Why do replicants hate being replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner? Is it because of their fear of mortality, given their built-in reduced lifespan (“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it means to be a slave”)?1 Or is it because of senselessness? If their lives are, to some unmeasurable extent, the product of someone else’s technical imagination, then their lives are unfree, the mere sequencing of a program. Even the freedom of the replicant, whatever scant amount of it they might manage to wrest, is structured and made to serve Tyrell Corporation’s ends. This is the moment of implosion, the “itch you can never scratch,” and the end of any possible project of replicant transculturation as meaningful. Why would the replicants want to be humans? They already know more than the humans can understand: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” one of them says. But their knowledge is not good for them. Why push it? Obviously, because they envy the freedom of the human. The humans are unprogrammed, the replicants think. Except, of course, that we are all replicants, and the humans have long since left our planet: “It is too bad you won’t live. But then again, who does?”
