The Armor You Can’t Take Off

For a stretch of my life I was academically catastrophic at accounting. Not in the way people mean when they say they’re bad at math—I mean genuinely, systematically failing, with a kind of unconscious dedication that bordered on artistry. I told myself it was a principled refusal to become an economic automaton: a creature of balance sheets, trained to process the world in columns of debits and credits, sitting in a bank somewhere shuffling ledgers until I died. A terrible fate. I was equally afraid of mutated green space spiders, for what that’s worth. Maybe I was just a lazy bastard who needed a more heroic story.

Marina Diamandis almost certainly isn’t singing about double-entry bookkeeping on I Am Not a Robot, but the phrase lands the same way regardless. The song is about the cost of emotional armor—the thing you construct around yourself to appear functional and low-maintenance and fine, which eventually hardens into something you can’t remove even when you’d want to. She sings it with just enough fragility underneath the production that it actually moves. It’s a quiet song about a very loud problem.

The robot fear isn’t really about machines. It’s about what happens when you optimize yourself into usefulness and out of feeling—when the version of you that shows up to things, answers messages, performs competence on cue, has quietly replaced whoever used to live there. I, Robot put the monsters in chrome chassis and made them easy to shoot. The real ones are slower and don’t announce themselves.

The obvious exception is Bender, who gets a pass for absolutely everything.