They Only Want Us from the Neck Down
Across the airport car park, a figure in a mad dash—a sprawl of limbs in motion, with bags flapping like the wings of some disoriented bird. The bus doors have nearly closed, but the driver catches sight of this runner in his rearview mirror. A pause, a sigh, a small smile—and the doors hiss open. The figure leaps in, breathless, half-laughing[1].
“Thank you,” they gasp, relieved, settling into the first seat next to the driver.
The driver smiles, a small grin softening his face. “No problem,” he says, his voice a blend of kindness and mischief. “It was good entertainment. You looked hilarious.” The driver nods toward the back of the bus, where another has just pulled in. “People are always sprinting for this bus. They don’t realize I’m just part of a rotating system, you see. I can’t leave until the next one’s arriving, and we are all timed to ensure one smooth circuit.” He gestures to a small computer display above his seat, lines of letters with countdowns. “Our times and locations are monitored to keep us in sync.” As the conversation develops it becomes apparent that the plan is to introduce autonomous vehicles, and while these autonomous systems are still being developed for public deployment, advance preparations are made by modifying existing labour so the human might be faded out and replaced. His finger taps the monitor, and he shrugs with resignation: “They only want us from the neck down.”
This line, dropped half in jest, lingers, and it’s clear he knows it cuts close to the bone. He says it lightly, even as he taps the monitor that blinks in synchrony with the machinery that surrounds him. Outside, beyond the bus windshield, the airport stretches on, grid upon grid of parking lots, shuttles, terminals, all set to the rhythm of scheduled, sanctioned movement. The would-be traveller listens but suddenly realizes they have left their passport in their car and pleads to be let off. They have not moved far, but are now on a busy road next to, but outside, the parking lot. The driver brings the bus to a stop, announcing that this won’t happen once the self-driving buses are here, it is in fact against traffic regulations to stop and disembark on main road. In this small act of halting the bus and opening the door, a rule has been bent, a choice has been made, outside of the predesigned system. The driver, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the door lever, has given more than just a ride; he’s let a small rebellion slip through.
people are slowly becoming tools, machines in sync, bodies in motion, but rarely minds
They only want us from the neck down. There’s a cruel precision in his words. They echo, as truths sometimes do, a whisper that never quite leaves. They only want us from the neck down, a refrain for the age of automation, when humanity is valued for output, for the precision of hands, the endurance of bodies, the compliance of motions. The driver’s casual remark hints at a larger reality, one in which people are slowly becoming tools, machines in sync, bodies in motion, but rarely minds.
He is not alone, and this experience is far from limited to the confines of a bus cab. It spills out, seeps into everything—a slow, pervasive reduction of self, a system hungry to strip away all but the functional remains. The concept of Homo Economicus has its roots in the Enlightenment: the self-interested individual, maximizing under scarcity, the model of a selfish being. Mainstream economics built its understanding of humanity around this figure, and in doing so, we’ve crafted policies that reflect this vision—policies that frame us as fundamentally atomised and self-serving, that organize the labour market, education, even healthcare, around an idea of the individual as separate from family, from community. This model has long been critiqued within anthropology and farther afield, what kind of humanity does this vision deliver? The question is not rhetorical. It shapes our lives, our possibilities, our sense of ourselves. And the answer we experience more and more, is fungibility—humans as units of function, replaceable, indistinct, reduced to utility. The fungible subject has emerged.
The Architectonics of Fungibility
In that small cab, the driver’s words land with the weight of a truth no longer hiding in plain sight: people are valued not as social individuals, not as thinking, feeling beings, but as parts of a system comparable to plumbing, circulation with as little leakage of capital as possible-components whose worth lies in efficiency, ability to execute, compliance. Marks of social identity are effaced – age, illness, gender, quirks – labour risks at best, irrelevant at worst. The bus driver knows, as well as anyone, that his job is not about his wisdom or character but about his capacity to keep the system running on time. He is needed not as a whole person, but merely a body that drives the bus. A cog. A function. A fungible human.
Fungibilis, in Roman law meaning that which is replaceable, derived from fungī to perform, to fulfil an obligation. Once, this meant something closer to duty, an ethic of service. The office existed beyond the person who held it, a duty to the role they performed. Now, that meaning has hollowed out, leaving only the performance devoid of a sense of duty. The requirement is not to be good, or just, or wise, but merely to be interchangeably functional. To show up and be slotted in. A disposable, exchangeable part in a system that doesn’t just permit replaceability—it depends on it.
