In an epilogue that examines the current shift from human to animatronic performers in film and video, this book concludes with a meditation on the contemporary ambition to “go viral.” The history of computer-generated imaging (CGI) technology suggests that, in its pixelated form, a new - if also contested - concept of self has emerged for the twenty-first century. While fantasies of disembodiment and photo-realistic avatars of domination and destruction persist in contemporary media, pixilation offers us an alternative model of self that presages a post-Anthropogenic era. By fracturing the contours of a reified identity, the pixelated image invites us to re-envision ourselves as multi-celled organisms capable of co-existing with other such life forms within a shared biosphere. Inscribed in this new performance form, in other words, is yet more evidence for the ways we seek to comprehend and adapt to changes in our ever-modernizing world.

This chapter explores why the liberal humanist dispositif cannot initiate a better future. Returning to Wynter’s critiques of the human as a colonial category, it links her work with Lisa Lowe’s analysis of labor, empire, and humanization to argue that the human of liberal humanist tradition is fundamentally a category of whiteness. It reads two speculative fiction texts: HBO’s reboot series Westworld, which positions viewers to sympathize with robotic Hosts who are repeatedly traumatized by humanity’s violent fantasies in its empire-themed recreation parks; and Jo Walton’s Thessaly series that explores the related issues of how a culture determines personhood and that it requires someone to perform the labor traditionally done by slaves, by positing an experiment in which Plato’s Republic becomes a material reality. Contextualized within the real subsumption of life by capital, these narratives about the precarious lives of robotic entities are also about the lives of people who are excluded from the protections conferred by the status “human” and discourses of human rights. Thus, the chapter concludes, dehumanization remains a potent force in globalized neoliberalism.

This conclusion offers a new template for approaching the apocalyptic landscape of contemporary advanced capitalist America, where environmental, political, racial, and class crises tend to simmer in silos, and where both Indians and southerners occupy outdated and discrete categories of stereotype. Gesturing toward new texts in the realm of virtual reality, this closing chapter demonstrates that Indigenous exceptionalism lingers in the American imagination as a confounding contradiction between the concealed horrors of national origins and the transcendent virtues of wisdom, catharsis, and deliverance. The Indians are always doomed, and yet they always manage to rise above as well - a paradox that the American narrative desperately needs and clings to, particularly when basic concepts like humanity and reality have become the slipperiest of conceits. Despite how acutely we might want to rescue the Indian from the heterotopias of modernity, these texts remind us again and again that these imaginative sites are the beginning and the end of our realities.