented. The depiction of Cassius Green in STBY illustrates this tendency, showing how racial capitalism both spurs fissured subjects in order to extract profit and how this fragmentation turns back against workers and adverselyaffects them. Although the conceptualisation of a whole self as opposed to a fragmented self is not without contention, I wish to show that racial capitalism creates and utilizes mutilated subjects, along racial and gendered lines. I thus explore the ways racialised people experience fragmentation (taking up W.E.B. du Bois’ conceptualisation of double consciousness) as well as how this fragmentation is both exacerbated through the separate and intertwined effects of labour in late capitalism and “digiti-zation”. The effects of the former are felt in the rise of affective labour and “horizontal” management while the latter is present in workers’ embeddedness in machinery and over-the-phone disembodiment, as well as subsumption under algorithmic management. In addition, people’s personal profiles on digital media and the ironic distance the meme-ification of news forces onto issues also contributes to the experience of fragmentation. I will thus explore fragmentation passing through an analysis of telemarketing and affective labour, illustrating the various growing tendencies of low-skilled jobs in late capitalism, and the contradictions and tensions they give rise to. After outlining the interaction of affective labour and fragmentation I will ground the discussion around racialisation, focusing on the “white voice”. The conclusion will consider the effect of fragmentation on Cassius as well as fragmentation’s inevitable spilling over.

Affective Labour and Fragmentation

Affective labour is defined by Michael Hardt as the “creation and manipulation of affects” (96), a form of immaterial labour which produces immaterial goods such as services, knowledge and communication (94). The historical precedent of affective labour theory is found in feminist analysis of kin and care work. Affective labour is thus not new, but in the rise of informational economy – centred around the production of communication and knowledge – it has become “one of the highest value-producing forms of labour” (90). The use of the concept of affect allows us to ground the present discussion in “the situational nature of affect in conceptualizing affects, as emerging at the moment when bodies meet, affecting the bodies involved in the encounter, and marking the transformation/s of the bodies” (Seyfert 29). Focusing on Cassius as a telemarketer, affect captures the exchange between customer and caller, how Cassius labours to create an effective sales atmosphere as well as how the bodies are affected. While exploring how affective labour leads to fragmentation I will touch upon the body of the telemarketer, how fragmentation arises in new management techniques as well as considering the role of the promise of promotion.

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In STBY, fragmentation can be explored through Cassius Green and his job as a telemarketer. From the start, Cassius is inadvertentlysuccessful at marketing himself. In his comedic intake interview with RegalView which is the first scene in the film, instead of being reprimanded for lying about his CV Cassius is congratulated on his initiative and ability to read. Neither his fake award for salesman of the month, nor his friend answering the reference phone number for his previous job impede him from getting hired, quite the contrary. At RegalView, the bottom line is to “stick to the script” and Cassius has the internalized discipline to do just that. In assuming responsibility and displaying the necessary skills for working at the call centre, he is being an entrepreneur of the self, displaying himself as capital (Lazzarato 91). Cassius is showcasing the immaterial labour he will have to employ in telemarketing.

Riley’s choice to situate the film within the context of telemarketing was based on his own experience of working in a call centre. As the site of my analysis of the interplay between affective labour, race, and mechanisation, call centres encompass all these interactions. Employment at call centres is increasing exponentially, such that in both Ireland and the Netherlands one third of all new jobs in the first decade of the 21st_{century was made up of call centre positions and nearly 3% of the} US working population labour in one (Brophy 412). Call centres therefore foreground many of cognitive capitalism’s particular characteristics.

Telemarketing in cognitive capitalism agglomerates a mix of low-skilled repetitive work – a mechanical routine of dialling, speaking, hanging up – with the mentally exhausting affective labour that is required in trying to convince potential customers over the phone. As set forth in German activist collective Kolinko’s analysis of call centre work, telemarketers “must rely exclusively on language, their choice of words and emphasis”. Many call centre workers have compared their workplaces to battery farms and communication assembly lines, as calls come in and out one after the other (Kolinko). Call centres thus present a cognitive production line, where a mix of low-paid but mentally draining communicative skills are put to work side by side. Moreover, similarly to industrial assembly lines, call centres contribute to a greater division of labour as previously existing jobs are divided up into smaller tasks distributed to different telemarketers. For example, a banker’s tasks are split into informing the customer about the state of their bank account, giving information on investment and credits, updates about special offers, etc.

Communicative skills, and affective labour more generally, are not new and have been required in many jobs for years. What is innovative, however, is “the extent [to which] it is now directly productive of capital” (Hardt 97), it is the act of communication that leads to the production of value. In telemarketing, affective labour is concentrated to such a degree that it is particularly demanding, as it is “infected with constant rejection” (Aneesh 49) and is emotionally similar to begging (50). Cassius remarks that he feels “like an asshole doing this job” (0:12:05). The affective demands placed on workers are not only geared towards customers but are also expected in the

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workplace, which Mark Fisher characterises as an attribute of control societies (CR 39). The request to show up to work “happy” is found in most minimum-wage job descriptions nowadays. A. Aneesh’s study of Indian call centres remarks on the “tens of motivational banners” hanging around the workplace, with slogans such as “believe in yourself” (51). In his intake interview, when Cassius gets the job, the manager lays out the three rules of which the third is “and you will show up tomorrow. Happy” (0:03:09). After a meeting at RegalView Cassius remarks that “I just think it’s kind of silly that we have to be all *excited* […] It’s bullshit” (0:18:12-0:18:17). Further on I explore in greater depth the particularities of affective labour in conjunction with the “white voice”.

