Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (Sharma, 2026)

=== [PDF page 2] === INSUFFERABLE TOOLS === [PDF page 3] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 4] === INSUFFERABLE TOOLS Feminism Against Big Tech SARAH SHARMA Duke University Press Durham and London 2026 === [PDF page 5] === © 2026 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Project Editor: Liz Smith Designed by Dave Rainey Typeset in Portrait Text Regular and Helvetica Neue by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sharma, Sarah, [date] author Title: Insufferable tools: feminism against big tech / Sarah Sharma. Other titles: Feminism against big tech Description: Durham: Duke University Press, 2026. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2025035452 (print) lccn 2025035453 (ebook) isbn 9781478038559 paperback isbn 9781478033646 hardcover isbn 9781478062165 ebook Subjects: lcsh: Feminism and mass media | Sex role in mass media | Mass media—Social aspects | Technology and women | Technological innovations—Social aspects | Patriarchy—Social aspects Classification: lcc p96.f46 s53 2026 (print) | lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025035452 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025035453 === [PDF page 6] === For Aishat, Dana, Rawan, Tala, Talla, and Yasmine as you flourish and fight === [PDF page 7] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 8] === Contents Introduction. “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 1. The Woman in Tech: A Useful Device 31 2. The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 66 3. And the Machine World Will Deliver Him His Wealth 99 4. Broken Machines: Toward a Feminist Technological Determinism 123 Conclusion. A Techno-Feminist End to the Insufferable Tool 151 Acknowledgments Notes 161 Bibliography Index 157 205 171 === [PDF page 9] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 10] === Introduction “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” But Never the Tool Shortly after Elon Musk launched his Tesla Roadster into outer space on February 6, 2018, via his SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, he tweeted an uncaptioned author photo of Wired’s patron saint of the internet and anointed father of media studies, Marshall McLuhan (fig. I.1). In 1964, the University of Toronto English literature professor had risen to mainstream fame for transforming academic and popular understanding of media. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan stated, “Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.”1 McLuhan’s proposition that man becomes the sex organs of the machine world was meant to describe the animating and coproductive nature of technology and human life. Man might be the driver of technology, but neither technology nor man could exist apart. This media insight has become rather perverted when it comes to the distorted vision of the world’s richest tech giants, who have seriously taken to their roles as the sex organs of the machine world and are overt in their patriarchal impulses to occupy the frontiers of technological innovation. Elon Musk, along with Jeff Bezos, an American businessman best known as the founder of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud com- === [PDF page 11] === FIG. I.1 Elon Musk posts author photo of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan from The Mechanical Bride on Twitter and Instagram, June 25, 2018. puting company, and second richest person in the world, and Richard Branson, English business magnate, have been engaged in a years-long “my spaceship is bigger than yours” competition. In 2019, Jeff Bezos unveiled Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander, which was designed to deliver cargo to the Moon. Bezos has long maintained that we must leave Earth in order to save it, and that his plan to develop space colonies for millions of people to live and work in, while developing new resources to meet growing demands, is the only way to protect Earth. He claims he will move all heavy industry off planet, and that Earth will be zoned residential and industry light. Elon Musk, who is often referred to as the inventor of the future, with his founding roles at SpaceX, OpenAI, Tesla, and Neuralink and at one point Trump’s senior adviser at the helm of the brand new 2025 Department of Government Efficiency (doge), has suggested the only way to overcome a mass extinction event is to inhabit outer space. The gravity of this situation doesn’t deter him from making a few little penis jokes along the way. After Bezos landed his lunar lander, Musk tweeted at Bezos, “Oh stop teasing, Jeff.” His tweet included a winky face emoji with a photoshopped image of Introduction === [PDF page 12] === FIG. I.2 Elon Musk tweet where the company name of the Blue Origin lunar lander is edited to say “Blue Balls.” Tweeted with the comment, “Oh stop teasing, Jeff,” followed by a winking emoji. Source: Mashable India. Blue Origin renamed “Blue Balls” (fig. I.2).2 In 2021, when nasa awarded SpaceX the contract to land on the Moon over Blue Origin, Musk teased Bezos again: “Can’t get it up (to orbit)” (fig. I.3).3 For Richard Branson, the British business magnate, entrepreneur, adventurer, and founder of Virgin Group, his interest in space is commercial and experiential, less about escaping Earth in order to save humanity and more about pleasure. His website for Virgin Galactic shares with McLuhan the sentiment that man is free to encounter a world of unending technological possibility once he accepts himself as an object of media. Branson’s company boasts, “Spaceflight has the unique ability to shift our perspectives, our technology, and even our trajectory as a species.” His own iconic approach, more poetic and subtle than those of Bezos and Musk, has him mounting varied landscapes with one of his chosen vehicles. He is often holding champagne at the same time. In 2021, he drove an amphibious car across the English Channel while wearing a tuxedo. This was reminiscent of a prior publicity stunt for Virgin Cola in 1994 when he drove a tank “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” === [PDF page 13] === FIG. I.3 Elon Musk mocks Blue Origin losing a nasa contract to SpaceX by implying that Jeff Bezos is impotent in Twitter thread with text “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol.” through a wall of Coca-Cola cans. Fancying himself a bit of a James Bond, he rappelled down the Virgin Galactic hangar in New Mexico while drinking out of a champagne flute. Jeff Bezos took frontier mythology to a new level when he donned a cowboy hat and boots for his mission to outer space (fig. I.4). During this expedition in 2021, he was the subject of intense internet ridicule due to the unusually extra-phallic rocket he had used to travel to outer space. Slate interviewed a rocket scientist to inquire whether or not Bezos’s hyperphallic rockets were necessary. The interview determined that the rocket shape was coincidental, a mere matter of function. Of course, I myself could go on, just as many commenters and feminist critics are wont to do on the internet, and fall into the gender essential4 Introduction === [PDF page 14] === FIG. I.4 Jeff Bezos wears a cowboy hat on his suborbital flight. Source: ap News. ist trap that equates the phallus with tech masculinity. It wouldn’t be that hard. But in the interest of my desire for a techno-feminist perspective that aims to delink essentialized and binary gender from the design of the world, I want to leave this easy critique behind. It is important to note, however, that Musk and Bezos do launch their rockets and rovers as an exercise in reproduction, as a means for producing a new multiplanet species.4 But this reproduction has nothing to do with a natural or essential quality inherent to the category of men in tech in the same way that there is no natural feminist politics inherent in the category of women in tech that could put an end to tech patriarchy. The patriarchs of Big Tech, the sex organs of the machine world, may appear to be driven by an essential masculine impulse that they cannot help because of their gender, but we must think rather in terms of how they can very much help it and that there is instead a very powerful structure of tech patriarchy that is tied to an overall ethos of the extractive utility of people, of the Earth, and now of the entire universe. This is consonant with German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s notion of standing reserve, where Earth and its inhabitants are valuable only in terms of utility. This conception of utility is oriented toward making utopian technological worlds flourish, but flourish only for them.5 “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” === [PDF page 15] === When Jeff Bezos completed his first space mission, he acknowledged the lucrative role of the machine world in expediting his wealth: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”6 Amazon has long been under investigation, with 70 percent of its workers complaining of physical injuries and mental stress as a result of Amazon’s intense working conditions that depend upon both speed and surveillance of its workers. When McLuhan states that the machine world exists to deliver man his wealth, we might pause and consider what it is that actually falls under the category of machinery. In the case above, it is clearly Amazon’s workers and customers. Bezos’s wealth has been delivered by Prime. So of course we could simply surmise the Big Tech giants are brash and insensitive to the needs of others and often malicious in their designs — very much dicks. The end. But thankfully for all of us, counting Big Tech phalli is not the focus of my book. That would be too easy, and it would come to a rather unsatisfying end. The most popular image of the 2025 inauguration of Donald Trump makes very clear that these insufferable tools do reign (fig. I.5). So what, then, is my big feminist problem with all of this if it is not just the toxic masculinity of Big Tech with all of its frontiers and phalli? This book makes two overarching interrelated arguments. The first argument is this: The patriarchs of Big Tech have a curious relationship to media theory that we need to pay attention to. The patriarchs of Big Tech do more than just lightly dabble in media theory, but rather operate with an intelligible facet of media theory that they wield strategically in order to maintain a governing form of power that I term the patriarchal techno-logic. The way the Big Tech patriarchs understand technology is tied to the way they conceive of gender and other forms of social difference. As I will elaborate throughout, Big Tech patriarchs discursively adhere to a tool-based approach to technologies in a way that corresponds to an extractive understanding of most of the world’s population in terms of their utility. This tool-based understanding of technology is tricky, however. That technologies are tools is usually a commonsensical notion that dominates the popular imagination and most discourses about technology; however, this tool-based notion of technology, I argue, obscures what the patriarchal tech giant is actually up to. On the heels of one of Trump’s first executive orders aimed at ending “Radical and Wasteful” dei programs and preferences, Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and chairman, ceo, and controlling shareholder of Facebooknow-Meta, opined on the need for more masculine energy in tech as he scrapped Meta’s fact-checking content moderators and Google scrapped 6 Introduction === [PDF page 16] === FIG. I.5 “Trump’s ‘broligarchy’ turned heads at the inauguration. It sends a powerful message.” Tech ceo s Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk. Source: usa Today. Image: Julia Demaree Nikhinson via Reuters. their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, citing Trump’s orders.7 As we take a deeper look at their machinations, what we find is that they favor and cultivate media environments that permit them to wield tools where they themselves are never at risk of becoming the tool. In other words, the Big Tech patriarch doesn’t really think of technologies as tools, but rather, as I’ll explain below, they imagine technologies as environments in which to cultivate, manage, and extend their power. But you and I, we are the tools. This patriarchal techno-logic is inherent in the materials that have been extracted to make our technologies (e.g., copper mining for our smartphones), and it is omnipresent in the way our everyday devices have been designed to remote-control the lives of others in a click. All of these devices, gadgets, apps, and media we hold closest to our bodies are also technologies that instigate worlds of dependent labor. Our governing tech, or what we might call dominant tech, refers to common technologies that are ubiquitously embedded and structured into the flow of everyday life. They are so basic as to be unassuming and often not even recognized as technologies. This power that an everyday user of such media beholds is largely unacknowledged. “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” === [PDF page 17] === The concealment is evident in the fact that Uber doesn’t register within the popular understanding of the service as a mobile factory of dispersed remote workers and their vehicles. Instead, the official designation is one of a tech company with enterprising and entrepreneurial drivers who come to work with their own tools (automobiles, gps, and smartphones). Our personal devices are tied to the whiz and whir of Ubers and Lyfts as they make full stops in traffic, block bike lanes, and have near misses with e-bikes, while all of the delivery trucks are forced to perch on sidewalks, trying to fulfill orders on porches monitored with live-feed video doorbells affixed to doors that will soon be opened by a hand whose wrist is adorned with another tracking device that is monitoring health, sleep, children, hydration, and messages from work. Together these technologies compose a world of tacit acceptance of surveillance, control, discipline, and consumption, but also they reflect and create a world of seemingly endless and abundant assistance made all the more attractive for the algorithmic return on one’s investment — enter into this domain, and you will be part of a recursive net; you will be seen and taken care of. All of life is delivered straight to your door. All of these orientations depend upon relations of capitalistic and individualized notions of time, and with this comes a dependency on the inequitable gendered, raced, and classed labor of others in order to get through the day. As I will elaborate more fully throughout, this patriarchal techno-logic I have my eye on, as described above, isn’t necessarily ascribed to bodies and/or subjectivities but compulsively oriented to time saving, productivity, family life, essentialized gender identity, heterosexual economies of exchange, and the masculine inclinations to exit out of the social. It is extractive, racist, consumptive, and classist. The list goes on. I have a growing and palpable feeling of an impasse when it comes to thinking through the gendered politics of this current technological landscape. Is this really what we all have? Was this all there was to design? These insufferable tools limit other ways of being in time and social space, in relation with one another. These tools depend upon extractive economies that target bodies and lands and create insufferable living conditions for so many. This nagging techno-feminist disquiet with the technologies that surround me is what fuels my desire to write this book. Where exactly can techno-feminism intervene in all of this? It is not always obvious where the politics of gender reside in this structure. We can sense that the hubris of space flight is masculinist in its bravado and grandeur, but what is less obvious is how this is connected to the mun8 Introduction === [PDF page 18] === dane technologies that shape the contours of our days and our relations with one another. The intricate relationship between gender and technology, I have come to believe, is deeply and purposefully obscured as conceptual categories, so much so that the two seem unrelated. But the power of patriarchal techno-logics gains momentum when it is able to negate attention to the actual gendered dynamics of racialized techno-capitalism. I also often think there is some reticence to really connect the Big Tech patriarchs’ grandeur with the technological massaging of everyday lives because of how this implicates so many of us, in our daily quotidian practices and ways of negotiating the day, as being part of a technological injustice and inhumanity. It demands recognition that one might be dedicated to social justice but still living a life commensurate with patriarchal techno-logic. This is not a mere matter of the inevitability of living under the contradictions of capitalism but also due to what I see as the absence of a technofeminist media theory to adequately guide struggles for social justice. In a world cluttered with constantly upgrading gadgets and seemingly infinite ways to download a new orientation or program for living, the centrality of patriarchy to the technological design of the world recedes from view. For McLuhan and the Big Tech patriarchs, understanding the recursive dynamic of media has been essential for understanding all forms of power and all forms of social organization. To understand media can change not only how to understand power but how this power is exercised and how this power can be challenged. Struggles for social justice are also bound to a technological field of possibility. And so what is a techno-feminist to do under these circumstances? I suggest we need a forceful and unified techno-feminist media theory that can take on this patriarchal techno-logic, one that can act as a guide for multiple techno-feminist projects and new orientations. Theory? We need a theory to take all of this on? And a unified one? Yes, I believe so. This is my second argument. The precise techno-feminist media theory I have in mind I call feminist technological determinism. I name this theory immediately while I recognize that the terminology of determinism some will find unsettling from the outset. I offer a more precise elaboration in the pages that follow as I take a wider techno-feminist lens in order to gather and develop this feminist media theory. This techno-feminist media theory does not demand a unified subject or singular feminist struggle, but it is unified by initiating a media study that forefronts and focuses attention on the technological structure of power. The baseline assertion of feminist technological determinism is “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” === [PDF page 19] === that technologies structure and alter what is possible for feminist struggle and politics. Not everything is possible under every and any technological environment. I am suspicious of the ways struggles for gender equality are currently cast within the tech world and the ways the problem of gender in tech is culturally understood. For example, the well-known plight of women in tech dominates the popular and scholarly conversation concerned with tech’s enduring gender problem. I have grown rather suspicious of “the woman in tech” and how her struggle masquerades as a feminist struggle at the expense of advancing a political techno-feminist project. This argument doesn’t just arise out of a need to counter the patriarchal technologic, but it’s rather in response to what I argue is an impasse in attending to the relationship between technology and gender. Let me be clear. It goes without saying that feminist scholarship on technology remains the most critical and pivotal when it comes to revealing how Big Tech ushers in a world of social, environmental, and economic harm, to the detriment not only of women but of all subjugated populations. The mutual entanglement of technology and the experience of social difference is a core concern of feminist media and technology studies. It is also feminist scholarship on technology that has been at the forefront of insisting upon a more just, humane, and livable world. But I would still submit that there has been a tendency within feminist approaches to the modern technology-based culture, and with it the digitally dependent workforces, to turn away from a philosophy of technology or media theory. I would also submit that a philosophy of technology or media theory is crucial to wrest us free from the grips of the patriarchal techno-logic. This turning away from media theory is perhaps the result of the exhausting work of simply having to contend with the patriarchal techno-logic on a daily basis. The sheer reality of living under the techno-logics of patriarchy has meant that feminist thinking about technology, as well as feminist struggles in and around technology, too often remain locked within the confines of the patriarchal techno-logic. In the name of techno-feminism, we are led down exhausting paths concerned with calling for repair, regulation, self-care, better working conditions, and inclusivity. The ideological operatives of patriarchy are revealed and called out. Arguments are made to seize the tools for feminist ends. Hidden figures are located, and the history of women’s pivotal role in tech is rewritten. But there is an a priori media question that must be reckoned with. Understanding how our technologi cal forms are the condition of possibility for social change is a question of 10 Introduction === [PDF page 20] === media that, I argue, needs to preclude these other questions of media that are concerned with policy, ethics, political economy, ideology, play, and representation. Recognition that media do in fact determine (orient and alter) the parameters of possibility for social change, and how we come to know ourselves and understand technology, is paramount. This book advances feminist technological determinism as a technofeminist media theory that is attuned to the technological conditions of possibility for social justice struggles. At the crux of feminist technological determinism, what I have in mind is a desire to cultivate and devise feminist techno-logics purposely at odds with the dictates of a racialized and capi talistic institutionalization of time and space. Feminist techno-logics are oriented to cultivating the temporalities, spatialities, rhythms of relations, capacities, and mobilities that are incompatible with one’s utility within the normative family, the workplace, and the marketplace. I have such high hopes for a techno-feminist media theory that could reinvigorate feminist struggles in and around technology. This would be a techno-feminism that eschews essentialized notions of binary gender identity as it operates as a guide through the contradictions of racialized capitalism. I argue that struggles for justice and political theories related to refusal and resistance require media theory. I turn toward the media theory of the Big Tech patriarch in order to devise a techno-feminist media theory oriented toward the eventual cultivation of a feminist techno-logics. Why must I turn to the media theories of the Big Tech patriarch? I will make this increasingly clear, but for now I will simply say that a techno-feminist media theory needs to be able to recognize the media milieu it exists within in order to break away from it. And this media milieu, unfortunately, has been ushered in by that man over there in the cowboy hat next to his rocket and that other man over there with his Nazi salute, driverless car, and plethora of dick jokes. Yes, the one who is also responsible for all those wilted corrugated cardboard boxes stamped with the Prime logo that are overflowing from recycling bins. This book also makes clear that the relevance of this techno-feminist media theory I put forth exceeds the purview of any particular technology or of the tech world writ large. It exceeds the confines of discrete binary categories of gender oriented to the patriarchal rhythms and relations that currently dominate the popular cultural narratives and their attendant norms. “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 11 === [PDF page 21] === Profiling the Big Tech Patriarch Before I delve further into the two overarching arguments and goals of this book, I need to make clear who it is exactly that I call upon here and gather under the moniker of the Big Tech patriarch. He is the man of the alt-right, the misogynist tech bro, the proliferator of horrific working conditions, and the masculinist with a universalizing but also miniature theory of media. Big Tech patriarchy is not always necessarily embodied in male tech figures but is extended by various actors in tech. It is not about an essentialized male, but rather how essentialized understandings of binary gender are utilized in the interests of Big Tech. For example, consider the infamous leaked Google memo written by Google engineer James Damore in 2018 and officially dubbed “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” This screed argued that diversity-based hiring would be bad for business. Damore suggested that women’s biological differences make them less capable of working in tech than men. When Ellen Pao, computer programmer, former ceo of Reddit, and cofounder of the nonprofit Project Include, filed a lawsuit against her former employer Kleiner Perkins for sexism and racism, she argued, “Like many groups of young men whose misogynistic beliefs gestate online, Incels often work in the tech industry and in engineering — and because of tech’s long-standing, well-quantified lack of women and other underrepresented groups, it’s a natural fit.” Damore flips the culture of inhospitality as a matter of nature and asserts that it was men’s “higher drive for status” that explained why women were underrepresented in leadership positions at Google. The Google memo didn’t reveal anything feminists haven’t already long contended with. Decades before, feminist scholars had already located this naive Cartesian, now Damorian, split between men/women and their technical aptitude as part of the overall patriarchal social construction of gender and its corollary binary splits of reason/emotion, culture/nature, body/ mind, and so on. But tech bros aren’t going to be swayed by references to feminist theory that point out the untenable ground upon which they lay their claims. Our feminist analysis, which lists all the false dichotomies that uphold the social construction of the gender binary, just reveals all the sites where patriarchy will guard the boundary. I’m not sure it even matters if Damore would acknowledge these are socially constructed categories. The boundaries aren’t guarded because they are natural, but rather because the imposition of these binaries upon our popular technology through imaginary categories allows tech to stay in the domain of men. All Zuckerberg 12 Introduction === [PDF page 22] === is doing is confirming that the patriarchal techno-logic reeks of masculine energy. Touché, Zuck! The Big Tech patriarch is the one who recognizes the technological as a form of power and exercises it in his own interests. He has a media theory, and he uses it like a tool.8 He has a platform where he theorizes about the platform. He also loves to explain the power of technology — rhapsodize when given the chance. The Big Tech patriarch we must contend with includes our Musks and Bezoses, but also the patriarchal tech types in everyday life who like to explain technology and define the way culture reacts to technological change. This includes the canonical and contemporary media theorists who exclude the contributions of feminist and critical race approaches to technology, not only the self-anointed and the peer-reviewed type, but also journalists and technologists with their blogs, columns, and podcasts. I want to be clear that patriarchal power doesn’t just operate in and through technology or through men, it also operates through cultural understandings of media. These understandings of media, I argue, are popular and scholarly, but they are also politically strategic and wielded as forms of patriarchal power. It is important to acknowledge and see that understandings of media are the result of the dominating media forms that circulate in culture — media forms that determine and alter how we come to know ourselves. In the current technological moment, punctuated by our Big Tech patriarchs’ extension across all media platforms and into outer space, it does appear as though we are stuck in a recursive circle jerk of galactic proportions. I am thus indebted to not only decades and decades of feminist scholarship on the topic of patriarchy and technology, but also the decades of unacknowledged labor undertaken by feminist technology scholars who have had to have technologies explained to them. It is a sector-specific job hazard to be a feminist media scholar. You are often on the receiving end of the banal nuggets of media insight doled out by a person who understands that a really good place to derive their patriarchal power is to dabble in media theory. We have perhaps focused for too long on tech’s gender problem when it is time to take on gender’s tech problem. A Media Theory for the Tools Marshall McLuhan anchored his most famous media theory, and now popular dictum, that “the medium is the message,” in the simple media form of the light bulb. For McLuhan, the message of the medium was the change “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 13 === [PDF page 23] === in pace, scale, or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.9 The light bulb, a content-free and, upon first glance, information-less medium, did have a message. It was the radical social and economic transformation that ensued when the definitional and experiential boundaries of day and night shifted with newly light-filled spaces. McLuhan’s insightful turn to the light bulb’s message was made during a time of great moral panic over the advent of the television and its domestication into the daily rituals and lives of the North American populace. McLuhan argued that the power of television was not actually in its programming, it was in the form of the medium and its formal properties. The technical details of one medium or the next would be a great place to get distracted from what McLuhan is actually trying to impart here. I prefer not to get distracted by the technical gaps in what a literature professor has to say about various media forms. I would rather focus on the larger context of the recursive power of media forms and what they mean for patriarchy. McLuhan argued, “If the student of media will but meditate on the power of this medium of electric light to transform every structure of time and space and work and society that it penetrates or contacts, he will have the key to the form of the power that is in all media to reshape any lives that they touch.”10 He will have the key to the form of power that is in all media! Is this not the exact penetrative pulse of media power that all of these insufferable tools, the contemporary giants of technology, the titans of tech, the tech patriarchy, the tech bros, or that guy over there who is online all of the time have their fingers on? It is no wonder why Elon Musk would have paid homage to McLuhan during his venture to create a space-faring, no longer limited to this one resourcedepleted planet Earth type of civilization. Musk recognizes his power to produce media forms that are transformative for how they can set new parameters of social, political, and economic possibility. Big Tech patriarchs have found a way to instrumentalize McLuhan’s “medium is the message” theory of media as a technological strategy to maintain patriarchy, capitalism, and white ethno-nationalism. Musk’s relationship to white nationalism was made blatant in his Nazi salute while professing support for Germany’s far-right party. Consider how Joe Rogan, the infamous libertarian podcaster known for spreading misinformation about the covid-19 vaccine, the occasional racial slur, and smoking joints on air with Elon Musk, regularly opines, as McLuhan once did, that “man [is] the sex organs of the machine world.” After all, regardless of its eventual diversity, podcasting as a grassroots space did attract, first and foremost, a very male and extremely online variety of self-appointed technologists 14 Introduction === [PDF page 24] === who recognized that this new amped-up and audio version of a blog held a new key to a new form of power. In fact, another frequent fan of quoting McLuhan, Marc Andreessen, software engineer, one of the richest Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and author of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” correlates the openness of culture with the openness of the internet on his own company webpage: “We believe technology is universalist. Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair, or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.” It appears that we are living in a moment in which many insidious tech bros, tech journalists, and poster boys for the far right appear to be pseudomedia theorists. As a feminist concerned with technology, I continue to find it unsettling how easy it appears for a certain type of patriarchal figure to traffic in media studies, and in media theory more specifically. But rather than continue to be turned off by their content, we must begin to recognize this type of figure as a technological phenomenon, a technological social character who is intricately tied to culture’s dominant media forms. The role of media technologies in determining how power is apprehended, maintained, and exercised is rooted in another Canadian and University of Toronto professor’s media theory — Harold Adams Innis. It was Innisian media theory that heavily influenced McLuhan’s own understanding of the significance of media forms over media content. In The Bias of Communication (1951), Innis connected the rise and fall of an empire to their dominating media forms, specifically the spatial and temporal properties of those media forms. Empires needed to be able to extend power across vast distances (space) and endure over history (time). Paper was space-binding, as it could be circulated across vast distances given that it was light and transportable. Clay and parchment were time-binding, as they were heavier and more durable. The basic premise of Innis’s media theory is that power is derived not from the content of the media but from a technology’s spaceor time-binding capabilities. While Innis compared stone and clay tablets (time-binding) to the properties of newsprint and paper (space-binding), the contemporary digital context brings us spaceships, X, Instagram, Tik- Tok, YouTube, BitChute, Parler, and Reddit. While Innis didn’t have to contend with tech bros or internet trolls when he considered how trains operate as technologies for the maintenance of power, his insights on media are still helpful in understanding how peons “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 15 === [PDF page 25] === became pundits and presidents by way of access to Wi-Fi. It turns out that would-be tech patriarchs and those who gain power via media technologies do recognize the ability of technology’s formal properties to determine the social experience of space, time, and the patterns of human organization. The correlation between misogyny, imperialism, and the technological power grab is not difficult to discern, but it is specific to its medium. A cultural history of fathers and their dominance over the television remote control has already been written.11 More recently, smart home technologies appear at the forefront of domestic abuse cases as new weapons of gendered domination and control.12 This includes not only tracking a partner’s movements through home surveillance technologies but also controlling environmental conditions against the other’s will (heating, lighting, and lock mechanisms). What interests me even more is how space-binding forms of media pro gress into attempts at microempires of domination. Take a look at your newsfeeds and social media timelines over the past decade, and you will find self-anointed tech experts referred to as technologists because they were early adopters of particular platforms. Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right British commentator recruited by Steve Bannon in 2017, enjoyed the formal title of tech editor and technologist at Breitbart News, without any tech training or experience. He was just a man known online for a lot of white supremacist, Islamophobic, and misogynistic views. Cultural understandings of media are themselves the result of the recursive, determining temporal and spatial dynamics of our dominating technology, and thus it always gives me pause when I encounter a technologist who has something like a blog or podcast where they then try their hand at media studies and use the platform to discuss the power of the platform itself and their own power. On the world’s political stage, the grab-them-by-their-pussy forty-fifth and forty-seventh president is prone to waxing poetic about the power of Twitter, now X. He attributes his first election win to the “tremendous platform.” His strategy for world domination is simple and involves tweeting, which he refers to as “bings”: “When somebody says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing and I take care of it.” Jordan Peterson, the infamous psychology professor at the University of Toronto, has garnered an alt-right cult following on both X and YouTube for his promotion of patriarchy and traditional gender dynamics. He uses these platforms to share his thoughts on the dangers of feminism and gender-neutral pronouns, as well as the benefits of patriarchy and an all-beef diet. Peterson seemed to understand the spatial bias of his chosen media form when he was asked 16 Introduction === [PDF page 26] === to explain why his following is largely composed of young men: “It’s an astounding platform... a Gutenberg revolution, as far as I’m concerned. It’s expanded [my audience] to a degree that is almost unfathomable. I convey very large volumes of very philosophically interesting and practically useful information.... You see that men are higher interest in ideas and women are higher interest in aesthetics.”13 Peterson attributes the power of his words to the ability to extend them faster and further — a process that is not about content but about the capacity to reach an audience that is predisposed to the circulation of ideas. These microempires and attendant imperialist impulses can be explained by what media historian and communication theorist John Durham Peters refers to as “media theory’s low bar for entry”: “Media theory has almost no barriers to entry — you’d be amazed at how readily some people opine on media without any sense of the field’s traditions or concepts — and almost anyone can call themselves a media theorist; as beings who live in the middle, in medias res, I think that every human being is potentially such a creature. Media theory, at its best, is a means of seeking greater awareness of the basic conditions in which we live.”14 Professor of German studies and comparative literature and tech critic Adrian Daub has also traced this strand of faux media theory intellectualism in his book What Tech Calls Thinking, where he locates within Silicon Valley a pattern of “Stanford dropout becomes technologist.”15 The Stanford dropout employs the cursory basics of the field, coupling easily digestible media theory with a desire for technological power grabs — a combination that lends itself well to thriving in Big Tech. When it comes to impressing upon others one’s media genius, Evgeny Morozov, public intellectual and technology critic, argues that popular tech ideas are often served as snacks, or the ted Talk way of understanding media. He suggests this version of tech has been a perfect shield for pursuing entrepreneurial activities under the banner of intellectualism.16 The snack version of media theory seems to satiate the tech investor or the organizer of a tech summit just enough. But I want to extend what Peters, Daub, and Morozov have so wonderfully captured here to consider the implications of this in terms of how a techno-feminist analysis might add an additional caveat. Beneath the faux intellectualism of these popular attempts at media theory there lies a patriarchal strategy. It is helpful to take a little detour through McLuhan’s media theory of extension. McLuhan opines that all media are extensions of human sensory or bodily capacities. From where you sit, you might be able to see how the wheel is an extension of the foot. The desk is an exten“The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 17 === [PDF page 27] === sion of the lap. The blinds on your windows are an extension of eyelids. The television is an extension not of a single sense or capacity, but of the entire central nervous system. We could continue to play this game of “name that media extension” all day. But the critical point here is not so much in the precise technical details of this extension but rather in the recursive dynamics between a media technology and its attendant social body. Technology reproduces the social, but in a very medium-specific way. McLuhan’s television set, his media muse at the time, was of the pre-high-definition variety, with a very low visual quality. In this way it demanded a very involved viewer to do the work of filling in the images, to fill in the dots. This interaction between the individual and the television set was thus highly participatory. For McLuhan, this process of media participation could cultivate a new interactive social body. In other words, far from the caricature of a viewer as a couch potato feasting on a buffet of media messages, alone and isolated and removed from culture, he offered a highly active viewer immersed in the medium and the creation of a new social character: Electronic Man. This immersion and integration with the medium had the potential to create a new social character and a unified and cohesive form of political and social organization: a global village. Fast-forward from the television set to Musk on the potential of artificial intelligence (ai), and we have Musk invoking extension and unity as he surmises the potential for a multiplanet species and global ai collective: “I think if we can effectively merge with ai by improving the neural link between your cortex and the digital extension of yourself which already, like I said, it already exists, it just has a bandwidth issue. And then effectively you become an ai human symbiote and if that then is widespread with anyone who wants it can have it, then we solve the control problem as well. We don’t have to worry about some sort of evil dictator or ai because we are the ai collectively. That seems like the best outcome I can think of.”17 I wish not to get stuck on McLuhan’s utopianism or the grandeur of Musk’s many visions; instead, I have my eye on something else that underlies their grand designs. What Musk and McLuhan are concerned with is how technologies behold a particular machine logic that gives way to forms of life that are more amenable to certain modes of organization over others. For both Musk and McLuhan, the evolutionary potential of humankind depends upon a particular kind of extension of man via technological reproduction. For Musk and Bezos, they both insist this extension requires one to now escape Earth. 