By culling through a history of computing technologies and racial capitalism from the last 150 years, this paper identifies a trans-historical figuration at work. Following, as case studies, the metaphorical lives and afterlives of the Mechanical Turk—a chess-playing automaton from the nineteenth century—and Maxwell’s Demon—a scientific thought experiment first conceived in 1867— in technical and cultural discourses, it traces the figure of a cyberhomunculus, a tiny science-fictional subject laboring underneath the machinic hood, that animates para-cybernetic discourse and makes computational work palpable. In doing so, it outlines the entangled origins of atomization, automation, and outsourcing, and demonstrates how racialized and classed social relations get miniaturized into the computer, resulting in the simultaneous valuation and erasure of posthuman labor.

通过对过去 150 年的计算技术和种族资本主义的历史进行筛选，本文确定了一个跨历史的形象在起作用。作为案例研究，机械土耳其人（19 世纪下棋的自动机）和麦克斯韦的恶魔（1867 年首次构想的科学思想实验）在技术和文化话语中的隐喻生活和来世，它追溯了一个cyberhomunculus，一个在机械引擎盖下工作的微小的科幻主题，它激发了准控制论的话语并使计算工作变得触手可及。在这样做的过程中，它概述了原子化、自动化和外包的纠缠起源，并展示了种族化和阶级化的社会关系如何被小型化到计算机中，