Chapter Text
They don’t give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, and even those are the cheap versions.
(All Systems Red)
"If You Want to Write" is drawing on an "exploited labor" reading of The Murderbot Diaries, rather than the reading of TMBD as a subversion of the constellation of neurodiverse/AI/robot/alien tropes. This isn't because I think those readings are wrong, but for this scene I wanted to explore how Murderbot's experience invokes the experience of low-class professionals and forced laborers.
When I look at Murderbot's illiteracy through the lens of tropes about mechanical life, I see a dramatic subversion. Typically in science fiction, a mechanical person has access to more information than the humans around it, and humans find this intimidating. But the mechanical person is unable to properly contextualize its information, because it has little insight or wisdom. Its character arc often involves developing that insight so that it can better help its humans achieve their goals.
Meanwhile, Murderbot? Murderbot's got insight and wisdom in spades. It was made specifically for intuitive context-evaluation.
you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter.
(All Systems Red)
In fact, Murderbot's better at intuition and critical thinking than most of its clients, despite having so much more to cope with. So I want to read the text thinking about Murderbot's uneducated intuition as an invocation of something, not a subversion, and see where that takes me. Because as fun as subversions are, they can't get a story very far since subversion is defined by what it's not–and TMBD goes a lot further than a simple subversion reading could carry it. (This is perhaps best embodied in the conclusion of All Systems Red, where Murderbot subverts the expectations of a "robot lives with human friends" happy ending or a "robot sacrifices itself for human friends" tragic ending—and then goes far beyond that subversion: it sets out in search of entelechy independent of its human friends. Pure subversion doesn't stretch like that, there's something more to be found here.)
I know a lot of people who resonate with the illiterate-Murderbot interpretation are seeing it as a neurodiverse thing (and I don't disagree!). But for me illiteracy is a common shared trait of exploited workforces: by restricting education the master/employer controls access to "dangerous" ideologies, makes it harder for workers to gain context for their exploitation or to coordinate action, leaves them dependent on the master/employer for basic services they could otherwise learn themselves, and gates access to many kinds of joy. (The last point, Murderbot would whole-heartedly agree, is not the least important.)
As I progress through the novella trilogy with this new idea in mind, I start to see that Murderbot's incomplete education is one of the things it has in common with humans in the Corporation Rim, though each group Murderbot meets is missing different chunks of a wholesome education.
Education isn't just reading and writing or the memorization of facts; it's critical thinking and logical analysis, the ability to evaluate situations. These are skills that, time and again, I see are sorely lacking in the Corporation Rim's labor force. On RaviHyral highly trained specialists are taken advantage of because you can get extensive job training and still have massive exploitable gaps in your critical thinking.
“Maybe Tlacey wants us to work for her again,” Tapan said hopefully.
Probably, before she murders you, I didn’t say.
(Artificial Condition)
And on the Transport to Milu, I see how basic failures of the Rim's education system (but let's be real, it's not a failure is it? this is the desired effect) create populations that can't process when they're signing abusive contracts.
I had asked Ayres if the twenty years was measured by the planetary calendar or the proprietary calendar of the corporation who maintained the planet, or the Corporation Rim Recommended Standard, or what? He didn’t know, and hadn’t understood why it mattered.
(Rogue Protocol)
Clearly Murderbot and other constructs are not unique in getting only the training needed for their corporation-determined jobs. And so lower-class Corporation Rim humans must have an underground culture valuing literacy and education, just like those in parallel contemporary communities that manifest in practices like distance learning, traveling librarians, and unofficial schools. Which is why I've written for Murderbot a human laborer who, at the earliest opportunity, spends his evenings pouring over a child's literacy module.
He never learns this, but the anonymous worker in "If You Want to Write" inducted our friendly construct into a proud tradition of clandestine education as a form of resistance and empowerment, suggesting solidarity between human and construct. Their experiences are not the same, but they have a lot in common.
It's almost like I've got certain themes I keep revisiting.