One of the best books I’ve read in ’09 is Digitizing Race by Lisa Nakamura. In her essay The Social Optics of Race, she writes that
the racio-visual logic of…science fiction films that depict interface use set up distinct roles for particular races, and distinct ways of conceptualizing the racialized body as informational property… [and that] Asians and Asian-Americans function as the material base for technologies of digitized vision….
I was reminded of it when seeing this Palm Pre commercial from Modernista! in which masses of Asian bodies signify supreme technology. While I doubt that this was overtly outlined as such, I do think it is a product of Western subconscious.
HT:Sociological Images for the clip and Erin Lamberty for noting it.