Mechanized Death and Disposable Lives: A Marxist, Technocritical, and Necropolitical Reading of Wilbert Salgado’s “The Human Obsolescence Company”

 

A stark dystopian tableau

AI-generated picture by Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano in December 2025

Introductory Note to the Reader      After reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or the many stories I have enjoyed by Isaac Asimov, dystopian fiction has naturally become part of my nightly reading routine before going to sleep. When I first encountered The Human Obsolescence Company, written by my friend and Nicaraguan author Wilbert Salgado, I immediately thought, “This short story of Wil’s is a great example of what dystopia is meant to be and how he criticizes the so-called ‘contemporarian’ world we live in.”      In this blog entry, Wilbert kindly shares his story so readers can experience it directly. What follows is my literary analysis of the text, this time through a Marxist lens, while also incorporating technocritical and necropolitical approaches to understand the unsettling vision of humanity portrayed in this powerful dystopian narrative.

Mechanized Death and Disposable Lives: A Marxist, Technocritical, and Necropolitical Reading of Wilbert Salgado’s “The Human Obsolescence Company”

	Abstract This paper offers a Marxist, technocritical, and necropolitical reading of Wilbert Salgado’s dystopian short story The Human Obsolescence Company. Through its portrayal of a forensic pathologist who mechanically processes the deaths of state-sanctioned “obsolete” individuals, the narrative exposes how bureaucratic rationality, technological control, and class stratification converge to devalue human life. The analysis examines plot structure, characterization, symbolism, and intertextual connections to Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka. The essay argues that Salgado’s story dramatizes the transformation of human beings into disposable units within a technocapitalist regime that manages life and death through algorithmic ethics. Ultimately, the pathologist’s moment of hesitation functions as the final symbolic resistance against a system that renders humanity obsolete.	Keywords: Dystopia, Marxist Literary Approach, Technocriticism, Necropolitics, Bureaucracy, Wilbert Salgado, Aldus Huxley, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Literary Criticism
	Resumen Este artículo ofrece una lectura marxista, tecnocrítica y necropolítica del cuento distópico The Human Obsolescence Company de Wilbert Salgado. A través de la figura de un patólogo forense que procesa mecánicamente muertes autorizadas por el Estado, el relato revela cómo la racionalidad burocrática, el control tecnológico y la estratificación de clase convergen para desvalorizar la vida humana. El análisis examina la estructura narrativa, la caracterización, el simbolismo y las conexiones intertextuales con Aldous Huxley, George Orwell y Franz Kafka. El ensayo sostiene que la historia dramatiza la transformación del ser humano en un elemento desechable dentro de un régimen tecnocapitalista que administra la vida y la muerte mediante una ética algorítmica. Finalmente, la vacilación del protagonista simboliza la última resistencia ante un sistema que vuelve obsoleta a la humanidad.
	Resumo Este artigo apresenta uma leitura marxista, tecnocrítica e necropolítica do conto distópico The Human Obsolescence Company, de Wilbert Salgado. Através do patólogo forense que processa mecanicamente mortes autorizadas pelo Estado, o texto revela como a racionalidade burocrática, o controle tecnológico e a estratificação social convergem para desvalorizar a vida humana. A análise aborda a estrutura narrativa, a caracterização, o simbolismo e as relações intertextuais com Aldous Huxley, George Orwell e Franz Kafka. O ensaio argumenta que o conto dramatiza a transformação do ser humano em um elemento descartável dentro de um regime tecnocapitalista que administra vida e morte por meio de uma ética algorítmica. A hesitação final do protagonista simboliza a última resistência contra um sistema que torna a humanidade obsoleta.

Introduction: Bureaucracy, Technology, and Manufactured Death

Wilbert Salgado’s short story “The Human Obsolescence Company” unfolds within a bureaucratic dystopia where death has become a function of administrative precision. Through the experience of a forensic pathologist working under the Human Obsolescence Program (HOP), the text interrogates the commodification of life, the ethics of technology, and the normalization of state-sanctioned extermination. The story lends itself to a multifaceted analysis through plot and structure, characterization, themes and motifs, and symbols and style. It also rewards readings through Marxist criticism, technocritical theory, and necropolitical analysis. In dialogue with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (2009), Salgado’s dystopia redefines the human within late capitalism’s machinery of control.

Plot and Structure: Routine as Violence

The narrative begins with the pathologist completing an autopsy report and marking “premature death” as the cause. His realization that the deceased, Subject 221, resembles his own father, fractures the sterile routine and injects emotional dissonance into mechanical procedure. When he “scribbled 221, with a shake,” the bureaucracy resumes its rhythm, highlighting the triumph of institutional order over conscience. Like Kafka’s protagonists, the pathologist is trapped in a system where duty overrides humanity, and guilt persists without redemption.