An interesting dynamic at play in the rise of affective labour is how it has historically been a feminine-coded labour – as part of care work and reproductive work – and as such it has always been unpaid or extremely underpaid. As explained in Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s account of the history of cheap care under capitalism, skills gendered as female (such as “caring attitudes and supportive miens”) are looked for by employers seeking cheap workers, telemarketers being such an example (141). This points towards a feminisation of work, in which more and more of the workforce is demanded to use affective labour. Donna Haraway outlines this tendency in which feminised work is rendered more vulnerable and subject to exploitation, partly due to being seen more as a server than a productive worker (38). In addition, the feminisation of affective labour ties into dynamics of sexualisation, in which affective workers are reduced to their sexual abilities (38), even if they are not themselves (gendered as) women. For example, in STBY intrusive inappropriate sexual advances emanate from the Power Caller’s elevator’s electronic voice, who suggestively says to Cassius “I hope you did not masturbate today. We need you sharp and ready to go. I detect the pheromones percolating out of your pores […] Mr. Green, I am a computer but I wish I had hands to caress your muscular brain” (0:49:12-0:49:33).

Another salient tendency found in cognitive capitalism is the blurring of the boundaries between work and private life, which Jonathan Crary names the incursion of “24/7” into all areas of life (30). This implies the cancellation of periodicity (30), as workdays become diffused and not confined to traditional 9 to 5 times. Moreover, with computers and phones, mechanical actions and routines are transferable from work to leisure time as “the skills and gestures that once would have been restricted to the workplace are now a universal part of the 24/7 texture of one’s electronic life” (58). During a considerable portion of time human bodies are performing the same actions, such as typing, whether at work or at home, heightening the porousness of the boundary. As productive time and habits become 24/7, Crary contends that mechanisms of power become just as continuous and unbounded (77).

Crary’s theorizing of the permeability of this boundary is based on the assumption that the work-home divide existed in the first place. It has been however, the experience of a reduced group of workers, as both reproductive labour and the ontological nature of slavery were not possible to

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turn off outside the factory or plantation but continued in the home. The expansion of a permeable work-leisure boundary into the experience of more and more workers ties into the growing tendency that Haraway describes as the feminisation of work, that “make[s] a mockery of a limited workday” (38). Reproductive labour and care work have always been 24/7, thus the feminisation of work heightens the invasion of worktime into all parts of the day. The porousness of the workday is progressively reflected by Cassius’ late nights working as a Power Caller and his inability to stop thinking about his job, even when at home.

Taking the increasing indistinguishability between work and non-work time, combined with the demand for affective labour, workers’ sense of self-worth resides more and more in their jobs. In Bifo Berardi’s account of The Soul at Work, he articulates how in contrast to classical industrial jobs, work now requires the workers’ intellectual, creative, and affective capacities. This precipitates workers to seek fulfilment in their jobs and invest their desires at work (84). Berardi distinguishes between chain workers in mental work and brain workers, arguing that the latter exploit creative intellectual abilities more than the former, who mechanically repeat the same actions over and over (87). However, telemarketers, as seen in STBY, despite being chain workers must also invest affective labour in the phone calls. And Cassius, who discovers he has a knack for it, starts to feel fulfilled and his self-esteem rises for the first time in his life. After a few weeks working at RegalView he tells his friends that “I finally feel like I’m good at something. I’m feeling myself. I’m a fucking monster at this” (0:29:50).

The experience of the fragmented self in relation to labour and capitalism is most popularly expressed in Karl Marx’s concept of alienation. As workers became increasingly alienated from the production process, due to mechanisation, increased automation, and division of labour, they also became alienated from their work and themselves. In the factory, their self-worth was no longer expressed in their work. However, under neoliberalism, despite increased mechanisation not having slowed down, workers are increasingly expected to act as if their work is fulfilling and actualizing, becoming entrepreneurs of their selves (Lazzarato). This is also Cassius’s experience, which echoes the reality of the precariat in late capitalism, in which “employees are simultaneously deskilled and encouraged to feel a deep emotional attachment to their work” (Moran qtd in Gregg 251). The tension of being asked to find self-worth in the very dynamics that alienates one, gives place to a contradiction that deepens the fragmented self and rips the pieces even further apart.

The Body of The Telemarketer

A major part of labour at call centres takes place over the phone, in an immaterial space. However, Riley’s depiction of Cassius’ telemarketing ruptures through conceptualisations of immateriality as a colour-blind disembodiment. The film shows Cassius at his cubicle desk, embedded in a network of technological appliances: seated in his chair, the earphone and microphone headset around his head, a desktop computer and keyboard at his hands. Despite the fact that phone calls are often imagined

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as immaterial labour and taking place in cyberspace, Riley emphasizes the materiality of affective labour by filming Cassius and his desk crashing into people’s homes. On his first workday, as Cassius’ computer automatically dials the next customer from his list, his desk shakes and he grips on to it as it comes crashing down into his first customer’s dining room (see fig. 2 and fig. 3). Quickly picking up the fallen computer screen, Cassius tries to introduce himself but is hung up on almost at once. The viewer is able to see Cassius’ efforts to connect to the customers, how he makes eye-contact and puts on a friendly voice, the affective labour he is performing clearly visible. This affective labour is seen both as intense and personal while also being somewhat ridiculous and absurd, as Cassius’ desk is obviously out of place in these intimate settings. The shots of Cassius in the homes speaking to the potential customers are interwoven with shots of Cassius seated at the office. At his desk he is flipping through a stapled set of paper with written instructions, the script he is supposed to stick to in order to make a sale. These efforts are in vain as the customer does not “see” Cassius and hangs up on him immediately. Two more failed calls follow, as Cassius fails to connect to the customers.

