“We’re all machines”

“We’re all machines” is Stephen Johnson’s compressed account of human agency under capitalism: people are shaped by the system, but may choose how to calibrate themselves to it. Recounted by G. H. (George Washington), the expression joins a claim about economic limits to a portrait of self-fashioning, making choice neither wholly free nor wholly absent.

The Metaphor and Its Limits

The machine metaphor presents people as systems whose programming is formed within material conditions. Johnson’s argument, as G. H. recalls it, rejects rebellion as an escape from capital: “Fools believe rebellion is possible. Capital determines everything.” The alternative is not freedom from that determining force, but choosing what kind of machine to become and, for those capable of it, determining one’s programming. The expression therefore holds constraint and agency together. Its apparent invitation to choose is sharply qualified by the claim that capital sets the terms on which choice operates.

The Mentor and G. H.’s Self-Image

G. H. places the saying within the story of his mentor, one of the first Black men at a Wall Street firm. At twenty-one, G. H. was taken to lunch at a restaurant whose carpeted, mirrored interior and brass ashtrays were unfamiliar to him; he arrived without a tie. Stephen Johnson took him to Bloomingdale’s and bought him four Ralph Lauren ties, which G. H. did not initially know how to put on. The episode gives the mentor’s theory a concrete setting: G. H. is entering a world with rules and signals he has not yet learned, and Johnson helps equip him to navigate it.

G. H. then sees himself and Johnson as the same kind of person. He describes his own identity—as patriarch, intellectual, husband, collector of fine watches, and first-class traveler—as something he chose to become. The list makes the expression more than a general statement about economic life: it becomes a frame through which G. H. interprets his accumulated roles and tastes as self-programming, even while the mentor’s account insists that capital determines the larger field of possibility.

Reception and Significance

The exchange does not produce shared understanding. Amanda is lost; she and G. H. are talking around each other rather than to each other. She responds that he must love what he does, shifting from his abstract account of choice and capital to the question of personal attachment. The contrast leaves the expression unresolved: it may describe deliberate adaptation, but it does not establish whether G. H.’s chosen identity began in conviction or became something he came to care about over time. In the scene, the phrase thus reveals both the coherence of G. H.’s self-explanation and its distance from Amanda’s attempt to understand him.