1. Character Analysis: The Pathologist (Protagonist)
Aspect	Description
Role in Story	Forensic pathologist employed by the Conglomerate to certify deaths under the Human Obsolescence Program (HOP).
Physical Description	Middle-aged, methodical, accustomed to antiseptic environments. His precision symbolizes institutional order.
Psychological Traits	Dutiful yet morally divided; represses empathy until the recognition of Subject 221 awakens guilt. Suffers from “ethical numbness” that cracks in the final scene.
Motivations	Initially motivated by professional pride and financial stability; later haunted by conscience and the need to find meaning in his work.
Conflict	Internal moral conflict between obedience to procedure and awareness of injustice. External conflict with the ideology upheld by his wife and employer.
Symbolic Role	Represents the alienated worker in Marxist terms, one who carries out systemic violence while losing his humanity. Embodies the collapse of empathy in a technocratic regime.
Transformation	Moves from mechanical compliance to moral awakening; though minimal, his final “shake” suggests the reemergence of conscience.
Literary Echoes	Comparable to Winston Smith (1984) and Josef K. (The Trial), figures trapped within totalizing bureaucracies, aware yet powerless.

Characterization and Alienated Labor

Characterization deepens the story’s critique of alienated labor. The pathologist functions as a technician of death, simultaneously victim and executor of the system’s will. His wife, an employee of the same conglomerate, mirrors the ideological absorption of totalitarian power, echoing the propaganda line, “Be happy to know we are ensuring our future, dear.” Their domestic complicity reproduces systemic oppression in private life. Subject 221, however, speaks from the margins through fragments of his affidavit, granting voice to the subaltern whose humanity survives only in bureaucratic remnants. His testimony reveals that those who sign the “Human Obsolescence Program” do so under desperation, sacrificing themselves for their families’ welfare.

The text’s themes revolve around dehumanization, class stratification, and technological control. HOP’s logic mirrors capitalist production cycles where human beings are manufactured, utilized, and discarded. As Marx and Engels (1848/2024) affirmed, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The program institutionalizes this struggle by transforming survival into a privilege of class. The “Centralites” live in comfort while the “Doopples” are consigned to death contracts. Bureaucratic euphemisms such as “Fulfilled submission” conceal moral atrocity beneath technocratic language. Orwell’s (1949/2021) notion of “newspeak,” which reshapes moral perception through vocabulary, resonates here: “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing” (p. 266). Language, in both worlds, becomes an instrument of ideological domination.

Symbolism and style reinforce the story’s critique. Salgado’s antiseptic imagery, the smells of formaldehyde, the pristine reports, and the corporate letterhead, metaphorically sterilize morality. The numbered bodies, such as “25,550 reports,” reduce individuals to production data. The glossy brochures promising “rebirth and paradise” recall Huxley’s engineered utopia. As Huxley (1932/2014) warned, “The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray” (p. 78). The story’s minimalist style and bureaucratic diction heighten its moral disquiet, dramatizing how efficiency becomes a euphemism for erasure.

2. Character Analysis: The Wife
Aspect	Description
Role in Story	Secondary character who reinforces state ideology. Works for the same Conglomerate, keeps confidential notes about the subjects, including Subject 221.
Physical Description	Professional, composed, with gestures of orderliness reflecting her devotion to the institution.
Psychological Traits	Emotionally detached; finds comfort in slogans that rationalize death (“Be happy to know we are ensuring our future”). Represents ideological internalization.
Motivations	Desire for stability, security, and social status among “Centralites.” Believes compliance ensures survival.
Conflict	Unspoken tension between loyalty to the Conglomerate and the repressed knowledge of the pathologist’s family link to Subject 221.
Symbolic Role	Embodies the apparatus of ideological reproduction, how the private sphere mirrors the propaganda of the state.
Transformation	Stagnant; unlike her husband, she does not question the system. Her silence symbolizes complicity.
Literary Echoes	Echoes Parsons’s wife in 1984, who repeats Party slogans without understanding them, illustrating total ideological absorption.

Class, Exploitation, and Marxist Critique

From a Marxist perspective, Salgado’s dystopia exposes the commodification of life and alienation of labour. The pathologist’s mechanical repetition exemplifies the worker estranged from the product of his labour. Hamadi (2017) emphasizes that “Literature must be understood in relation to the historical and social reality of a certain society” (p. 155), and the story reflects the logic of late capitalism, where value depends on productivity and disposability. Jameson’s (1981/1989) admonition to “always historicize!” (p. x) situates the narrative within the ideological apparatus of neoliberalism, which treats obsolescence not as failure but as design. Human beings become waste products of economic progress.

Technocritical Readings: Coding Humanity

Through a technocritical lens, the story dramatizes the collapse between human and machine. RFID chips, digital submissions, and automated mortuary systems exemplify Michel Foucault’s biopower: “a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it” (Critical Legal Thinking, 2017, para. 2). In Salgado’s world, biopower mutates into algorithmic necropower, where technology administers death to maintain equilibrium. Donna Haraway (1991) warned of “the translation of the world into a problem of coding” (p. 164), and the pathologist’s digitalized conscience illustrates this reduction of human experience to data processing. Like Kafka’s paper labyrinths, Salgado’s bureaucracy of silicon annihilates moral agency through procedural necessity.