Fig. 2. & Fig. 3. Cassius crashing down into a customer’s home (10:16)

In STBY, by choosing to drop Cassius and his desk, headpiece, and computer into the customers’ homes Riley shows how the labouring body is formed by the entwining of human and machine. Machinery that forms an integral part of most forms of labour and production lines but which is often still differentiated from the workers is highlighted in these scenes. It is the agglomerate of flesh and muscles, software and hardware, telephonic connections and neural pathways that labour together to make sale calls. In a Spinozian sense, it is the body-of-Cassius-and-headset that carries out the affective labour at RegalView. The blurring of boundaries and the interwoven bodies of human organisms and machines are captured in Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto as she writes that in high-tech culture “it is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine” (60). Human consciousness is being interwoven with electronic networks. The blurring also arises and is exacerbated in academia, as communication sciences and biology muddy differences between machine and organism, as “mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms” (Haraway 36). Mechano-morphism englobes this tendency, as conceptualisations of computer processes are mapped onto human and other animal behaviours.

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From the point of view of the customers, the heavy physicality and clanking sound of the telemarketer’s body dropping into the homes also gives it a slightly violent and invasive appearance, showing how selling and capitalism encroaches into private and domestic spaces. Consumption has become a 24/7 event, as illustrated by Crary. People are surveyed, tracked, and saved, their identities and habits are data-fied and made available to companies for targeted advertising. In STBY, RegalView’s database stores potential customer’s names and phone numbers as well as previous purchases. Aneesh writes about call centres as “turning identities into programmable events for use within the framework of databases differentiated for the purposes of finance, medicine, law, and consumption.” (9).

Lastly, the materiality of telemarketing is also felt in the physical consequences and stress that workers experience after a shift on the phone. Workers interviewed by Kolinko complained about head and neck pains, eye problems and tinnitus as well as too much strain on their voices. In addition, the long shifts and being both under technological and human surveillance from the team-leaders lead to insomnia, irritability and stress.

Fragmentation in New Management Techniques

At RegalView’s office floor there are two management styles, both popular in late capitalism, which “blen[d] older and newer forms of command” as seen in Brophy’s study of call centres (414). The horizontal manager-friend may at first appear contradictory to algorithmic management, but both management techniques in fact complement each other in the production of “compliant subjectivities” and teamwork surveillance (414). Starting with the former, during their worker’s inquiry Kolinko noted the great amount of “drivel about ‘horizontal’ hierarchies in call centres”. The character of Diana DeBauchery is the ultimate friendly manager in STBY, she acts as though the formal hierarchies no longer matter and that they are all equal on the office floor. The irony is not lost in her first scene, as the physical divide between workers and the managers is stark, they are positioned on either side of the room, three managers standing taller than the rest of the sitting workers. DeBauchery asks rhetorical questions about herself as if she were a worker, such as: “is she going to treat me like a system of motorized appendages?” (0:16:47-0:16:53), to which she answers no, as for her they are not employees but a family. Her speech equates team members to familial relations.

Manager DeBauchery’s impassioned speech is met by a mass of starey-eyed gazes, some earnest nodding and Cassius’ question “does that mean we get paid more?” (0:17:04). The answer is, of course, a “no” in air quotes as DeBauchery asks: “But what is capital? Right? I would argue that social currency now is more important […] I don’t want to scare you, but it’s a new world” (0:17:07-0:17:21). Thus, in cognitive capitalism workers do not only have to labour their cognitive and affective skills but are sometimes “paid” in immaterial benefits too. Consider the many tech companies today

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that offer perks for their workers such as food, massages, ping-pong tables, etc. For low-paid workers these skills cannot materially sustain them, as social capital does not pay their rent.

A higher level of management is portrayed in STBY by the character that encapsulates a California young tech boss aesthetic, WorryFree’s CEO Steve Lift. He is presented as young, hip, approachable, and charismatic, wearing laidback clothes and open-toe shoes in his TV interview (0:21:22). Lift forms part of the meritocratic discourse that is pervasive at Silicon Valley. There are numerous accounts of misfits and nerds who against all odds and owing to their natural talent created a code or innovative piece of technology (e.g. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs), and thus triumphed and became millionaires. The (re)surgence of the narrative of the success of the underdog is deeply embedded in readings of technology and the internet as a democratic equalising sphere in which only “talent” is visible.

However, these meritocratic ladders are still coveted and only open to a group of privileged people from the start. The structures in place at Silicon Valley are prejudiced against certain groups of people from the outset, as racism is coded into them. Adding a few black women coders in certain jobs will not be enough to disrupt the racist structures. As Safiya Umoja Noble writes, it is not a “pipeline” issue, that black people are unprepared to be hired, and framing it at such eschews the “persistent marginalisation of Black women in Silicon Valley” (74). Instead, Noble emphasises the need to challenge the idea of Silicon Valley as a meritocracy and stresses the need to address it as a structural problem of racism and sexism “which extends from employment practises to product design” (74). I will return to this discussion on meritocracy in cyberspace in the second chapter on cybertopias.

These friendly managers and CEOs work side by side with algorithms, the other side of the coin. Algorithms can often be used to scapegoat and maintain the managers’ friendly façade, as these can always fall back on blaming numbers for not promoting someone or for firing them. Although algorithmic management is less overtly present in Riley’s film, elements of it still appear, and when read together with studies on telemarketing and call centres, algorithmic management surfaces more noticeably. The software telemarketers have to use to make the calls, for example, can be programmed to automatically make a call as soon as a worker is off the phone, so the machine controls the workers’ breaks and pace of work (Kolinko). Taking away from the workers the possibility of deciding who to dial, when to dial, even when to take a rest, is subordinating the work process under automatization and algorithmic management. The work rhythm is set by technology and workers have to struggle against it. Similar dynamics are increasingly found throughout the contemporary labour world. One example are the electronic shackles that workers have to wear in Amazon warehouses, that control their movements by shocking them and forcing them to take the most efficient route around the warehouses (Gent). In addition, the standardisation imposed by the use of the script and set computer forms in which to fill in customers’ information does not give the workers creative space or agency.

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Lastly, workers are also more rendered more controllable by technology that measures their work. The number of minutes they spend on each call, the amount of calls per hour… all these measurable variables lead to a tighter control on their performance.

