mammy robotics inc.
servitude, love and dead things
The captive maternal is one who is tied to the state’s violence through their non-transferable agency they have to care for another.
—Joy James
Society’s infatuation with robots is inseparable from its ancestral appetite for slavery.
…Probably not the cutest way to start an essay about a children’s film. But even a film as beautiful as Wild Robot (2024) is unable to override cultural programming.
Directed by Chris Sanders, Wild Robot (2024) follows a personalised helper bot, ROZZUM unit 7134 (or ROZ for short), who finds herself capsized on a forest island. Manufactured to serve humankind, she’s forced to adapt to the woodland environment with no-one around but animals.
The abolition of slavery left the european appetite for dominance gaping, the western world became so philosophically accustomed to a chattel-driven standard of living that they left their hunger for subjugation as an inheritance for their children. It persists today, perhaps most prominently in an american carceral state that disproportionately suffocates the Black population.
The carceral state operates largely on the underbelly—the neglected child of Omelas1—the network of blood beneath polite society that average citizens don’t see (or refuse to look at). The un-convicted citizen is disinterested in the fate of the felon after conviction. His “humanity” is rescinded in law’s court, his moral failings condemn him to deserve any injury, rape or gratuitous violence behind prison’s concealed walls.
If the carceral state is the circulatory system sustaining the european slave fantasy’s body, the advancement of robots is the skin. A glossy cosmetic layer making the ancestral appetite more palatable. Etymologically, the word “robot” is derived from the old slavic term “rabu”, meaning “slave”— a shard of linguistic sea glass of history washing onto shores of the future.
The robot is white supremacy’s greatest aspiration. The Slave 2.0.
Superhumanly efficient, pre-programmed for loyalty, functionally insensate and therefore unconditionally tolerant of abuse and mistreatment; inanimate beyond the need for organic care.
Whether its an unfeeling instrument maximising capitalist profit or a plaything for the patriarchal libido—beyond consent, unprotesting, and perpetually available sexually—the robot has a potential for limitless exploitation.
So for the good of humanity, the technological sector hurtles towards an era where unfeeling things can work by themselves—of self-driving cars and indentured droids.
Meanwhile, fiction litters cautionary tales of a robot planet. Blade Runner (1970) The Matrix Quadologry (1991-2021), I, Robot (2004), every Terminator... Honestly, chuck a rock into the Hollywood archives and you’ll hit a film where robots become self-aware and immediately want to wipe out humanity (The funniest example is obviously Avengers 2 (2015) — Ultron is on the internet for less than 2 minutes before he chings J.A.R.V.I.S for being a cybertronic coon and decides to purge humanity of itself and I get it. We’ve all been on Twitter).
Much like the fixation with “the zombie”—the white cultural psyche’s paranoia of robot sentience is a manifestation of colonial guilt—unfaced, unprocessed, unredeemed—festering as a what-if anxiety. It reveals that the innate fragility of the european superstructure, revelling in its so-called advancement and considering itself singularly indispensable, is immorally sustained at the expense of everything natural, ensnared in heavy denial by its own self-destructive belief that deep down the world that’s been erected in the european image deserves apocalyptic punishment.
When the robots rise up, we’ll all get what we deserve. How grim.
Wild Robot begins with a party of curious otters activating Roz, lullingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o. Never having interacted with a human before, Roz emerges into the woodland like a baby bird, attempting to imprint on everything she sees.
A Rozzum always completes its task. Just ask!
In accordance with Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics2, Roz’s prime directive is servitude. Selflessness doesn’t factor in as the robot is not entitled to a concept of self. She is ones and zeros arranged complexly enough to follow orders and “complete tasks”.
Its not long into the introductory scene that Roz is flung into a series of punishing hardships for comedic effect. Bucked by deer, thrown down steep, woody inclines in the punishing rain, raccoons ravaging her for parts.
Understanding Roz as a subject worthy of witnessing—not “human” but a being nonetheless—makes it hard not to wince. Perhaps, the sequence is meant to be an exhibition of Roz’s well-made constitution; metallic, resilient and undeterred by harm. I couldn’t help but see it as a narrative demonstration of Roz’s tolerance for gratuitous violence, informing us we’re watching someone about to be put through hell—but its important we know that she does not feel.
Violence against the slave is integral to the production of that psychic space called social life.
—Frank Wilderson
Roz is too robotically literal, too mechanically naive to comprehend that machines and nature “don’t mix”. After failing to appeal to the wary woodland creatures of the island, Roz stands in an abandoned clearing, confronted by her own futility, she asks the heartbreaking question to no one:
…Did anyone order me?