Necropolitics and the Administration of Death

A necropolitical reading extends these insights. Achille Mbembe (2003) defined necropolitics as “the contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (p. 39). The Human Obsolescence Program epitomizes this, transforming death into a patriotic duty. Zimmer (2018) notes, “The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill”, a truth embodied in the Conglomerate’s mandate. Houtz (2022) adds that “weapons are deployed in the name of life but produce death-worlds”. The story’s bureaucratic serenity conceals its genocidal intent; the apparatus kills not through violence but through paperwork, echoing the quiet extermination of Kafka’s courts and Orwell’s ministries.

3. Character Analysis: Subject 221
Aspect	Description
Role in Story	Deceased participant in the HOP whose file triggers the protagonist’s moral awakening. Revealed to resemble, or possibly be, the pathologist’s father.
Physical Description	“Burly body in his 60s,” “stern look as if repented of something.” Healthy yet executed by programmed obsolescence.
Psychological Traits	Honest, resigned, torn between duty to family and instinct for survival. His affidavit reveals a reflective, moral voice.
Motivations	To secure his daughter’s welfare through the insurance promised by the HOP; participates out of desperation, not conviction.
Conflict	Struggles with the moral paradox of self-sacrifice for collective good versus self-preservation.
Symbolic Role	Represents the dehumanized working class (“Doopples”) and the moral residue of humanity that systems seek to erase. His death exposes the ethical bankruptcy of the Conglomerate.
Transformation	Posthumous revelation; through his words, he reclaims individuality and moral depth.
Literary Echoes	Similar to the clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, conscious of their fate yet retaining dignity through memory and love.

Intertextual Lineages: Huxley, Orwell, and Kafka

Intertextually, Salgado’s story situates itself within a lineage of dystopian literature. Like Brave New World, it sanctifies progress and stability to justify eugenic selection. Huxley’s motto “Community, Identity, Stability” (1932/2014, p. 3) becomes the unspoken creed of Salgado’s state. Like Orwell’s 1984, the narrative exposes surveillance, ideological indoctrination, and linguistic control. Like Kafka’s The Trial, it portrays a protagonist trapped in a labyrinth of procedure that defies logic yet demands obedience. Salgado fuses these traditions with posthuman anxieties about biotechnology and automation, producing a distinctly twenty-first-century dystopia of human obsolescence.

Conclusion: Conscience Against Automation

Through its plot, characterization, thematic depth, and symbolic austerity, “The Human Obsolescence Company” portrays how bureaucratic rationality annihilates the intrinsic value of life. The antiseptic tone of the narrative reinforces its critique of mechanized ethics. Marxist analysis reveals class-based exploitation; the technocritical perspective uncovers the ideological role of technology; and the necropolitical framework exposes the systemic governance of death. In conversation with Huxley, Orwell, and Kafka, Salgado’s story extends dystopian critique to an age of algorithmic morality and digital compliance. The pathologist’s trembling hand becomes the final symbol of conscience resisting automation. His hesitation mirrors our own complicity in systems that quantify and discard human worth. Ultimately, the story forces us to ask an urgent question: in our technologically managed world, who decides when a human being becomes obsolete?

📚 References

Critical Legal Thinking. (2017, May 10). Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and biopower. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/

Hamadi, L. (2017). The concept of ideology in Marxist literary criticism. European Scientific Journal, 13(20), 154–162. https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2017.v13n20p154

Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). Routledge.

Houtz, C. (2022). Biopolitics, living death, and difficult ethics. Harvard University. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstreams/27eef36b-664e-426f-8f5c-a65ac9ba4887/download

Huxley, A. (1932/2014). Brave new world. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Jameson, F. (1981/1989). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. Cornell University Press. https://archive.org/details/politicalunconsc0000jame

Kafka, F. (2009). The trial (M. Mitchell, Trans.). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1925). https://lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/_Textual/FranzKafka_TheTrial_228pp/FranzKafka_TheTrial_228pp.pdf

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848/2024). The Communist Manifesto. Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11

Orwell, G. (1949/2021). Nineteen eighty-four. Penguin Classics.

Salgado, W. (2025). Subject 221 – The Human Obsolescence Company. Unpublished manuscript. https://es.scribd.com/document/965237896/The-Human-Obsolescence-Company

Zimmer, D. (2018). The power to kill life itself: Michel Foucault, biopolitics and the political challenge of human extinction. Perspectives on Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592718001562

Short Story by Wilbert Salgado: Subject 221 - The Human Obsolescence Company

The Human Obsolescence Company by Jonathan Acuña

Handout: Reading Wilbert Salgado’s “the Human Obsolescence Company”

Reading Wilbert Salgado’s “the Human Obsolescence Company” by Jonathan Acuña

Sample Creative Writing: Dramatized Script - “After the Fulfilled Report”

Dramatized Script - “After the Fulfilled Report” by Jonathan Acuña

A Marxist, Technocritical, And Necropolitical Reading of Wilbert Salgado’s “the Human Obsolescence Company” by Jonathan Acuña