Nevertheless, accounts of algorithmic management need not lead to a totalizing increased surveillance and control over workers. There are also ways of resisting, tricking, and subverting machinic control. For example, workers doing customers’ shopping get around the automatized shopping lists by replacing items with different ones or marking them as sold out (Gent). While this may appear as a futile superficial subversive act, it shows how there is still room for creative resilience, and it gives back some dignity and agency to workers. In STBY, WorryFree’s CEO Lift is aware of capitalism’s capacity to co-opt and incorporate the struggles against it, as he is anticipating that his new workforce will organize and rebel against him.

Mythologised Promotion

Apart from different management techniques, the creation of compliant subjectivities also manifests in more subtle forms, such as in the promise of promotion. The managers at RegalView often mention the mythical “Power Callers”, pointing ceremoniously to the ceiling, indicating the higher status of the telemarketers on the top floor (see fig. 4). This higher salaried position, coming with prestige and power, is presented as the next step up in the corporate ladder. However, its feasibility appears rare, as other workers warn Cassius that they have been baited with the same promise for months without ever seeing this infamous top floor. It thus appears as one of those corporate myths, if you work hard enough, you will get promoted. The character Squeeze, the leader of the workers’ strike, makes a salient remark on promotion in sign-twirling jobs: “That’s a scam […] If you twirl that sign really well, then maybe you can twirl a larger sign on a more glamorous corner” (0:23:43-0:23:52). He reflects on how it plays into the creation of compliant subjectivities, holding a promise of self-worth and self-betterment while the structural exploitation of working remains unchallenged.

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Promotion also plays into masculinist visions of success, being the most powerful and being the provider. Cassius is haunted by the fact that he does not have a calling like his girlfriend Detroit, who is an artist. He complains that to introduce him Detroit talks about what he did in the past, saying “why do you always talk about what I did in high-school? Like look at our high-school football team. Literally. Look at ‘em. All they do is work at the home furniture store and play football all day. It’s, like, they’re stuck or something” (0:19:49). His friend Salvador questions “What the hell are you talking about, I mean, they’re friends?” But Cassius remains unable to see friendship as a success as he concludes “at the end of the day I don’t wanna be stuck in their position” (0:20:22), his definition of success remaining tied to employment status.

Racialisation and Fragmentation

Racialised people, and in telemarketing, racialised voices or accents, must labour at “neutering” themselves, putting on or emphasizing specific phrases, pronunciations and inflictions that aspire to a “neutral”, or in STBY, white voice. This gives way to a fragmentation, the creation of different selves that pass as a different race (or class) in order to succeed at the workplace. Racial passing ties in together with du Bois’ double consciousness, the experience of racialised people having to navigate simultaneously seeing themselves as self and as Other. In addition, code-switching provides a useful tool to analyse the spectrum and varying degrees of racial passing, and how what is deemed as “neutral” or criminal is steeped in prejudices and harmful racist structures. Aneesh notes that the upholding of neutrality does not allude to a pre-existing reality but also participates in its production (4). I would argue that what is considered neutral is informed by existing racial hierarchies and by claiming neutrality, the hierarchies are produced again and perpetuated.

As delineated above, cognitive capitalism presents a new regime of accumulation in which the production “incorporate[s] knowledge at its core with unprecedented intensity” (Brophy 411). As knowledge now occupies the highest tier in capitalist value production (Hardt 90), it is providing a base on which to justify racial hierarchies anew and naturalise differences between people through an increasingly popular return of racist eugenics science (Saini). Such justifications fall under the rubric of meritocracy, an ideal that permeates many ideologies, such as the American Dream, neoliberalism, and Silicon Valley. Noble draws from a number of studies that note this, such as Daniels’ documentation of the fantasy of post-racialism and colour-blindness in tech industries (115). An essentialist reading of a worker’s immaterial labouring capacities – such as seeing someone’s ability to code as an innate talent untethered from a social context - obfuscates structural inequalities and systemic prejudice, as well as ignoring the fact that different knowledges are valued differently within a hierarchy. In cognitive capitalism’s interlocking system of knowledge as the most prized commodity and algorithms as the new unbiased judges, racism becomes naturalised on the premise that it is an objective and fair meritocracy.

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Algorithmic management, apart from serving a disciplining and surveillant function, can also be employed in racist justifications, by seeing machines as fairer and more unbiased than human judgement. Noble muses over the coincidence that in the same decade that women and black people gained full admission into political voting power, machines were then judged as the most capable of making decisions (172). The supposed neutrality of technology has been countered by many accounts, such as in her book Algorithms of Oppression which explores how search engines reinforce racial biases and reflect the current value system. Here Noble narrates how algorithmic driven software is created by biased people and thus carries on and reinforces prejudices and discrimination. She emphasizes that algorithmic oppression (ways in which sexism and racism are structural in data) is not an occasional glitch but is fundamental to operating systems (22). Through an analysis of search engines Noble provides numerous examples of racist software, for instance Google searches associating “Michelle Obama” with “ape” (21) and an artificial intelligence mispredicting future criminal activity which led to the overincarceration of Black people (37). The pervasiveness of racism in software is due to a number of reasons that Noble lays out, such as the self-evident fact that digital media is not a blank slate, it is a continuation of traditional media and so it carries on prejudices (42). In addition, her study of Google outlines how, even if popular interests are represented to some extent, it mostly caters to commercial interests, to its most highly paying advertisers (46).

Another example that shows the intertwining of technology and racism, is how colour photography was first optimized to favour light-skinned people, as seen in the photography company Kodak’s Shirley card (Samudzi, “Bots Are Terrible”). This card was only adjusted later when the South African apartheid regime wanted to keep surveillance passport photos of the black population. However, Zoé Samudzi’s account of contemporary software systems’ inability to distinguish between Black faces signals an important thought: increasing these robots’ ability to recognise individuals should not automatically be taken as progress as it would just democratise a surveillance power that has always been used against black people (“Bots Are Terrible”).