Fungibility is a property of some commodities – gold, wheat, oil – items whose value is a property of sameness, their ability to be exchanged without differentiation. But now, it’s not just goods that bear this quality. Homo Ludens, first degraded to Homo Economicus, has degraded further to Homo Fungibilis– the human reduced to a resource, judged not by their complexity but by their utility. The consequences are vast: economic insecurity, sure. But beneath that, something more insidious- a creeping existential erasure. A quiet undoing of the self, reduced to action, devoid of meaningfulness.
Automation is no new spectre. It has been creeping in for some time, breaking labour into ever smaller, ever more fungible tokens.
Long before the flickering digits on the bus driver’s dashboard, before Uber and Amazon and the sterile precision of automated logistics, the dream of a perfectly oiled machine – one without the frictions of human needs – was already taking form. Marx saw it in the factories of his time: workers no longer craftspeople, no longer authors of their own labour, but interchangeable units of production, moving in time to the demanding rhythm of capital. The carpenter is no longer a carpenter; their wizened woody touch no longer matters. What matters is not the singularity of the craftsperson’s work, but its measurability, its abstraction into capital. Automation is no new spectre. It has been creeping in for some time, breaking labour into ever smaller, ever more fungible tokens. Meredith Whittaker (2023) notes how the social contours for this can be seen in slave plantations of the British Empire, she argues the work of English polymath Charles Babbage shares a common theme in his development of ideas around labour control and his development of plans for calculating engines, namely to offset labour risk via disciplining and segmentation in order to deskill tasks and subsequent automation of menial tasks. Harry Braverman (1974), in his seminal work Labour and Monopoly Capital, charted this erosion of skill and autonomy, showing how industrial capitalism systematically deskilled workers, reducing them to mere instruments of efficiency. He traced the shift from craft-based production to mechanised labour, where control was stripped from the worker and absorbed into the logic of the machine.
And yet, something new is apparent. If Braverman’s worker could still grasp onto the remnants of skill, find some refuge in craft, today’s workers are left with less, an appendage of an algorithm. Their work stripped to its barest mechanics. If the machine becomes total, what is left for the human? Where is our meaningful action vis-à-vis Graeber (2001), where he posits a foundational base for value?
Contemporary automative possibilities with increasingly capable AI systems have pushed this idea to its furthest edge, turning workers into mere extensions of, and within, larger systems. Warehouse workers scan and lift, track packages along predetermined lines. Call centre employees read from scripts designed by unseen hands. Even doctors, those paragons of expertise, now consult algorithms that rank their decisions, nudging them into preordained paths and diagnostic treatments. The driver’s story is just another variation- the same logic, the same displacement of thought, the same hollowing out. It is not his mind that matters, only his body. And when that body is no longer needed? Another will take its place.
The economic risks of age, illness, temperament, death – once woven into the fabric of labour – are now externalised, handed over to the market to sort. To be fungible is to lose any claim to uniqueness, to be slotted in and swapped out at market demand. It is to exist as a resource, valuable only in its functionality, discarded the moment it no longer serves. This is a great inversion: we do not shape our systems, our systems shape us. They mould us, press us into their efficiencies, train us to see ourselves as they do- replaceable, interchangeable, unremarkable.
To be fungible is to be forgettable. And what is more terrifying than that?
The Reach of Automation Beyond the Workplace
The driver’s words reverberate beyond the confines of his small cab: “They only want us from the neck down.” It isn’t just him, nor is it only on the bus. In homes across the city, smart devices claim to “learn” our preferences- much like the small computer above his seat, blinking, always watching. But just as the driver knows he is only part of the machine, we, too, adjust ourselves to the rhythms of the smart home. We move, we think, we anticipate in ways that fit neatly into its technical needs, we speak differently for Alexa. And in doing so, we become prey to the system of diffuse disciplining (Cuffe 2021) that disperses loci of responsibility and accountability – counterparts to ethical behaviour – we become a little bit more like the machine- predictable, compliant, forgetting the little acts of care and of play that make us human.
Click here. Tap there. Follow the script. We have learned to work in fragments, to perform as micro-tasks ourselves. Ilana Gershon and Melissa Cefkin (2017) have traced this dismembering of labour — the way it is split into hyper-atomised actions, each assigned a fraction of a penny, a tick on a digital ledger. The warehouse worker lifts but does not place, the call centre agent reads but does not think. A disjointed existence, where humans are left to stitch together what the system has broken apart. The bus driver’s half-joke about being wanted only ‘from the neck down’ is no joke at all- it is the outcome of a logic that has been refining itself for centuries. Each move, each gesture, is just another node in an endless process, its human executor necessary a while yet, but interchangeable.
Public spaces are no different. Surveillance cameras and predictive algorithms calculate our movements, assess our behaviours, anticipate our actions- not to facilitate, but to streamline, to contain. In government and corporate offices, data flows between agencies, collecting, categorising, discarding, until only the most convenient labels remain. The driver’s phrase takes on a new resonance here. Automation does not demand people in their fullness, their histories, their complexities. It demands bodies reduced to data, to efficiency, to utility.
