ESSAY
text by JACKIE WANG
artwork by XAVIER VEILHAN
excerpt from carceral capitalism, published by semiotext(e), 2018, intervention series 21.
I grew up with a little brother who had a RoboCop toy, and we would sit around taking turns touching the chest plate button that would activate actuated electronic speech. The RoboCop toy had three phrases: “Drugs are trouble,” “Drop it!” and “Your move, creep.” For the toy RoboCop, criminals were the enemy, but we were implicated; we were the “you,” the addressees, the potential targets. We were the creeps of “your move, creep,” — it was we, the ones holding the toy, and not the Omni Consumer Products corporation, who used agent Murphy’s half-dead body as raw material for the creation of a cyborg cop designed to clean up the streets and pave the way for commerce and development in a lawless, dystopic Detroit.
Little cop in the…