In Riley’s film the intertwining of race, technology, and affective labour is materialised through the white voice. After overhearing Cassius’ failed sales attempts on his first day at RegalView a senior worker leans into Cassius’ telemarketing booth and advises him to “use your white voice”. The senior worker, played by Danny Glover, describes the white voice as follows:

“is like when you get pulled over by the police […] I’m not talking about sounding all nasal. It’s, like, sounding like you don’t have a care. Got your bills paid. You’re happy about your future. You’re about ready to jump in your Ferrari out there after you get off this call. Put some real breath in there. Breezy like… “I don’t really need this money.” You’ve never been fired. Only laid off. It’s not really a white voice. It’s what they wish they sounded like. So it’s like what they think they’re supposed to sound like.” (0:13:55-0:15:08).

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In STBY, race and affective labour come together in the white voice, a new self Cassius has to construct to succeed in telemarketing. In affective labour, the commodities produced are immaterial and intangible, such as knowledge and communication in “in-person” services (Hardt 94-96): at call centres, language is “put to work” (Brophy 411). Cassius needs to sound serviceable, friendly and convincing, by creating and manipulating the affects of the phone conversation, constructing an atmosphere in which the customers are likely to make a purchase. As Kolinko’s study noted, the telemarketer hopes that their “cultural understanding of communication somehow overlaps with the caller’s”. Cassius soon discovers that “white-ness” is an essential part to this success, as it carries the assurance of security and wealth, designed to set customers at ease and feel trusting. STBY mirrors Aneesh’s analysis of Indian telemarketers in which he identifies their labour as being a mix of “emotion work”, i.e. emotional or affective labour, and “cultural work” (65). As Glover underlines, the white voice is “what they [white people] wish they sounded like”, emphasizing the importance of performing fantasies of whiteness.

Once Cassius starts using the white voice the affective exchange becomes completely different. Cassius banters, creates a sense of comradery and puts himself on the same level as the customer – showing an understanding of the customer’s aspirations (“you bring a chick home…” (0:25:04)). Cassius finishes the call by sealing the sale and mentioning he needs to get off the phone to go play squash. A booming soundtrack accompanies the following scene, as it shows a montage of Cassius and a manager celebrating, pumping high fives, hugging, both ecstatic about Cassius’ success at making sales. The scene ends with the manager congratulating Cassius but telling him to call even more people per hour. Cassius is praised for his success at “racial passing”, as it is bringing in more sales for RegalView.

Racialised people disproportionately have had to take up racial passing - defined generally by Philip Brian Harper as the masquerade of someone who while legally designated as black lives successfully as white for a period of time (381) - in order to access the “material comfort as is conventionally seen as being precluded by black identification in the U.S. context” (387). However, racial passing is not only tied to material gain but often arises in situations of safety and survival. From the need to distance oneself from harmful stereotypes (for example when black people’s natural hair is seen as un-professional in the US) to surviving life or death situations. Such situations arise as “blackness itself is criminalized” (9), as denounced by the anonymous editors of the Afro-pessimism reader, and reflected in Cedric Robinson’s recounting of US national myths in which “Blacks became the irrational, the violent, criminal, caged beast” (187).

Another dynamic at play in the fragmentation of “passing” is W.E.B. du Bois’ concept of double consciousness. This concept encapsulates the experience of a person of colour being constantly aware of being racialised in the eyes of others, experiencing oneself simultaneously as “self” and as an “Other”. Du Bois describes this experience in The Souls of Black Folk

:

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“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, –– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (8).

Du Bois point towards the navigation between two consciousness that racialised people experience, between the self and the constant othering. In the case of an African American it means seeing oneself as a Black person and seeing oneself as an American, wrestling with the connotations that come attached to these words. It results in the feeling of a fragmented self, a disconnect between different ways of presenting and being perceived.

Code-switching is another concept similar to racial passing. More commonly used to explain a bilingual person’s switching of language, it has been taken up by Chandra Arthur to illustrate the daily experience of people of colour. Arthur narrates the ways in which people change their behaviour in order to fit in, in particular, how black people are expected to fit into white-dominated spaces. As with racial passing, code-switching does not only affect oneself in terms of having to be alert and watch one’s way of speaking, but it can also be lifesaving. In front of a drawn police gun, the ability to appear less “black” can mean getting out alive – as Arthur narrates from her own experience. In the “white voice speech”, Glover first describes it as the voice you put on when you get pulled over by the police, clearly showing the ties between code-switching, the police state, and the criminalisation of blackness. Thus, despite the fact that white people also code-switch and have different personas for different situations, it is hardly ever the case that their safety lies in a successful performance, as the state and police force act in a context in which Blackness is seen as inherently criminal (Afro-pessimism 9).

Code-switching and racial passing thus exist on a spectrum of presenting edited versions of self, and despite being a necessary tool to survive, they ultimately uphold the system they seek to reverse. What is deemed a “neutral” voice is imbued in prejudices and hierarchies. In STBY’s senior worker’s speech, the white voice is clearly tied to a performance of wealth and ease, of having no financial trouble nor worries about the future. The subversion of racial passing thus remains fleeting as it does not challenge the foundations on which racial binaries are constructed. In a successful racial passing the attachment of criminality to blackness is not contested, and whiteness continues to remain as the norm or neutrality, as for it to be successful “it must be inconspicuous, so then it cannot be a threat to the governing order” (Harper 382). As highlighted in STBY, the whiteness of the white voice is just as much of a construction, as Harper indicates “in racial passing what is at stake is the definition of whiteness itself, against which “blackness” functions principally as the oppositional sign (382-3). The senior worker in STBY says “it’s not how they [white people] sound like but how they think they’re supposed to sound like” (0:15:08). The performance of whiteness does not subscribe to some inherent characteristics of whiteness, an essentialised biology, but it upholds the construction

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of an ideal, an ideological whiteness. Therefore, even if racial passing can never fully challenge the racial order, its “limited critical value lies in its deconstructing race, and, particularly, whiteness” (16), which is so often assumed as neutral – it shows that it is constructed and a performance, one invested in upholding racial hierarchies. The humorous tone of the overly exaggerated white voices in STBY highlight whiteness’ performativity – while critiquing its position as norm.