They do not consider context; they calculate risk.
In policing, for example, algorithms now claim the ability to predict crime. AI systems scan patterns of behaviour, identifying risks not through understanding, not through stories, but through statistical probabilities, detached and decontextualised. These systems do not see individuals; they see threats, tendencies, potential liabilities. They do not consider context; they calculate risk. And in a system that prioritises efficiency over humanity, individuals become units to be monitored, managed, controlled producing more data for more surveillance and yet more disciplining.
To be fungible in these terms is to be stripped of story, to become a body watched, directed, surveilled without the richness or messiness that is human life. In a world that prizes precision over personality, efficiency over empathy, the human is seen as a liability- something to be optimised out unless it can function without variance, without disruption, without identity. The future automation envisions, is not one of liberation, nor of convenience, but of compliance. A world where we are seen only in fragments, processed only in fractions. Where, in the end, the machine will not even need us from the neck down.
The Automated Border
Nowhere is this shift toward fungibility more visible than at the border. Here, automation has sculpted a system that evaluates people not as persons but as profiles, as risk factors, as liabilities to be calculated. This is not new. The border has always been a site of sorting, of bodies deemed admissible and bodies to be cast aside. Once, it was the inked stamp, the scrutinising gaze of an official, the barbed wire delineating who belonged and who did not. Now, it is biometric scans, predictive analytics, the quiet hum of an algorithm parsing histories into patterns of risk.
For asylum seekers and refugees, the border is a sieve where humanity is reduced to numbers, fingerprints, case files. The deeper folds of a life – the weight of exile, the jagged edges of loss, the irreducible story of self – find no purchase here. Decisions are made swiftly, with minimal human intervention, because efficiency is the altar of the modern border. To streamline, to manage, to control: these are the imperatives. And so, the human story is stripped away, replaced by base facts, by yes/no categories, by checkboxes that decide who may pass and who is left to wait, to beg, to disappear.
The border, like the factory before it, has always functioned through processes of dehumanisation.
The logic is not unfamiliar. The border, like the factory before it, has always functioned through processes of dehumanisation. In industrial capitalism’s rise, workers were slotted into rigid systems of production, valued only for their output, their discipline, and their ability to fit within the preordained structure. At the border, this logic extends itself: a person is no longer a person but a case, an input, a potential burden or an acceptable resource. The history of labour and the history of security entwine here—both systems rooted in managing bodies, disciplining movement, ensuring that only the ‘right’ ones get through.
At the border, you become data. A risk assessment, a metric, a number waiting to be processed. The paradox: you must prove your worth through the very system that erases you. To be fungible is now the aspiration—if only you could fit just enough, be seamless enough, pass through unnoticed. But there is no neutrality in these calculations. They are trained on past exclusions, shaped by histories of fear, of suspicion, of power reinforcing itself. The ones deemed undesirable are not merely turned away; they are ejected from the record of recognition itself. The checkpoint does not just deny entry—it denies existence.
To stand before an automated border, to be judged by a machine without empathy, is to feel that bitter indignity—to know that you are only what you represent, never who you are. And if you fail to meet the criteria, you are not just refused; you are erased, unaccounted for, disposable. In this moment, the fullness of your humanity is made invisible, even to yourself.
Resisting the Drift to Fungibility
For some, of course, new automative efficiencies grant benefits- speed of service, reduced stress, new leisure. If you benefit from streamlined efficiency, you ought to ask why you have such access. Has anything been lost along the way?
But there is, perhaps, still a way out- a way to resist this drift toward a world that values only how we conform to a system, that sees us only from the neck down. The bus driver, in his choice to open the door, to hold the line of humanity, offers a glimpse of a different kind of world, one where small acts of defiance are still possible, where kindness and choice can slip through the cracks of an automated system.
What counts as rebellion? The driver’s small acts – waiting, chatting, holding the door open, letting a passenger off, affording moments for care to slip through – feels like resistance, a whisper of humanity amid the automation. But sometimes, kindness is not an interruption to the machine; it is its very lubricant. Michael Burawoy (1979) noticed that workers on a shop floor made games of their gruelling routines, finding ways to reclaim dignity within the grind. Laura Bear’s (2015) work on riverboat workers in India illustrates how labour, even under exploitative conditions, is not just about survival but about maintaining the very infrastructures that uphold economic systems. Her ethnography shows how these workers, bound by cycles of debt, ensure that the boats – and by extension, the broader capitalist flows – keep moving. They do not dismantle the system, but they keep it afloat, holding together the fragments just enough to let the rusting machinery continue its debt-driven journey. What if the small rebellions are not cracks in the system, but the glue that keeps it together?