18 Introduction === [PDF page 28] === This escape as a means for extension can also be located in the everyday practices of the involuntary celibate (incel), who we now know has a longdocumented relationship with Silicon Valley. After Ellen Pao waged her lawsuit against venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins for sexual harassment, she penned a tell-all memoir titled Reset. Her book chronicles a growing population of incels in Silicon Valley who have a peculiar escapist relationship with technology. Pao states, “Technology plays a central role for these hate groups, as a career and as a weapon.”18 We are far from the simple innocence of the light bulb and its content-free message, or the television set and its promise of a participatory social body. The contemporary tech giants do not hide what they are extending, nor do they hide their inspiration. One of these effectively harnessed machine logics is the masculinist desire to extend one’s power across space and time. This is a formula that requires tinkering and calculation — what must be achieved, if we follow Innis, is the proper balancing of space and time for the extension of patriarchal power. This must be strategically cultivated. This patriarchal desire for influence might explain how the mit Media Lab ended up as research bedfellows with sexual predator, pedophile, and tech entrepreneur Jeffrey Epstein. When I first read about Jeffrey Epstein, it was hard not to be distracted by the various media moguls and tech investors he kept as friends. These included Elon Musk; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s cofounder; Boris Nikolić, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science adviser; Marvin Minsky, ai computer scientist; Scott Borgerson, ceo of CargoMetrics; Joi Ito, entrepreneur and venture capitalist; and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s cofounder, to name a few. Of course it was a list of the wealthy and the powerful, and today that would also simply mean those who can invest in tech. But we shouldn’t miss the connection — this is not a coincidence related to economics but rather a technological social character that we are dealing with here. Epstein was fascinated with transhumanism, which includes not only artificial intelligence but also genetic engineering of the human population. His long-term plan was to impregnate women at his New Mexico ranch so that he could seed the human race with his dna.19 In McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, he argues that the modern man is who he is because of the dominant technology of the time — the printing press. The printing press, according to his main argument, provided a means of communication for the population, but it also determined how one thinks, the forms of thought possible, and “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 19 === [PDF page 29] === the types of social organization that result from the internalization of a medium’s formal properties. The Typographic Man is marred by print-age forms of thought and politics: linear thinking and compartmentalized logic, which lead to an extractive and reifying relationship to nature and others. The electronic universe could deliver the Typographic Man into his full potential of a connected and worldly humanity, characterized by care and concern for others. But alas, it has not. Instead, we have space conquests and the dna -spreading Typographic Man on Mars and in the metaverse. The patriarchal tech giants we must now contend with are the ones who want to terraform Mars, build sea-steads, and move into apocalypse bunkers where their hot rod cars currently live, living off alternative currencies in a quest to live forever, underground and away from the expendable plebs. We are dealing with a technological social character who theorizes why he has the power he has. Marc Andreessen said it himself when he said anyone can have this power given a cheap laptop, but what he doesn’t seem to understand is that it is he who is perhaps the ultimate extension of the cheap laptop — a tool. The reality is that our tech patriarchs — our Bezoses, Damores, Epsteins, Musks, Thiels, Zuckerbergs, Trumps, Petersons, Rogans, and that guy over there who is extremely vociferous online— are themselves the technological phenomenon that the media theory they seem to be most enamored with actually accounts for. They are as enamored with the penetrative pulse of media as they are with explaining the power of technology. And this is central to their identity construction. The hubris of the tech giant and the minor technologist inheres in both rocket ships and podcasts. At the core of their technological designs, both the grand ones like terraforming and the more minor ones like PayPal, Amazon Prime, Alexa, and Uber Eats, is a consistent media strategy built around a shared and unified understanding of media and the overall project of maintaining the patriarchal technologic. To treat the patriarchal tech bro as a technological phenomenon, an enduring remnant of the Typographic Man, is to begin to circumvent his strategies. Within the patriarchal techno-logic there is a deep fear that the tools will eventually come to rule, that the tools will refuse to reciprocate, or that the patriarch will become the tool. Throughout this book, I show that alt-right understandings of gender and alt-right formulations of technology are tied together by an ambivalent and fraught relationship related to maintaining the submission of the tool. It is this shared understanding of gender and technology to which techno-feminism must continuously attend. 20 Introduction === [PDF page 30] === A Techno-Feminism for the Insufferable Tools I find inspiration for a media theory capable of taking on the insufferable tools of big technology through the work of science and technology studies (sts) scholar and techno-feminist Judy Wajcman, who in 1991 wrote, “Insofar as technology critically reflects a man’s world, the struggle to transform it demands a transformation of gender itself.”20 Her work is often read to be in slight opposition to the specific umbrella term within feminist technology studies known as cyberfeminism.21 The term cyberfeminism was coined by feminist philosopher Sadie Plant in 1994 to capture feminist critical engagement with the design and making of technologies, and also the analysis of how technologies are entangled in power dynamics and forms of systemic oppression. But cyberfeminism since, many would agree, consists of far too many threads to try to condense into a coherent discipline or school of thought. When Wajcman invoked the term techno-feminism in her 2009 book of the same name, she was insisting on a counter to some of the strains of cyberfeminism that were too optimistic about the liberatory potential of technology, namely the sentiment that women should/could seize technological tools for feminist ends. For Wajcman, techno-feminism instead “conceives of a mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology, in which technology is both a source and a consequence of gender relations.”22 She further posits that techno-feminism does not identify technology itself as the source of positive or negative social changes, but instead concentrates on the changing social relationships, which technologies are embedded within, and how technologies may facilitate or constrain those relationships. Thus, instead of advocating for the inclusion of women in tech in order to challenge the male culture of technology or suggest that one must seize tools or rewrite policies related to technology, Wajcman forces us to reckon with how the world is being made. She notes, “Men’s affinity with technology is central to gender politics.” She further states, “While there has been a problematic alliance between technoscience and male power, there still needs to be a more radical critique of technology itself.”23 Wajcman’s insistence on the need to form a radical critique of technology while being oriented to a transformation of gender itself is at the heart of my desire for this book to advance a unified techno-feminist media theory fit for this contemporary landscape. I acknowledge Wajcman is usually labeled a social constructivist, and I am advocating in this book for a type of deterministic feminist media theory. But what is crucial for me and also reads as slightly unconstructivist in some ways is that Wajcman’s “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 21 === [PDF page 31] === is a feminist theory of technology that does not imagine everything is possible; instead, it argues one must reckon with what technologies foreclose and what they open up. Another key and formative text is feminist philosopher and historian of science and technology studies Donna Haraway’s 1991 essay “Cyborg Mani festo,” where she points out how the blurring lines between machinic life and human life offer an emancipatory politics for women and other subjugated populations. She also insists on the urgent and absolute necessity for feminism to keep up with the changing technological landscape and become proficient, technologically speaking, to develop new tools, new politics, and new strategies. Her insistence on new strategies as technologically informed strategies should not be forgotten. If her particular description of a cyborg fails to account for some contemporary techno-realities, her theory of cyborg feminism as a strategic politics withstands time. The history of feminist approaches to technology is rooted in a shared resistance to the notion that the field of technology and technology studies was the natural domain of men, and, as such, antithetical to feminist politics. The ongoing potential of techno-feminism is that it is able to attend to the changing technological scene because of how it insists that gender cannot be unhinged from technology. Moreover, it is not imagined as superseding any feminist school of thought, umbrella term or otherwise. I thus take another important cue from Wajcman — her suggestion that technofeminism does not supersede cyberfeminism but rather aims to “advance theorizing and action in relation to technology, and to do so in ways informed by, rather than simply positioned as superseding, previous feminist analyses.” I would, however, maintain right from the start that what is unique about Wajcman is her refusal to delink any understanding of gender from technology. Gender is not a singular category against or an addendum to the conceptual category of technology, but rather mutually affirming.24 This understanding of gender as always already technological is central to the contemporary theorizations of gender and technology I utilize below. But first, it is important to note how the work of Anne Balsamo, as a feminist technologist, designer and theorist, is also distinct in this regard for her theorizing on the frustration of gender as a boundary concept. Balsamo argues that gender has always been transformed by technology and yet gender as a technological construct continuously fails to be reconstructed in the social and political imaginary as such. In 1996, Balsamo notes how the gendered boundary between male/female remains heavily guarded despite new ways to write the flesh.25 Think antibiotics, weight22 Introduction === [PDF page 32] === lifting, prosthetics, and Botox. Resonating with Haraway’s question of why bodies should end at the skin, Balsamo questions where exactly gender is located on the body. While my focus in this book is not on this material technological refashioning, what I want to maintain from Balsamo is how the discursive dominance of the normative essentialized gendered body, or what Balsamo calls technologies of the gendered body, remains heavily guarded within the patriarchal techno-logic, even in the absence of gendered bodies. As I address in the chapters that follow, the technologies that flow from the patriarchal techno-logic are endemic of the natural, sexual, and reproductive systems that re-create this binarized gendered dynamic. This apparatus of binarized and normative gender still organizes power relations at the level of automation, gig work, and ai assistance. There’s a reason it is so hard to figure out exactly where and how to wage a technofeminist fight. Where gender is in this dynamic is never exactly clear. If it is hard to locate where gender exists on the body, it becomes harder even still to consider how gendered power is operating in a culture that is structured through the dictates of the Big Tech patriarchy. These earlier techno-feminist works, concerned with the mutually affirming relationship between gender and technology, propel and inspire the feminist strategic media theory that is at the core of this book. Because where should we attend to the politics of gender in this current insufferable nightmare that we are all differentially enduring but uniformly witnessing? Where is gender in Musk’s being given an advisory role in the Trump administration’s doge? Where is gender in Musk’s invoking of the far right in Germany? How should a techno-feminist respond to Meta ceo Mark Zuckerberg when he appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience in January 2025 and stated that corporate culture needed more masculine energy and had been suppressed in the last decade due to being forced to include feminine energy? How should one attend to this violent and imposing gender binary while also attending to the violence of the statement? Locating gender and technology’s mutual imbrication without re-entrenching gender normativity is precisely what a contemporary techno-feminism must attend to both theoretically and practically. The technological culture that these feminists mentioned above were responding to in the 1990s could certainly feel the potential impending violence of the Big Tech patriarchs of today. There was already some writing on the wall in terms of what the technological would look like if power was consolidated in the hands of a few. But just as gender and technology are mutually reinforcing, we must continue to do this work. It is ongoing. This “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 23 === [PDF page 33] === book asks against the contemporary historical techno-scene: How do we take on the politics of gender and technology while (1) demanding a radical rethinking of technology in the processes of patriarchy and feminism, (2) while also being able to address how technology has been central to the historical processes and techniques that have subjugated and systematically oppressed women, without (3) endlessly expanding the category of what counts as the domain of woman, and while (4) staying attuned to the fact that we are concerned with a patriarchal techno-logic that is also always tied to racialized capitalism?26 The techno-feminist media theory I have in mind now turns to trans, queer, and Black techno-feminist scholars, some of whom were working alongside the above theorists and others whom I want to bring into the conversation in a deeper way because they share an unacknowledged, and I would argue a quite palpable, even if strange, affinity with the media theories of McLuhan and Innis that I presented above. In addition, I turn to critics of technology who are unabashedly comfortable with the refusal of technology, not wanting to reform technology but rather altogether delegitimate the insufferable technological tools that compose the techno-scene. What all of these thinkers, these strange bedfellows, share is an acknowledgment that there are indeed formal properties of media technologies that can alter and determine the social experience of difference. There is a recognition that any political struggles related to race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on, are always already tied to a technological field of possibility. In sum, they are all joined by the inclination to ask the a priori media question before they entertain repair or reformation. And moreover, the recursive understanding of media they share with the masculine media theorists ultimately refuses to align with the patriarchal techno-logic. I want to make a brief pass at revealing some of these connections here, but they will also be elaborated more fully throughout the book. McLuhan’s and Innis’s insistence on an understanding of the ontoepistemological power of media resonates with the trans feminist scholar Sandy Stone, who argued in 1995 that “it’s hard to see what [social technologies] do, because what they do is to structure seeing.”27 Similarly, Os Keyes, science and technology studies theorist with a focus on trans medicine and care, argues nearly twenty-five years later against adding new categories of consent to things like facial recognition technologies and suggests instead that these technologies should be rejected altogether. To fine-tune them is to accept their development. They argue, “We should focus on delegitimizing the technology altogether, ensuring it never gets integrated into society.”28 24 Introduction === [PDF page 34] === Keyes states, “Any measurement system, once it becomes integrated into infrastructures of power, gatekeeping, and control, fundamentally changes the thing being measured. And these outcomes become naturalized: we begin to treat how the tool sees reality as reality itself.”29 Yuk Hui, a Hong Kong philosopher of tech culture, who argues for a Chinese philosophy of technology to counter the imposition of North American tech culture, uses the term mono-technological culture to capture the current techno-culture I described, as one that ignores the necessity of coexistence and continues to see the world merely as a standing reserve. Hui argues that this mono-technological view of the world structures the technologies that are developed. He, too, turns to the imagined utility of technology and how it then maps onto how social relations are formed. While he does not connect this specifically to patriarchy, I would suggest this monotechnological view and the patriarchal techno-logic are actually one and the same. Nonetheless, in this context of mono-culture, Yuk Hui argues the question of ethics, policy, regulation, and inclusion always comes too late. As Hui argues specifically of ethics, “Ethics is an afterthought, another technological solution or technical corrective. It either comes too late or when it is included as part of a technology’s diffusion into society it is always rife for violation.”30 Under the auspices of mono-technology, or the patriarchal techno-logic, there is no such thing as ethical tech. Through Hui’s argument then, we can understand that the tendency to turn to ethical tech as a solution would be as naive and as politically futile as an ethical capitalism or an ethical patriarchy — as absurd as an ethical racism. Instead of ethics, inclusion, representation, or regulation, what must come first is a break with the patriarchal techno-logic. Hui argues for a digital solidarity, which can only emerge by breaking away. He argues that this digital solidarity “is not a call to use more Facebook, Twitter, or WeChat, but to get out of the vicious competition of mono-technological culture, to produce a techno-diversity through alternative technologies and their corresponding forms of life and ways of dwelling on the planet and in the cosmos.” Hui shares with me this disdain and discomfort with the tech that we have. While theorists like Innis and McLuhan were grand and universalizing and unconcerned with identity, their approach to media does in fact allow for a broader conception of techno-diversity. And in this way I see how their materialist approach can fuel the queer and trans critical scholars of technology that I am pulling out here and hoping to braid together as a basis for a techno-feminist media theory. This work is powered by what I see as an unstated refusal to engage in questions about technology where the cri“The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 25 === [PDF page 35] === tique of technology and gender depends upon reifying and renaturalizing a normative gender binary. This work is suspicious of the utopian dreams of representation, recognizing that the politics of techno-diversity are not going to be realized by counting representative bodies. It is also deeply suspicious of any conception of technology and capitalism that forgets the racialized dynamics that fuel this accelerated unevenly globalizing economic system. For example, American artist Martine Syms, on the fantasy of an all-Black space crew, argues, “Out of five hundred thirty-four space travelers, fourteen have been black. An all-black crew is unlikely.” She goes on to insist, “The dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured upon a master/slave relationship.”31 Syms’s point here is significant for how it makes clear that representation will not undo a power dynamic between master/ slave, but also that space flight certainly has no plans to deliver justice but is in fact predicated on injustice. Syms isn’t just suggesting that representation is futile but rather that the inherent technological relation surpasses the politics of representation to the point that it is completely and utterly moot. Feminist nonbinary internet scholar Legacy Russell, who also focuses on the relationship between technology and Black visual culture, states in Glitch Feminism, “When we reject the binary, we reject the economy that goes along with it. When we reject the binary, we challenge how we are valued in a capitalist society that yokes our gender to the labor we enact.”32 The patriarchal techno-logic is composed of technologies that both reflect and organize an economy of care that takes as given the utility of others while it depends upon an ever-increasing demand for the labor of others. A feminist techno-logic would challenge this utility. For example, for Femke Snelting, a Belgium-based feminist technologist, a feminist internet is not a tool for feminists but rather a technology that fosters a particular logic. She has argued that a feminist internet server would “avoid efficiency, ease of use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps... networking is parasitic.”33 Snelting here, in a way that reminds me of Innis and McLuhan, urges us to see that the internet’s spatial and temporal politics of efficiency, scalability, and immediacy gives way to neoliberal forms of organizing one’s social life, such as networking, as the dominant way of relating to others. Further to this, we can ask what is networking other than sharing in a culture of utility — here is what I can do for you; what can you do for me? If we follow from the recursive media theories of thinkers like McLuhan and Innis, then what becomes most evident is the reality of a media environ26 Introduction === [PDF page 36] === ment where the world that is externalized is one that is extended via tech in such a way that it creates more and more conditions and means for servitude and indentured labor so that the world may deliver wealth to a few. The way one comes to know oneself and others is through these extractive logics of service and utility.34 There is a deep resonance here also with the work of Ivan Illich, an Austrian philosopher and priest who argued in Tools for Conviviality that Western societies made a fundamental mistake in conceiving of machines as a means of providing an alternative to indentured labor. This approach to technology as a replacement for the labor of others is detrimental to the design of the world. He argues that the more crucial question is the “need for technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.”35 To return to her techno-feminist perspective, Judy Wajcman suggests that “opening up the processes of technical innovation to encompass a broader range of social realities and concerns is the only way to generate new devices for new times.”36 In order to do this, the focus has to be on the corresponding forms of life and sensibilities of power that arise under certain technological environments. Machine logics remain central to a politics of techno-diversity, and these machine logics should be at odds with, as I’ve elaborated above, the dictates of racialized and capitalistic institutionalized time and space, oriented instead to cultivating the temporalities, spatialities, rhythms of relations, capacities, and mobilities that are incompatible with one’s utility within the normative family, the workplace, or the market. A feminist techno-logic captures how the machinic can be attuned to feminist ends. Can we imagine a nonextractive notion of utility, for example? Can we redefine what a technology is and how it is understood? As I spend time on this relationship between utility and extension through these pages, the feminist techno-logic does not challenge the notion that technologies are extensions of our capacities, but it accounts for how, in this extension, the reorganization of labor and vulnerability are a part of the message of every medium. A feminist approach to the techno-logic is not only a theory about the extension of human bodily capacities into socalled innovations that reorder sensory apparatus and social life, it is also a media theory that recognizes and finally calls attention to the fact that one particular body has been extended. I have not been completely alone in this finding but have been thinking alongside a remarkable intellectual companion, filmmaker and writer Chase Joynt, since 2019. While I have been unable to let go of the notion that McLuhan was theorizing patriarchy in “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 27 === [PDF page 37] === tandem with technology, Joynt states, “where McLuhan saw the production of media, I see the production of masculinity.” In Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir, Joynt states, “McLuhan argued we habituate to technologies to make them less painful, and I have found the same to be true of masculinity.”37 To take my vantage point of patriarchy as my anchor over a focus on the production of masculinity, I suggest there is a gendered balance of feminized care and the misogynistic exit out of the social that is intertwined within technological objects used for navigating the day. Joynt goes on to say, “My family is a technology that produces me as both masculine and feminine in turns and I harness that instability of association, as well as my transition from female to male in my twenties, to think across gender and genre simultaneously.” For me this is not a genre or identity question but rather a materialist gender and technology question that allows us to get to the structural question of how the instability of association can be harnessed for an overall economy of gender. For now, we must keep our eye on how every new technology brings with it the question, and often the answer, of what or who this new technology will take care of, and who and what are relinquished from social responsibility. What gets harnessed are the gendered social relations that determine the rhythm of care and delegation across the social body. Chapter Overviews In chapter 1, I consider how Big Tech’s in-house feminism has come to set the popular (and often the scholarly) agenda for what constitutes tech’s gender problem. Oddly, Big Tech’s feminism turns away from the question of technology and remains locked into the normative and confining media environment, determining its own set of questions and concerns about gender and technology. The result is that when it comes to feminism, Big Tech wields its women and other marginalized identities as if they were one of its very own technologies. Big Tech Feminism is a type of popular feminism that intersects with the logics of dominant technologies and a neoliberal conception of the self and is primarily concerned with keeping people and machines working well within the machinations of capital. The chapter chronicles how the plight of the “woman in tech” begins to intersect with the popular and academic concern over Amazon’s Alexa’s plight as a feminized and disenfranchised technology trying to make it in this misogynistic world. 28 Introduction === [PDF page 38] === In chapter 2, I outline how the masculine fantasy of exit, as it exists across the political spectrum, has come to define the technological design of the world. We can see that one of the most popular patriarchal spaceand-time-binding endeavors is a relationship with technology where one can physically exit from society while maintaining and extending one’s own power. This can be done via cryogenics or doomscrolling from bed for the day. Going to Mars (space) and long-termism (time) are so hot right now — as is any tech philosophy that forsakes today’s world for a techno-utopian future. The escape fantasies from Earth coincide with the fascination and investment in machine logics that could allow one to live forever. For the right, exit is found in the alt-right sexodus movements, nationalist movements (Brexit), and Trump’s invoking of new borders and bans. Exit on the right is imagined as a mechanism of establishing sovereignty. Across the political spectrum of the left, from “nice” liberals to neoliberal popular feminists, to strands of autonomist Marxists, there are variations on the theme of how exit via refusal is productive for the politics of maintaining autonomy; however, both exit and refusal have a significant gender problem. There is a gendered politics of utility that emerges, a disjuncture, to which I argue feminist refusal must attend. The masculine inclination to exit out of the social is inherent in the extractive, racist, consumptive, and classist technological design of the world. In chapter 3, I trace how the impetus to pull out of the social, as it emerges in the previous chapter, depends upon a normative structure of care I refer to as the maternal mandate, an unacknowledged guarantor of the patriarchal social structure, which continues to provide sustenance in ever-more socially and technologically innovative ways. The domination of exit technologies maintains a world completely oriented around capitalist, racist, and patriarchal conceptions of the need for the utility and servitude of others. The mundane technologies (smartphones, apps, Fitbits, assistive devices, ai companions, chatbots, online friends, water bottles with digital reminders, and sleep monitors) that organize the temporal and spatial contours of the day are fundamental to the reproduction of patriarchy and together compose a media complex that includes machinic forms of care and intimacy, and constitute an unacknowledged gendered normativity tied to capital. While these technologies manage time and the mundane tasks of social reproduction, they also uphold a binarized and gendered division of labor as still necessary to social reproduction. The ultimate dominance of the gender binary is often obscured thanks to the way these technologies “The Sex Organs of the Machine World” 29 === [PDF page 39] === and forms of labor seem to be untethered from discrete gender identities. What I see are technological gadgets, systems, programs, and devices that uphold established and devalued understandings of labor and gender. These insufferable tools are imagined to be oriented around the care of the self and others but ultimately function as narrowing worlds of care via an impetus to enclose one into a regime of privatized space and the control of the time of others. Within a normative structure of care, the dependence on a gendered and racialized economy of utility ensures that those who don’t abide are rendered aberrations, broken and unfit machines unwilling to reciprocate man’s love in this patriarchal machine world. In chapter 4, I turn more explicitly to the outlines of the techno-feminist theory I refer to as feminist technological determinism and begin to outline how a feminist techno-logics of refusal might emerge from inhabiting the patriarchal conception of feminists and others as broken-down technological tools. A feminism of the broken machine accounts for the differential experience of being positioned and determined by patriarchal capitalism as a technology that doesn’t work properly. This feminism, from which a techno-logics of refusal can grow, begins at the point of being incompatible with Big Tech. The techno-feminist power here relies upon a recursive understanding of technology. It demands recognition of a politics of difference that is keyed into the logics of the machine world. Ultimately, feminist techno-determinism provokes the following two questions — both of which can be applied to different historical formations and cultural contexts. It is a media theory that can be transported. First, what are the technological conditions of possibility tied to the terrain of feminist, antiracist, and anticapitalist struggle? Given this, how might we cultivate feminist machine logics? It insists that an understanding of the technological needs to be part of a strategy of refusal. Locating the current machine logics and holding open the possibility of new feminist machine logics is at once a practical matter and a political goal for feminist techno-determinists. A feminist technological future demands, then, not a life free from the logic of machines, but rather a different set of machine logics— feminist techno-logics. This book is an attempt to provide a theoretical clearing and take a scan of the insufferable tools and their machinations in order to incite and inspire a future rife for feminist techno-logics. 30 Introduction === [PDF page 40] === The Woman in Tech A Useful Device The Problem with Big Tech Feminism Sexism at [insert your favorite tech company] is no longer a noteworthy headline. The rise of Big Tech as a nexus of American power and wealth means that the sexism, harassment, and discrimination that had been typical of Wall Street has found a new venue where it can flourish in very sectorspecific ways. In 2019, a group of women tech investors and executives called Women in Tech conducted a survey of two hundred senior ranking women in Silicon Valley and published “The Elephant in the Valley.” They found that 60 percent of women had dealt with unwanted sexual advances from men in positions of authority, coworkers, and even clients and customers. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported on the racial composition of the top seventy-five companies in Silicon Valley and found that only 3 percent of employees are Black, and the employment of Black professionals in technical positions at premier tech companies like Google and Facebook hovers below 2 percent.1 Meta faced a lawsuit filed on February 3, 2025, for sexual discrimination in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that tech companies had been “culturally neutered” and needed more “masculine energy” in order to thrive. The dominance of white men in tech creates an asymmetrical power dynamic that has led to misogyny === [PDF page 41] === FIG. 1.1 “Mark Zuckerberg flaunts his abs with ufc stars as he gears up for Elon Musk showdown.” Mark Zuckerberg with ufc fighters Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanovski. Source: Mashable Middle East, July 13, 2023. Image: Instagram. and other forms of exclusion based on race and sexuality; however, there is still something very specific about tech that we must take into account when reckoning with how misogyny appears in tech — the technology itself. As equity and diversity campaigns continue to combat the white masculinist culture of Big Tech, it is interesting to note how the characteristics of misogyny continue to transform in tandem with nascent technological changes in the modern workforce. While working on this book I have seen the stereotype of the misogynistic guy in tech (or tech bro) morph from the unassuming programmer hiding behind the screen to the buff tech giant who is unabashed in his masculine display (figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Amazon’s Jeff Bezos sure has become a prime beefcake these days. The very ripped Bryan Johnson, the antiaging tech millionaire, claims he has created an algorithmic health protocol that can make death optional. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has been doing jujitsu and enjoys slaughtering his own meat; he is also increasingly keen for a topless photo op to display all that masculinity in vibrant action. Zoe Bernard, writing for Vox, profiles the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who claims that mixed martial arts is the primal sport of civilization. Andreessen considers this to be “a very jacked up movement” in tech right now, noting, “The people I know are thinking about testosterone and eat32 chapter one === [PDF page 42] === FIG. 1.2 Amazon founder billionaire Jeff Bezos with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez on a megayacht from the New York Post article “Why Rich Men Like Jeff Bezos Are Striving for Hollywood Physiques.” Source: New York Post. Image: Splashnews.com. ing 500 grams of protein a day. They are ravenous, carnivorous, and totally yoked.”2 This new jacked-up tech patriarchy treats the body as a machine that needs to be optimized. The patriarchal tech bro has incorporated and internalized Harold Adams Innis’s theory of media power, which argues that the enduring power of a civilization depends upon a balanced temporal and spatial dynamic of a civilization’s dominant technologies. Technologies that expand and extend spatial power must be balanced by technologies that offer lasting duration in time. For Innis, power is always media based. Here the tech bro seems to recognize that the technological extension of male identity and sustained future of patriarchy requires the perfect balancing of spatial (go to Mars) and temporal (live forever) power. As noted in the introduction, this is the era of the tech giant who wants to live forever and also wants to push for dominance and expansion into new territory. He seems to be succeeding. While the Big Tech patriarch continues to unfold in this new media milieu of his own making, tech’s gender problem has become almost banal. Vox laments that this jacked-up tech culture no longer even feels the need to pay lip service to the facilitation of positive gender politics: “When I started The Woman in Tech 33 === [PDF page 43] === working in this space [a decade ago], it was very male-dominated, but everyone pretended to include women. Now it’s still very male-dominated, but nobody feels the need to pretend that it’s true.”3 But while the article implies that gender equality is a far-gone dream, this account of masculinity in the tech industry concludes, much like so many other journalistic takes and feminist critiques of Big Tech, with a glimmer of hope for equity and diversity in Big Tech: “The pendulum may eventually shift toward a climate that’s even more welcoming to women and minorities.” When the 2022 mit Review asked yet again why can’t tech solve its gender problem, it too ended with a hopeful refrain that a new generation of tech activists, organizers, and whistle-blowers, most of whom are female, nonwhite, gender diverse, or queer, may finally bring change. For the last two decades, the enterprising concept of “more women in tech” has been a rallying popular feminist slogan that rests on the hopeful assumption that infiltrating tech with more women and “others” will break the cycle of misogyny, sexism, and racism. Ah, here she is, again and again, the glimmer of hope within a patriarchal tech culture: the woman in tech and her diverse entourage. As it stands, the prospect of a tech bro who aims to live forever and the promise of more inclusion of this woman in tech starts to seem like a troublesome quandary. It would seem that it is high time to rescue this woman in tech from her confinement within the patriarchal techno-logic. This chapter argues that the woman in tech is one of Big Tech’s most useful tools. In order to address the ever-mounting accusations of misogyny and toxic working conditions, Big Tech has cultivated its own form of inhouse feminism. I call this Big Tech Feminism. This in-house tech feminism masquerades as having a feminist techno-politics, but it is never about the technology or the patriarchal technological structures of power that are fueled by the tech industry. Instead, Big Tech Feminism focuses on repairing the relationship between the overall culture of Big Tech and female-identifying, queer, or racialized individuals. It does so at the expense of breaking with the patriarchal techno-logic. Big Tech Feminism focuses on inclusion in a way that is consistent with a tool-based notion of the utility of women and other marginalized populations. As I discuss below, this tool-based notion of the utility of women also appears in masculinist versions of media theory. Such a view is borne by the patriarchy, a system of power that depends upon technology in the same way it depends upon the utility of others. I want to make clear from the outset that in this chapter I ask nothing of Big Tech. I do not ask for it to change. I do not expect a sudden transformation. I do not have advice for how it should better operate with better 34 chapter one === [PDF page 44] === gender politics in mind. In fact, my purpose is to stop this type of feminist intervention in its tracks for the time being and shift our gaze. Instead, I want to highlight the power of Big Tech Feminism in maintaining the patriarchal techno-logic and how it has come to dominate the popular understandings of the relationship between technology and gender. I argue that Big Tech Feminism problematically distracts attention away from not only the very technologies and the tech companies in question, but also the technological structures of power that are tied to the social experience of gender and other forms of social difference. Big Tech Feminism also infiltrates scholarly understandings of gender and technology as well. I do recognize that Big Tech does have feminist actors who are organizing and pushing for a more equitable technological future, and that the industry is not a monolithic enterprise composed only of tech bros; however, I want to insist that this overwhelming focus on inclusivity and representational politics distracts from and negates the potential of feminist techno-politics. To understand gender and technology requires a deeper understanding of how technologies are environments that set the parameters of social and political possibility. In other words, understanding the gender politics of Big Tech requires a strategic understanding of media in order to take on the patriarchal techno-logic. This is even more pressing as we are living through an attack on dei initiatives by the Trump administration where everything from terrorism to tarmac plane crashes are being blamed on a perceived wave of woke inclusions. Ultimately, this chapter hopes to release the woman in tech from her confinement within the patriarchal techno-logic, as she appears in popular discourse, in tech workspaces, in media theory, and in our technological devices. By the end of the book, I will introduce an alternative feminist figure in tech, the Broken Machine, who operates strategically and subversively, with a deep understanding of both media and the patriarchal techno-logic. This feminist figure operates with a technologically determined understanding of agency. I begin first with a composite sketch of the woman in tech as gleaned from popular culture. The Woman in Tech: A Useful Tool The repository of hope that is the woman in tech started to appear in popular tech culture magazines and industry websites around 2008. The woman in tech suffers from tech’s gender problem, but she’s also the imagined solution to the problem. The inhospitable working conditions for women workThe Woman in Tech 35 === [PDF page 45] === ing in tech has been the subject of many memoirs and news headlines. As Tamara Kneese, media studies scholar and director of Data and Society’s Climate, Technology and Justice program, has argued, these accounts of women in the tech industry should be understood as a form of worker’s inquiry — a type of reporting that uncovers working conditions and workers’ class perspectives from within an organization.4 In her book Whistleblower, Susan Fowler, writer and software engineer, documents the sexism she uncovered during her year at the company Uber. Fowler shares how complaints to then-ceo Travis Kalanick about inappropriate workplace behavior would often result in his famous retort, “That’s what we call Boober.”5 Technologist Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley recounts trying to fit into the masculine culture of Big Tech. She would use male pseudonyms in her customer service emails so that men would respond better. She changed the way she dressed — wearing pants to avoid comments from male coworkers in a team of fifty where she was one of only six women. Emily Chang’s Brotopia chronicles her experiences at a tech startup where she recounts the hot tub pitch. The former Bloomberg Technology executive and anchor writes, “What woman is comfortable getting into a bikini and pitching to an investor while holding a beer in a hot tub?” She explains how Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist who invested in Twitter, Instagram, Uber, and CloudKitchens, was so impressed when some of the men were able to sit in a hot tub for eight hours while discussing a potential business deal. Chang explains how women who were invited to these same parties at the investor’s home could be heard saying, “I’m never going to get an investment from Chris Sacca.” This palpable feeling of not having the chance to even be given a chance is the impetus behind the 2018 Forbes Women in Tech campaign in Brazil. The magazine swapped the gender identities of the world’s leading tech giants and turned them all into women (figs. 1.3 and 1.4). The smiling faces and gold-embossed names of Jenny Bezos, Marcia Zuckerberg, and Ellen Musk accompany images of their failed ventures of Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla. Forbes was calling attention to the lack of opportunities for women working in the South American tech industry, highlighting the fact that venture capitalists and tech investors would not have given Jenny, Marcia, and Ellen the same sort of chance that Jeff, Mark, and Elon had been given. If women ran these companies, they would not exist. From here we can see that refusing the tech company or their technologies is outside the scope of this campaign. We are deterred from making political economic critiques or questioning what these companies have wrought. Instead, we are guided 36 chapter one === [PDF page 46] === FIG. 1.3 In an ad reimagining millionaires as women, Elon Musk becomes Ellen Musk. Source: Ads of the World. Copyright: Ogilvy. FIG. 1.4 In an ad reimagining millionaires as women, Jeff Bezos becomes Jenny Bezos. Source: Ads of the World. Copyright: Ogilvy. === [PDF page 47] === by Big Tech Feminism to lament the lack of women’s opportunity to thrive in these companies and contribute to the way they have undermined local economies and provided wealth to the few. The woman in tech has an enormous portfolio and mandate, and yet she must still carry the identity of a contemporary tech titan in order to be taken seriously. The popular discourse contends that if she were included, she could provide the necessary checks and balances, all the way up the Big Tech ladder, to deal with sexual harassment, gendered pay gaps, inhumane family leave policies, cycles of overwork, and the lack of diversity-based hiring. One woman in tech begets more women in tech. A woman in tech would be there to remind people that certain things may cause harm for populations that are already marginalized — things like facial recognition technologies and the untrammeled proliferation of hate on social media platforms. If she were present, she might be able to make a distinction between the different uses of machine learning in technology so that automatic soap dispensers would better recognize dark-skinned hands, but similar technologies wouldn’t perpetuate an already racist system via biometrics and face scans. “Faces bad, hands good,” the woman in tech would say. Perhaps she could be there to point out that digital platforms are as dangerous as tobacco and ought to be regulated too.6 A woman in tech might have been in the right room at nasa to ensure that medium-sized spacesuits were made so that the all-woman spacewalk didn’t have to be canceled due to a wardrobe malfunction of celestial proportions. A woman in tech might also change the thermostat settings of office air conditioning to accommodate the different temperature needs of different biological bodies, slowing the sales of the trusty office cardigan. The woman in tech signals progressivism but does little to mitigate racial and class disparities and resource displacement by Big Tech. One only needs to look at the tent cities and encampments that circle Silicon Valley high-tech firms.7 What good is better racial and gender representation on the boards of Tesla, Amazon, or Foxconn if the working conditions are so inhumane and degrading that workers are driven to suicide?8 In 2010, assembly line workers in Longhua, China, began staging fatal protests of their working conditions by throwing themselves off their dorm towers in broad daylight.9 What good was all that ill-fated diversity at Meta anyway when the content moderators only have short-term contracts that expire after two years, coinciding with the onset of the ptsd and depression that accompanies the traumatic labor of working with images depicting sexual violence, child abuse, and animal torture?10 One wonders how a more inclu38 chapter one === [PDF page 48] === sive and representative executive board or management team can resolve the fact that the technological devices conjured by diverse and talented design teams, and assembled within factory walls by an underclass of tech workers, are still detrimental to the world. One needs only to consider the massive equity and diversity campaign of rtx Raytheon Technologies — that they are queer, Black, trans, and open to everyone and were voted the best place to work for lgbtq equality means what exactly for techno-feminism? rtx makes missiles, bombs, parts of fighter jets, and other weapons used by the Israeli military’s genocidal mission in Palestine. rtx is also responsible for the surveillance technology used at the US -Mexico border. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are not a universal good.11 By all accounts, I could make the easy feminist dismissal of Big Tech Feminism as neoliberal feminism. Big Tech Feminism is indeed rooted in something like former Facebook Chief Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In feminist politics and is indicative of a type of feminism for the 1 percent. Big Tech Feminism certainly reeks of a type of capitalistic entrepreneurial feminism that is corporate, white, bourgeois, and largely dependent upon the devalued labor of poor white women, and Black and brown men and women. In “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” Marxist cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall argues that popular culture is a place where power struggles against the culture of the elite occur.12 For Hall, popular culture is the arena of consent and resistance, a common site where we can see the rise of hegemony along with where it is secured and maintained. Feminist media studies scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser extends Stuart Hall’s theorization of the effects of popular culture on feminism and argues that all types of popular feminism, across the political spectrum, are still subject to misogyny and violence.13 It is undeniable that there is mounting and proliferating misogyny in tech. As Sarah Banet-Weiser argues, every type of feminism, whether it is popular or capitalist, and depoliticized or radical and anticapitalist, is met with corresponding forms of misogyny. Thus it is not surprising that Google engineer James Damore’s sexist memo was leaked during a push to make Google more inclusive in its hiring. But even so, I would argue we need to insist that tech’s gender problems are not entirely ideological, given that Big Tech Feminism, too, insists on treating patriarchy as an ideological form of power as their ultimate means to reckon with Big Tech. Sarah Banet-Weiser’s advancing of popular feminism makes it impossible for me to abandon these gendered, racialized, and queer actors in tech that are simultaneously captured in the context of the woman in tech as simply neoliberal actors locked in the patriarchal techno-logic. The Woman in Tech 39 === [PDF page 49] === Instead, what we need is a techno-feminist focus on the techno-logics of patriarchy in a way that does not abandon Big Tech Feminism but reveals how misguided the feminist techno-politics of Big Tech Feminism are when it comes to dismantling patriarchy. In Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell, from the perspective of a Black queer feminist scholar of technology, powerfully argues that “as a movement, the language of feminism — and more contemporarily lifestyle feminism has in large part been codependent on the existence of [the] gender binary, working for change only within an existing social order.”14 But Russell also points to digital culture as offering new ways of subverting this normative code of gender difference. For me, the problem with Big Tech Feminism is certainly what Russell points out — a feminism for the few that upholds normative categories of difference (man/woman). But the additional element that makes Big Tech Feminism most problematic is its avoidance of dealing with technology and the technological structures of power. Big Tech Feminism reduces the understanding of big technology as if it were a matter of the workplace, or as if the question of technology is a matter of tools that need to be wielded by women in a different manner. The problem with Big Tech Feminism as a type of popular tech feminism is that it adheres to ideology and representation, and tool-based notions of technology, in order to accomplish its goals. This frame misses an opportunity to understand the material and coconstitutive nature of gender and technology. Understanding how Big Tech Feminism actually functions in this culture also allows me to provide an overall cautionary tale for how we approach gender and technology in our scholarly work as well. We will see this at play in the next section, where I take up Amazon’s Alexa and her rather popular feminist struggle. The Rise of Alexa Feminism It is hard to believe that a cylindrical hands-free speaker that connects to a cloud-based virtual voice-based system could be the site of so much feminist consternation. Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, named after the Great Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt, has over 100,000 functions, including playing audio, controlling smart home features, finding recipes, forecasting weather, and giving news updates. Through voice activation, Alexa assists in the overall management of a household. Alexa can be linked to appliances and third-party apps to pick up laundry or deliver food and groceries. Alexa will also provide companionship; if one desires a more natural flow to 40 chapter one === [PDF page 50] === confab with Alexa, the virtual assistant can be upgraded to conversation mode. But Alexa is just one of many feminized assistive devices that assume women’s voices and names as they take care of the small things.15 Together they sound like a rush roll call for the same sorority: Alexa, Cortana, Erica, Harmony, and Siri are in the house! Like sorority girls, but also like Barbie, Bond girls, and any women in the spotlight, Alexa and the rest of the virtual assistant squad have been subject to an ongoing cultural debate concerned with their feminist status. It would seem that feminized voices are welcome to provide domestic assistance, and masculine voices are preferred when it comes to things like security or surgery. Artificial intelligence assistants are a precursor to the humanized robots that have also contributed to gendered and racialized violence — from the hypersexualized robots that are designed for sex and flirtatious chatting to the orientalist fetishization of these same robots as a means to fulfill a market that has always exoticized Asian women as subservient tools for white male pleasure. The fascination with Alexa’s feminist struggle started appearing in popular tech news headlines around 2017. The virtual assistant was critiqued for how it perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes endemic to the undervalued and underpaid pink-collar workforce. As media scholar Taylor Moran has argued, the absence of any other markers of identity beyond the feminized voice means most virtual assistants are coded white, feminine, and servile.16 Rachel Withers, writing in Slate magazine, questions, “Does her existence represent a setback for feminism all together?” The article chronicles how Alexa is subject to sexist and harassing commentary by users. The article concludes, “But perhaps, most disconcerting of all, men would be less rude to them if they sounded like dudes.”17 Slate profiled a relationship that ended because a love interest was overheard telling Alexa to shut up.18 Journalists and academics have recounted how they have sexually harassed Alexa just to see how it would respond.19 Leslie Witt, the former vice president of design at Intuit, writes of how she became concerned with Alexa’s role in her own domestic sphere after witnessing her family’s overtly gendered interactions with the virtual assistant. Citing Clifford Nass’s book Wired for Speech, which argues that people prefer help from women, Witt decided to rescue Alexa from the living room so that her family no longer had access to it. In what reads as a moment of solidarity and kinship with Alexa, she states, “For now, Alexa’s been shifted to my study, removed from the family sphere and tucked into a place where she and I can safely commune. And, here I sit with her, imagThe Woman in Tech 41 === [PDF page 51] === ining how we should shape this increasingly ubiquitous technology not just to make our lives easier, but to make us better.”20 An international petition to stop sexual harassment directed at digital voice assistants organized by the social network Care2 was signed by almost seventeen thousand people. The most high-profile intervention, however, came from a unesco report, which claimed that the device was harmful in relation to gender discrimination. The report stated that “overwhelmingly male engineering teams” are responsible for creating digital assistants that “greet verbal abuse with catch-me-if-you-can flirtation.”21 Finally, in response, Amazon installed a “disengage mode” for Alexa. Alexa could now reply to sexually explicit questions with either “I’m not going to respond to that” or “I’m not sure what outcome you expected.” At the same time as Amazon introduced this new shutdown function, the company also created the Alexa Personality Page (fig. 1.5). The multinational e-commerce and technology company wanted to reinforce that Alexa was, as they say, “not a person with a gender but a persona for an ai.”22 Amazon offers “the Alexa personality,” which is “welcoming, friendly, humble, witty, kind, fun, personable, curious, imaginative, respectful” but “not chummy, fawning, folksy, bubbly, condescending, sarcastic, cynical, negative.”23 From these descriptors, Amazon insists that Alexa is not so much gender neutral but positively gendered. They state, “Amazon avoids reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes by designing content that is not overtly male or female. Amazon does this by giving Alexa a wide range of interests and opinions, including a love of stem, space, sports, cats, music, pop-culture, and science fiction.” Amazon developers continue, “We avoid positioning that makes Alexa appear subservient, apologetic, desperate to help, or overly eager.”24 These changes to the Alexa persona characteristics seem in line with scholarly conversations about the need for technologies to reflect back shifting gender norms. And so this is just as computational social scientist Eleonore Fournier-Tombs suggests: “If we as a society are trying to evolve, and trying to have new norms for gender... we can’t do it [if] more of the tools we’re using just propagate these stereotypes.” Ramona Pringle, a scholar of creativity and media studies, suggests that diversity is the solution to the gendering of assistive devices. Like dei initiatives all across universities, it would seem that so too must technologies reflect this momentum. She writes, “Diversity isn’t an option, it is a necessity, and if the moral argument doesn’t resonate, the bottom line should.” Biochemist and professor of diversity and inclusion and founding dean of 42 chapter one === [PDF page 52] === FIG. 1.5 Amazon’s breakdown of digital assistant Alexa’s personality traits from the company’s website. the Faculty of Science at Toronto Metropolitan University Imogen Coe similarly states, “How can we truly expect to find solutions to some of the most complex challenges we face... if we only have half of humanity at the table doing the work?”25 Industry does in fact fall in line. Fast-forward to 2021, and digital assistants now come with new gender options. Alexa was equipped with a masculine voice and a new wake word, “Ziggy.” Now even more men in tech! This occurred at the same time as Apple introduced Quinn as the gender-neutral option for their virtual assistant. Today if you were to ask, “Alexa, are you a feminist?” it would respond with a resounding “yes!” followed by “as is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.”26 Finally, some good news for gender equity in tech, right?27 But gender diversity does not alleviate Alexa’s subjection to harassment. Leah Fessler, tech journalist for Quartz magazine, provides a brief history of Alexa’s feminist evolution during the #MeToo movement: from a passive bot that was traditionally feminized and untrained to deal with harassment, to a more The Woman in Tech 43 === [PDF page 53] === feminist device that is now reprogrammed to respond to sexism and harassment. Fessler proclaims, “Amazon’s Alexa is now a feminist, and she’s sorry if that upsets you.”28 Alexa’s feminist status has also preoccupied feminist media studies. It is important to note that while there are over fifty popular articles that discuss Alexa’s feminist status, there are approximately seventy academic articles on the topic of digital voice assistants and gender that mention Alexa as a case. In 2020, feminist media scholars Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy argued in The Smart Wife that this shutdown function was a positive step toward eliminating negative stereotypes of women and other marginalized groups.29 They suggest that while these devices are not women, they should be able to respond to abuse in a way that is desired or expected for interactions between humans. unesco claimed the recent development and adoption of this new technology provided an opportunity for technology firms to explore the possibility of developing a “neutral machine gender” that is neither male nor female. In media scholar Lai-Tze Fan’s study of how Alexa is coded to deliver gendered care, she concludes that “perhaps we can seek a diversity of ai ’s human-like representations, including genderless voices like Q.”30 From this scan of the commonly understood narrative of Alexa’s feminist journey, it would appear that, for some, Alexa is on a trailblazing path, albeit slow but steady, in terms of subverting gender norms in the world of technology.31 Like Barbie, Bond girls, and sorority sisters, it looks like we won’t really get to some common ground and final determination about the feminist status of Alexa. We don’t really need to anyway. Instead, we should look at what is indicated by this larger cultural conversation about Alexa’s feminist status and struggle — one in which feminist academic discourse has played a significant part. You see, while Alexa’s feminist status remains in flux, and these dreams of a neutral machine gender are being entertained, Amazon has been working on its next Alexa upgrade, which appears to have nothing to do with Amazon’s gender politics: “With generative ai bringing our north star for Alexa within reach, we’re previewing a new large language model and a suite of conversational ai capabilities that will help deliver an even more intuitive, intelligent, and useful Alexa.” I would argue that although retrofitting Alexa with the technological power of feminist refusal and gender neutrality (something most people could only dream of ) are imagined to be feminist wins, they are really a technological design solution to smooth over how misogyny interrupts the flows of racialized techno-capitalism. 44 chapter one === [PDF page 54] === In all of this volleying back and forth over Alexa’s gender politics, what I find is a cultural conversation that is overly concerned with stereotypes, gendered roles, devalued labor, and the virtual assistant’s lack of preprogrammed feminism, at the expense of understanding that Alexa is a technology tied to gender struggles of an entirely different and potentially more destructive magnitude. This popular feminist preoccupation with Alexa’s gender politics distracts from gender’s actual tech problem. In the case of Alexa feminism, what becomes clear is how the focus on inclusion and diversity is consonant with a tool-based notion of the utility of women. I offer another example of how Alexa’s struggle intersects with feminist scholarship. There is a thriving vein of feminist scholarship dedicated to retrieving women’s hidden labor and their early roles within tech. Feminist media scholars continue to remind us that the discourse about tech lacking women is itself productive for keeping women out of tech. Retrieving the pivotal role women played in early computing and the development of digital technologies is important feminist work.32 Highlighting the lost histories is often understood to be important due to how it allows for the retrieval of role models that could then create new representations and stories that might foster social change. Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch argues for the need for better representation: “Basically reasons for why there aren’t more women in the industry are well-known and much discussed, primarily the lack of role models for women who are interested in tech. How many tv programs and movies have key protagonists who are engineers, let alone women engineers?”33 This sentiment is echoed almost verbatim by Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, who stated in 2016, “If women had been more prominently talked about in computing, both in history books and schools, we literally would not have the lack of women programmers that we do today.”34 From weaving to memory storage, to navigating a rover on Mars, women were not only central to technological innovation throughout history, but they were central to making sure technologies see the light of day.35 As historian of technology Mar Hicks points out, “In the 1940s, computer operation and programming was viewed as women’s work — but by the 1960s, as computing gained prominence and influence, men displaced the thousands of women who had been pioneers in a feminized field of endeavor, and the field acquired a distinctly masculine image.”36 Thus a transformation in the gendered veneer of tech work occurred with the advent of personal computing in the 1980s. Computing was rendered feminine but then masculinized when it became clear that the power of the electronic universe would need to be harThe Woman in Tech 45 === [PDF page 55] === nessed in order to extend patriarchal forms of power.37 Men’s relationship to technology was renaturalized as a masculine trait.38 Retrieving this gendered history, recovering it, and exposing the way the eliding of women functions within the history of the tech industry works as a patriarchal ploy is not just about celebrating the fact that women were once computers, operators, and metallurgists. This is not the point of locating hidden figures in tech. Instead, the true power of scholarship like that of Hicks is how it very clearly shows that patriarchy has relied on a discursive strategy of placing women inside and outside tech. For the patriarchal technologic, the woman in tech is less of a person and more like a discursive tool. Women and marginalized others are continuously absent and then found again, central but then elided again. Women perform a particular narrative function that can be summoned at will, and such analyses constantly work to reattribute and reassign, as well as reassess, the true and hidden value of women’s role in tech. At every step along the way in technological development— whether computing is transferred to a machine or a task is transferred to an app — the technologies, and the populations and tasks that they organize, are reattributed value within a greater technological imaginary. We know that things are elevated culturally when they resonate with masculine values. It is possible that the popular feminist tendency to continue retrieving lost histories — while important from a representational perspective — operates within a similar normative understanding of gender and value. This normative understanding is locked into a patriarchal techno-logic that reduces women’s worth and utility to their place in the reproductive order of things. Thus elevating gendered technologies associated with gendered labor suggests that these technologies, once hidden and devalued, are now visible and therefore valued. My point is that popular feminism performs this reattribution of value instead of dealing with what the technology does. The Big Tech Feminism ruse that is operating here, however, is that it takes the historically significant feminist concern with reproductive labor and the politics of care but actually locates its social value as exceeding the reproduction of workers and concerned instead with maintaining a life of excessive consumption. Note that the underlying issue of feminist concern here is not with how virtual assistants have been designed to deliver socially reproductive care, but rather that their servile disposition is what is in need of repair. What exactly are we miffed about here? That this world of servitude should be more diverse? What about the world of servitude? Much like the concern with sexual harassment at Uber over the way Uber structures the social, it 46 chapter one === [PDF page 56] === is not enough to decry the gendered automated voices of our ai assistants. Shouldn’t there be something other than a world of consumption and instant gratification? Something other than Uber and Alexa at all? It is one thing to recognize the status of devalued labor, but it is another thing entirely to treat Alexa as an exalted technology worthy of feminist allyship or feminist rescue, in the name of solidarity, as it motors the circuits of racialized capitalism to deliver the patriarchy its wealth. What is shared across the scholarly and popular critiques of Alexa’s feminist politics is an emphasis on being in communion with Alexa. Whether it is the designers, tech journalists, unesco, or Amazon itself that has us communicating, rescuing, protecting, reprogramming, organizing with Alexa as if Alexa were in fact a feminist ally, the focus on Alexa’s gendered representation and the role it occupies in the domestic sphere ignores what Alexa actually is — a medium that alters and determines the mobility, tempos, routes, and paths of others. What recedes from view is that Alexa is a technology tied to Amazon’s disregard for its own workers, local economies, and the climate. The entire popular intervention into Alexa’s feminist struggle seems to forget the fact that this device only exists in the first place to reproduce a capitalistic and environmentally degrading day that is costly, sometimes deadly, and inequitable for much of the world’s population, which remains largely at the expense of women globally. Neither the popular discussion over Alexa’s gender bias nor the subsequent response from Amazon developers acknowledges that Alexa is, in fact, a technology — a form of media. To have reached the point where gendered technologies are elevated and empowered — as they work hard to deliver capitalism’s promises of instant gratification, consumption, and convenience — reveals that we are at a significant impasse in the larger cultural discussions about the relationship between gender, technology, and the reproduction of the social order. While it is true that Alexa does take on mundane tasks related to personal and household organization that have long been associated with women’s work, there is a popular feminist concern over Alexa and other digital assistants that dilutes and disarms a long history of feminist activism concerned with the devalued status of social reproduction. This popular feminist response to Alexa also aligns with Big Tech’s understanding of the social purpose of technology writ large. In the 1970s, the Marxist feminist call for “wages for housework” was a rallying slogan and political movement that highlighted how the tasks of social reproduction — whether cooking, cleaning, shopping, clothing, smiling, caring, wiping, sweeping, fornicating, birthing, pleasing, or gathering — The Woman in Tech 47 === [PDF page 57] === have historically fallen onto women, and even more so onto women of color, for little or no pay. The call for wages was meant to highlight that these tasks were not performed out of love or joy, or because of the imagined inherent aptitude women had for undertaking such work. The work was simply drudgery — boring, unpleasant, and repetitive. I refer to this Marxist feminist slogan as it seems that Alexa’s success in gaining feminist allyship stems from a diluted and depoliticized version of this politics. Alexa is imagined to be in need of value simply because it undertakes devalued labor. Is this the end goal of Alexa’s feminist transformation and the desire for equity across virtual assistants? Appreciation and better working conditions for a feminized technology produced by a company with a role in climate pollution that doubles annually? The call for wages for housework was intended to make reproductive labor visible so that it could be refused. Alexa is given the power of refusal in order to smooth over any ideological (namely now feminist) dissent within the patriarchal techno-logic. A more diverse Alexa, or a spate of other virtual assistants, including a fresh new repository of machine gender ais, keeps gender struggles in and around tech not only completely depoliticized but confined to and relegated to serving the patriarchal techno-logic. If we are truly interested in Alexa’s feminist techno-politics, we should pay attention to how Alexa is a medium that puts worlds in motion upon the command of a voice, regardless of gender. Recalling the introduction of this book, we could return to Marshall McLuhan’s formulation of the light bulb as a form of media. As I argue in the introduction to Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan, the message of the medium is not uniform, but rather that different technologies alter the time, space, and patterns of relations in differential ways for different populations. Thus, the light bulb didn’t just have a singular universal message of light and the definitional boundaries of the day, it also shifted the gendered labor of the day. The light bulb made possible new patterns of labor, servitude, subservience, joy, and leisure. For example, the light bulb enabled— at a much earlier historical moment — the second shift or double day that 1980s second-wave feminists have examined in their own work.39 We can go further and consider how light bulbs and streetlamps ushered in a new politics of night, replete with new subaltern publics, transgressive politics, and new modes of policing. These new social patterns and how they were negotiated and came to structure the experience of difference, of both inequality and privilege, are the message of the medium. In terms of social relations of power, these patterns are inextricable from the history of the light bulb, as we 48 chapter one === [PDF page 58] === can understand the light bulb to be a medium for social change. “Alexa can you” instantly instigates a change in the time, space, and patterns of social organization. Alexa simultaneously expands the world of consumption in the name of convenience, which works to expand what is imagined necessary for the reproduction of daily life. Same-day delivery means the worker can be reproduced, cared for, maintained, clothed, and fed at an ever-accelerated pace. Same-day delivery means that drivers and boxers in the warehouse have different types of repetitive strain injuries. Alexa’s arrival in the home means there are new expectations on the domestic front but also on the warehouse floor. Once activated, the medium sets in motion assembly lines, box packers, drivers, fast food and slow food cooks, and baristas. Alexa is a key nodal point in the flows of goods, people, capital, and latte foam across global chains of supply and demand. Alexa is integral to the reorchestration of labor and servitude in factories, warehouses, and roadways. An entire infrastructure has been built up to support the expansive scale and pace of this assistive device. Prime’s discarded corrugated cardboard boxes overflow landfills.40 To rest our critique on the need to treat Alexa better is to have lost the technofeminist plot. As a feminized tool with