A neutral voice does not only call up racial prejudices as in STBY, but also class or education-based assumptions, though these necessarily also interact with race. The BBC’s fly-on-the-wall documentary series “The Call Centre”, zooms into a Swansea telemarketing company, showing many of these dynamics. Although race is not featured prominently in this particular Welsh call centre, class accents do play a salient part. When interviewed, multiple workers talk about how they make sure to pronounce all their “Ts” while on the phone. They employ words outside of their usual vocabulary, to elevate their class position in order to make sales or be taken seriously. Aneesh’s studies on call centres in India exemplify a mirroring dynamic, in which workers are taught to speak in “neutral” accents, which more often than not mean American or British.

Affect theory proves useful in analysing how bodies affect and are affected in the dynamics of racial passing. A body’s Spinozian affective capability is defined by how this body is racialised: a black racialised body needs to alter its affective capability to put on a white voice in order to affect its customers/the police/the state in a different way. Cassius’ use of the white voice is not a performance that remains at skin level. It is not merely a script as in employing it Cassius is creating another self, another fragment. As Seyfert writes “affects are not just ‘produced’ by bodies, they define and ceaselessly constitute and reconstitute the nature of a body” (32). Thus, in the repeated use of the white voice Cassius is also reconstituting his body, deepening the fragments.

Racial passing, apart from being unable to challenge racial hierarchies, also leads to fragmentation, as one is performing an edited version of self that differs from and hides parts of one’s usual self. Cassius’ white voice is such a thorough act of passing, his voice becomes so different and is so distant from his usual self, that it is literally performed by another actor in the film. Call centres workers in India experience similar identity dissonance and identity crisis, as they start responding more to their westernized work pseudonyms than their birth names (Aneesh 67). Fragmentation and racialisation thus become enmeshed and exacerbated by digitization as “in the virtual age our awareness of the fragmented self is heightened by computer-mediated communications” (Stone paraphrased by Nelson 3). This flux of identity, according to Nelson, has “long been the experience of African diasporic people” (3), thus creating more points of connection between digitization and racialisation.

It is possible to tie affect theory into the reasoning for why racial passing is inherently un-subversive. As Ahmed writes on the affective politics of fear, fear “works through and on the bodies of those who are transformed into its subjects, as well as its objects” (62) – so it is re-inscribing “past

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histories of association” (63) onto the bodies. Fear is multidirectional and passes through and installs itself in affective actors. Taking into account how whiteness functions in the US, when Cassius uses the white voice, it re-enforces the association of white-ness with un-criminality and wealth, repeating stereotypes and upholding white supremacy. As Glover explained, the white voice reiterates the association of whiteness with having enough money and the expectation of a comfortable future. In addition, the fragmentation brought on by Cassius’ racial passing, the experience of double consciousness, affective labour, and different management styles end up influencing Cassius’ sense of responsibility.

Effect of Fragmentation on Cassius’ Sense of Responsibility

STBY illustrates a succession of ways in which Cassius’s ambitions are ultimately thwarted by the logic of fragmentation. As seen above, Cassius’ success with the white voice, despite enabling him to succeed and ascend the corporate ladder by by-passing and tricking a racist system, is conclusively invested in upholding these dynamics and re-enforcing harmful stereotypes. Moreover, fragmentation aids Cassius to separate his ethics from his job. The white voice adds another layer of performativity, distancing Cassius’ politics from the Cassius-at-work to such an extent that both selves can follow conflicting actions. By combining the fragmented self with bureaucratization and the many levels of management in a workplace, power and responsibility becomes even more diffuse. The fragmented Cassius is thus able to sell slave labour as a Power Caller and feel like he has no choice as it is his job.

In addition, Cassius is able to distance himself from his friends, as seen in the scene after he has been promoted to Power Caller and his former work colleagues are organizing a strike outside the RegalView building. Cassius gets called out by Squeeze on breaking the picket line, as he attempts to start his first day earning a high salary as a Power Caller. Squeeze and Salvador feel that Cassius has betrayed their friendship and their cause but Cassius shrugs off any responsibility. His first justification is material, announcing that “I’m playing from the bench, the bench where you sit and get your bills paid. You know my uncle is about to lose his house” (0:47:31-0:47:36). His need to get paid is apparent, but his co-workers tell him they are also fighting to get paid, “collectively”. Then Cassius verbalises the divide he sees between them: “My success has nothing to do with you, alright? You just keep doing whatever it is that you’re fucking doing, and I will root for you. From the side-lines” (0:47:42-0:47:50). His ability to see both a separate and unconnected allows him to profess support for the people he is turning his back on and to push away any sense of responsibility.

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Fig. 5. & Fig. 6. “S.T.T.S = Stick to the Script” (3:04 & 16:06)

The play of contradictory alienation and human capital must be placed within the context of accelerating mechanisation. The subsumption of workers under this machinic expansion retroactively affects them in making their own labour become more mechanised and automatized – their behaviours and actions more formulaic and controlled. At RegalView, the most important directive is to “Stick to the Script”, making the callers read out pre-formulated phrases from a paper script (see fig. 5 and fig. 6). Standardisation is accelerated in call centres by the use of computers (Kolinko) and a script. Workers are rendered more and more like machines, and the line between a human voice and a computer voice becomes more and more diffuse. A quote from a call centre worker illustrates this point “After the shift, you really feel like a machine that has repeated the same text a hundred times” (Kolinko). Telemarketers are increasingly mechanised affective workers, and as such both experience fragmentation and are able to refuse responsibility.

