Chess Among the Posthumans

I will confess forthright my surprise when Elon Musk suggested that nineteen-year-old American chess grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann used remote-controlled vibrating anal beads to defeat Norwegian World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen on September 4, 2022. Although exactly the kind of overwrought scheme that appeals to our public sphere’s newest tyrant, the logistical difficulties of its execution would be profound. Intervening into what has been called “the biggest chess cheating scandal ever,” Musk misses the deeper anxieties fueling the scandal: chess’s particularly fraught location between cultural notions of intelligence and cutting-edge technology.