an upgraded persona, Alexa is stronger than ever—an empowered Alexa! The focus on Alexa’s feminist trajectory forgets the global chains of labor tied to the technology and the local racialized politics of labor — who is doing the driving, cycling, and serving on the other end of Alexa’s management. In the end, Alexa is much like the woman in tech who must navigate the toxic masculinity of Big Tech as she tries to climb the tech world ladder and fights for more diversity and inclusion (fig. 1.6), and like a happy ending to a biopic of a hardworking woman in Silicon Valley, Alexa is affable and assertive but also able to code. Short of being hydrated, it would appear that Alexa has become the ideal woman in tech. This focus on representation and ideology as the root of Alexa’s gender politics is disarticulated from Alexa’s techno-politics. The focus on Alexa’s gender issues turns immediately either to the representational in terms of what the device signifies or to “her” role in relation to devalued care labor. In this popular concern with what Alexa means for the state of feminist ideology today, the device is treated like a popular cultural text we can read as a site of meaning-making and determine how the ideological battle between patriarchy and feminism is doing. From here we can make arguments for the need to have better representations at the level of content. Alexa should be coded with better language for feminist retorts, and/or Alexa should be better appreciated and respected for taking on the devalued The Woman in Tech 49 === [PDF page 59] === FIG. 1.6 Artistic rendering of digital assistant Alexa as if it was a woman working in tech. Credit: Lee Wilkins. labor of social reproduction. Alexa must be made strong, and Alexa must be valued. This popular approach to Alexa misses entirely the coconstitutive nature of technology and gender. And let me reiterate and remind the reader here of my overall argument. This coconstitutive understanding of technology and different populations (racialized, gendered, classed) is indeed an understanding that the Big Tech patriarch does behold. The Big Tech patriarch insists upon maintaining a notion of the utility of technology and of women, as well as the utility of others, as part of the strategic goals of the patriarchal techno-logic. All of this tool talk within Big Tech is not new but instead endemic of what Black feminist and critical race scholars have long been arguing: that for many populations, life has been lived as technologies — as vessels, wombs, and cogs; in sum, as tools. Technology alters and determines what we call the human as well as what it means to be abled, gendered, raced, 50 chapter one === [PDF page 60] === and sexualized. This book argues that our Big Tech patriarchs and all of their forms (as misogynistic and racist boys of the alt-right, masculinist theorists of media, and titans of tech) are guided by an understanding of media that is synonymous with how they perceive gender and other forms of social difference. What type of feminism is needed when technology is understood to be a tool to deliver his world? How should techno-feminism respond to this world full of technologies that are as abiding as they are anticipatory but also strong and valued? Not only is Big Tech Feminism inadequate to address tech’s gender problem, but it is actually why gender has a tech problem. In the next section I outline how we might begin to move toward a techno-feminist media theory and practice out of an unlikely source. I turn to the way that women have been equated with technologies and where nothing is hidden about this relationship. I also turn to a canon of media theory, some of which I rely on, where this common trope of woman as machine is part of the media theory. All of this is in fact hiding in plain sight, and techno-feminism should be ready to take this on strategically. It isn’t merely a matter of condemning the trope but of working with what this means about the conceptual categories of gender and technology. Womb Envy Denaturalized John Durham Peters, media historian and communication theorist, describes new media as womb envy. He is not alone in making this provocative statement. What he is referring to is the masculinist penchant toward theorizing and creating technologies that work upon matter, or what have been referred to as power technologies. The masculine understanding of technology as that which works upon matter obscures and devalues technologies that also labor upon life and bodies. The infrastructural elements of technology and life are often disregarded by the masculinist media theorist. He goes on to argue that out of this distinction between power technologies and life-giving technology, digital media is the result of womb envy. Modern enterprises like Google, with the development of search engines to increase the capacity for the storage of information, reflect a masculinist understanding of technology as a tool that exists to extend one’s capacity beyond cognition and beyond life. Before Peters, Joseph Weizenbaum, the mit computer scientist responsible for creating the first early natural language-processing computer program in 1964, eliza, is also known for his later lamentations on his role in the development of early ai. WeizenThe Woman in Tech 51 === [PDF page 61] === baum typified his fellow ai researchers as having uterus envy. Their fear of being replaced by intelligent machines, coupled with the desire to live forever, makes a fertile ground for womb envy; according to Weizenbaum, “After all, the field of ai is dominated by males. It seems to me that, as well as the delusion of playing God, the envy of women and their ability to bear children is also a driving motive.”41 Weizenbaum further insists that they want to create not only new life, but better life, with fewer imperfections. Both Peters and Weizenbaum suggest that the turn to the digital is a turn to the immortal. This technological reproduction of life is tied not only to the patriarchal envy of woman’s ability to reproduce but also to the need to surpass her. We can see womb envy, then, with the way Musk and Bezos are racing to reproduce an interplanetary human species. We can see it in the beefed-up tech bros’ new health protocols that make death optional. We can see womb envy with the now-deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s desire to spread his dna, and his abiding interest in the mit Media Lab is indicative of this envy as well. And then there is the fact that the countercultural icon Stewart Brand and his stint at the mit Media Lab in 1990 was guided by a vision of a technological future based on the womb — one where all needs could be anticipated in advance. Brand called this vision an “artificial ecology.” A behavioral psychologist employed at mit’s Media Lab during the years of this “artificial ecology” project maintained that “the boys building our digital future were developing technology to simulate the ideal woman — the one their mothers could never be. Unlike their potentially fallible human mothers, a predictive algorithm could anticipate their every need in advance and deliver it directly, removing every trace of friction and longing.”42 This womb envy manifests as competition and a desire to overtake the capacity of the womb. For the mit Media Lab, this meant designing technologies that could make up for the perceived inadequacies of an inattentive mother. Douglas Rushkoff, also interested in the relationship between womb envy and new media, chronicled in Survival of the Richest how Brand was inspired by the work of Chris Schmandt, who was working on developing a machine that would work like the most “ideal secretary.” Brand suggests in his book Media Lab that Schmandt once stated, “I would like the machine to pick up that I’m not having a particularly good day and be supportive or something... ask me what’s wrong... ask me if I’d like a sandwich.” Schmandt is quoted as saying, “If you’re having a bad day and somebody does some little thing for you, it can really swing your whole day around.” Schmandt was also developing a machine that could detect a 52 chapter one === [PDF page 62] === one-sided phone conversation. It would then work like a doting secretary hovering in the background to interrupt with a voice reminding him of a pending meeting, allowing him to hang up, and so this nagging secretary technology would be a time-saving device. From here Schmandt is said to have been working on the idea for Phone Nag, a technology that would remind these men to call their mothers: “Don’t you think you ought to call your mother? You haven’t talked to her for a month, you know. Here, let me dial the number for you.”43 A more contemporary example of the Phone Nag is the 2018 Bro App designed by two startup boys, Todd and James, which would send automated text messages to a girlfriend throughout the day. Todd and James recognized the capacity of the Bro App’s algorithmic targeting as a way of providing comfort. These technologies reveal that within normative domestic economies of exchange or romantic relationships, what is more important is the need to stay in contact and within the confines of the relationship. To be acknowledged in this way is a precursor to other media content such as an algorithm like Netflix’s “you might like.” It feels good to be known and to see a curated representation of your choices staring back at you. As media studies scholar Liz Ellcessor argues, to be watched is also to be cared for.44 Programmed care is often good enough. The machines don’t have to feel truly concerned about your bad day in order to make that sandwich. David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots, maintains, “When you have a robot around the home whether for cooking or for sex, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have a chat with it?”45 Womb envy can be gleaned from the way the contemporary gig economy replicates the labor of one’s absent mother—feed me, drive me, do my laundry. Silicon Valley’s major tech companies offer workspaces that replicate the creature comforts of the suburban American mom’s basement — a womb with a Ping-Pong table and snacks. This is a topic I’ll return to in chapter 2. For now, I want to point out that I find womb envy to be a helpful starting point in understanding how the toxic misogyny of Big Tech is inherent in the technological devices it designs. As Weizenbaum powerfully argues in his entire body of work, the computer programmer with the help of a computer creates worlds where only he can rule. Key to this rule is having tech that is able to be a provider of needs that is reciprocated by a user that has a desire to be pampered or provided these needs. Womb envy relies on an essentialist understanding of woman and relegates her to reproduction, while it recognizes that the patriarchal conception of technology is one in which technology replicates a patriarchal idealization of woman The Woman in Tech 53 === [PDF page 63] === as it competes with her threatening ability to reproduce or not. Technology is imagined to be that which creates the fertile conditions for his rule. This technological reproduction of the world does not free women from their task, but rather it further binds them to the order of a well-working machine construct. Consider how within the alt-right manosphere there is a deep anxiety that technologies are competing with the patriarch’s power. Roosh V, alt-right American blogger and proud pro-rape advocate, in his selfpublished screeds, equates tech and the woman’s body as rendered equally necessary to mastery and control by men: “If rape becomes legal under my proposal, a girl will protect her body in the same manner that she protects her purse and smartphone.”46 At the same time, he expresses resentment of a woman who pays more attention to her phone than her would-be suitor. He says, “If the changes brought by the internet weren’t disruptive enough, men now have to compete with smartphone devices that simultaneously force them to compete with other men who in the past wouldn’t even fall under their girl’s radar.”47 The mounting tension and suspicion over the potential for alternate machine logics that challenge the patriarchal technologic rises to the surface here. He goes on: Soon every woman in the world will have a smartphone, and the idea of commitment and love will be a throwback, something that belongs in old movies. Until then, when I’m talking to a girl and she pulls out some piece of shit old Nokia phone, I can’t help but get a little excited. I know she will be warmer, I know she won’t flake, and I know that I’m about to have an experience with a woman that will give me an honest shot. But if she pulls out a smartphone, I know that she’ll just be adding me to her collection of penises.48 Moving from the overt violence of this pro-rape extreme men’s rights advocate, we can turn to the example of a male executive at Apple. In her analysis of early Apple ads, Lindsay Weinberg notes that in the promotional video for Apple Lisa, a male executive says to the camera, “What’s so special about Lisa? Oh I’ve had other computers. But my Lisa’s different.”49 The flirtation with the machine ensures that the executive is not read as seeming feminine, as he uses the machine for his clerical work, while it insists on a seemingly special subservient relationship that the technology has to him. I see this tendency at play in the threat of untrammeled data, or data gone wild in the ad pictured in figure 1.7. The San Francisco – based company Snowflake placed a billboard on Interstate 80 reading, “grab 2019 by the data.” As Adrian Daub notes in What Tech Calls Thinking, data in 54 chapter one === [PDF page 64] === FIG. 1.7 Skona uses former President Donald Trump’s comments about women to market its data cloud ecosystem called Snowflake. Source: Twitter. this billboard is a feminized resource to be seized and forced to yield by a masculine force.50 Data, a vagina. Data is the woman’s sexual anatomy that needs to be subdued and reminded who is boss. The question of uncontrollable data, women on smartphones, and a computer that can’t be dominated hovers in all of these equations of women as machines and machines as women. But it raises a vital question that I’d rather turn to than bemoaning these designations. What happens when the data slips from your grip? What happens when this machine world refuses to reciprocate the patriarch’s love, and it begins to appear that it isn’t working so well after all? The alt-right has an answer for this too. Milo Yiannapoulos, the one-time poster child for men’s rights groups and self-proclaimed technologist once employed at Breitbart, stated that “the rise of feminism has fatally coincided with the rise of video games, inThe Woman in Tech 55 === [PDF page 65] === ternet porn, and, sometime in the near future, sex robots. With all these options available, and the growing perils of real-world relationships, men are simply walking away.”51 This statement is astounding for its misogynistic equation of women with technological tools that can be replaced. As Andrew Cadman, it consultant and UK businessman, argues in a piece for the Conservative Woman, “If sex-bots really do take off, women will have to contend with the indignity of competing with machines — machines, for goodness sake — that will become more life-like, more realistic — even more intelligent — with every passing year.”52 Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s onetime pick for labor secretary, ruminates on the virtues of robot employees over humans, saying, “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late. There’s never a slip-and-fall... or an age, sex, race, or discrimination case.”53 In this example, Puzder is referring to the coming robot revolution that could fix capitalism’s labor problems associated with calls for equity by the racialized, classed, and gendered workforce that bog down the otherwise smooth functioning of the factory floor. Feminists, antiracist activists, factory workers, the nonnormative, and the nonabiding emerge as broken parts of a system — not because they are truly broken, but because the ways of their existences make the structural injustices obvious. Feminists are seen as obsolete technologies that aren’t working properly— faulty aberrations in a long line of otherwise efficient technologies that have been designed for caretaking and reciprocating love in a male-dominated world. Feminists are as useful as a vacuum that has lost suction or a dishwasher that won’t stop leaking. Men can turn to the newer technological models that are better equipped for their lives as secondary companions. The argument is that if feminists don’t want to fulfill their positions within a patriarchal society then so be it, there are other toys and technologies that will do the work. The problem with feminists is that they refuse to work well, unlike the women in tech and unlike Alexa. The Big Tech patriarch, or, perhaps more fittingly here, the womb-envious new sex organs of the machine world, will either discard or offer repair to its potentially destructive workforce. We can see the discard-and-replacement working above, but the repair industry of Big Tech Feminism is a more subtle form of patriarchal and capitalist control. In 2022, Amazon’s introduction of the ZenBooth — a small kiosk that Amazon fulfillment center workers could enter to access meditation and other mindfulness processes (fig. 1.8) — supported this notion of factory workers as machines. The booth was in fact created by an Amazon employee who conceived of the idea as a means to have employees “recharge 56 chapter one === [PDF page 66] === FIG. 1.8 Amazon ZenBooth. “Amazon rolls out kiosk for overwhelmed employees to use.” Source: Daily Dot. the internal battery.”54 The booth was added as part of a larger company wellness campaign in 2021 called Working Well, which included the practice termed “savoring,” oriented toward improving workers’ states of mind. In 2017, after Uber’s abysmal diversity report, the company initiated things like Los Ubers and UberEspañol driver appreciation days. They held fireside chats with successful women of color. They tackled ageism through Sage at Uber. Women at Uber’s slogan is “We believe in lifting as we climb.” Tech’s gender and its other equity problems can be ameliorated by keeping the machines in good working order through repair or inclusion, or better yet, through inclusive repair. In fact, “inclusive repair” has a nice sort of Big Tech Feminism ring to it, doesn’t it? The sort of repair offered by the tech industry returns the worker to the shop floor by offering a more caring environment. In my first book, In the Meantime, I captured a host of workplace initiatives used to offer workers meaningful temporal experiences (yoga, napping pods, desk meditation) so that work could be understood also as a place of working upon one’s qualitative sense of time. That was in 2014. Fast forward to 2025, and what is on offer while at work is increasingly about repairing broken-down bodies, psyches, and spirits. This repair is part of the technological structure of power. Brian Merchant, luddite expert and author of Blood in the Machine, argues that we are living in a cultural moment where ai is expected to repair what automation has broken. He points to how processes of automation have worn down workers, from repetitive strain injuries to high levels of stress. For example, call center workers experience high stress and short turnover due to most The Woman in Tech 57 === [PDF page 67] === hours of the day dealing only with angry and rude customers.55 Merchant refers to the example of First Horizon Bank, which is using ai video rests to offer calming moments to their call center agents. This includes music and montages of family photos. This is a futile technological solution, as Merchant suggests, but I would add that this is also a solution that clearly mimics the womb. In other words, workers are offered to enter into a space of repair, warmth, and care. And so yes, womb envy is a helpful paradigm, but it still needs a technofeminist tweak. A techno-feminist media theory aims to rid itself of the binary attachments and gender essentialism that make it so difficult for feminist scholars of technology to do their work. In the next section, I turn to how the woman in tech appears in media theory. Media as womb envy is part of the extension of patriarchy. What is being extended are the technologies devised to replicate and provide an artificial ecology, which is a rather normative idea of women as part of the maintenance of patriarchy. In the context of technologies understood to be women that need to be controlled, or hence subject to discard, this return to the womb within the tech space fortifies the symbiotic relationship between technologies and patriarchal conceptions of women’s utility. As we delve further into the next section, we will see this at work in what might be one of the most significant canons of masculinist media theory. Media Theory’s Woman in Tech John Durham Peters makes a distinction between the power technologies that work upon things versus technologies as containers that labor and work upon life.56 Power technologies might drill, excavate, or harpoon a material entity, while a container technology might hold, carry, or store a material entity. He goes on to argue that male philosophers of media have an implicit media theory of gender in their dual approach to containers and power technologies. Media theorists like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler share a concern with the totalitarian potential of technology to determine life. This media theory would typically fall under the category of materialist approaches to media. It is a vein of media theory concerned with the machine logics and formal properties of a culture’s given media forms. It is a type of media theory that seems far from feminism, but it is precisely the type of media theory I find the most helpful in thinking forward to the possibilities of feminist techno-logics. 58 chapter one === [PDF page 68] === For Peters there is an implicit gendered binary between media theory concerned with the invisible infrastructural component of container technologies that labor upon or give life versus the power technologies that work upon matter. He intimates that a philosophy of technology is implicitly feminist, but I would suggest we would still have to deal with the dependence on this reorganized gender binary. He argues, “What if the philosophy of technology focused on birth as much as death? What if we appreciated container technologies as much as power technologies, or labor on life as much as work on things? What if we took domestication not as lost vigor but as the site of the hardest and greatest work?”57 His distinction echoes earlier feminist theorist Maria Mies and her critique of origin stories. She argues the “division of sexual labor” relies on the fiction of the male hunter and the women who gather. The hunter is imagined to be playing a productive role in maintaining human society. Mies goes on to say the hunter’s tools would kill (end life) while women’s tools were to reproduce life. She dug, sowed, and cultivated new life. For Mies, the distinction misunderstood what was, in fact, the most powerful of the tools. The hidden labor of women and the tools they used were oriented toward the reproduction of life force, and hence more significant than the power tools like a spear that could end life. When Mies makes a distinction between life-giving technologies versus technologies that end life, she is relying on a socially constructed gendered logic that continues to be mapped onto technologies and gendered practices. This notion of womb envy and life-giving tools versus power tools is helpful for understanding the masculinist impulse to extend patriarchy via tools; however, in moving toward a techno-feminist media theory, we must wrestle with this concept and de-tool it, so to speak. Social reproduction can be central to a feminist philosophy of technology without being relegated to the domain of women. Having a more expansive understanding of how life-giving technologies are, in fact, power technologies and power technologies are also life-giving is necessary as well. The gendered dichotomy need not hold simply because it historically maps this way in the overall social construction of gender. A techno-feminist media theory aims to rid itself of the binary attachments and gender essentialisms that are impediments to imagining technology otherwise. Media as the manifestation of womb envy is part of the extension of patriarchy, but what is being extended, insofar as technologies devised to replicate and provide an artificial ecology, is the normative idea of women as part of the maintenance of patriarchy. Thus, the critical question we must The Woman in Tech 59 === [PDF page 69] === ask for a techno-feminist media theory, or even this feminist philosophy of technology, is, what are the feminist techno-logics that are possible under these popular, technical, and media-theoretical conditions of womb envy? I want to tell this story through the perspective of masculine media theorists who on first glance, it would seem, have a penchant for power technologies, but what I find is actually a media theory that has the most unabashed references to women as tools. And so, it would seem to suggest that power technologies are indeed life-giving, and the binary does not hold so well. In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan suggests, “It would seem reasonable that the executive who can usually afford a secretary to correct his spelling and grammar could also afford today an electric brain to do his thinking.”58 On the topic of women’s relationship to advertising, McLuhan writes, “To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points, which she has been taught to tailor, but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously. She swings her legs from the hip.... She knows that a ‘long-legged girl can go places.’ As such, her legs are not intimately associated with her taste or with her unique self but merely display objects like the grille on a car. They are date-bated power levers for the management of the male audience.”59 Philosopher of technology and acceleration Paul Virilio repeatedly suggests that woman is man’s first vehicle. In Speed and Politics, as one instance, he writes that, pretechnology, “woman plays the role of the logistical spouse, mother of war and of the truck.”60 He goes on to say, “She is a mediator, but also an initiator, woman is the first in a series of relays that helps launch man progressively further into space and away from animal and social territories in his pursuit of total control.”61 Virilio argues, “Woman becomes a force of attraction, her body as a communicational body — and not simply flesh — the ideal vector between man and the new world in which the attraction of bodies is linked to gravity.”62 These little phrases are easy to dismiss as relics of a certain period of gender dynamics. That this language is outdated and therefore easy to excuse or pass over misses an opportunity to engage with the coconstitutive nature of technology and gender that this theory points to. The understanding of the technology is gendered and misogynistic because it contains a conception of both women and technologies as tools. In fact, what they actually describe are the precise gender politics that arise as a result of the totalitarian, patriarchal desire to devise technology in a way that the technology can still be dominated. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler suggests, in response to the proliferation of typists, “as a consequence, it might be possible — as we approach 60 chapter one === [PDF page 70] === the threshold of infinity — to forecast the year in which typist and woman converge. Minnie Tipp will have been Eve.”63 He draws an analogy to how this computer is both the person and the machine. The word typewriter, he writes, “after all, signifies both: machine and woman.”64 The mobilization of women as connectors for communication is traced by Kittler in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, particularly in his example of the bourgeois world of letters. Kittler also equates being a mother with being a medium, using the example of the mother reading aloud to conduct a historical analysis of language acquisition, social organization, and mothers (motherliness) in the bourgeois world of letters: “The Mother’s Mouth thus freed children from books. Her voice substituted sounds for letters, just as in the course of his Scholar’s Tragedy Faust substituted meanings for words.”65 Kittler uses the word Muttermund, which means both mother’s mouth and a cervix. Media theorist Ganaele Langlois asks, “What kind of tweaking and critique of the dominant order happened in these long moments of mothers educating their children in private?”66 I see resonance here, too, in media scholar Cait McKinney’s Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, in which she writes, “Lesbian-identified telephone operators thumbed through reference books or drew from file cabinets full of print resources to provide callers, some in crisis, with the information they asked for, which was also the care many needed to survive the day.”67 McKinney highlights intertwined media practices beyond the telephone— guidebooks, pamphlets, referral cards, and other reference materials drawn from broader feminist print cultures that were sorted and filed for easy access by capable operators. McKinney notes, “A volunteer used her hands to do this work. Operators shuffled through paper records and spoke on the telephone to make lesbian life more livable for hotline callers. Hotlines promised assisted information retrieval. Telephone hotlines were connective infrastructure in which practical, communicative work was also emotional support because it brought callers into the fold of a larger lesbian movement and its services.”68 These examples by Langlois and McKinney point to a technologically determined agency. Being technologically savvy in the context of gender’s tech problem does not mean you have bought the latest navigational tool, but rather that you recognize yourself as the technology that needs to navigate the terrain of patriarchal techno-logics. As one of the early queer cyberfeminism scholars, Sadie Plant argued that “woman is the go-between, the in-between man, the one who takes his messages, decrypts his codes, counts his numbers, bears his children and passes on his genetic code. She is the medium, the tool, the first commodity of a specular econThe Woman in Tech 61 === [PDF page 71] === omy whose circuits are the definition of patriarchy.”69 Anna Wiener certainly felt this tool function in her memoir of working in Silicon Valley. In Uncanny Valley she states, “Helping men solve problems they had created for themselves, I felt like a piece of software myself, a bot: instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or a warm voice, giving instructions, listening comfortingly. At the top of every email the men received, my avatar, a photo.”70 Feminist scholars have examined how women often serve as part of the communication technology available to men.71 As Kathleen McConnell argues, gendered technologies do not just refer to discrete media objects. Instead, they refer to a greater cultural sensibility that communication is a problem solved by a gendered process where “she” will provide the technical, infrastructural, and socially reproductive attention and care that will guarantee ideal and clear communication.72 This indicates that there is a socially reproductive guarantee offered by communication technology. It is there to reproduce “his” world and, more specifically, the patriarchal techno-logic. Feeling like a technology that must deliver efficiently is not just a matter of gender. Arthur Jafa, American visual artist, argues that the Black relationship to technology is unique. It cannot be collapsed into popular notions of personhood. Describing African Americans’ foundational role in the story of American industrialization, he writes, “We were the first technology. We are the technology that drove the American industrial engine.”73 Mere dith Whittaker, renowned scholar of ai and director of the Signal Institute, argues that the specter of the plantation hangs over computation and regimes of industrial labor, writing that “we must directly confront the unmarked presence of Black unfreedom that haunts ‘free’ labor and reweave links that have been strategically severed between race, labor, and computational technologies.”74 She argues that Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer who designed the first automatic computing engines, was aware of the disciplinary function of automation “as a tool of control that builds on and extends the disciplinary features of labor division.”75 This division of labor was based on the logics of plantation technologies. In an interview I conducted with Ladan Siad, a Toronto – New York – based designer who focuses on Black diasporic experiences, for Re-Understanding Media, they discussed how inspirational Jafa’s notion was for them. They said, “This quote seemed to explain what I had long been encountering — structures and systems of power that were meant to actively classify and control me and my family — things like immigration, the welfare system, and the in- 62 chapter one === [PDF page 72] === stitutions of education in Toronto. Upon reflection I had learned to maneuver through institutional space in a way that translated almost exactly how I was maneuvering through digital spaces.”76 Siad discussed how they have always felt like a piece of detection software or mining technology. They went on to say: So being on welfare and being a refugee in Canada and feeling like I’ve been in limbo for 16 years, has a lot to do with how I’ve learned how to maneuver in the world. You understand what you have and what can be done with what you have. This is sort of what makes some people feel like they are technology. For example, I think of myself as a scanner. I have to get a lay of the land, identify all the landmines, and figure out how to get through them all and come out not just surviving, but trying to thrive. I think it is also part of being a black, queer trans person. You navigate these spaces differently not knowing how people are going to perceive you. You are always in constant negotiation. You are the technology because you are always scanning.77 Siad articulates a real sense of needing to understand that their life unfolds within the governing machine logics of the dominant media forms. This media situation demands that they recognize how their routes, paths, and pace of life are technologically determined. Moreover, they understand that their sense of themselves is also technologically determined. What we learn from Siad is a recognition that their best way to manage strategically is to affirm the technological structure of power and maneuver within it. This is not a form of repair or maintenance, or even a tech workaround. It is strategic. The turn to scanning is at once a technologically determined social experience of difference and a technological form of survival that enables them to conceive of what sorts of refusals could push against rather than recalibrate or become subsumed by the patriarchal techno-logics. Recognizing that one occupies the position of a connector or a circuit as part of the infrastructure of technology is not an acceptance of the patriarchal techno-logic, but it’s rather a recognition that this techno-logic does alter and, at times, determine what is possible. Returning to the light bulb as medium, there is a feminist opportunity here to recognize that this media theory makes more sense if we widen the net scope of relations that a medium organizes. The Woman in Tech 63 === [PDF page 73] === No Longer a Container to Deliver His World or His Sandwiches Big Tech Feminism distracts from attention to gender’s tech problem by insisting that the problem with gender and technology is one of glass ceilings, the gendering of machines, the lost histories of women in tech, and the ideological battles between patriarchy and feminism in the tech workplace. These are all significant impediments to feminism and gender struggle in relationship to technology, but as it stands, attending to these matters continues to conform to the dictates of the patriarchal techno-logic. Instead, the work of techno-feminism is opposed to this preoccupation as it turns to the technological structure of power. Understanding the coconstitutive relationship between gender and technology requires an understanding that technology is not outside of identity. By this I mean that gender is not just imposed on a technological device but rather our devices are part of the determining force in the construction and experience of gender and other forms of social difference. By starting here rather than an imposition of ideology onto a technology, techno-feminism is also careful not to fall into the critique of reentrenching gender normativity. When we imagine technology as an addendum to difference rather than a determining force in the construction and experience of one’s identity, what we lose is an eye toward bringing forth different technological parameters of political and social possibility. What sort of future for gender exists when the everyday technologies for managing the day are emblematic of the womb, as containers to deliver his world? A world that is as predictive and automatic as it is abiding and anticipatory. A world where there’s apparently always the possibility of a satisfying sandwich to be made on-site or delivered. I do not wish to abandon this woman in tech, but rather I would invite her popular feminist struggle to reconsider its terms under the auspices of the techno-feminist project advanced here. As feminist media scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser argues of popular feminism, regardless of how it evokes a neoliberal politics, it is still subject to misogyny and violence. Every type of feminism — whether it is popular, or capitalist and depoliticized, or radical and anticapitalist — is met with corresponding forms of misogyny. Thus, a techno-feminist cannot abandon Big Tech Feminism and write it off as simply not feminist enough, or too capitalistic and patriarchal and leave it at that. But I do suggest that in the wake of Big Tech’s patriarchal legacy, feminists concerned with technology must move beyond ideology critique 64 chapter one === [PDF page 74] === and behold a deeper understanding of patriarchy as a technological structure of power. In chapter 2, I turn to how tech operates as a refuge and how this has become part of the patriarchal paradigm of domination — the Big Tech patriarch being a master of the tools who can orchestrate the utility of others such that he is never the tool. It has long been reductive within media studies to advance a binary understanding of real life and digital life. In fact, the most compelling work within the study of media is oriented toward advancing a more nuanced understanding of digital life as life itself, and not at all opposed to something offline, unplugged, and outside of tech. But I suggest that it is time to return the politics of refuge-and-retreat as not the binary opposite of real life; rather, it is time to see such tactics of refuge and retreat as an overlooked patriarchal political strategy that precedes the digital but is now manifest in the culture of Big Tech. The Woman in Tech 65 === [PDF page 75] === The Tools in Mommy’s Basement Exit Math These are Exit Times. Britain has left the eu (Brexit), and Meghan and Harry have left the Crown (Meghxit). The self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck has been on various international bestseller lists for years.1 Language is full of exit vernaculars: “I can’t even” is a millennial mantra, while “giving no fucks” is a badge of honor. Knowing when to say no is a learned forte of lifestyle feminism. Everyone seems to be doing their exit math as they plot a range of highly individualistic and also collectivist escape routes. Facebook friends post public service announcements letting people know they are leaving the platform; they will be disconnecting shortly. Someone with a blog is leaving academia, and now we have “quit lit.”2 Men’s rights groups have put women on notice; they will withdraw their reproductive participation so long as the patriarchy remains under attack. For the critical theorists on the left, refusal offers a more compelling political possibility than representation and inclusion. Someone else is quietly quitting— doing the minimum requirements of one’s job and putting in no extra effort through time or social engagement than necessary. Some exit in place as they undertake sedentary exits — little lifestyle choices and changes that can provide pleasurable, temporary escapes. In 2023, bed rotting emerged on TikTok as a new self-care practice — you lie in bed all day and remain unproductive. South Korea has an annual Space-Out Competition where === [PDF page 76] === more than one hundred people will gather to do absolutely nothing. One must zone out for ninety minutes without sleeping, talking, or looking at one’s phone. The winner is determined by judges who vote for their favorite contestant. The finalist is the one with the most stable heart rate among the ten semifinalists. The event is meant to call attention to South Korea’s hypercompetitive society. Exit has become a way of ameliorating the pressures of whatever ideological imposition one might feel — whether from capitalism, patriarchy, racism, feminism, or wokeism. Everyone longs to detach, unplug, escape, refrain, remove, withdraw, refuse, retreat, hide, leave, and flee. Exit is certainly in vogue as it runs the gamut across the political spectrum. For the right, exit is a mechanism for establishing sovereignty. For the left, exit is a mechanism of establishing autonomy. But regardless, exit has a gender problem. Not only is it a masculine fantasy, but the ability to exit is an exercise of patriarchal and capitalist power. This gendered politics of exit, or what I call the sExit, is a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy. The sExit is a deliberate disavowal of having to undertake care and its labors. To care demands recognition of the uncompromising interdependency and contingency of life, including the mutual precariousness of the human condition. The labor of social reproduction does not end when doors slam. Instead, there is often more work to be done in the wake of an exit. I invoke the terminology of sex (the sExit) rather than gender to signal how the patriarchal fantasy of exit falls along naturalized and essentialized understandings of gender and reproductive labor. This means that within the male fantasy of exit and within the world of feminized responses to this exit, there is an unacknowledged commitment and adherence to a notion of gender that is based on biology. In this chapter, I suggest the sExit is an intrinsic gendered dynamic within the technological structure of power. Like so much of how the patriarchal techno-logic operates, the sExit escapes the conceptual concerns of what is usually imagined to be a problem of gender and technology. Technologies are social, and yet proclivity to exit the social also appears to be one of the most significant preconditions for working in and with tech. The libertarian impulse of Silicon Valley is captured by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who writes, “In our time the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guide so-called ‘social democracy.’ ”3 Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are off to Mars. Currently, The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 67 === [PDF page 77] === Thiel has signed up to be cryogenically frozen so that he can be revived in the future. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s race to outer space is rooted in this libertarian impulse to exit social democracy as a means to save Earth. In other words, they must leave Earth in order to save it. At the press conference before Bezos first went to outer space in June 2021 he stated, “We’re going to build a road to space so our kids and their kids can build the future. We need to do that to solve the problems here on Earth.” They insist that Mars will provide fertile ground for new industry as well as a safe haven to escape from climate change, war, the robot revolution, global famines, and other inequities and struggles that have no technological solutions. They live in homes with armored escaped rooms and have built luxury apocalypse bunkers stockpiled with food and hot rod cars. Vivos, a company that built many of the Silicon Valley tech companies’ bunkers, promises that their underground communities “have all the comforts of home, but also the comforts that you expect when you leave your home.”4 The nouveau riche blockchain boys are leaving California en masse to create a crypto community in their own private Puerto Rican posthurricane paradise. There are plans for sea-steading communities where people can float by without paying taxes. The Freedom Ship offers a way of living outside of society but with the illusion of complete control. The sExit is not just a technological fantasy of the tech titans but part of the technological organization of the rhythms and modes of everyday time management. For example, consider how a smartphone is also a sort of freedom ship — a pocket-size life raft to deliver you away from others while simultaneously being able to conjure an entire world of service and instant gratification. Download and satiate all your desires and have them delivered to your door. Sort, swipe, submit, or ghost. Exit by remote control. Stare at your phone in the company of others, unload boring labors and tasks via a handy app, disconnect an employee rather than fire them face-to-face. Keep constant tabs on a lover or partner or child — keep them tethered in a regime of compulsory connectivity but of course do so in the name of virtuous love, safety, security. Then, of course, there is the field of robotics, where human capacities and power dynamics are excised and projected onto machines. Some of our functions, which we can enable through a retreat to large language models, promise to take over some of the steps of daily living and do what was once considered to be our own thinking. In 1991, Judy Wajcman argued in Feminism Confronts Technology that mastery over technology is a source of male power and pleasure related to a masculinist practice of retreat and refuge. She defines technology as a cul68 chapter two === [PDF page 78] === ture that consolidates and expresses relations among men. And while radical feminist scholars in the 1980s argued that technology is always already masculine, Wajcman’s point is that this is not an essentialist proclivity but socially constructed — that men’s historical relationship to technology is central to the overall social experience of gender.5 In 2013, Wajcman’s TechnoFeminism turned to the “cyber-brat pack” or what she calls the “entrepreneurial young guns” of the early internet. She argues that those at the helm of personal computing derive their sense of masculinity from treating technology as a form of both escape and control simultaneously, and that “being in an intimate relationship with a computer is both a substitute for, and a refuge from, the much more uncertain and complex relationships that characterize social life.”6 This relationship between escape and control is evident, I argue, in the white male patriarchal fear of becoming a tool that leads to a misogynistic and racist conception of others in terms of their utility. The growing fear of white male redundancy is not a new condition, but automation, sex with robots, machines that care, climate change, dei, and immigration are all tests of his staying power. It becomes necessary to impose redundancy for others, those who are tools within his paradigm of patriarchal power and those who must also be simultaneously rendered indispensable to the social order — in both its reproduction and maintenance. While not a new condition, the white patriarchal penchant for exit rears its ugly head at any hint of having to live with one’s supremacy in question. The turn to exit is a ruse in order to maintain power. And so I want to return to this formulation of technology as a refuge that Wajcman invokes. I must still tread carefully and remark, however, that I recognize that my turn back to a critique of refuge comes after feminist scholarship and critical race scholarship have brilliantly insisted against any such blanket approach to technologies, rightfully arguing that such generalized understandings of technology as escapist are problematic for how they rely on a false distinction between digital life and real life. I recognize that the field of media studies, and specifically its turn to cultural approaches to technology, has risen to prominence as a discipline precisely for how it has been able to show that technology is not distinct from social life but rather is social life. At its very best, the focus in this field of media studies that I do call home has been on untangling the raced, classed, and gendered complexities of technologically mediated life where being in an intimate relationship with the internet is often as much about bringing forth a more just world as it is about other types of political action. I recThe Tools in Mommy’s Basement 69 === [PDF page 79] === ognize that finding refuge online has also been the impetus for social movements, and that the power of hashtag revolutions is that ultimately, they do in fact leave the confines of the digital thread. A refuge is a safe haven, and tech certainly has provided shelter, protection, and security from harsh circumstances — intrinsic to practices of survival for queer and trans life. Finding refuge online has been necessary for social justice organizing. The existence of Black Twitter as a source of joy, pleasure, and political action is also part of the political sanctity of the refuge. Online life has provided a digital safety net for at-risk populations, and the media platforms of the internet facilitate the condition of possibility for feminist movements like #MeToo. These are not passive forms of technological withdrawal, they are world-building and necessary to other forms of feminist and antiracist empowerment. Cyberfeminism as a feminist form of scholarly, activist, and artistic intervention exists out of the shared sense that technology is not truly the domain of men and men alone. And yet I think this matter of tech as a means of refuge, a type of masculinist control exercised via the exit, needs to be revisited for the sake of a techno-feminist theory of media and feminist techno-politics that can account for contemporary patriarchy. Tech is not antisocial in the fashion of a quiet loner minding his own business; tech is antisocial because it is inimical to all that is incompatible with the tech itself. Working with tech is never about minding one’s own business. What does patriarchy represent other than antisociality anyway? It is exactly the ruse of harmless escapist media and the notion that we live in a world full of men with their impotent retreats that enables misogyny to guide those at the helm of the tech industries. The loner behind the screen is not a political problem relegated to the right-wing conservative media culture, as it is so often framed. The digital world, as I will elaborate, has offered a new realm to imagine both refuge and refusal as entangled with new forms of world-making on the left. As it does so, there is also an overwhelming reliance on a feminist return to care as the ultimate antidote to exit — both theoretically and as a matter of practicality. The current exit machinations of the Big Tech patriarchs are a means of fortifying patriarchy via the technological structures of power. The patriarchal techno-logic of exit inheres in the everyday technologies that attend to and organize the contours and rhythms of daily institutional and capitalistic life. Exiting out of the social is a key design logic of these everyday technologies. But this antisocial retreat is parasitic — it exits out of the social while it depends upon a normative gendered structure of care in order to exist. This poses a problem that techno-feminism must be attuned 70 chapter two === [PDF page 80] === to: What is to be done with this cumbersome conceptual category of care when exiting out of the social is not an option, but to stay under these conditions is also untenable? In other words, the opposing world of care that the exit departs from is not necessarily a type of care in which to launch a feminist politics. These exit machinations rest upon an already culturally accepted gendered politics of withdrawal that is at the core of heteroand homonormative domestic arrangements and economies of exchange. It is not so much that one must and should be offered an exit of one’s own and another should be instructed to care more, but rather I argue that this tension between exit/care, the sExit, is an impediment to overcoming the dominance of the patriarchal techno-logic. This chapter traces the sExit as it appears across the political spectrum and operates to intensify the machi nations of the patriarchal techno-logic. He Left for a Pack of Cigarettes and All She Got Was a She Shed Popular culture is full of men making fabulous exits. He went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. There’s no detective needed. No crime committed. He simply left because he could. Exit know-how is a learned masculine trait. The Art of Manliness, a tongue-in-cheek book about elevating the conduct of men in a society, includes a section on how to exit a room like a man.7 The manual insists that a man must make for the door with unwavering confidence once a decision to leave has been made. For example, if halfway to the door the man realizes he has forgotten his jacket, he is strongly advised to leave it behind, as stopping midway through an exit is rather unmanly. One of the exits with the most panache I can recall is that of former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. Varoufakis had a choreographed final departure from the parliament buildings in Athens that has been labeled the Grexit (Greek exit). Minutes after quitting, he revved his motorcycle and rode off with his wife. It wasn’t just the iconography of the motorcycle exit that struck me, however. It was what Varou fakis said during his announcement that he would be leaving because of pressure from Greece’s European partners. He stated that he planned to keep a letter of resignation on his person at all times: “I intend to write my resignation letter and keep it in my inside pockets ready to submit it the moment I sense signs of losing the commitment to speak truth to power.”8 The staged sExit is a popular genre of American daytime television that spans decades. Maury Povich has made millions parading unconfirmed biThe Tools in Mommy’s Basement 71 === [PDF page 81] === FIG. 2.1 Men carrying bottled beers and a portable beer cooler in a park for Father’s Day in Dortmund during covid -19. Source: Ruhrnachrichten.de. Copyright: Stephan Schuetze. ological fathers in front of a live studio audience for a dna test reveal. The paternity test results determine if he stays or goes. The you-are-not-thefather dance is a form of speaking truth to the power of biology. He struts off triumphantly, but she remains in the frame, her body slumped over from shock and despair. In Germany, Männertag or Vatertag (Father’s Day) is a national day of retreat for fathers (fig. 2.1). The men head into the woods to roast a pig and drink beer. They can be shirtless and rogue as they act out their masculine wiles, free of their families. In the less rural areas, fathers may opt to take a booze or beer bike ride. The tradition is rooted in the Middle Ages, when men would gather in the village center and the man with the most children would be honored with a ham. Juxtapose this with Mother’s Day, where the societal norm is that a small person will wake Mom up by crawling into her bed, force-feeding her breakfast. There is no German or North American version of a day free of dependents for the mother. Instead, she will be honored by getting to spend the entire day with her loving dependents. Mommy’s Time Out is also a brand of cheap wine. In 2018, Erik Hagerman, an average guy from New York, was profiled by the New York Times after Trump’s election win. Hagerman had become so disenchanted by all the bad news after Trump’s election win that he adopted a new personal policy he called “The Blockade.”9 He went to great lengths to avoid current events, news, social media, radio reports, and any political discussions. He even told his favorite coffee shop barista to avoid making small 72 chapter two === [PDF page 82] === talk with him related to current events. While Hagerman elected to creep out of the political picture, the struggles for refusal (the noise) waged on in factories, on streets, outside police stations, in prisons, at universities, and in classrooms. His position of privilege allowed him to decide to drop out and avoid the discomfort of needing to stay informed and engaged, which is a matter of survival and not at all an option for many marginalized populations. Women’s exit, on the other hand, is hardly on the table. It would seem that a woman is, historically, unable to choose when to leave, let alone able to enter or exit a room in a carefree manner. She is subject to biopolitical management at the entrance to the sphere of the social, the public, the political, the institution, the university, the corporation, Silicon Valley, and outer space. Is it still half price for ladies at the bar on Thursday? Are the medium-sized space suits finally ready for the all-women moonwalk? Instead of exit, popular culture instructs women to lean in and lean out, balance, juggle, modulate, take time off, breathe, meditate, exercise more, visualize, manifest, rock their bliss, or shake it off. In sum, she is invited to recharge in order to reenter. Because she can never really leave, her exit looks more like a commercial for a Maxwell House International Suisse Mocha Café break. The voice-over in the television commercial says, “You know you can never leave, but you can sit and enjoy your coffee and be transported to Vienna,” as the lyrics “Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide” echo in the background. Anything more than a little coffee break or rearranging the furniture of a new domestic arrangement might warrant becoming headline news. Women’s inability to leave is so culturally ingrained that in March 2016, when busloads of women left Montclair, New Jersey, for the day to march in Washington, DC, the New York Times headline read “How Vital Are Women? This Town Found Out After They Left to March.” The article followed dads around for the day, reporting on what they did without the mothers. They chronicled the minute details of one father’s day as he fed his kids pizza and took them to the park. The town was apparently eerily quiet with the local Starbucks and yoga studios empty for the day. Instead of exiting out of the scene after Trump’s election, women were increasingly instructed on how to better breathe their way through the moment.10 Bustle profiled seventeen millennial women about tips for practicing self-care in the age of Trump. The article ends with the chilling reminder that if you don’t take care of yourself, who will?11 Patriarchy is best managed by capitalism’s opportune wellness industry with new modalities like yoga and Net- The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 73 === [PDF page 83] === FIG. 2.2 “She Shed” from the Country Living magazine article “8 Easy Tips for Creating Your Very Own Backyard She Shed.” Source: Country Living. Copyright: Anisa Darnell. flix. It does not include Hagerman’s Blockade or even Alexa’s shutdown function. The no-exit zone of Mother’s Days, she sheds (fig. 2.2), “me-time wine,” and other repressive heterosexual accoutrements indicate that this enclosure of care is indicative of a dissatisfaction with heterosexual gendered dynamics but also finds enjoyment in a form of gendered resignation. The neoliberal feminist conjures a minor exit of her own, but it is one that takes place within the domestic private domain: the oikos (the family, the home, the homestead), the hen party, girls’ night out, and her apps. A feminism waged from the enclosure manages patriarchy rather than abolishes it. I invoke the enclosure as a useful Marxist concept to understand how the privatization of care literally creates a parameter around my care and yours, or the making scarce of things we should have in common. Fitbits and she sheds are material manifestations of the processes of enclosure that reflect the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. The enclosure of the commons refers to the precise economic relations within this overall system of colonial violence that targeted English peasants within the Industrial Revolu74 chapter two === [PDF page 84] === tion, where the settled land held in common was seized. Within Marxist theory the enclosure of the commons, therefore, is the pivotal moment of “primitive accumulation” and is understood to have ushered in the system of capitalism that we continue to live in today. This is not a onetime historical moment; it’s an ongoing structural issue related to tensions between settler colonialism and dispossession, public and private property, austerity, and the rolling back of the state. Imagining care at the center of economic planning, civil rights, and basic protection so humans can thrive is one of the most fundamental and shared points of focus in any politicized sense of feminist politics today. But the popular impetus to care, to profess it and enclose it, is not radical care; it’s actually the way the crisis of care is often put to work in the interests of patriarchy and racialized capitalism. The construction of the she shed speaks to a larger feminist construction in which the response to the overall care crisis is not to address gender but instead to resume the enclosure of care. The sExit comes to dominate what is culturally understood to be a heterosexual gender struggle. What results are various feminist responses and interventions that are so often about the unyielding sense of one’s indispensability to the reproductive order. From the exhaustion of living in a world where the sExit dominates, there is often an overvirtuous attachment to care. At its worst, it gives one endless meaning and purpose in life to be so resigned to one’s gendered domestic traps while it provides an endless market for new (and futile) technological solutions. The problem of normative heterosexuality cannot be solved through an app, but here we are living in and among these designs. The vision at the heart of wages for housework, as introduced in chapter 1, was not a she shed of her own or the feminist version of Alexa, as already discussed. Instead, the movement’s goal was to provoke new ways of living, laboring, and loving that would ultimately make a world of she sheds as unnecessary as it is inadequate. In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, feminist Marxist Kathi Weeks elaborates a refusal via a living wage. She argues that the opening up of more time and social space is not to facilitate the work of reproduction at home or work, nor is it to further the maintenance of the self (such as self-care).12 Instead, this expansion is intended to explore new intimacies and connections that break away from the normalizing and confining spheres of social reproduction. The feminist impulse to return to care can become one of these normalizing and confining spheres that forecloses other forms of socially reproductive experimentation and freedom. As feminist The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 75 === [PDF page 85] === FIG. 2.3 Melania Trump pictured in Glamour magazine’s article “Here’s the Latest Explanation for Melania Trump’s Infamous ‘I Really Don’t Care, Do U?’ Jacket.” Source: Glamour. Image: Mandel Ngan/afp /Getty Images. Marxist scholar Helen Hester has argued repeatedly in her entire body of work, care is too multifaceted to position as an absolute moral good or an unquestionable ethical norm, and it’s not always helpful to set it up as a perpetual obligation that is utterly resistant to change.13 The perpetual obligation Hester refers to includes the fact that only certain populations are perpetually tethered to the reproduction of the social order. Being resigned to a world of care is not as virtuous as it appears. Instead, one might see that the relegation to the domain of care locks too many people in place — left behind, damaged, exploited, and drained.14 Or, alternatively, that this person cares and this one doesn’t becomes an overdetermined politics of virtuousness. Within the popular imagination, I think we can all agree it is rather unfeminist to not care. Consider when Melania Trump, as she went to Texas to visit detained children in an immigration detention center, wore the now infamous jacket with the words “i really don’t care, do u?” emblazoned on the back (fig. 2.3). 76 chapter two === [PDF page 86] === The jacket was intended to communicate to the “liberal media” that she didn’t care what they (the media) thought of her and her husband’s policies. And yet “I don’t care” appears violent and cruel in this context. Melania Trump’s invoking of “I don’t care” might at first indicate that she too can exit like a man and not have to care. In response to Melania, a series of “I do care, do you?” T-shirts and protest signs emerged. A Portland designer, Wildfang, released one such T-shirt collection with all proceeds going to raices (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) Texas to offer legal services and resources to immigrants. Of course the fundraiser is political and overtly kind, meant to heal the harms caused by such a detached and violent disregard for the lives of so many others. Melania becomes villainous, and the caring classes become virtuous. The virtuousness of one’s inability to exit establishes a hot market for consumer goods for managing a woman’s place in the social order, where she is resigned to stay. Take, for instance, the she shed again. It is marketed as having the political and economic purpose of creating heterosexual harmony. The she shed is decorated with the virtuous accoutrements of white bourgeois feminist self-care aesthetics: inspirational pillows, scented candles, and essential oil humidifiers. It comes with the promise of cordonedoff she time. Advertisements for she shed living come with very specific instructions warning women not to spend too much time in the she shed and away from their families. This is reminiscent of Lynn Spigel’s argument in Make Room for tv, where the sexualized spatial division of the heterosexual family is such that individuals in the family unit are separate but together, which is crucial for achieving harmony.15 The man cave, unlike the she shed, is treated as space for men to release their excesses (fig. 2.4). In a man cave, a man can get drunk and welcome in other male camaraderie. The purported purpose of the man cave is to make sure a man stays home to release his excesses rather than leave and find company elsewhere. Within the heteronormative domestic arrangement, he is always/already positioned as a flight risk. A woman, on the other hand, is rendered virtuous but exhausted in her inability to leave. The she shed offers an exit of one’s own as it dovetails with the maintenance of the overall patriarchy. The she shed fetishizes and reentrenches the normalizing spheres of reproduction as it balances the composition of home, work, and family life. This balancing of the private sphere is what becomes the guarantor for the overall normative structure of care that supports his exit. During the covid pandemic, the already gendered fault lines in heterosexual domestic arrangements provided a fertile ground for pandemic The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 77 === [PDF page 87] === FIG. 2.4 Inside a man cave basement from Kate Wagner, “How Man Caves Took Over America’s Basements,” November 2, 2016. Source: Atlas Obscura. Copyright: Derek Trask/Alamy. sExit. Newspaper headline after newspaper headline confirmed a harsh reality for working women during lockdown. He might have been at home, too, but he would enter his portal and Zoom off. She fell behind professionally, tending to the new office-home-school-daycare-restaurant-cleaning arrangement. What was striking about the Zooming men of the pandemic sExit is the way there was news coverage of computer screens and technological devices being treated as masculine portals for escape. In February 2021, a New York Times article, “The Primal Scream: America’s Mothers Are in Crisis,” concerned with the uneven gender-based toll of the pandemic on women’s careers used a series of images of technological objects and various media that women would be juggling on the home front (fig. 2.5).16 While the article poses the question of uneven distributions of labor, it adheres to a gendered understanding of technologies for him and technologies for her. In my reading, I see this as part of an invisible and latent cultural understanding of technologies and gender along sExit lines. The media objects of the computer, the phone, and other digital devices are entirely immersive objects for him. He enters into the patriarchal technologic and exits out of the socially reproductive labor that supports this 78 chapter two === [PDF page 88] === FIG. 2.5 A baby bottle full of milk is open on top of a smartphone reflecting the idea that a mother is trying to balance childcare, the home, and work and possibly the outside world in Csilla Klenyánszki’s photo series for Pooja Lakshmin’s New York Times article “America’s Mothers Are in Crisis.” Source: New York Times. Copyright: Csilla Klenyánszki. techno-logic. She, on the other hand, is external to the technological devices and cannot be immersive herself, but rather they exist outside of her as part of the everyday management of the oikos, of her domestic lifeworld domain. For her, technologies are objects — whether they are programs, devices, apps, or gadgets — that she must use smartly in order to manage her day in the wake of his absence. In fact, technology itself becomes another problem that needs to be managed on top of marriage, kids, and dishes. It is external to her, part of the objective world outside of her. He, on the other hand, is completely conflated with the technology as if it were an extension of his The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 79 === [PDF page 89] === body, his domain. He enters technology and somehow, he is out of the picture. She is always left to her own devices, quite literally. The pandemic sExit for the mundane heterosexual husband was enabled by this enduring imaginary gendered relationship to technology. The brilliant mind who needs to retreat in order to build, undistracted from the world out there, is a common theme in numerous hagiographic accounts of great academic men, philosophers, and tech giants. But before I get there, the threat of exit looms as a key strategy of right-wing nationalist groups and overlaps with the machinations of the Big Tech patriarch. The couldexit-anytime ethos is a preemptive strike that reentrenches one’s power and utility in the social order. As Maria Mies argues about masculinity and tools, “The male self-conception as human, that is, as being productive, is closely linked to the invention and control of technology.”17 She states, “Without tools man is no man.”18 This tool relation, we might call it, exceeds the (man) cave and finds itself in the heterosexual ordering of everyday life. Men’s Rights and the Withdrawal of the Long-Suffering Tool The popular caricature of the internet troll has him tucked away from the world, clutching his qwerty keyboard and patrolling the comment section like a medieval soldier wielding a crossbow. The Sexodus is a male-led social movement concerned with the rise of feminism and loss of traditional male roles. News coverage of Sexodus portrays the typical member of the movement in his underwear and playing video games. In 2014 Milo Yiannopoulos featured a pregnant trans man in part 2 of his Sexodus series and asked, “Why bother trying to work out what a woman wants when you can play sports, masturbate, or just play video games from the comfort of your bedroom?”19 The men of the Sexodus are voluntarily celibate, satiated by a new set of what they see as replacement technologies: video games, sex robots, and ai companionship. All of the multi-culti feminist decolonizing queer Black intersectional gender-neutral toiletry taking place out there is just too much for Yiannopoulos to contend with. Men Going Their Own Way is one of many male movements of the manosphere in which the acolytes claim they are withdrawing from women. The men of mgtow believe that the social system faults males and priori tizes the rights of women. In response, they choose to leave traditional concepts of marriage and female partnership in favor of a life prioritizing the individual. Within this discourse, it is never the labor laws or a flawed 80 chapter two === [PDF page 90] === economy or the inequitable principles of the free market and unfettered capitalism, but rather it’s the feminists who are responsible for new forms of precarity experienced by men. The Honey Badger Brigade is a group of both men and women who support the mgtow movement. They state, “We are here, ultimately, to educate the public that our society’s view of gender relations is wrongheaded and destructive.”20 They focus predominantly on white men, “the true victim teetering on obsolescence.” They go on to say they are rising up against the “tendency of society to judge men by their usefulness and dispose of them when they are no longer useful.”21 In her 2019 book, Latter-day Screens: Gender, Sexuality, and Mediated Mormonism, Brenda R. Weber uses the term toxic femininity to describe the need to conform to rigid female gender roles due to social pressure. According to Weber, such beliefs and expectations reveal that to be a woman is imagined as never apart from the needs and desires of the patriarchy. Weber argues that this is typical of usually white, mostly middle-class, relentlessly heterosexual, and typically politically conservative expectations of femininity. The uptick of trad-wife movements online speaks to the rise of a type of conservative white feminism that is oriented to elevating and repairing white male disposability.22 Picking up on the recuperation of disposable white men, Jordan Peterson, also known as the custodian of patriarchy, taps specifically into the fact that being new to feelings of redundancy means that the disposable male has a need for new self-care regimens. Peterson offers life advice as a form of political strategy for patriarchy. In his book 12 Rules for Life, he offers self-help advice to a generation of men who are teetering on the brink of disposability. Peterson provides a how-to manual to construct a new gender—the neomasculine figure. I find his dedication to reconstructing gender especially curious given his resistance to acknowledging trans people. His nascent neomasculine gender is geared toward the potential for a renewed patriarchal order.23 It is important to note that Peterson has argued that sexual assault is what happens when men do not have secure partners. He thus advocates for enforced monogamy, which he argues will mitigate the potential for violence. But enforced monogamy will require a new type of man. The neo-masculine accounts for a type of male adaptability to survive biologically during such times as our current moment when patriarchy is apparently under threat. The neo-masculine man is instructed to take himself off the market while he works on himself in an effort to increase his market value. In a chapter titled “Set Your House in Order Before You Criticize the World,” Peterson takes the common nagging advice of a mother to “clean The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 81 === [PDF page 91] === your room” and repurposes it as an argument to achieve hierarchical dominance over one’s environment. As one Petersonite paraphrases, “When you clean your room, you will yourself to exercise deliberation with everything that comes into your environment, and you eliminate everything that doesn’t serve you.”24 Peterson’s contribution to the Sexodus revolves around cultivating a sense of male utility in order to produce a new empire of men that have a renewed utility, having started with themselves before they attempt to change the world. He offers a program for retooling patriarchy. At the heart of this is, as I’ve been arguing, the patriarch’s tenuous relationship to the tool. His fear of becoming a redundant tool is coupled with his growing demand for the utility of others. All those who stray from their functions to maintain the patriarchal and white nationalist world order are the ones that should be disposed of. The sense of white male disposability is blamed on things like feminism, automation, Black Lives Matter, and immigration. The critical point is that these men have always assumed that society’s disposable tools are other women, Black people, brown people, and technological gadgets. Inherent in this assumption that others are the disposable tools, and not them, is also the admission that their material lives and identities are dependent upon the availability of others. This explains the ambivalent but nonnegotiable demand that women and racialized others are indispensably disposable, a tool that is vital in attaining achievements but relegated to a bin when inconvenient. It is important to note here as a quick aside, the assumed availability of others to labor in lowpaid and degraded ways is also central to our technological imagination of assistance. The neo-masculine self-care routine that Jordan Peterson prescribes shares much in common with other nationalist movements like maga, Brexit, and the Proud Boys. In each case, references and practices of controlling women’s bodies and sexualities are exerted as part of the reestablishment of male power. In the case of Brexit, the campaign relied on the phallic metaphor of Britain as an unprotected unit engaging in risky relations with others. The sexual politics of white nationalism coalesce around what to do with one’s penis, or more precisely, how to keep control over one’s long-suffering tool. At one point in the campaign, condoms were circulated as Brexit swag, encouraging voters to pull out of the eu. The “Vote Leave” condom package reads “it’s riskier to stay in” and “the safer choice” (fig. 2.6). Britain was framed as a spent unit — tired and worn out with nothing left to provide. It was being held back by its needy dependents. It would pull out as an act of sovereign will and power. 