“Prove You're Human”: Fetishizing Material Embodiment and Immaterial Labor in Information Networks

Abstract

In the information age, are theories of subject formation based on material bodies becoming obsolete? Rather than evacuating embodiment from signification, the computational logic of informatics has fetishized it. Seeming to give up on the performing body, the ontology of information has nevertheless preserved it in a disavowed form. Returning to turning points in the development of information ontology—from Alan Turing's initial proposal of machine consciousness to the contemporary proliferation of the Turing test in mundane online transactions—this essay demonstrates how dematerialized code has continued to rely on indexical traces of material embodiment as markers of human subjectivity.