The meme-ification of news also contributes to this tendency, as well as being a backdrop into which meaning and responsibility is easily lost. Television is used by Boots Riley to give a context to the Oakland setting, portraying the mass media and advertising that the characters are surrounded by, as well as showing how news is reported. Through the many television screens appearing in different scenes of the film the viewer gets a sense of the dystopic senseless present. The most popular TV show is “I got the s#*@ kicked out of me!”, a reality TV show where people are beaten up on camera. Adverts for WorryFree’s live-in life-long contracts often populate the screen. Television also acts as an agent of capitalist co-option. In one of the scenes of Cassius crossing the picket line an activist protesting against WorryFree throws a soda can at Cassius, hitting him in the head. A few scenes later, the television news shows the same activist taking up a sponsorship with the soda company to promote their product. Soon after the moment in which Cassius attempts to take action against Steve Lift, the news reports that WorryFree’s stocks have gone up since the revelation of the Equisapiens workforce. The depiction of media in STBY thus shows capital’s ability to incorporate any critique lodged against it into its own logic. Moments of resistance appear not only as futile but are actually desired by capital, as the activist throwing the soda can or Cassius’ outrage on the news feeds into the spectacle of the media and abets capital. Perhaps Riley is suggesting that it is these

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moments of individual ambition that are most easily subsumed by capital, as it is through collective organizing and solidarity that resistance manages to persist in STBY.

Spilling Over

The darker side to the fragmented self, apart from the alienation and distancing it entails, is Cassius’ complete loss of control over these fragmented elements spilling over. Despite his commitment to his job and quartering himself in creating these separate personas, Cassius ends up not having control over when each self has to be performed. The threat of having to change scripts at a moment’s notice hangs over him. This forcing of non-consensual performance, the rising loss of autonomy appears in various scenes throughout the film. For example, work at the Power Callers’ office is a “white voice at all times” space. However, at CEO Steve Lift’s party – already an ambiguous mix of work and pleasure – Cassius is asked to perform his blackness in the form of rapping. Being the only black person in the room he is called upon to entertain an audience of white people. He fails at rapping as he has no talent for it but then he starts rhythmically repeating the n-word over and over again (see fig. 7). The now satisfied audience repeats it back to him, dancing to his “black” performance (see fig. 8). Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton write on the aggression that slurs represent and how “the repetition of derogation becomes the performance of white supremacist identity, over and over again. The derogatory term occupies the very centre of the structure of white supremacy” (58). In this scene the repetition of the term, thrown back at Cassius is absurd and harmful. These lines are drawn and diffused outside of racialised people’s control and consent, as any one of their personas can be interpellated at any moment.

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Fig. 8. White audience repeating the n-word back at Cassius (1:10:09)

Another moment of spill-over in the film is when Cassius wakes up in his own bed, next to his girlfriend Detroit, and unintentionally greets her with his white voice. This seemingly un-imposed spilling over of boundaries between Cassius-at-home and Cassius-the-Power-Caller points towards the actual porousness of these boundaries that Cassius was trying to maintain. The spilling over does not always have an obvious outside actor forcing it. Fisher’s account of the contradiction of capitalism as both “a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation” (CR 21) accounts for the fragmentation and spilling over that occurs. After his first day selling WorryFree’s slave labour as a Power Caller, Cassius goes to visit Detroit in the art exhibition she is setting up. His workday is over, and he is supposedly his own “private” person now, but as Detroit starts talking about capitalism and Africa, he literally tunes her out, and can only concentrate on the joint between her fingers. This scene depicts the inability to turn off work while at home, and as Crary expounds, the current breakdown of the work-life distinction in 24/7 capitalism. Thus, this increasing seepage of work into worker’s “private lives”, could be described as the racialisation and feminisation of time: in that more unremunerated time is rendered productive to capitalism.

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Chapter Two: Racial Capitalism in the Digital Age

The racial blindness of many Marxist accounts of capitalism has become increasingly apparent in recent critical theory. In this chapter my analysis of STBY is situated within the wider context of racial capitalism, and particularly the discussions on how race functions within the digital sphere. In examining racial capitalism, I present a critical engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and the theoretical mood of Afro-pessimism that has become dominant in Black Studies, as they offer both radically emancipatory analyses as well as pointing to significant limitations. I then consider how the discourses surrounding racialised bodies and technology are situated in a polarised debate, in which some uphold a utopic vision of a dis-embodied race-less democratic digital future against denunciations of the digital divide. Accounts of a digital divide illustrate the disparity between the technological poor and the technological rich, placing digitization as a historical continuity which is exacerbating pre-existing inequal systems of oppression such as racism. Seriously examining digital divide narratives and cybertopias, I will take elements from both and synthesize them with more techno-positive accelerationist anti-capitalist tendencies, analysing the interplay of race and technology in STBY.

Views of Racial Capitalism

The Black Radical Tradition versus Afro-Pessimism

STBY’s plot revolves around questions of race and labour, and as such, interacts with academic theories that set racial capitalism at their core. Afro-pessimism has increased its traction and popularity in Black Studies in recent years, especially in the US. Centred around the writing of its main proponent, Frank Wilderson III, it is a radical line of thinking that postulates Blackness as the abject of being. At the same time another current in Black studies, formalised in Cedric Robinson’s writings under the heading of Black Radical Thought exerts what at first glance appears as quite an opposing view to Afro-pessimism. The difference is most marked in their account of the figure of the slave. Wilderson asserts that Black people became Black on the Atlantic passage, and in fact have never ceased being slaves. Despite the official ending of slavery in the US, Wilderson argues that the structures that maintained slavery have continued unabated, and therefore there still exists a

master/slave relationship between all Black and white people. On the other hand, Robinson’s theory highlights the part of the consciousness of Black people not formed under slavery. He emphasizes the collective consciousness, past, and culture of the African people who were brought to the US. He finds great value in all the aspects of life that the racial regime was unable to eradicate or subjugate, documenting valuable resistant impulses throughout the whole history of slavery. Robinson’s more humanist understanding re-asserts agency whereas Wilderson’s radical thought is more unforgiving

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and calls for the abolition of the idea of humanity in order to abolish anti-Blackness, as incremental conditional inclusions in the social contract would never be enough to liberate Black people. Greg Burris summarises the gulf between both strands as follows, “for Wilderson, Blacks have not stopped being slaves. For Robinson, they were never really slaves to begin with” (92).