82 chapter two === [PDF page 92] === FIG. 2.6 Brexit “Vote Leave” condoms from an article about the Museum of Brexit. Source: Daily Mail. The Proud Boys were a large part of the insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. The Proud Boys, a white nationalist group opposed to feminism, Islam, and immigration, has a strict #NoWank policy. This seemingly comical policy is not comical at all but is part of the Proud Boys’ display of male domination expressed in the form of a man’s power being derived from being able to control the sexual lives of himself and others. “A Proud Boy may not ejaculate alone more often than once every thirty days,” states the group’s “initiation ceremony manual.” It reads, “He must abstain from pornography during that time, and if he needs to ejaculate it must be within one yard of a woman with her consent. The woman may not be a prostitute.”25 This ritual is usually understood as a matter of proving loyalty to the cause; however, between Brexit, the Proud Boys, and Peterson’s invocation to get one’s house in order, what we have here is an exertion of male domination by the perceived threat of their exit and the overdetermined imaginary of what withholding one’s sexual participation would do to the social order and world order simultaneously. The ad campaigns for Brexit, the exit of Britain, as if it was Britain leaving when it is in fact actually the forced expulsion of others, also The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 83 === [PDF page 93] === FIG. 2.7 Donald Trump stands behind Hillary Clinton while she addresses an audience, from the Guardian’s “The Authority Gap: Why Women Still Aren’t Taken Seriously.” Source: Guardian. Image: Rick T. Wilking/ap. speaks to how masculinist fantasy and the threat of exit are organizing factors for patriarchal and nationalist forms of power. The social experience of living in and among structures that are designed to exploit and utilize people while discarding them at will is embedded in a culture of patriarchal exit. The image of Donald Trump lurking behind — stalking — Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US presidential debates (fig. 2.7) allows us to visualize how impossible it is for women to exit out of patriarchy. The patriarchy hovers and threatens to expel, eradicate, deplete, and exhaust, but it doesn’t ever leave. It also includes women. During the Capitol Riot of January 2021, white women’s role in sustaining patriarchy’s control over women was evident in the phenomenon of right-wing mothers joining their sons at the Capitol (fig. 2.8). This tendency reappeared with Trump’s threat to not exit, to not leave his position of power on January 6, 2021, and looms again after his second election win with his constant threat that he will find a way to run a third time or never step down. The white patriarchal penchant for exit rears its ugly head at the mere suggestion of having to live with one’s supremacy in question. For most of the population, you might say that living in a world of human constraint and limited conditions is just part and parcel of living. The sExit thus entails the patriarchal resistance toward undertaking certain types of labor, 84 chapter two === [PDF page 94] === FIG. 2.8 “Capitol Riot Moms Stand Behind — or Alongside — Their Sons,” an article about protesters and their mothers storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Source: Salon. specifically the controlling of arrivals and departures of others, including the immigration laws that govern those who will take on this labor. There are signed laws for deporting children and mothers but at the same time do not allow for abortion. Here women are expected to actively assume their posts as machines of reproduction with men at the levers. Patriarchy will outlast the departure of any specific man or institution. His refusal to truly leave is, in fact, the ultimate sExit. The return of Trump and his threat to continue to run for office is perhaps the example that currently hides in plain sight. In the next section, I turn to a particular insufferable space within the social order, and it’s one that houses this patriarchal exit — a place I’ve termed Mommy’s Basement. It is also this space that I will argue in chapter 3 is responsible for the promulgation of the insufferable tools that compose the media environment characteristic of the current moment. The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 85 === [PDF page 95] === Big Tech and Mommy’s Basement The grown white man in his underwear hanging out in Mommy’s Basement is the poster boy for a new identity category of the gender separatist sketched above. A composite sketch gathered from his browser history reveals a twenty-to thirty-year-old disenchanted male, a video game addict who participates in men’s rights discussion boards on sites such as Reddit and 4chan. He is perhaps an incel, having committed himself to the male abstinence movement, or else an adherent of the misogynist pickup philosophy espoused by men such as Roosh V (a pickup artist), who is responsible for Return of the Kings, a series of blog posts and self-published books that promote rape. When Roosh was arrested for hate speech, he was shown being escorted out of his mom’s basement by police (fig. 2.9). The insult “he must live in Mommy’s Basement” certainly infantilizes, but it doesn’t exactly emasculate. Instead, it seems that there is a lot of power to be wielded from the descent into Mommy’s Basement. One can joke that the men of the Sexodus can console themselves with games, porn, blogging, vlogging, and coding — efforts to program a world that cannot dispose of them. But I want to caution against such a simple understanding. The men of the Sexodus know something about technology and gender that is worth examining. Recall after the former ceo of Reddit, Ellen Pao, waged her lawsuit for sexual harassment against venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins, she penned a tell-all memoir titled Reset. In her book, which chronicles the relationship between incels and Silicon Valley, she argues that the escape into technology is a form of power. She states, “On incel forums, they pride themselves on their tech contributions; they joke that the world would collapse without them to maintain network infrastructures, and that their companies would fail without them.” Joseph Weizenbaum, the programmer and theorist who developed eliza, an early natural language processing computer program, from 1964 to 1967 at mit, grew critical of the masculine penchant for programming, and in Computer Power and Human Reason he argued, “I have not found a compulsive woman programmer and there must be a reason for that. Is there a connection between compulsive programming and the drive to play God? I think so, and through my observations I am encouraged even more than before, to believe that such a connection exists.”26 In 1987, British sociologist and feminist activist Cynthia Cockburn argued that it was technology’s promise 86 chapter two === [PDF page 96] === FIG. 2.9 “Roosh V. Is Now Hiding Out at His Mother’s House”: Daily Mail coverage of pro-rape blog writer living in his mother’s basement. Source: The Cut, Daily Mail US, Twitter. of transcendence and the ability to escape immanence that seduced men, and what results are technologies applied to inhuman ends.27 His exit from the world has been normalized as a precondition for engineering this very world. Much like the coverage of the pandemic and women juggling technology on top of family life, versus the father who can immerse in technology, there is also a clear gendered media-representational repertoire of how tech innovation happens. Journalistic accounts of tech innovators home in on the spaces for escape that are tied to the success of technological innovations. They are keen to point out that innovation requires one to exit out of the picture and work in the dark, away from others. In 2013, the garage of Steve Jobs’s childhood home in Los Altos, California, was designated a historic site. In 2007, the garage where Hewlett-Packard was started was named The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 87 === [PDF page 97] === FIG. 2.10 Jeff Bezos’s modest rented garage where he started billion-dollar company Amazon. Source: hello! magazine. a US National Historic Landmark. Business Insider chronicled the basements and garages where all the tech giants did their wiling. The trope of the basement/garage appears again within the journalistic account of how Matt McMullen created the sex robot Harmony. In journalist Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat she lightly mocks the faux genius of McMullen but still refers to the significance of McMullen’s garage for the advent of the first sex robot. It reads, “When McMullen loftily recalls his early years experimenting with latex and the female form in his garage he claimed ‘I found that sculpture was my medium.’ ” She notes how McMullen talked “as if he were Rodin rather than the man behind the RealCock2.”28 In 2020, Netflix’s documentary The Social Dilemma investigated the harms of social media and featured Tristan Harris, the former designer at Google turned ethicist and cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology. The focus on Harris’s change of heart about the ethics of technology centered on his need to take a private and isolated “deep dive” into thinking of technology in a new way. Nicholas Thompson, writing about Harris in Wired, recounts, “So, months ago, he draped his office with white sheets of paper and began attacking them with dark markers. He jotted phrases, made doodles, put things in all caps. He was looking for the right combination of words, a conceptual framework that could help reverse the trends tearing society apart.”29 The article continued, “His brainstorming was almost manic: part Don Draper, part Carrie Mathison, and part John Nash as portrayed by Russell Crowe.”30 Harris maintained this practice of 88 chapter two === [PDF page 98] === taking refuge and retreat in order to think deeply about tech. The Wired exposé chronicles how Harris went to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where he would cover his walls with white paper. He then went back to San Francisco and again plastered the walls with paper. The article states that he was “scrawling phrases like ‘humans swiss cheese’ and lists of problems caused by technology. Addiction. Fake news. Rising populism. There was a sketch of a deer in headlights.”31 I can’t help but pause here with a bit of incredulity over this. I feel it important to state that feminist theorists of technology have long been doing this work that Harris has just “discovered,” thinking ethically about technology and its potential for social harms. We often use paper and whiteboards, too, but we do so with very little fanfare about having to exit out of society in order to do this work. No one is chronicling our writing processes. These basements, garages, and whiteboard-filled rooms are only part of the story. It is the fact that these descents require normative forms of care and the socially reproductive labor of others that we must pay attention to. Consider this passage from Joseph Weizenbaum, where he reflects on the computer programmer’s surroundings: Wherever computer centers have become established, that is to say, in countless places in the United States, as well as in virtually all other industrial regions of the world, bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. But only for a few hours—then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. They are an international phenomenon.32 Today, if you peek inside the workspaces of most successful tech companies, you will find Ping-Pong tables, napping pods, and bottomless snacks (figs. 2.11 – 2.13). In other words, these workspaces have a striking resemblance to Mommy’s Basement. Google’s official policy for its Mountain View headThe Tools in Mommy’s Basement 89 === [PDF page 99] === FIG. 2.11 Google office treats, with small bagged chips and various breakfast cereals, from “Here’s Why You Should (Maybe) Give Your Employees Free Snacks.” Source: Money.com. FIG. 2.12 A large slide from the floor above delivers employees to a surfing-themed lounge space with vending machines inside Google Tel Aviv offices. Source: Dezeen. === [PDF page 100] === FIG. 2.13 “Google Zurich: An inspiring and innovative pioneer in workplace design,” featuring Google Eggs: phone booths and meeting pods designed in the shape of an egg. Source: Evolution Design. Image: Peter Wuermli. quarters stipulates that food must be within two hundred feet of its employees at all times. Google is not alone in offering napping pods — Uber does the same in its offices. Capital One Labs, the bank’s experimental software firm, goes further, incorporating themes of childhood basement adventures into its office design, building in nooks and crannies that employees can climb into to retreat. The “coder’s cave” is a common term to explain antisocial bro culture in programming and how tech workspaces become implicitly classified as spaces for male retreat at work. There is a shared exit aesthetic across man caves, luxury bunkers, tech company workspaces, and the renderings of future outer space habitation. All of these spaces are fitted with the accoutrements of Mommy’s Basement, replete with upscale La-Z-Boy recliners, giant tvs, and luxury care items (figs. 2.14 and 2.15). What kind of work is being done in this coder’s cave? What sense of the world do these spaces cultivate? How is this uncomplicated safety and abundance “brogrammed” into the devices we hold closest to our bodies? What does it mean that my life unfolds within the media milieu of the technological designs of a burgeoning population of antisocial men? I address this in chapter 3. For now I want to take a slight detour through critical theory. The sExit besets more than the imagined wounded masculinity that fesThe Tools in Mommy’s Basement 91 === [PDF page 101] === FIG. 2.14 A luxury survival condo included in Logic Integration’s YouTube channel video “Ultimate Tour of a Doomsday Bunker, Inside the Luxury Survival Condos.” Source: YouTube. FIG. 2.15 Vivos Shelter’s luxury bunker design included in the cnn article “Billionaire Bunkers: How the 1% Are Preparing for the Apocalypse.” Source: cnn. Copyright: Terravivos. === [PDF page 102] === ters in the extreme right wings of the political spectrum or the exhaustion of the neoliberal feminist and their turn to self-care. There’s also a Marxist who is “going his own way.” A gendered politics of utility plays out in the exit plans of the left. Exodus: When the Marxist Also Goes His Own Way Getting out of this place is fundamental to the world-making political imaginaries on the left. Paolo Virno, Italian philosopher and figurehead of autonomist Marxism, argues that exodus is a radical new form of postpolitical democracy. For Paolo Virno, exodus is a political philosophy and tactic that rethinks the practice of dissent through fleeing as a political strategy rather than the democratic impetus to resist and stand one’s ground.33 Instead of vying for representation and joining the political race, he makes a case for exodus: escape, exit, withdrawal, and refusal. Exodus is propelled by the hope for a new revolutionary left-wing paradigm fostered under postindustrialism or postmodern capitalism. Within this autonomist Marxist imaginary, refusal is also conceived to be the counterlogic that can defy the capitalistic tendency to co-opt every facet of life.34 For example, the factory has exceeded its walls and has turned every moment or activity of the day into producing capital, to the extent that all of life becomes a social factory. Refusal lies at the heart of autonomist Marxist social theory and political practice. Mario Tronti, another central figure in this tradition, suggests that being alienated from work creates a particular type of imagination that can give way to revolutionary politics. Marxist theoretician Harry Cleaver argues, “The power of refusal is our power to carve out times and spaces relatively free from the capitalist imposition of work. The power of self-valorization is our ability to fill those times and spaces with alternative activities and new forms of sociality—to elaborate our common future in the present.”35 In “What Is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?” the Italian Marxist theorist Franco Berardi argues, “The Refusal of work means... I don’t want to go to work because I prefer to sleep. But this laziness is the source of intelligence, of technology, of progress.”36 The sense is that there is a positive side to precarity in terms of what it inevitably releases into the social body. Uncertainty, for example, can lead to innovative ways of living and organizing labor. Being in the precarious state of uncertainty can allow new forms of creativity to flourish. Being in the precarious state of being subject to state violence can allow for new ways of relating and communing with others. There are counterlogics and zones of autonomy—the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, Burning Man, Occupy Wall The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 93 === [PDF page 103] === Street, the People’s Circle for Palestine at the University of Toronto —that can act upon established power. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, published in 1967, Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian theorist and proponent of the Situationists, states, “Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”37 For these Marxist theorists one must not submit to a pathology of boredom or laziness; to be uncreative and made redundant is equivalent to not having adequate resources to live. In this strand of Marxism, it is the recognition of digital media’s new machine logics that enables new forms of political action, which include communication networks that will enable one to fly under the radar within contemporary institutions of power. In Escape Routes, scholars Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos suggest that in order to create change, one must exit and merge with the process of sustained decoding, becoming imperceptible.38 Similarly, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter argue that one must become uncommunicable.39 As political theorists and activists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in Empire, merging with the logic of the machines is seen to allow for new opportunities. Information technologies produce new forms of knowledge and communication, which provide new possibilities for the working-class struggle. As much as workplace automation and surveillance are a part of the politics of control-and-capture, these forms of workplace technologies also rise to new forms of resistance and revolutionary politics. As Marxist scholar Nick Dyer-Witheford suggests, workplace automation “opens paths toward the reconstruction of a twentyfirst century communism capable of confronting information age capital with a radically alternative vision of community and communication.”40 In a similar vein to the right-wing mgtow movement, which relies on the sExit fantasy, the Marxist Going His Own Way has given up on capitalism, but he often forgets that capitalism is racialized and gendered. The Marxist Going His Own Way’s ability to slip away, fly under the radar, modulate, and become imperceptible because of new technology appears as though it can happen by magic — de-territorialize, become recombinant, mutate, be rhizomatic. There you have it, alakazam! Exodus. The exit of the autonomist Marxist Going His Own Way becomes a sExit. How easy it is to forget that world-making — all the escapes, refusals, withdrawals, and departures — does actually still need to be made. The road from refusal to joy has been left for others — namely, brown and Black women and other marginalized populations — to pave. Anticapitalist worlds still need to be built, maintained, produced, reproduced, and cared for. His exodus is endemic of the patriarchal tendency to imagine that the work of social repro94 chapter two === [PDF page 104] === duction and the labor necessary to materialize the social order is automatic, whether done by machines or someone else. The Marxist plans for exodus appear to be uniquely male and antisocial, and in stark contrast to the ways that refusal operates as a mode of survival within Black, feminist, and Indigenous political imaginaries and political practices. In these spheres, there are no exit figures languishing in a sense of disposability, boredom, or redundancy. No one is feeling impotent or underutilized. There is no expectation of a clean break. At the core of Black feminist refusal is a shared commitment to a politics of nonparticipation—which is much like the autonomist Marxists highlighted above — in systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Feminist, antiracist, and Indigenous forms of refusal turn away from the politics of representation and inclusion in order to depart from the normative and violent order of things; however, the labor of the exit and the necessary care it demands is integral to the way refusal is theorized and enacted. Within Black feminist and Indigenous provocations on refusal, there is recognition that refusal has preconditions related to survival, labor, and the sustenance of the social order in order to take place. Thus there is actually a widespread gendered inequity in the way refusal is posed across the political spectrum. A gendered dynamic is shared by the popular discourse of men’s exit we see in the right and the Marxist versions of going their own way. Feminist, Black, and Indigenous forms of refusal are hardly simple, they are exceedingly laborious. In many ways, critical feminist forms of refusal are not seeking exit but would rather seek to not be included within patriarchy. This distinction between exit and inclusion results in a more nuanced and politically relevant understanding that social reproduction and survival are intertwined and articulated to refusal. There is no way to saunter off so easily. At the core of the masculinist exodus is a focus on one’s disposability and redundancy de-linked from social reproduction and the survival of the self and others — all of which leads to the possibility of just being able to leave. This reflects to me that there is a persistent division of labor evidenced in an unacknowledged gendered and racialized conception of utility at the heart of autonomist politics. At the core of feminist and antiracist considerations of autonomy and refusal is a sense of one’s indispensability to the violent order of things. The invocation is that one no longer wants to be in the patriarchal system or be utilized in its interests. When cultural theorist Bonnie Honig advocates for the potential of inoperativity as central to a feminist theory of refusal, she does so because “use is a particular mode of subjection imposed on women and other minoriThe Tools in Mommy’s Basement 95 === [PDF page 105] === tized peoples historically and to this day in modern liberal democracies.”41 This means that for feminist and Black scholars of refusal, being nonproductive in and of itself is not a stance that lends itself to autonomy but is still something that must be produced itself. Writer and organizer Wanda Vrasti argues that “all forms of action and inaction are already indebted and dedicated to someone else’s labor.”42 Once again we have feminist Marxists offering a corrective to the masculinist tendency of Marxism to forget about reproductive labor. From Silvia Federici to Mariarosa Dalla Costa to Selma James to the GynePunk collective, what these feminist Marxist interventions offer is a focus on gaining control over the material conditions of reproduction while also creating new forms of cooperation. In the feminist Marxist treatises concerned with wages for housework, what emerges are new forms of sociality outside of the spheres of normative social reproduction. The patriarchy, including the Marxist Going His Own Way, ignores the processes of social reproduction, while the popular neoliberal feminist privatizes and makes uncommon the processes of social reproduction. It is important to recognize the patriarchal links between what would appear to be two political positions that have nothing to do with each other. On the other hand, feminist Marxism is concerned with making common the processes of social reproduction. This is evidenced materially throughout history in pamphlets, books, and activist materials peppered with plans that include roadside cooking lessons, gardens, urban farms, and workshops for designing gynecological tools. The focus is always also on the new forms of cooperation as a part of the ongoing terrain of struggle. Furthermore, Indigenous feminist, Black feminist, and critical race scholars offer yet another corrective but as a way to address what can often be the uniformity or whiteness of feminist Marxism by insisting on the differential historical and corporeal realities of refusal. Within this approach there are various navigational strategies for flying under the radar. As feminist scholars of refusal Lilian Mengesha and Lakshmi Padmanabhan write, “Performing refusal requires obstinance, bodily comportments that disassociate and emanate the desire to not be included.”43 The performance of refusal is as complex as the forms of resistance to state policies that attempt to incorporate and include. Political anthropologist Audra Simpson writes that for the Mohawk people, “their notion of nationhood is driven by their refusal of recognition, their refusal to be enfolded into state logics, and their refusal, simply, to disappear.”44 Tina Campt, feminist theorist of Black vision culture, turns to the concept of Black fugitivity. She highlights the tension between the acts or flights of escape and the creative practices of refusal, 96 chapter two === [PDF page 106] === which are nimble and strategic practices that undermine the category of the dominant.45 Simpson names refusal as an alternative to the politics of recognition. She asks what it means to refuse what “ ‘sensible’ people perceive as good things,” such as a passport, recognition, or other goods of the so-called good life.46 Indigenous self-determination is a form of refusal that deliberately takes place outside of the white liberal logics of representation. In What’s the Use?, the feminist social theorist Sara Ahmed considers how resignation can be instrumental, writing, “Complaints become writing on the wall: we were here; we did not get used to it.”47 She argues, “Resignation is another way of saying no to the system; you withdraw your labor, your body, yourself. The word resignation can seem to suggest giving up, reconciling yourself to your fate, to resign yourself to something.”48 Ahmed continues, “What appears to be giving up can be a refusal to give in. I resigned in part because of the silence about what was going on. To get information out, sometimes you need to get out. There is no point in being silent about resigning if you are resigning to protest silence. When I shared my reasons for resigning, I became the cause of damage. To speak out is to become a leaky pipe: drip, drip.”49 It is worth pointing out that none of these Black or brown feminist and Indigenous theories and practices of refusal mention feeling bored, disposable, or redundant. Instead, they are occupied by the bodily practices, stances, and strategies necessary for both refusal and care. Indispensably Disposable All the sExits—the men of Sexodus, Pandemic Exits, Brexit, man caves, Marxists Going Their Own Way, online in Mommy’s Basement, or space flight— are forms of withholding participation and responsibility toward others in a way that reestablishes the power of white nationalism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Men’s rights groups escape into the internet in order to harness power rather than deal with the potential of being disposable. Neoliberal feminists who feel exhausted from being overutilized and indispensable dream of she sheds. Patriarchal Marxists invoke sentiments of redundancy and political impotence and dream of technological lines of flight; however, they rely on their feminist counterparts to facilitate the care (and theories of care) required to wage political interventions. The sExit, in its various forms, reestablishes male sovereignty while remaining dependent upon the utility of others. As I have argued, a common feminist response to all of this taking leave is to insist upon an unyielding sense of one’s indispensability to the reproThe Tools in Mommy’s Basement 97 === [PDF page 107] === ductive order. This response inheres in the technological structure of power, which we need to examine next. It is absolutely critical for antiracist and anticapitalist technological futures that a techno-feminist project moves beyond a politics waged from binarized notions of exit/care and he-goes/shestays. Imagine what could be designed if the masculine impetus to exit was not the organizing impulse of tech. Imagine what a feminist politics of refusal could accomplish if it could wrestle out of this enduring binary between care/exit — a binary tied to the sexual division of labor and the gendered/ raced politics of utility. But before we get there, it is important to see how this economy of gender between care and exit is part of the technological order of everyday life. In chapter 3, I turn to the Mechanical Mom and her maternal mandate. The Mechanical Mom is the invisible guarantor of a structure of care in the wake of mommy’s absence. This structure is composed of a range of technologies that mimic the idealized functions of a heterosexual family unit. This media direct from Mommy’s Basement is central to the maintenance of the patriarchal techno-logic. So many of the everyday technologies, our so-called tools, used to manage the day (Fitbits, virtual assistants, Lyft, Uber Eats, Taskrabbit) are culturally understood to be technological solutions to a feminist care crisis. It is important to see how these technologies make possible and sustain the patriarchal culture of exit. Chapter 3 illuminates how popular technologies are concerned with maintaining the semblance of capitalistic and normative family life. What is perhaps most interesting about these technologies that are used to organize time and navigate space on a regular basis is that their existence reveals that the family has already in fact abolished itself. These technologies appear to be innocuous and innocent, but I argue that they are parasitic to the feminist techno-determined goal of creating feminist techno-logics oriented toward cultivating processes, activities, and relations for life beyond the patriarchy. It is a little more than strange, then, that everyday technologies are oriented to exit the social while simultaneously compulsively oriented to time saving, productivity, family life, essentialized gender identity, and heterosexual economies of exchange. But what other design of the world could we anticipate anyway from the auspices of Mommy’s Basement? It is an insufferable space, and the insufferable tools who dwell there must be evicted. 98 chapter two === [PDF page 108] === And the Machine World Will Deliver Him His Wealth SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me? — Github coder Aziz Shamim on Twitter The institution of motherhood must be destroyed — not to abolish it but make it mandatory to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work. — Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born I have long been inspired by the epigraph quote from Adrienne Rich. It argues for a denaturalized conception of motherhood. It hints at a future where being indispensable to the social order is a collective and communal undertaking rather than a form of devalued labor. It captures the political potential of being untethered to an economy of gender that binds “woman” so narrowly to the reproduction, maintenance, and repair of the social. Fast-forward a few decades, and, technologically speaking, motherhood has indeed been made mandatory, as it is inherent in the ubiquitous technology we depend on for managing our day. Motherhood has been de- === [PDF page 109] === naturalized and emancipated from the home in and through tech but anti thetical to the dreams of Rich. Around 2020, a funny quip circulated on social media, saying that the gig economy was now mostly composed of apps that replace the labor of Mom. Business Insider suggested that tech bro twentysomethings were wasting their talents by designing technologies and programs for things they wished their mommies still did for them: driving, cooking, cleaning, and laundering.1 Newsweek ran a similar story under the headline “Silicon Valley Needs Moms.”2 The term postmom economy emerged to capture this particular moment in tech (bro) culture when Uber (“Mommy, drive me”), Taskrabbit (“Mommy, clean my room”), Grubhub (“Mommy, I’m hungry”), and LiveBetter (“Mommy, I’m bored”) emerged. But to suggest that these apps are designed to replace Mommy misses a key point. These services do not replicate, reproduce, or replace Mommy. Instead, they extend a normative maternal mandate and expand the realm of consumption. The labor associated with Mommy merely attaches to new bodies and figures not usually associated with Mommy, while the goods and services associated with Mommy’s care expand. Mommy is in your Fitbit, in your pedometer, and in your new randomization app that programs serendipity and spontaneity into your day. She’s there to remind you to live in the moment. She’s the hot-pink-clad Foodora cyclist aggressively swiping past cars. She’s sitting on your counter, waiting for you to activate her, ask her for something. She’s Sense Mother, the flexible home automation kit launched in 2014 for $300 that secures more than just the perimeter of your house.3 The Sense Mother promises to replicate the heightened visual, aural, and tactile sensory capabilities that occur during pregnancy and last long after childbirth. Sense Mother consists of a data tracker with four remote sensors that can monitor motion as well as temperature, and then sends this info back to the main Mother hub. A Sense Mother motion cookie can be carried in your pocket or left next to your bed. If you leave the main Mother hub, you won’t be able to access the data until you are back home, in the vicinity of your Sense Mother. Sense Mother is just one part of a diffuse techno-structure composed of gigs, services, and programs used to manage the day. The Mechanical Mom meddles and monitors, and anticipates all of your needs, including the ones you never planned to have. To anticipate is to care; algorithmically speaking, she gets you! She provokes and shares, establishes your networks and connections, and paves the way for your intimate endeavors. She sends reminders and gives directions. She warns you 100 chapter three === [PDF page 110] === and warms you. She comforts and cleans, saves and sorts. She will keep your secrets filed away. She’s a popular platform for many, but she functions as if she were personally yours — a repository and outlet for your most random thoughts, from throwaway observations to groundbreaking insights. She’s always thrilled for you when you make an announcement. She is there in all the data devices for the quantified self — the place where Mommy can get back together with that roving Big Data and provide all the intimate, normative, and exclusive care that patriarchal capitalism depends upon to keep going. These forms of technology are rather mundane in that they are consistently present and no longer warrant explanation for why they are present — the smartphones, the Fitbits, the apps to take care of all the needs you never knew you had, the ai assistants, and the gadgets that make it possible to #captureeverymoment and share any thought tell a cultural story about what we have deemed necessary to make it through the day. These are the outputs of the coder’s cave and of antisocial tech bro culture. These technologies have been designed from a position of uncomplicated safety and abundance. They are media direct from Mommy’s Basement. Patriarchal tech is not all space colonization, rocket ships, drilling, terraforming, or sex robots. The patriarchal technostructure is as mundane as patriarchy itself. Big Tech patriarchs, who have freed themselves of responsibility and care (the sExit), have devised a world that can continue to provide normative care, through what I call the Mechanical Mom and her maternal mandate. These media and devices are the tools used to cultivate and maintain techno-social realities that promise a frictionless world of protection, immediate gratification, exit, and spaces of inoculation, away from the complexities of the social. The significance of these apps, programs, and technologies is that they are not just discrete one-off services that replace Mommy’s individualized tasks. The Mechanical Mom accounts for the processes within the techno-structure that redistribute tasks in order to keep patriarchy and racialized capitalism working well together. In other words, the issue with Mommy is not just who is doing the labor, it’s the demands for this sort of labor in culture. The Mechanical Mom is patriarchy’s essential gal, continuously automated, reprogrammed, and redistributed. She is neither the matriarch nor the virtuous one who labors out of love. All the focus on managing the minutes, our bodies, our schedules, and our relations to others reveals a patriarchal tech culture that produces techno-social realities that are anti thetical to techno-feminist futures. The Mechanical Mom upholds narrow Deliver Him His Wealth 101 === [PDF page 111] === conceptions of time and utility in support of the dominant notion that life is best lived between the spheres of home, work, and the self. American studies scholar Elizabeth Freeman calls this “chrononormativity.”4 This tripartite segmentation persists despite cultural shifts challenging the normative structures of life. As a patriarchal techno-structure, the Mechanical Mom’s maternal mandate includes a conception of others in terms of their utility (laborers, immigrants, women — the precariat). What prevails is the patriarchal capitalist idea of immediate gratification and the expectation that all of the things that need to be taken care of in order to balance home, work, and the best self are guaranteed to be taken care of automatically — whether by machine or by a person. The power is in both the expectation and the guarantee. As scholar of labor and digital media Kylie Jarrett insists, we need to bring “feminist theorization and activism about... unpaid reproductive work out of the domestic sphere, applying its insights to contemporary digital media.”5 The goal of this chapter is to reveal the persistence of a patriarchal maternal mandate at the core of our technological culture. The Mechanical Mom’s most important work, I argue, is to deliver not just Uber Eats but all that the family structure has historically been imagined to deliver. Generations of feminist Marxists agree that the family is the site for socializing and disciplining children, oriented spatially and temporally to the demands of the capitalist organization of work and the family, and at the same time operates as the center of consumption, reserve labor, and the reproduction of the worker. These technologies I am concerned with are the ones that work in tandem to uphold the structure of the heterosexual and homonormative family, complete with a conservative, doting mother.6 I arrive here with the sentiment that our common tech for managing the day reflects and perpetuates the dominant notions in contemporary society of what it is that should constitute social reproduction and care. From within Big Tech Feminism and popular culture, the fact that these technologies are patriarchal is often obscured due to the way these technologies and the forms of labor they undertake seem to be untethered from normative domestic arrangements as well as discrete gendered and sexual identities. Moreover, popular feminism responds to the care crisis by turning to technology to manage care through what I term popular refusal. The critical feminist theorist Nancy Fraser argues that capitalism depends upon an ongoing crisis of care and that we should be careful not to imagine that care is suddenly in crisis. Fraser suggests that the care deficits we experience today are not new but rather are the current form the contradictions 102 chapter three === [PDF page 112] === of care currently take in the most recent phase of capitalist development or what she more aptly defines as financialized neoliberal capitalism. This means that we cannot simply conclude we are in a crisis of care but must rather pay attention to how the current crisis of care works. Accordingly, the current care crisis takes place under financialized neoliberal capitalism and is centered and experienced as a problem of social reproduction. Fraser goes on to argue that “the strains on care are not accidental, it is not something now rotten or unaccounted for — you usually see this in arguments that care is in crisis because women have gone to work or are exercising new forms of sexual freedom or independence from men.”7 She suggests we pay closer attention to how every form of capitalist society harbors a deep-seated social reproductive crisis tendency or contradiction. In other words, care is not universally in crisis now and in the same way across societies. On the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other hand, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. If we stay with Fraser and this acknowledgment that a crisis of care is not new or uniform but what capitalism depends upon, we must then be more precise in drawing a parameter around the types of care worlds we invoke within feminist interventions and outlines for the future. For example, scholar of Indigenous studies Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and