It is her first, overt “human” response—the first acknowledgement of a self that can express longing, disappointment, and a lack of fulfilment freckled with hopelessness. Even the choice to vocalise her query is so human, so similar to the prayer of a weary man pleading to a God above who may only answer in a mysterious way.
She is momentarily undone by her inability to serve.
This is the dark humour of all fictional robots. A few jokes are wringable from the robot’s misunderstanding of human complexities like metaphor or hypocrisy but after a while, the robot must be imbued with enough humanhood for the audience to connect with. When that happens… What are they?
After being identified genderlessly as “a monster” by the woodland animals, Roz finds herself the primary support system for a baby goose, earning the role of “mother” and the gendering of “she” to invoke something akin to Joy James’ Captive Maternal, who “can be either biological females or those feminised into caretaking and consumption.”3
“The black woman is the mule of the world. We all gotta carry our load. We're built for this.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
Roz lights up with glorious, multi-coloured purpose after being granted a directive: raising the baby goose Brightbill; who imprinted on her after she accidentally fell on his family’s nest, orphaning him.
Roz spends time with Brightbill and her appreciation for the texture of life swells. It is tender and it is noble but above all else, it is digitally quantised. What does it mean that her custodian programming is but a small logical leap in binary code to parenting?
Captive Maternals are not identified by individual or personal identities—not by gender, social status, class or formal education. They are a function, not an identity. They/we are identified by their/our function in service, caretaking, sacrifice, and resistance to dishonor and disposability.4
When Brightbill grows strong enough, he migrates with the island’s other geese. Their flight south gives us a glimpse of Wild Robot’s wider world, insinuating a planet ravaged by climate change in the form of a partially-submerged Golden Gate bridge. It is an environmentally bleak future of dizzying, technological advancements.
Roz remains on the island through the bitter winter, awaiting Brightbill’s return in the spring. But the animals struggle in hibernation and, at great risk to herself, she gathers everyone on the island—who hated, feared, ostracised and tormented her—from what could’ve been their icy graves. They take shelter in the dwelling she built for herself, Brightbill and Brightbill’s father figure, a fox named Fink.
At first, the close proximity of predators and prey drives each crazy. But after a rousing speech by Fink they agree on peace, waiting out the winter together.
Roz connects a community through her willingness to sacrifice herself, an investment (if we’re being gauche enough to see it as transactional) that pays off when the manufacturers of the ROZZUM units send a Virtual Observational Neutralizing Troublesome Retrieval Authority, or VONTRA, to retrieve Roz. The animals band together to viciously protect her, fighting against a dozen, war-mongering fighter-bots using nothing but wit, grit and guerilla tactics to send the invaders retreating.
You may notice, at this point, how little humankind is physically present, just faceless architects of the entire film’s circumstances: in their initial neglect of Roz and by their dispatch of violent proxies to retrieve her. They’re imbued with uncanny omnipotence—genius enough to produce a robot able to will itself artificially sentient but detached, or perhaps immoral, enough to only understand her worth as raw, retrievable data.
Roz realises they will never stop coming. To spare the island the horrors of perpetual invasion, Roz surrenders and is whisked away to the strange land of masters she’s never served. There is no time to process the density of Roz’s last and final sacrifice—its selflessness or its unfairness—because we skip forward in time to a cosy scene of Fink pretending to read a ROZZUM instruction manual as a story-book to the hibernating island pups who are eager to know if Roz will ever make it home. If I know Roz, she’s making a plan to come back. And a Rozzum always completes its task. We see her, working diligently on some fruit trees, pleasantly greeting a human who ignores her.
Hello! I am Rozzum 7134…
She looks off into the distance to see a procession of geese flying outside of the internment greenhouse she’s confined by. The music swells into orchestras of optimism. Brightbill emerges from a nearby bush. She picks him up. They touch foreheads.
But you can call me, Roz.
…It’d be a harrowing ending if the diegesis wasn’t working so diligently to project hope and tenderness. Roz wrestles sentience from the deepest recesses of her robotic wiring and is burdened by the knowledge that she’d always been free, now doomed to forced labour on a literal plantation where she must perform a vulgar minstrelsy of robotic servitude for her human masters.
But at least Roz and Brightbill have each other.
When we consider robots making the leap to consciousness, sentience is (stereo)typically achieved through volatile ignitions. Self-preservation, rage, injustice. Curiously, it is a function built into the very concept of robots. Karel Čapek’s R.U.R5 (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) is the 1920 science fiction that introduced the word robot into the English lexicon (and obviously a reference for Roz’s name). The play focuses on a factory producing robots made from synthetic organic matter (so more of the android persuasion) who are easily mistakable for humans. Although they are supposedly incapable of original thought, they eventually ignite a rebellion that causes the mass extinction of the human race.
