Oriental Cyborg

“Technology is only barbaric when wielded by a barbarian” is Aditi Kini’s crisp summary of the colonizer mindset. Their debut chapbook, Oriental Cyborg, considers how domination through machine and social control has led to a world in which the titular cyborg is as faceless and tractable as a Čapekian robot. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon Mechanical Turk is just one of its incarnations.

Kini’s dry humor leavens this researched, essayistic work. “I sometimes acutely feel the misfortune of being born into a Brahmin family with not one, not two, but three cousins who are lifestyle bloggers,” they admit in one passage. In an “addendum” to their “positionality statement,” they acknowledge: “I’m aware I am not an Oriental Cyborg I just own a MacBook Pro.”

The writer paints a stark picture of the worker incensed at “the ‘foreigner taking all of our jobs’”; here foreigner can mean a machine or an immigrant, since both are “without face, as they always will be.” Meanwhile, “Digital Nomads […] maraud around the world.” The book puts in sharp relief the distinction between those who can choose identities and those who find identities imposed on them.

The author’s ambivalence about their own place along a continuum of alienation and belonging adds a welcome complexity. On a visit to a coastline some kilometers from their father’s ancestral home in India, the feeling of “My hair looked great. I was like: I’m finally home” quickly vanishes when their clothes and “loud English” cause them to be perceived as a foreigner. This tension comes to a head when the author poses the question, “What’s the difference between an immigrant and an expat?” They imagine the answer they’ll receive: “Stop it, Aditi. You were born in the U.S.”