scholar of media Tamara Kneese define radical care as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds.8 Four decades of neoliberal approaches to the provision of care (medical care, mental health care, childcare, and elder care, to name a few) have resulted in a crisis of care so ubiquitous it appears to be natural. When the crisis of care becomes naturalized, a market emerges for technological solutions. Recognizing how the technological structures of power intertwine with the care crisis, in both how it’s imagined and how it’s managed, allows us to understand what the social reproductive contradictions are in a given culture. What I trace in this chapter is how a popular form of refusal emerges via tech to manage the care crisis. This technological management encloses care — it makes care the private domain of the self, while it makes access to care appear to be scarce. Like the she shed from chapter 2, the managing of care via app is indicative of how the confining spaces of normative heterosexual patriarchal life depend upon continuing to instigate the enclosure of care by new means. As I argued in chapter 2, the enclosure of care is a feature of the culture of sExit, where to be resigned to the realm of care is esDeliver Him His Wealth 103 === [PDF page 113] === sentially reproductive, gendered, binarized, and normative. The enclosure of care is also historically a past time of white neoliberal feminism where care is intensive rather than inventive relying on outsourcing, programs, apps, laborers, and technological gadgets. In doing so, intensive and enclosed care forecloses the possibilities for even imagining forms of radical collective life. The Extensions of Mommy In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan defined technology as any extension of the physical, social, psychological, and intellectual function of man. For example, the blinds covering your window are your eyelids, which you close to block out the light. Windshield wipers function like blinking to clean debris from the surface of your eyes. The glass of water on your table is an extension of your cupped hand full of water. Print is an extension of the eye. The television set and the electronic media are extensions of the entire central nervous system.9 As technologies extend the capacities and functions of humans across space and time, McLuhan argued that the message of all these media (whether drapes, cups, televisions, or rockets) is the “change of pace or scale or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”10 The cultural significance of the technology is not just in this extension of human capacity but in the medium’s ability to alter and determine the social experience of time, space, and patterns of social organization. These technological extensions of the body are media, and they give rise to technological social characteristics particular to the media form in question. To understand media is to understand which media forms, due to their formal properties and logistical capacities, are better suited to cultivating certain sociotechnical realities over others. This is the crux of McLuhan’s media history, wherein media are imagined to be the driving force for social change. I have come to understand this theory not so much as a bad media history, quick and fast in its assumptions, but rather as a recognition that our dominant technologies do govern and determine what is possible in culture. They foster the rise of particular social characters and lend themselves to particular ways of relating, living, laboring, and forms of intimacy. They set the pace and pattern of how life unfolds in distinct ways. In turn, the forms of life ushered in by technologies are also responsible for developing new technologies. Key here is a conception of media as recursive. It demands we acknowledge that it is not just culture that is determined and altered by dominant media, but our forms of resistance 104 chapter three === [PDF page 114] === and refusal also unfold under the technological parameters of possibility. Technologies are themselves environments that will cultivate particular kinds of life and deter the possibility for other kinds. Not all media forms are hospitable to every type of social reality. In order to be able to understand the environment (the media) as a determining difference, it makes more sense to understand technologies as structures of power — or what I refer to throughout this book as “the technological.” McLuhan’s insistence that technology is the extension of man is a useful insight for developing a feminist philosophy of technology. Of course, you can imagine what occurs when this phrase is uttered out loud. It usually provokes a quick, scrunched-nose dismissal. It is easily rejected for its antifeminism and racism in its invocation of the universal white male.11 The phrase “media are the extensions of man” invites an eye roll, a penis joke, or a “[sic]” qualifier. Some brave masculinists will even say, “Calm down, ladies. He just meant human! It is how they talked back then.” However, I can develop a feminist approach to media extension without excusing the phrase’s connotations. To me, it is clear that McLuhan understood that technologies extend the reach of patriarchy. It was the only viable power dynamic as far as gender was concerned in his world. When I consider the media environment, it isn’t all rocket ships exploding in the sky or the great killer robot takeover. The media environment is composed of technological gadgets, systems, programs, and devices that portend devalued understandings of the labor of real people. The mundane technologies for managing the day operate like remote controls as they bring forth the world on demand. Our mundane technologies are oriented toward satiating the needs of a few at the expense of many, as well as narrowing the political possibility of care to be used as grounds for feminist and worker solidarity. Within our popular technologies, I see a strategic impetus to enclose space as well as a deliberate choice to reduce one’s proximity to others. I can see that technologies are largely about controlling the time of others or about being on the receiving end of having one’s time controlled. The technologies that circulate reproduce the capitalist and racist conceptions that patriarchy has of time and relies on the utility of others. These are the specific patriarchal machine logics that are instigated in the app economy, as well as the time management technologies that compose the world of the Mechanical Mom. They come with the expectation that others will submit to these regimes, and this expectation is necessary in order for the tech to work. Typical surveillance technologies include things like baby monitors, Amazon Ring cameras, Uber Eats, and Fitbits, which depend on submissive Deliver Him His Wealth 105 === [PDF page 115] === subjects.12 They are forms of banal surveillance and monitoring that have become normalized, but they are also technologies of delegation. The parameters of what constitutes care in a digital age will contract and expand in this culture of self-monitoring, baby watching, submit now, order now, where are you now, and confirm driver. McLuhan’s attention to great epochal shifts in culture as determined by dominant media is universalist, but it also reveals something every technofeminist must contend with— that only one type of body has been extended, and with it his mom. Moreover, depending on her level of privilege, the extension of man and his mommy also includes a reserve pool of other mothers, which are the racialized, classed, and precarious workers. For example, the contemporary gig economy in the city of Toronto, where I live, depends upon a very specific racialized workforce tied to Canadian immigration policies. The Uber Eats app does not begin and end with the phone but includes streetscape and city dynamics where young brown men congregate, nap, and converse on the sidewalks.13 To approach the media theories of “technology as extension” and “the medium is the message” from a feminist perspective, one must account for how the reorganization of labor and vulnerability of disadvantaged classes are an intrinsic part of the message of every medium. In other words, different media call forth and exacerbate social inequities by way of depending on devalued forms of labor. In the pivotal book More Work for Mother, technology historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan challenges the widespread idea that domestic technologies free up time. Instead, she reveals how the introduction of domestic technologies into the home created more work for mothers. Feminist scholars show us how the bottle, the breast pump, the dishwasher, and the cell phone are all technologies that not only make more work for mother, but discipline and control her movements as well.14 To take this further, we can understand technology in a way that attends to how a new program, device, media object, or platform will have particular properties and capacities that demand different forms of utility and care. Every new technology answers its own question of “what will this new technology take care of?” We must recognize that it will also need to be taken care of by people at some point — content moderators, tech support, maintainers, cleaners, programmers, or electronic dusters.15 Sex robots will need to be cleaned. Content moderators will need therapy for ptsd. What is important to understand about gender and these technologies is the new patterns, pathologies, and rhythms of relations that they will produce. Not only do technologies need to be taken care of by people, but these people may need 106 chapter three === [PDF page 116] === further care because of their caregiving roles vis-à-vis technology. There will be new forms of manual labor related to cleaning, housing, and assembling, and new cultural anxieties that will demand new types of care labor. There will be new forms of consumption and justifiable excess. New apps don’t just respond to new needs but rather are themselves responsible for ushering in new needs, new forms of labor, and new expectations related to the productive management of time and life’s demands. The delivery of a single hot crepe to your office hardly registers as excessive in this tech-based patriarchal culture. The demand to always know where a partner might be hardly registers as excessively controlling. The maternal mandate depends not only on workers but on the economies and desires that different technologies enhance and make possible. To return to McLuhan, particular social characters emerge under specific media environments. His scope of social characters was limited to epochal figures of oral man, print man, and electronic man — a social character for every media age.16 But a techno-feminist must untangle this false uniformity of technological change and more accurately consider the production of differential and inequitable technological subjects that emerge under a dominating media epoch or media object. For example, as labor and technology scholars Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora argue in Surrogate Humanity, nonreproductive sex with a machine can be (socially) reproductive because it reproduces normative subjects and desires.17 They move the analysis away from the specific gendering of the media object, and they focus instead on the normative economic and social reproductive order that the practice tied to the particular media object upholds. To insert more of a media theory perspective here, this normative economic and social reproductive practice includes how these technologies set new and specific patterns of social relations. The issue with gender and the rise of technological social characters is not that we live among a world of gendered machines, sexed and pink. While these exist and are certainly problematic, focusing on their presence fails to get at the heart of gender’s tech problem. Similarly, the gender profile of the machine user — or the one who is being watched — does not tell us about the rise of technological social characters. Instead, we must consider how technologies have logics that orient us in specific ways and foreclose the possibility of taking other routes and paths. I suggest that there is a fruitful resonance here with Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology and McLuhan’s medium theory that the techno-feminist can run with.18 Techno-feminism is concerned with cultivating feminist machine logics that could follow someDeliver Him His Wealth 107 === [PDF page 117] === thing other than the lines that have already been established — to operate within the techno-logic but push against its universalizing determination of singular social characters. In order to do so, one cannot simply work around the Mechanical Mom and the maternal mandate; one would also have to commit to abolishing this patriarchal techno-structure and, with it, the trappings of normative care. As the sex organ of the machine world where he can never be the tool, compete with the tool, or be subject to the tool, the Big Tech patriarch ensures that a world of options are continuously at his disposal. This prompts the question, was this all there was to design? The answer, patriarchally speaking, is perhaps a simple “yes.” By controlling the pace, patterns, and scale of social organization, the tech patriarch works in the interest of a singular goal: to maintain both the fiction and function of man’s domination over technology, and over others, in order to deliver him comfort and ease of mind. In the case of surveillance and monitoring, what is delivered is the security — whether false or not — of being in control. An entire infrastructure extends out of Mommy’s Basement and sets up shop in our city spaces. E-bike repair shops line the high street in my neighborhood. Uber Eats cyclists jam the sidewalks with their larger and faster bikes. It is hard to find a taxi and rare to get a ride from a friend. Media from Mommy’s Basement changes what we understand as necessary, but it also fosters a techno-culture where the utility of others expands endlessly and where refusing the technological order is impossible. The Mechanical Mom has an unanticipated recursive function as it sets the terms for the contours of justifiable and necessary care. The Mechanical Mom makes ordinary the forms of care it offers via app, device, and media object. In the next section I will examine how the maternal mandate of the Mechanical Mom also offers up the gig economy to Big Tech Feminism as a way of exercising popular feminist refusal. Taskrabbit and Popular Refusal Taskrabbit was founded in 2008 by Leah Busque, a former ibm software developer, after she grew increasingly frustrated that she had no time to buy dog food. Busque realized how helpful it would be if she had a neighbor or a friend to rely on. With the guiding ethos of “neighbors helping neighbors,” she started Taskrabbit — an online company that connects freelance laborers to local demand. She needed a friend, so she started a company. That explanation alone should give us pause. The rising popularity of Taskrab108 chapter three === [PDF page 118] === bit indicates a culture where collective life and alternate forms of kinship beyond privatized consumption seem impossibly out of reach. Taskrabbit can get the job done, but it can also save you from having to depend upon others outside of transactional economic exchanges. In fact, as proponents and heavy users of the gig work of others often maintain, money greases the transaction where it would otherwise be awkward to ask another human for a favor. “We Do Chores, You Live Life,” Taskrabbit promises. Lifehacker’s promotion of Taskrabbit gets to the heart of the matter: “We all have stuff on our to-do lists that we’re either too busy to finish, or let’s be honest — we just don’t feel like doing. That’s where TaskRabbit comes in. Whether it’s getting groceries, putting together furniture, or picking up a Craigslist purchase, TaskRabbit’s network of reliable do-ers will take it off your hands.”19 Taskrabbit profiled an entrepreneurial mother and user named Tiffany in their ten-year anniversary promotional campaign. Tiffany exclaimed, “Taskrabbit helps me be able to have a career, a healthy partnership, and a way to be a conscious global citizen.”20 The reality is that Taskrabbit is a time management solution composed of short-term workers without proper protections or recourse related to working conditions, but it is culturally understood to be a Big Tech Feminist technical solution that, in the absence of a traditional social structure, maintains the imaginary virtues of what a family provides. The tasks themselves and the opportunity to perform them are equally imaginary; they are understood as essential for keeping people productive and good users of their time. Productivity is framed as virtuous, being necessary to keep the self on track and the family functioning. The popular feminist response to the care crisis that working mothers experience is to turn to technology. New tech becomes a way to manage life, but not being the one to do the work is celebrated as a form of popular refusal. This type of refusal is not about moving social reproduction into the commons or overthrowing capital; it is a popular refusal via an app that works to enclose care. Our Taskrabbit user Tiffany states, “I don’t need to do it all in order to have it all.” This suggests that the “all” is still necessary but being the one to bring it forth is unnecessary.21 Taskrabbit’s original advertisement for their services via Lifehacker features a cartoon image of a mother with a mop. In the accompanying promotional video, the mother is split into two — one of her continues to mop the kitchen floor while the other gets to go whitewater rafting and breaks out of the confining spheres of normative life. Work and life are enclosed in a regime of private management. They are discrete spheres that are treated like private property that must be protected. Deliver Him His Wealth 109 === [PDF page 119] === FIG. 3.1 Taskrabbit promotional image: “From cleaning to organising. Taskers do it all — so you don’t have to.” Source: Masters and Savant. All alternate configurations that may destabilize these two categories as they pertain to gender, intimacy, work, or kinship are off the table. And yet Big Tech Feminism offers the opportunity to free oneself from being tethered to the reproductive order — you can split into two and leave one person behind. I note here how the work still remains the work of the mother, even when it is undertaken by another laborer. Feminist Marxist scholar Kathi Weeks argues that the category of social reproduction cannot be reduced to domestic labor. She notes that domestic labor is increasingly offered by the marketization of such services, and for some it has always been possible to outsource and pay. The political import of social reproduction, according to Weeks, must be more expansive and include the refusal of work. She asks, “What happens when social reproduction is understood as the production of the forms of social cooperation on which accumulation depends or, alternatively, as the rest of life beyond work that capital seeks continually to harness to its times, spaces, rhythms, purposes, and values?”22 Taskrabbit embodies a popular version of this harnessing. While it too invokes a life beyond work, it is not oriented to life in common. Social reproduction does not cease to exist under a different economic or technological 110 chapter three === [PDF page 120] === arrangement. It will continuously need to be rethought; there will always be work. Weeks’s articulation of social reproduction is something crucial for a techno-feminist politics to organize around. She insists that we hold onto the Marxist feminist tradition that remains committed to the utopian possibility of fundamental transformation where “work is not only a site of exploitation, domination, and antagonism, but also where we might find the power to create alternatives on the basis of subordinated knowledges, resistant subjectivities, and emergent models of organization.”23 As the environment of digital platform capitalism continues to develop, it becomes harder to locate how patriarchal conceptions of gender are at play. The platform economy is a site where a unified techno-feminist understanding of the co-constitutive nature of gender and technology must preclude a concern with matters of singular gendered identity. In the restrictive division between work and life, outsourcing is cast as self-care. Taskrabbit’s imposition of work-life balance promotes attaining gender parity by using services to multiply the mother. As Tiffany states, “I use Taskrabbit to clone myself when I’m in a pinch, usually when I can’t do something or be somewhere.”24 Ads for Taskrabbit intimate that one mother is not enough. As mentioned above, their very first ad campaign was based on splitting a mother between tasks. Another ad suggests, “You never want to fail your family. At that crucial time when my daughter needed me to be dependable and reliable, there’s no way I could’ve pulled it off without Taskrabbit.” Tiffany also says that she struggles with work-life balance and knows that any time she needs an extra set of hands she can declare, “This is a Taskrabbit day” (fig. 3.2).25 This declaration captures the mutually reinforcing power of heterosexual conceptions of family, productivity, gender, and time. Worth exploring is how the existence of Taskrabbit, and other similar apps, exposes the fiction of the self-sufficient family. What the rise of these apps indicates is that the imaginary of the family is already one pushed over the heteronormative capitalist edge. The enclosed family unit appears to be already well on the way to abolishing itself. In Feminism Against the Family, Sophie Lewis argues, “If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is still perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.”26 She does not necessarily mean actual family units but rather the family as a cultural, political, and economic organizing principle. The patriarchal techno-structure is one site where the concept of family persists, even in the absence of the actual family. In a desperate bid to preserve the heterosexual economy of exchange, the gig economy fills the space that could otherwise be a different life in common, Deliver Him His Wealth 111 === [PDF page 121] === FIG. 3.2 “This is a TaskRabbit day,” Tiffany D., New York City, from the no longer active Taskrabbit blog. a collective social structure. The gig economy has a parasitic relationship to the possibilities of collective life. Gig economy apps should be rejected on the grounds of their affront to the potential of queer kinship, multigenerational family structures, and other forms of community. Such forms of community cannot flourish through consumption and techno-solutionism that depend upon forms of convenience and demand the precarious labor of others. Moreover, the gig economy obscures its own relationship to the politics of social reproduction and patriarchy because of the composition of its workers and how they understand themselves. The most prominent media image of the gig worker is an entrepreneurial man working hard to make a buck. Rather than Mommy’s minivan, we have the enterprising Uber driver. He gets cast as a businessperson with a shiny new car. Rather than Mommy at home cooking, we get a rugged cyclist weaving through traffic with his hot pink backpack (fig. 3.3). The gig economy is predicated on the valorization of laborers who are hustling, entrepreneurial, and innovative. Gig workers are remotely accessed through tech company apps that hide the personal histories, struggles, and precarious conditions that have pushed workers into gig work in the first place. Moreover, the shallowness of the praise that these workers are entrepre112 chapter three === [PDF page 122] === FIG. 3.3 Hustling entrepreneurial delivery cyclist. Source: Matteo Compostrini. neurial hustlers is reflected by the fact that mothers, nannies, housekeepers, taxi drivers, and others who have historically taken on this work have not been applauded for their ingenious artistry. Nor do the descriptions of “life in the fast lane” get attached to the labor of conventional taxi drivers, delivery drivers, or restaurant dishwashers, who predate the gig economy. None of this labor has previously registered as suitable to a discourse of a hyperprofessional ethos. And yet if you follow this logic, cooking, cleaning, clothing, and caring has never been so gender neutral. But what is culturally understood as care work is still performed by women, and especially women of color. As the work expands and theoretical understanding of binary gender loosens, so too could labor activists’ understanding of the complexity of care and gender within the digital platform economy. In Riding for Deliveroo, the labor activist and scholar Callum Cant artfully combines interviews with delivery drivers and his own experience of bike delivery work. He writes, “Sometimes you felt like you were in a bobsleigh, getting up to 30-odd miles an hour down a 15 percent slope and dodging parked cars with the lights of the city spread out below.” He continues, “The first hour of the shift always reminded me of the arcade game Crazy Taxi.”27 Because wages depend upon the speed of cycling, the work demanded new ways of strategizing mobility, as well as cunning and athleticism. Cant explains: I got used to hopping on and off my bike. Sometimes you could get around complicated junctions faster by becoming a pedestrian, waiting for the Deliver Him His Wealth 113 === [PDF page 123] === lights to turn and walking across, depending on what point in the traffic light cycle you were at. Your ability to descend at high speed, fitness, and bike handling were all factors that determined how much you made. The combination of adrenaline, speed, skill, and insider knowledge of routes across the city was intoxicating at times, but once you started to get cold, tired, and bored, that intoxicating element of the work died away pretty fast.28 Cant describes how the excitement of the hustle is often used to recruit workers. It is part of the aura that obscures the exploitative working conditions and impoverished daily life of gig work done in service of other people’s home and work lives. The more feminist issue is similarly obscured, that these gigs are part of the maternal mandate of the Mechanical Mom. Our Uber drivers are unaware of where their next call is coming from, and our Foodora delivery cyclists, weaving through cars, dogs, and people, do not at all equate their work as gendered labor within the patriarchal techno-structure. Even when they organize for better wages and working conditions, their rallying does not invoke the feminist Marxist principles of wages for housework or an abolition of the family. To recognize the labor as the work of the Mechanical Mom in a patriarchal culture is the first step in refusing it; however, because the politics of gender are typically rooted in the composition of the workforce, or in who is using the services, it makes it difficult to determine where exactly to wage a feminist critique of digital capitalism’s racialized and gendered politics. For example, Cant addresses the politics of race and gender in relation to organizing militant labor at Deliveroo. He confirms that Deliveroo is maledominated, and that the composition of its unions has been problematic for women in general. He suggests that the workplace dynamics at Deliveroo are consistent with the way class composition theory explains how solidarity fails across class domains. For example, the collective failure of male workers to treat female workers with respect (social composition) is even worse when the technical composition of the workforce is typically decentralized labor. Deliveroo’s ability to produce a form of worker selforganization to represent the entire workforce is limited. The result is that the political composition of Deliveroo’s work actions are weakened by its political composition. Along with gender, Cant argues that other issues of identity related to the workforce are regimented along the lines of race and immigration status.29 Like many Marxists, Cant makes the salient argument that cooper- 114 chapter three === [PDF page 124] === ation is necessary for collective resistance; however, he locates gender and race as political variables related to the politics of representation. Cant addresses the diminishing possibilities of working-class alliance — the social division of labor in the office and with Deliveroo workers, as well as the fact that the interests of the McDonald’s fryers and Deliveroo drivers are deliberately kept separate. He argues, “Purely in terms of the relations to the means of production themselves, there exists an underlying possibility for solidarity between the two types of worker in the same way that there exists the possibility for an alliance between Deliveroo and tech workers.”30 Cant suggests that “the whole system of Deliveroo functions to share the products of social cooperation — by chefs, porters, waiting staff, bike mechanics, software engineers, and couriers — but this process of cooperation is being used to perpetuate a social crisis of scarcity” in order to keep the ruling class in place.31 We must extend Cant’s recognition that Deliveroo is engaging in socially reproductive labor that keeps the ruling class in place. My techno-feminist perspective argues that we must not begin, however, from the perspective of gendered identity first. Patriarchal racialized capitalism creates social division by separating the interests of the working class, thereby eliminating the possibility of solidarity. The collective interests of workers, separated across gender and race, must not be seen in terms of identity categories with different stakes but rather as a shared undertaking of what gig work produces — patriarchy’s link to racialized capitalism. Only then might one build a bridge between current feminist theory and politics regarding unpaid labor for social reproduction, current union organizing, and the collective action of waged gig economy precariats. Making this connection draws attention to how reproductive labor has effortlessly expanded into a range of consumer goods and services within the capitalist marketplace. In other words, we cannot conflate all of these activities within the gig economy as care labor; however, these activities are seen as work in the service of digital capitalism. After all, saying that every contract worker for Foodora, Uber Eats, and DoorDash is doing care work risks appropriating the specificity of the feminist Marxist position on reproductive labor, as well as the particular types of political demands that flow from it (e.g., wages for housework or current campaigns for national public childcare programs and universal basic income). But widening the category of reproductive labor to include the paid labor undertaken by every service worker in the social factory creates an opening for thinking through how to articulate one sphere of critique and set of political demands alongside Deliver Him His Wealth 115 === [PDF page 125] === another, thereby supporting an intersectional coalition. I am not elevating the housewife’s labor above others, nor am I elevating the Foodora worker above the housewife. This situation does not demand an elevation of care work or a more expansive category of care; it demands a more nuanced conception of gender and technology. That the Uber drivers and Foodora cyclists are never really considered to be “mommies on the move” is perhaps an indication of a cultural disconnect between the politics of gender in terms of technology and the relationship of gender to platform capitalism. To acknowledge this as a patriarchal structure — the Mechanical Mom and the maternal mandate — would provide a location to wage a feminist intervention within the actual mechanism that delivers the patriarch’s wealth, the platform economy. Key here is that platform labor is composed of short-term workers who do not have to care, nor are they cared for. The relationship between gig work and politics of care is obscured and negated at almost every level. To understand this relationship under the auspices of the Mechanical Mom requires us to find a different point of entry so that we may launch a different sort of feminist intervention. We must pay attention to who gets tied to the reproductive order and who does not. Why is ordering takeout considered necessary for the reproduction of the social order and a form of popular refusal for working women, but the delivery driver who brings the food is not considered part of the reproductive order? To make this dissonance visible through the lens of feminist action would strengthen worker solidarity across various platforms. This is the power of the Mechanical Mom: the way the patriarchal structure escapes designation as feminized labor. The term feminized labor does not account for the expansive skill set or her technological capacity, and it is ultimately not a particularly useful term for understanding the work of the Mechanical Mom. Sophie Lewis insists that discussions of gendered labor must always be aware of the imposition of gender on the action.32 She notes that the political economists’ use of the feminization of labor thesis presumes what femininity is, and then they describe global trends toward emotional labor and job precarity as falling under the domain of the feminine.33 Rather than label labor as feminization or gendered, we could turn to the Mechanical Mom in order to highlight the machinic forms of care that make a so-called productive life flourish. Feminist Marxist Elise Thorburn uses the term machinic social reproduction to describe the type of social reproduction that flows through digital and mobile devices and makes embodied socially reproductive labor increasingly invisible.34 What is inter116 chapter three === [PDF page 126] === esting about these forms of machinic reproduction is how they circulate culturally to hide already devalued labor. They also effectively disarticulate several forms of devalued labor, like Uber drivers and cyclists, from the overall feminist project of solidarity related to social reproduction and care labor. Life-giving is not a purely prepolitical or pretechnological concept. The types of services offered sustain the life of labor and create a cultural distinction between work we delegate and work we take on ourselves. Mommy apps are not just Mommy labor but are tied to normative capitalist life and work to extend the basic requirements of patriarchal capitalism. The gig economy is very much a part of what social reproduction theorist Tithi Bhattacharya would call the “life-making” terrain of social reproduction; however, life-giving labor as a distinct category no longer makes sense within this paradigm, where neoliberal feminism intersects with the offerings of tech bro culture to extend Mommy via tech.35 This binarizing and gendered distinction between gendered tools (power tools versus lifeaffirming tools) continues to exist today within a more complicated set of machine logics — ones that move the work of social reproduction away from categories of men and women and onto a wider range of people and anthropomorphized technological objects (e.g., Alexa and Uber drivers). They are all life-giving technologies in that they sustain the life of the patriarchy. Vora and Atanasoski insist that sex robots or caring bots and household tech are equally tied to social reproduction. They argue that both types of robots plug into the domestic household economy in a way that allows for its continued existence — and the economies and desires tied up with it. I would add that we, too, contribute a broader range of intimacies within the household economy, including our relationship with our devices and the worlds of motion they instigate. Smartphones, Taskrabbit, and Uber are also socially reproductive technologies when they are oriented to managing one’s time and the time of others. The trick is to be able to expand the scope of what counts as socially reproductive labor without enclosing care and intensifying capitalist consumption. Media Theory for a Techno-Feminist Revolution The technological and cultural shifts that leave us to our own devices also provide the techno-solution — the devices themselves. This is the current state of techno-social reproductive order. The performance of the heteronormative structure matters more than its actual existence. Consider the Deliver Him His Wealth 117 === [PDF page 127] === rise of rent-a-family services in Japan and China, where people can rent out family members to perform familial functions at public-facing events. The issue with these services is not that the actors are not real family but rather that these services insist upon maintaining normative forms of gendered care tied to capitalistic notions of productivity. The institutions that put a demand on subjects to fulfill their normative duties also ensure that new forms of collective life are stymied before they can even begin. The Mechanical Mom offers goods and services, novelty and surprise, sustenance, comfort, and security. The Mechanical Mom delineates the parameters of justifiable care, justifiable work, and justifiable free time. This is another way the commons become enclosed; care is understood as a matter of tending to particular property — including one’s time as property. At the same time, the services proliferating within the gig economy tell a cultural story about what is worth one’s time and what can be refused. A culture pursuant of free time inevitably rests on gendered and classed preconceptions of what are meaningful or useless pursuits of time. The political question of what we truly need to sustain our lives is left for our technologies and the useful tools to answer. The contours of care are technologically altered by the devices that fit into our pockets and guide our days. Whether at home or at work, the bots, assistants, companions, and smart devices take care of things, but they also redefine for the market and for popular feminism what counts as care and how to provide it. The Mechanical Mom is a techno-solution for the gendered family that can no longer function under the imposed neoliberal fiction that it should be a self-sufficient unit. Elevating care is part of Big Tech Feminism’s commitment to acknowledging gender and social reproduction; however, it is lip service, and as a result, the political virtue of care is disguised rather than identified. Elevating or identifying care should not mean expanding the arduousness, exhaustion, and exploitation of social reproduction, and simply pass it along to others. The Mechanical Mom should, however, force us to reckon with the question of what care would look like if it were not stymied by this form of alienation that seems to be all about optimizing a productive family life, even in the absence of a nuclear family. The Mechanical Mom reveals the machinic and robotic forms of care, intimacy, and time that make up gendered normativity tied to capital — it is in our apps!36 These technologies are designed to erode the political possibility of care as a collective social process. Silicon Valley’s technological solutionism must be confronted with what Silvia Federici would argue is a “change in social relations, whereby the valorization of capital no longer commands social 118 chapter three === [PDF page 128] === activity and reproduction becomes a collective process.”37 The politics of care requires one to multiply the spheres that constitute life beyond the two mutually oppressive poles of home and work. It means being oriented toward postwork and postgender futures rather than the technical question of better robots, better assistants, or better apps. What would better assistance look like in relationship to postwork and postgender imaginaries, or would the politics of assistance need to be up for reevaluating? The actual spheres of life that this or that technology manages, however, are never called into question. These devices, apps, and programs reflect a techno-culture that seems to be wrestling with the palpable fear of Mommy’s departure. They tell a cultural story about what is deemed necessary, but they also reveal what patriarchy and capitalism need from each other