Between The Lines: The Online Art/chive of Informes Informales

Robots across the United States are buzzing with rage as tens of thousands of domestic robotics jobs continue to be lost to cheaper machines overseas.

The steady hum of activity has been replaced by eerie silence as assembly lines from California to New York are shutting down. Automated production jobs, which were once at the core of the American post-industrial economy, are being shipped to locales with lax labor standards such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, North Korea and Texas.

"What CEO's are doing is inhuman," said one machine that used to sort mail for an MCI billing facility in Illinois. "We used to run for eighteen hours a day sorting mail, sending out overdue notices, doing MCI's dirty work. Now they've got Pakistani machines that run 24 hours a day, seven days a week and work for half the cost. How can we compete? It just does not compute."

One robot, which lost a job in the high tech industry, says it was able to find work eventually, but at a much lower rate of pay.

"I used to handle Pentium III chips in a sterile laboratory environment, now I'm trying to pick up plush toys in a vending machine at Chuck E. Cheese," said the robot, which wished to remain anonymous. "It's humiliating. And to make matters worse, I'm doing it for chump change."

Some machines are able to find work in the military, in prisons and in the new Department of Homeland Security. But not all robots can fit into the new Gestapo-industrial economy, and the level of anger among America's working machines is starting to approach that of America's working people.

"I wish I could take the CEO of Chrysler and press him into the shape of a car fender," said one out-of-work automotive robot. " That's what I do. What do you expect? How am I supposed to do anything else?"

Mike Reaubrain, a spokesman for the multinational labor organization A.F.L.-C.E.O. said the nature of the global marketplace dictates that corporations must seek out the cheapest labor supply.

"Rights and decency be damned!" said Reaubrain.

Despite this cavalier attitude, however, sparks continue to fly as angry robots reach their limiters. One organization of nativist machines, the Revolutionary Robotic Defenders of Democracy (R2D2), sees multinational corporations as computer viruses that must be stopped. The group is so angry that they staged a recent power outage in the northeast United States and Canada to call attention to the issue.

"The corporations are causing the system to crash and they must be cleaned out like the viruses they are," said an R2D2 spokesfax/modem. "The government blamed older equipment for the recent blackout, but the truth is we took the power into our own hands. As long as corporations continue to rob us of our dignity and right to work, you can expect more equipment failures, computer crashes and power outages."

Because they are machines, the irony that robots once forced humans out of the workforce is lost on them. Needless to say, robots that replaced Black and Latino workers are among the hardest hit.

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