Though evidence of a desire for thinking machines extends back at least as far as Plato, it was only with relatively recent increases in computational processing power available user data that these machines have become a ubiquitous if semi-obscured force in the lives of everyday people. At the same time and across diverse American media, popular and scientific fantasies of AI have frequently imagined it via master-slave narratives and rhetorics that paint these machines as being, on the one hand, the next stage of the human and the human domination of the world, and, on the other hand, the human’s living tool or slave, the object that threatens to liberate itself and take the master’s place. Though these tools can be powerfully destructive in the hands of surveillance states and multinational corporations, and powerfully productive in the hands of artists, their existence in the popular imagination of the United States is still consistently divorced from the actual, fairly reductive capabilities of these tools. Rather than reading these fantasies as desired futures for computation (though they are certainly that as well), I read them as ciphers for how dominant conceptualizations of self and other are presently being destabilized by digitality. More so, I read them as ciphers for how this destabilization is occurring in a manner that repurposes the epistemology of the closet for machinic ends and heightens the unresolved affects of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade as resonant within American subjectivities. Touching Menace has grown out of ongoing questions about the affectivity of technology and its ability to dis- and re-organize those that it touches, the enfleshment of indeterminacy as a means of producing new spaces of conquest, and the possibility of newly ethical formations of society in which present forms of domination are not just eradicated, but rendered fully unthinkable. As such, this work examines AI via the combined light of Black studies, digital media theory, and new materialism, and it does so as a means of investigating digitality’s broader temporal suspension, abject entanglements, spatial production, and epistemological prodding. Throughout, I argue that the abrasive generativity of AI rhymes with the generativity of blackness and queerness. That is, via its connection to the transatlantic slave trade, I understand blackness to involve an ongoing confrontation with one’s existence as a living anachronism and too plastic form whose plasticity makes distinctions between normative categories thinkable. Further, I understand queerness to involve an ongoing confrontation with one’s existence as product of and catalyst for polymorphous temporalities at the same time that the open secret of oneself grounds knowledge production as such. If these forms together articulate the frictional deterritorialization of a body and its frictional reterritorialization elsewhere, then reading them as analogous to aspects of artificial intelligence makes it possible articulate the real strife of technological becoming, strife that is difficult to access if one does not think within histories of what it actually means to become a living abstraction.