This is the cruel trick of automation: it does not eliminate human labour, it simply shifts it to the margins, hiding the hands that smooth its processes, patch its failures. And perhaps the greatest irony is that we still fight to prove our worth within it. The driver smiles, lets the passenger off. The machine will one day do this better… we are told. But will it? And if it does, what will be left for us? Even skills of creativity are being encroached upon by the ‘intelligent’ fruits of our labour.
to live is to engage in the uncalculated, the unnecessary, the inconvenient
The quiet rebellion in those small ethical acts – choosing to wait for a stranger, to offer a hand, to break the script – is an assertion of humanity in a world that would otherwise strip it away. To wait, to listen, to choose to see beyond the function, is to reclaim what automation would erase. And though these actions may seem small, in a world increasingly dominated by machines, they are radical, they are back to the root of who we are. They are within all of us.
The driver knew something that cannot be automated. That to live is to engage in the uncalculated, the unnecessary, the inconvenient. To resist fungibility is not to abandon structure, but to insist on humanity within it. And so, he opened the door. He chose. He made this moment his own. The machine will never understand that. It cannot. Because the machine cannot recognise the weight of a fleeting moment made significant by the ethical.
Beyond Efficiency and Control and Towards a Cyber-Sociality
Technological modes in their current guise do not have the social as their guide. But we can. In those moments where the response might be computer says no, let us choose otherwise. Let us choose to see, to hear, to help. To insist that morality does not collapse under the weight of efficiency, that the social is not subsumed by the system, so that technological operations might be reconstituted to include the texture of humanity.
We do not resist by rejecting the machine outright. We resist by refusing to let it swallow us whole. We insist that systems designed to serve people do not erase the people in the process. That even as we streamline, optimise, and automate, we refuse to let go of the right to hesitate, to choose, to feel. The driver’s phrase lingers—they only want us from the neck down—not as lament, but as a warning. A quiet insistence that we are more. That we must be more.
Because in the end, it is not just function, but the wholeness of being – the messiness, the generosity, the irreducible, the unruly humanness of it all – is fundamentally important. And maybe, if we hold onto that, if we refuse to be whittled down to the essential and the efficient, we can find our way back.
Not just to each other. But to ourselves[2].
References
Bear, L., 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River, Stanford University Press.
Braverman, H., 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press.
Burawoy, M., 1982. Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism, Chicago University Press.
Cuffe, J. B., 2021. “Diffuse disciplining: On the pervasive nature of autonomous systems and its consequences”, in Završnik, A. and Badalič, V. (eds) Automating Crime Prevention, Surveillance, and Military Operations, Cham: Springer, pp. 163–182.
Gershon, I. & Cefkin, M., 2017. “The Problem with Jobs”, American Anthropologist website, November 7.
Graeber, D., 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Springer.
Whittaker, M., 2023. “Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control”, in Logic(s), Issue 19: supa dupa skies (move slow and heal things).
Featured image by Andy Kelly via Unsplash
[1] This essay draws inspiration from CyberSocial, an Irish Research Council funded project led by Dr. James Cuffe in University College Cork, Ireland. The project examines the ongoing entanglements of digital and technological transformations in urban life, focusing on how these transformations embed and reshape what it means to live in ‘smart’ cities. The CyberSocial project grapples with the tensions between technics and culture, asking how technics and human values reformulate themselves through dialogical exchanges, and how these changes embed – or fail to produce – new social contours.
[2] We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the reviewer for their generous and incisive feedback on this piece. Their insights encouraged us to interrogate the historical lineage of automation more thoroughly and to question the ambivalence of small acts of rebellion. Their thoughtful engagement has enriched this work in ways that we could not have done alone. Thank you for pushing this piece to be more layered, more precise, and more attuned to the complexities at hand.
Abstract: In an age where automation increasingly shapes our lives, from the workplace to the border, we find ourselves valued less as social beings and more as fungible actants- bodies in motion, effective but interchangeable. Through the seemingly small but deeply human act of a bus driver waiting for a late-running passenger, we reflect on what it means to be needed only “from the neck down.” This essay proposes homo fungibilis as a more accurate articulation of current experience than the once feted homo economicus; where our stories, empathy, and unpredictability are effaced and ignored and people become profiles, risks, and data points. Our value as human beings transmogrified, centering on the ability to fulfil external function. Nuances of judgment, kindness, and care are left behind. In the age of Homo Fungibilis, we argue for small rebellions- moments of ethical choice and care that defy disciplining automation, reclaiming the human from effacing systems.