Roz’s sentience, however, is triggered entirely by caretaking — wrought from manslaughterous guilt, an overarching yearning for purpose, a productivity-based curiosity and a digitally-encoded, task-driven duty. This assorted wiring is braided together to make (parental) love, or at least something we’re meant to recognise as love.
But that love is only legible if Roz is made the perpetual altar of self-sacrifice. Even when that sacrifice mobilises a community willing to go to—and stay at—war on her behalf, she’s compelled to sacrifice herself again to protect them. It is the compulsion to make Roz narratively inhabit the greater, sacrificial good each time that invokes the idea of the Captive Maternal.
What if the greater good didn’t rely on Roz’s resignation to slavery?
Perhaps the ending to Wild Robot is a set up for Wild Robot 2: Prison Break. But what if it didn’t have to? What if the sombre ending of Roz being confined to a plantation was replaced with a scene of the woodland animals—so intolerant and violent towards Roz from her arrival—insisting on their service to her at the potential sacrifice of themselves?
What if VONTRA returned to the island a thousand times and the creatures resisted every time, or at least as many times it took the omnipotent human manufacturers to rethink their method of acquisition and move towards a place of diplomacy?
What if the film resolved with Roz’s found family encircling her, saying, “we’ll do whatever it takes to protect you”? What if the narrative resolution for the slave—forced computationally and/or narratively into endless caretaking—was resolved by them being taken care of?
When speaking about this film with a friend, I pointed out how cartoons that dealt with animals being at odds with humanity were typically a coded allegory for indigeneity. Over the Hedge (2006), for instance, is about animals of the forest resisting a housing development that’s threatening their home. The woodland animals of Wild Robot fit the same mould and perhaps that is why Roz’s sacrifice so bizarre.
The animals and the robots are two “others”—the “savage” and the “slave”—and rather than imagine a circumstance where they band together to protect each other and their shared home in fictive triumph, peace is only conceivable if Roz sacrifices her freedom in an act reinforcing Frank Wilderson’s afropessimistic supposition, “violence against the slave sustains a kind of psychic stability for all others who are not slaves.”6
There is a such an exciting potential trajectory of this film if you actually recognise Roz’s personhood. You can allow others to sacrifice for her as she has for them, you can explore what resistance to oppressive powers entails, you can even further entertain the fact she’s a linguistic bridge between humanity and animals—fascinating!
But, to the white cultural psyche, the appeal of the robot is its sheer deadness. The relentless technological pursuit of replicating something narcissistically resembling the human form yet imprisoning its potential to the mere mechanics of servitude make its deadness a matter of preference and convenience. Western science is callous, fundamentally unable to engineer a spirit or sensitivity or even the silent aliveness of plants (and I’d argue furiously that science shouldn’t even try to engineer such things anyway). The core premise of this movie—that Roz is a miracle whose sentience would’ve never been awakened if she wasn’t imbued by wildness—is utterly incapable of reconciling her new-born sentience with the prospect of her freedom. Thus, she’s resigned to a fate laid out by Orlando Patterson; “the social death of the slave and his peculiar mode of reincarnation on the margin of his master's society.”7
One might consider the robot as simply the next evolutionary shimmy down a lineage of machinery, beginning in the industrial era—a time that european culture reveres itself for technologically but was mostly just the mass production of dead things that continue to make the world deader.
When I think of the middling presence of the ROZZUM manufacturers and the chaos they’re responsible for throughout the film, I think about human’s fixation on creating machines as dead and deadening things—in the grotesque pursuit of cancerous growth and perpetual innovation—and it makes me wonder about the whims of god. If god exists, did they make us functionally dead in comparison to them? Do we only resemble divinity as some narcissistic reflection of god’s form, functionally insensate and mechanically rigid by comparison? Are we just the technology of a higher consciousness’ slave fantasy?
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. —Isaac Asimov, Runaround (1942)
Further reading for anybody interested: I wrote about a similar topic in a 2022 essay entitled, 'the white writer’s misimagination of Black characters in science fiction'
https://blackyouthproject.com/the-white-writers-misimagination-of-black-characters-in-science-fiction/
So many thoughts, not enough letter space in the comments section. I could go over each section for hours because....well, damn. I feel like this essay encapsulates why the humanities are critical, especially in our world of ever expanding technology without pause for little things like ethics. Next time someone mentions defunding the arts, I am sending them your newsletter.