Nevertheless, both Wilderson and Robinson centre racial domination and slavery in their analysis of capitalism and critiques of Marxism. As Ruth Gilmore – writing in the anthology of Futures of Black Radicalism inspired in Robinson’s tradition – postulates, “the racial in racial capitalism isn’t secondary, nor did it originate in color or intercontinental conflict, but rather always group-differentiation to premature death” (163). For Robinson, capitalism is never not racial, even in the remotest European rural villages, as he argues that “hierarchies among people whose descendants might all have become white depended for their structure on group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, exploited by elites, as part of all equally exploitable nature-as-other, to justify inequality at the end of the day.” (qtd. in Gilmore 153). Capitalism requires inequality, which racism enshrines by categorizing people into hierarchized races (163). Alexander Weheliye has also echoed the description of race and racialisation as a hierarchical structure that disciplines and segregates people into “full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans”, with Blackness distinguishing between those who are considered fully humans and those who are not (Samudzi, “Bots Are Terrible”).

It is this intersection of Afro-pessimism’s and the Black Radical Tradition’s centring of race in capitalism’s structures that STBY presents. Riley’s film does not portray racism as a simple add-on to capitalism but illustrates how integral it is to its functioning. The company WorryFree – offering the “cheapest labour in the world” as it has “lifetime contracts so no wages needed” (1:09:53) – plays a central role in depicting how capitalism’s works. Capitalism needs a group of vulnerable people, people who are racialised and whose labour is taken for free. As WorryFree’s labour is essentially slave labour as many characters of the film mention, the film is commenting on the presence of slavery in all stages of capitalism, even when dressed up to appear as a smart solution that solves people’s housing and unemployment problems.

It is in this closeness to death that I see Wilderson and Robinson’s theories converging and interacting with STBY. Racism in capitalism functions to bring some groups closer to death, making them more vulnerable to exploitation, as well as rendering their bodies less grievable and more disposable (Butler 146). This is not to say that race and racism have exclusively capitalist origins but is “a claim that racial differentiation is intrinsic to capitalist value-creation” (Singh 36). Wilderson also links Blackness to necro-politics, taking social death as characterising Blackness, as for him violence is ontological and for civil society Black people are socially dead, their kin unvalued and seen as the very opposite, abject, of what “human” means. Closeness to death is intertwined with a scale of humanity, and for pessimists the concept of human is set against that of Blackness. As the

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Afro-pessimism editors wrote “Blackness [is] the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-Black” (9), such as white, worker or gay. The latter non-Black categories are all “human” and for the editors, Blackness is situated outside and not included in any of them or in the concept of humanity. As such, Blackness cannot be defined or encompassed within the definition of worker, which is why Afro-pessimism easily leads to nihilist abolitionist conclusions, or a negative identity politics, as put by Aarons.

Wilderson’s main tenet that stipulates that the ontological being of blackness is non-being has elicited critiques, from, among others, Annie Olaloku-Teriba who takes issue with Afro-pessimism’s very US-centric placing of Blackness at the very bottom of all oppressions, situating Blackness in the position of ultimate victimhood. In addition she reads in Afro-pessimism a return to race-science in which people have to prove their Blackness, and this identity is zealously guarded in an almost purist and essentialist manner. It does not allow space for the construction of solidarity nor does it allow for understanding intersectionalities that inform how people experience all different forms of oppression. Its particular positionality does not aim to universalise liberation but instead seeks after a more nationalist separatist sentiment (99), which Olaloku-Teriba critiques for not guaranteeing freedom for anyone, as she says a Black government would not be automatically pro-Black. Olaloku-Teriba contends Afro-pessimism’s assertion that the master-slave dialectic is based on a demand for mutual recognition, a demand revolving around humanity. She sides herself with Fanon in reiterating that the master does not want to be recognised as master, what the master wants is labour (107-108). Therefore, Olaloku-Teriba is firmly opposed against what she calls the (un)logic of anti-Blackness that affirms that the violence and oppression of Blacks forms the DNA of civil society, seen as unreasoned and always present. In contrast, for Afro-pessimists violence against other groups is seen as having a logic operating behind it, in which workers are exploited for their labour and Native Americans for their land.

However, taking Olaloku-Teriba’s critiques into account I think Afro-pessimism does offer useful analyses and ideas worth salvaging. The radical positionality of Blackness can serve as a place from which to demand liberation for all, and I think Wilderson perhaps aims towards this idea in expressing that the slave expands the demand put on the state in contrast to the worker. He writes on the Black subject’s potential for extending the demand place on state and capital formations, as while “the worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practises, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself” (“Gramsci’s Black Marx” 230). This impetus is echoed in working-class radical writer Richard Wright’s thought as well, as he assumed that Black workers experienced a more totalizing alienation than the white working classes (Robinson 299) and are thus the vanguard of the American working class.

Cassius Green can thus be read as epitomizing the condition of the self under capitalism, racialised and alienated. Rather than race being presented as an exceptionality and as a particular point

“White Voice at all times here”: The Portrayal of Telemarketing under Racial Capitalism in Sorry to Bother You