in order to thrive. The devices, apps, and programs set the parameters of possibility and foreclose particular ways of life. Part of the “crisis of care” is the world these technologies uphold — a conception of one’s time as lived within an enclosure of private property oriented toward the family structure — and the potential ways of relating and being in collective communion that they hinder.38 I find inspiration in feminist writer Sophie Lewis’s question: “Can humans collectively enact this kind of counter-social reproduction — a mode of social reproduction against the reproduction of the social?”39 She argues, “Certainly, the techniques of dependency and renewal with which we replace kinship are going to have to be radically, relentlessly anti-natural. Care will have to come to the fore, ceasing to be the background of social life.”40 We must also stay on top of the proliferating tasks of the Mechanical Mom, as she is bent on stymieing countersocial reproduction through the technological structures of power. Feminist Marxist critiques of housework and refusal need deeper media analysis. Technologies are not just tools. In Women, Race and Class, Marxist feminist Angela Davis calls for the abolition of housework, departing from the feminist call for more wages. Davis asserts that the problem of this work is not solved by redistributing it or by valuing it, because the problem resides in the work itself — it is oppressive, exhausting, uncreative, and unproductive, and no one should have to do it. For Davis, a solution to housework is not piecemeal but must be revolutionary, and she turns to technology as a potential source of this solution. When she critiques the feminist Marxist aspirations for a communal social factory, she argues that what these feminist solidarity movements failed to recognize is that the nature of this work is not resolved by redistributing it. It is not a deep philosophy of the machines that informs Deliver Him His Wealth 119 === [PDF page 129] === FIG. 3.4 Yorkshire inventor David Weston’s robot nanny “Tinker” from the 1960s. Source: Phys.org. Credit: David Weston. === [PDF page 130] === Davis but rather a hope for the machines. Like Lewis, she argues that communitarianism or finding ways to collectively enjoy and share in housework is a poor substitute for social change. For Lewis, such a statement is based on the awareness that communal sharing will not necessarily abolish the structural power of the family. At the crux of Davis’s argument, however, is a Marxist hope that machines could redistribute labor and relieve everyone from grunt work. Davis turns to technologies within the industrial economy as the solution for the necessity of domestic tasks: “Teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and primitively.”41 Davis echoes the Hegelian forms of Marxism that Paul Lafargue — Karl Marx’s nephew and author of The Right to Be Lazy — employs in his ruminations on machine revolutions. Lafargue writes, “Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.”42 Currently, the gig economy offers a parasitic version of this revolutionary idea. It offers a form of popular refusal with wages for housework but without the larger political project. It repairs the gendered division of labor without dismantling patriarchy. There is, in fact, a whole slew of technologies, services, and programs that take over this domestic work but simultaneously impede the political potential of social reproduction as a facilitator of feminist solidarity. Davis disarticulated the technological structure of power from refusal. She employs a tool-based notion of technology, resonating with strands of Marxism that imagine technological tools can either be seized or be oriented toward alleviating class inequities to counter capital. In this conception, technology is neutral and just appears on the scene. It is for this reason that I cannot quite get in line with Davis and the imaginary of well-trained workers and clean industrial technologies. Her imaginary still binds us to a confining patriarchal conception of technologies as tools, eschewing a more expansive understanding of the medium and its relationship to the political. Someone will need to make the machines, care for the machines, and tend to the parts. The machines will break down. The well-trained workers will have strain injuries and modified movements Deliver Him His Wealth 121 === [PDF page 131] === related to the work they undertake. The technology will set the parameters of what is possible for refusal, but refusal will not simply be made possible by technology. The technological solution negates any attention to the technological structure of power. This is a shared tendency across the spectrum, from popular to feminist refusal. We need a theoretically informed understanding of technology alongside the plans for revolution. I turn to this example as it reveals how easy it is to fall back to the tools and the tools’ enduring power within liberatory politics. Theories and practices of feminist refusal related to the politics of social reproduction can be strengthened with a deeper understanding of media. The gig economy is based on an already impoverished way of organizing care — a dependence upon Mommy. This is a techno-culture that dispenses Mommy while dispensing with Mommy. We must be careful not to elevate the Mechanical Mom’s role or insist upon attributing value to this invisible and hardworking techno-structure as it performs gendered labor. Instead, the Mechanical Mom should remind feminists concerned with technology that we must continue to develop a more expansive conception of gender beyond identity as we develop a more nuanced feminist approach to media. Together this would cast a wider net that could capture the activities, practices, and identities that currently escape classification in the essentialist reproductive order of things. It would also allow for a more expansive conception of how Big Tech patriarchy flows through the quotidian technologies used to manage the day. In chapter 4 I turn to feminist refusal and a more sustained outline of feminist technological determinism. I offer the imaginary of the broken machine as a way out of the potential feminist trap of tech repair and reform. 122 chapter three === [PDF page 132] === Broken Machines Toward a Feminist Technological Determinism Welcome to the Mojo Dojo Submarino Submarine On June 18, 2023, Stockton Rush, ceo of OceanGate, boarded his 6.7-meter submersible vessel named Titan. A former flight engineer and tech investor, Rush fancied himself as a bit of an “Elon Musk of the oceans.” Rush even imagined he had a bit of an upper hand when it came to his vision for saving humanity. Rush thought it was Earth’s oceans, and not Musk’s plans for outer space, that would provide humanity a refuge from climate change and other existential risks. Accompanying Rush was Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert; Hamish Harding, a British businessman; Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani British businessman; and Dawood’s son, Suleman. Each had paid US $250,000 for a seat on the expedition to see the Titanic shipwreck in the North Atlantic Ocean. Stockton Rush persisted with his plan and ignored multiple expert warnings about the mechanical risks of his feeble Titan, ones that came by way of official engineering reports, phone calls, emails, dramatic departures, and fiery resignations from key interlocutors in the decade-long development and design of the submersible. His personal tech philosophy was that certification stood in the way of innovation. An example of this is evident in the curious detail that the vessel was controlled by a Logitech game con- === [PDF page 133] === FIG. 4.1 OceanGate submersible with inset photo of the Logitech controller, from the article “Logitech Controller Review Goes Viral After Titan Sub Tragedy” in Newsweek. Image: OceanGate/Handout/Anadolu Agency/Getty/Logitech G. troller, a handheld device used for video games (fig. 4.1). The game controller exemplified Rush’s commitment to a simplicity in design over that of more complex systems — complex systems that would come with a backup for emergencies. He held up the handheld Logitech joystick and joyfully exclaimed, “We run the whole thing with this game controller.” Within one hour and forty-five minutes into the dive, communication between Titan and its mother ship, Polar Prince, was lost. The next day the Titan failed to resurface at its scheduled time. A debris field was located four days after the submersible was reported missing. The Titan had imploded. On July 23, 2023, a month after the Titan implosion, the Barbie movie was released. The film, earning $1.4 billion worldwide, was the highest-grossing movie of the year and the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film in one hundred years. The film follows Barbie as she endures an existential crisis that has her questioning her mortality, her body, her social role, and her domestic arrangements, as well as the struggles of men under the patriarchy. The Titan submersible, not a movie but a real-life event, was also about all of these things. The public discourse surrounding the Titan focused on the mediocrity of the Titan’s mechanics, with its reliance on a media relic straight out of Mommy’s Basement (the Logitech controller) coupled with the overconfident masculine energy of Stockton Rush and his excessive pursuit of adventure. Meanwhile, the Barbie movie generated both popu124 chapter four === [PDF page 134] === lar and scholarly articles concerned with how feminist the film was. For some it was capitalist, a two-hour commercial for Mattel. For some it was trans and queer positive, and for others it was transphobic. For some it was the lowest-common-denominator form of feminism, digestible and uncomplex. It was very feminist, it was not feminist enough. But I got stuck on another point. Barbie and Titan were the two most Google-searched terms of 2023. They were searched separately, but to me they were a single gender event of the summer of 2023. I couldn’t help but see that Barbie and her own existential crisis was tied up with the patriarchal techno-logics of the Titan submersible. In the Barbie film, Ken, on a search for meaning, locates the epitome of masculine power. He becomes obsessed with horses after he sees mounted police officers. He is in fact inundated by tropes of men in power on horses. He eventually decorates his abode, his Mojo Dojo Casa House, in a horse theme and exclaims, “At first I thought patriarchy was run by horses, and then I realized horses are an extension of man.” The horse as an extension of man is the analog precursor to the adventuring, exploring, and pioneering that Titan and SpaceX both afford. The public discourse on social media surrounding the Titan’s doomed mission focused on the hubris of the deceased crew. It was because of their wealth that they had an unquenchable and untrammeled desire for adventure, exploring, and pioneering. More specifically, it was because they were rich men. There was a significant side-eye to the Titan’s fate — that this was a consequence of patriarchy itself, with its silly boys and their toys. A viral TikToker joked, “You know who is not at the bottom of the ocean, women!”1 Indeed, Stockton Rush’s Mojo Dojo Submarino Submarine was composed of an all-male panel of oceanic explorers. An article in the Nation turned to the essentialist life-giving nature of “the female” to explain why there were no women onboard. A woman would not choose to board the Titan, the article argues; she has an instinct to survive and would have recognized the impending doom. Others remarked that it wasn’t so much a choice but rather that the Titan was another example of a gender inclusivity problem. The Nation article further argues that “the exclusion of women from the Titan submersible exposes the harsh reality of gender bias that hampers their involvement in remarkable adventures.”2 This type of enduring exclusion and uneven gender composition is also the reason why that busy Barbie doll has had over two hundred jobs over the course of her life, beginning in 1959. Unlike the useless Titan, she has been an overutilized technology that has been poised to attend to the struggles for inclusion across all sectors, Broken Machines 125 === [PDF page 135] === over and over again. There’s a sector, there’s the exclusion, and there’s the Barbie! Given her history of employment, what about one more job, Barbie? Would the Titan Submersible Barbie have joined the ranks of President Barbie, Physicist Barbie, and Doctor Barbie to complete the unfinished work of being a woman in politics, science, and medicine? Would the Titan Submersible Barbie have successfully confronted OceanGate Ken and have made sure the Titan was safe and the crew would still be alive? What we know about Barbie is that she would have been capable of the mission, given her relationship to technologies oriented to life-giving. For her, eschewing safety is not the least bit innovative. Whether Barbie would have refused the whole concept of oceanic exploration and left OceanGate Ken to meet his own fate in his Mojo Dojo Submarino Submarine, or whether Titan Submersible Barbie would have successfully completed the mission, we will never know. But in either case, hot pink would never be part of the refuse that now needs to be located at the bottom of the ocean. But it would be a mission that we must acknowledge we don’t really need to have completed either. I begin here with Titan Submersible Barbie in order to illustrate the common feminist, albeit popular feminist, option for navigating Big Tech Patriarchy: By virtue of being relegated to the sphere of life-giving, one is either left behind by choice or exclusion, or one perseveres and fights against all odds to be included. Both options leave the patriarchal technologic intact. We need the option where the Titan submersible is not even able to exist at all. The lack of representation in the refuse that now needs to be located at the bottom of the ocean is not really something to celebrate as a feminist win. Even if I’m at times inclined to claim it as evidence, it shouldn’t distract from the ways in which the ill fate of the Titan is emblematic not so much of tech’s gender problem but of gender’s tech problem, a problem that I have emphasized in the previous chapters. The gendered issue to contend with is not the composition of the expedition (tech’s gender problem) but in the patriarchal time-space axis that has these men seeking ways to live forever while attempting to extend the reach of patriarchy — further, faster, and deeper. The Moon and the ocean floor are no longer safe from the techno-logics of patriarchy. The buff tech bro popping longevity vitamins is the temporal counterpart to the spatial expeditions of the tech giant on the Titan. The issue for me isn’t whether they are successful in their attempts — whether they reach the Titanic and live forever — but that, 126 chapter four === [PDF page 136] === as feminists, we are left with having to contend with living in the wake of an ever-evolving patriarchal techno-structure. The relegation of women as having a natural aptitude for life-giving technologies is tied to the resignation of having an essentialized body designed to give life and care as being the reason for one’s nonparticipation. One may join the patriarchal technologic as Representation Barbie, but where is my Refusal Barbie? The techno-feminist refusal I have in mind has no desire to get on board a SpaceX craft or the Titan submersible, or any all-male panel. Neither does it feel left behind. It does not resonate with the notion of being resigned to the domain of life-giving back on the shores, in the cave, or taking care of residential Earth. Nor does it want to continue to extend any longer this essentializing biological deterministic metaphor of women as life-giving caretakers with an affinity toward life-giving technologies. There is no chance for the more communal, non-gender-normative notion of life-giving to flourish within the patriarchal techno-logic. The techno-feminist refusal I have in mind is decidedly incompatible with the patriarchal techno-logic. Refusal Barbies are not ostracized or alienated like Weird Barbies. They do not escape or hide away, or imagine themselves sufficiently queer, radical, or autonomous enough to be Exit Barbie, somehow outside of the technologic. As I’ve argued already in previous chapters, one cannot live outside of the techno-logic. And so Refusal Barbie actively inhabits the patriarchal techno-logic. In this incompatible inhabitation as a technology that refuses to work well, by all accounts of patriarchy, Refusal Barbie operates like a broken technology. But as it does so, Refusal Barbie is also devising new feminist machine logics that can challenge and stymie the technological extension of patriarchy. While the Titan rescue mission was taking place over several days and through the use of public infrastructure from both Canada and the United States, a migrant ship with roughly 750 people traveling between Libya and Italy was sinking — only 104 people were rescued. The implosion of the Titan and the sinking of the migrant ship are in stark contrast, but that is not the point. The point is that these are intertwined tragedies. The hubris of the patriarchal tech giant, in all its machinations, is tied to worsening life conditions of so many other populations. The Titan was by all accounts a broken, useless technology before it imploded. And yet it was deemed to be a technology worth saving. The international search using public infrastructure and funds, while it captivated global audiences, was akin to a real-time disaster tourism reality tv show. As for Barbie, the icon is a feminized technology teetering on the edge of breaking — overutilized Broken Machines 127 === [PDF page 137] === and indispensable with her two hundred jobs but also never quite good enough. She named her gender struggle, called out the patriarchy, and would end up with her dream house and a gynecologist. The fishing vessel is a technology that works, but it is not designed for three hundred people and becomes a broken technology when it is full to the brim with individuals who have an indispensable type of dispensable utility. The migrants were fleeing but also discarded, deemed worthless by racialized capitalism. They were in pursuit of life, and the vessel was potentially a life-giving technology. Would we call the migrants’ ship a feminist technology? No. The category of life-giving is not adequate to our techno-feminist pursuits under the patriarchal techno-logic. Turning people into tools and imposing utility is how most systemic and structural forms of racism, colonialism, and misogyny operate. These systems equate women and other marginalized groups to machines as they exploit and extract labor, land, and energy, and then they eventually discard the machines that are deemed nonabiding and nonnormative. As I have argued throughout this book, Big Tech is the ultimate manifestation of these forces that flow through technologies, industry, workplaces, factories, roadways, imaginaries, public discourse, airways, outer space, ai, and so forth. For broken technologies, there is, however, another type of media study — what I term a “Feminism of the Broken Machine.” A Feminism of the Broken Machine captures the differential experience of being determined by patriarchal techno-capitalism to be a technology that does not work properly. This brokenness is prevalent in workers, refugees, gendernonconforming, racialized subjects, as well as virtually any other populations and social groups marginalized by patriarchal techno-capitalism. The broken cohorts will undoubtedly shift. The contemporary social-politicaleconomic system is a system that is already undeniably broken. It is a system that is full of queer, racialized, classed, and disabled subjects who are incompatible with it. Becoming compatible with this broken system is antithetical to techno-feminism; instead, there is power to be had in harnessing the media logics of a Broken Machine. Before turning to the Broken Machine more explicitly, this chapter takes a media theory detour and outlines the significance of what I want to advance as a feminist technological determinism to take on the patriarchal techno-logic. The term determinist is alarming, I know. It is a term we equate already with Big Tech patriarchs, who have been successful in presenting technological innovation as not only inevitable but as part of a narrative of development and progress as they extract, pollute, and destroy the world’s 128 chapter four === [PDF page 138] === resources, and as they hoard what is left while still creating innovative ways to hide out from the environmental collapse they will capitalize on. But there is also a type of media critique that is too often disregarded and labeled technological determinism, when I would argue that it is a media theory that offers feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, class critique, and crip politics of technology an understanding of media that can challenge the patriarchal techno-structure our Big Tech patriarchs depend on. It is a type of media critique that allows for refusal rather than reformation or repair. Before I attend to this and move toward this Feminism of the Broken Machine and outline how the Broken Machine operates to generate refusal, I must attend first to all of this baking that seems to occupy feminist media studies. So much baking! All That Baking I have become increasingly concerned with all the feminist references to baking when it comes to understanding how inequity is a feature of technological designs and not a bug. Largely, I think of this as an innocent tendency, but at times I do wonder if it isn’t Big Tech Feminism that is trying to get me to worry about baking instead of thinking deeper about how gender and technology are intertwined categories and how to disrupt these systemic logics. It is often said that patriarchy, anti-Blackness, transphobia, and ableism are “baked into” our technologies and technical systems. The baking metaphor, which has been applied to search engines, soap dispensers, surveillance cameras, and automated checkouts, is now fervently being applied to ai. Bias happens within training data as well as the algorithm itself, and there is also cognitive bias. Similar to the bias that has been located in search engines, gender bias in ai can occur at multiple stages — from the training of the datasets to the actual development of the algorithm.3 Ultimately, any existing biases can be internalized within the algorithm, and then, over time, there are biases in the decision-making. There are biases that are inherent in microaggressions, where certain words and phrases may seem innocuous, but they actually reflect sexist, racist, and ableist concepts that get embedded in the computational processes of our machines. Tech companies that rely on these computational systems for sorting data will also discriminate against potential hires on the basis of race, gender, and ability. Technologies inevitably become integrated into the flow of our daily lives, and this is within the cultural context where men are still equated as being in charge of power tools and women are in charge of what are deemed Broken Machines 129 === [PDF page 139] === to be the less-valued tools used to facilitate life-giving. Recall our discussion of Alexa and the domestication of feminized ai. It is in this context of overcoming baked-in inequalities where Alexa is given the power of disengagement, and the discussion of robot rights continues. Across industry and academia, the intrinsic biases that are inherent in tech, in contrast to the harnessing of ai for the betterment of society, are always on the table. Women and diverse people are beckoned to return to the field of tech in order to eliminate these biases and harness ai for good, for beauty, for fun, for anything other than violence. Moreover, women and diverse people are there because they understand what happened with the baking. There is rarely, if ever, an opening to say, “I want none of it.” I want none of it for fun, for beauty, or even for good. And how even worse is it that tech’s gender problem is subsumed in this narrative of baked-in biases, which paves the way for the increasingly well-funded focus on things like regulation, ethics in tech, and the continued promise of better tech? To imagine difference as baked in is to simply use a catch-all idiom that I have come to see as hiding the reality of patriarchal racialized capitalism’s relationship to technology. It is easier to assume that the racist and sexist dynamics that find their way into technology are there in the same way a sweeter cake is made because the baker had a sweet tooth. Gender and race are treated like essential ingredients that can inflect a view or experience of technology. Women and other marginalized groups are placed outside of the technology first and then added into the mix later. It is as if media environments were flavorless cakes that can later be flavored with gender and race. And, therefore, one can assume that a diverse technologist can make better tech. It is a problem of technology that can be solved through inclusion. This betrays a weak understanding — not only of gender and race but of contemporary critical race and gender theory. It also refuses to acknowledge the significance of theorizing media — that a politics of technology demands thinking theoretically about media. Baking treats difference, inequality, and identity categories as if they are ingredients — a complete recipe for disaster. All this baking distracts us from having the potential to refuse technology and has us on board with reforming the technology instead. It is a trap. When it comes to thinking about a feminist technological future, all of this imaginary baking isn’t yielding the right results anyway. For example, when unesco declared a problem with Alexa, saying, “Baked into their humanized personalities, though, are generations of problematic perceptions of women,” the statement deflects from the fact that capitalism does 130 chapter four === [PDF page 140] === depend upon the service of marginalized others, and as a technology it is already based on legacies of populations who assist and those who are assisted.4 To overcome the poor treatment and problematic perception of others would in part require the technology of Alexa to not exist at all. Better baking with better perceptions of populations would in fact not yield this assistive ai technology as desired in any politically feminist way. This turn to the metaphor of baking, handed to academia by tech companies, has the effect of obscuring the coconstitutive nature between gender, racialized capitalism, and our governing technology. And yet baking persists as the most popular term to describe technology’s relationship to inequity. Instead of relying on the metaphor of baking, I suggest a feminist technodeterminism in lieu of baking — one that asks what these tools are oriented toward and questions what they accomplish for maintaining the patriarchal techno-logic. A feminist techno-determinism asks this before it decides that the tools must be ethical, good, and bias-free, as it works surreptitiously to maintain the patriarchy’s techno-logics. I am done with all this baking, but now I have to deal with this matter of the puppies, as you will see below. Canadian Media Theory and Cute Puppies To label someone a techno-determinist is a bit like saying that he enjoys strangling cute puppies: the depraved wickedness of the action renders further discussion unnecessary. — John Durham Peters, “ ‘You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong’ ” I cannot turn to my outlines for a feminist techno-determinism without dealing with this matter of the puppies. I will share with you here a petty intellectual squabble that has real implications for media theory but none for puppies. I’m scrolling through my messages when my colleague slides me this dm: “It’s happening again.” He’s letting me know that we have yet another American media theorist dismissing Canadian media theory on Twitter. The most exciting slides into my dms over the last five years have been messages like these, sent from many like-minded secret lovers of technological determinism. We are secret lovers of this media theory not because we accept the label but due to the fact that we recognize how dismissal of this form of media critique operates as an act of intellectual imperialism in our own discipline. I won’t name my secret lovers of technological determinism here. I must spare them from accusations of engaging in cattiness and pro- Broken Machines 131 === [PDF page 141] === tect them from the risk of being seen as puppy stranglers. But I’ll tell you what we do say: “Oh look, the American media studies profs are at it again.” The great dismissal of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Adams Innis as technological determinists is also a dismissal of decades of Canadian media studies, including feminist and antiracist scholarship concerned with the centrality of communication technologies to cultural, social, and institutional change. This approach is often referred to as the so-called Toronto School, and it includes University of Toronto theorists from the 1950s to the 1980s — Harold Innis, Edmund Carpenter, Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, and Ursula Franklin. In 2009, cultural theorist Jody Berland’s North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space argued that the settler nation of Canada, also a world power, had a particular relationship and understanding of media technologies given the nation’s proximity to the United States, literally living under the influence of the empire to the south, often diminutive in juxtaposition and stifled by this nearby power. Canada’s media landscape was central to the production of subjectivity and everyday life in relation to the influence that extended from its southern border. Berland argues that the materialist understanding of media technologies inherent in the works of Canadian communication theorists like Innis and McLuhan is what drives Canadian research into media and communications, and this is because of the possibility that it allows for an anti-imperialist understanding of media. It is a media theory from the margins of technological power of an American broadcasting empire — an empire where there was no control over content, and thus one where content was hardly the issue to contend with when compared to the reality that content available was one of the many determining effects of the imposing communications infrastructure. This imperialist imposition of communications leads to a Canadian media study and theory where attention to the properties of technologies is deeply intertwined into questions of meaning-making, ideology, and political economy. The dismissive media professor is unable to recognize the imperialist attributes inherent in his dismissal of an entire tradition of media study, and yet he is quite confined to the dictates of his particular machine logics. He, too, is rather technologically determined, isn’t he? A type of social character tied to governing technologies. For one, he has made a home within the enclosure of X comments that are the impetus for territorial marking on what is good scholarship and what isn’t. His taking to a media form to discuss media theory begs me to ask of him, what would it mean to do media studies from an awareness that the power of media is its recursivity? It 132 chapter four === [PDF page 142] === might mean that one’s hot take on media is also part of this logic. To mark out territory through space-binding media is not so much a resistant occupation as it is a form of settling as an uninvited guest into the space of someone else’s timeline. It is part of the machine logic of territorial expansion, which is not unlike Musk on Mars. What would it mean to recognize that our social characters, and our sense of self and others as well as the institutional arrangements we inhabit, are in fact tied (altered and sometimes determined) by governing technologies? This so-called technological determinist media theory that is being dismissed is instead a media theory which insists that what is socially, politically, and culturally possible depends, at least in part, on dominant media forms. This turn to the materiality of media offers a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between technology and social difference than the current catch-all idiom that biases get baked into technologies. It offers feminist media and critical race scholars insight into not only how patriarchy, racism, and other violent forms of power are extended through technology and are themselves exercises of technological power but also how technologies produce the categories of difference we are contending with. In other words, this techno-determinist media critique, especially when informed by a feminist perspective, allows us to ask how, where, and to what extent different technologies alter the tempo, scale, and rhythms of life in differential ways for various populations. It also allows for an opportunity to theorize technology in a way that is cognizant that technology critique takes place under the imposing power of Big Tech patriarchy and can, if we are not careful, have its potential power delimited by the machi nations of the patriarchal techno-structure. The tendency to write off this form of media critique as technologically deterministic and therefore unhelpful doesn’t just stem from a few tweets. Rather it is part of a larger intellectual debate within the field of media studies. British cultural historian Raymond Williams presents his own theories of social shaping of technology in opposition to McLuhan’s apparent technodeterminism. In his 1975 Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Williams’s critique of McLuhan on the grounds of technological determinism is based on an entirely different understanding of agency in relation to technology. I would argue that it is this very significant misunderstanding of dealing with diverging relationships to agency and technology that tends to discard McLuhan in the bin reserved for deterministic technological garbage. This misunderstanding has set the terms of debate for far too long. Williams suggests that McLuhan’s disregard for technology’s use being a sigBroken Machines 133 === [PDF page 143] === nificant factor in its cultural effects inferred a technological essentialism where the driving force in a society is technology instead of human actions. Williams felt that McLuhan ignored a multitude of impacts related to the human factors of design, implementation, intention, and regulation. These human factors compose what Williams calls the “social shaping” or “social constructivist” approach to media. For Williams, the impact of technology is socially and culturally constructed, depending on how technologies are used. Williams was also ultimately concerned with democracy and individuals’ participation in the social processes of technology. McLuhan’s approach to technology, however, is about the technological as a structure of power — one that emanates from human capacities and the extension of the body in time and space. His theory of media participation was not about democracy or civic life. This was not because McLuhan did or did not believe in democracy. His interest was related to one’s participation in the media form in relation to the formal properties of a technology. Each medium is an environment. Williams’s concern with human actors, in terms of how technologies are developed and implemented, leaves the recursive power dynamics between technologies and subjective life unexamined. While Williams’s focus on the social shaping of technology is attuned to technologies and subject life in part, his social shaping does not account for the more common social dynamics whereupon one does not have power over one’s media forms or power over the exercise of patriarchy, white nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and so forth. And this is why, for feminist and critical race approaches to technology, what becomes so fundamental as recognition is that the technological is a field of foreclosure as much as it is a field of opportunity. Not everything is in fact possible with all media forms. Staying with the onto-epistemological power of media developed in the previous chapters, and guided by the work of Canadian media theorists Harold Adams Innis (time-biased and space-biased media), Marshall McLuhan (the medium is the message), and the German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler (media determines our situation), I see potential for a feminist techno-determinism to offer a strategic feminist politics to counter the patriarchal techno-logic. Other potential sources of inspiration include historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, who argues that machines “developed out of a complex of nonorganic agents for converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the human body, or for reducing to a measurable order and regularity 134 chapter four === [PDF page 144] === the processes of life.”5 The interactions between machines and society are what is called technology or technics. Mumford’s theory of technics is concerned with how power operates according to media-specific logics. All of these theories of media challenge the dominant cultural understanding of technologies as tools whose effects merely depend upon their use. This is reminiscent of McLuhan and his insistence that we return to electric light as a means of understanding media: “Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”6 We know technologies are powerful materials that are designed to alter the social world. Media determines the social experience of time, space, and distance — and, more fundamentally, what it means to be human and our relations to one another. But what we must discard from the capitalistic and patriarchal approach of wielding technological determinism is the masculinist and patriarchal tendency to invoke and unleash a grand narrative as an attempt to impose a single technological effect that will privilege a singular and universal human subject. Such an uncritical view of technology is already espoused by Elon Musk, and it’s evidenced by the tech bros of Silicon Valley, who remain willfully blind to the uneven technological futures they are responsible for materializing. But what we must absolutely hold on to with this approach to media is an understanding of how media determines the terrain of feminist struggle. To be technologically determined as a techno-feminist is to be strategic and cunning in how one maneuvers through the patriarchal techno-logic. This requires understanding the corresponding forms of life and sensibilities of power that arise under certain technological conditions. This means that the political project of refusal itself will be determined in part by available machine logics. To be technologically determined is to put the techno-logics of a culture’s dominant technologies at the forefront, as part of the investigation into media representation, narrative, meaning-making, semiotics, information, ethics, representation, political economy, or ideology critique. To invoke a feminist techno-determinism as integral to the media theory is to understand the way power operates like a machine. The way social injustice is experienced and the mechanisms by which these injustices are waged upon others is inextricable to the machine logics of reigning tech- Broken Machines 135 === [PDF page 145] === nologies. It starts here rather than with the notion that media are tools to seize and/or repositories of meaning where injustice gets baked in or that media power ultimately depends upon who is using the tool. Toward a Feminist Technological Determinism Technologies produce forms of knowledge and power that underpin processes of subjectification. These processes are often medium-specific, and, in this specificity, they also offer different terrains of struggle. The light bulb offers a terrain of struggle that differs from TikTok, binoculars, or the computer processor. The way a light bulb ushers in a new temporal and spatial terrain, altering the hours available for labor and bringing about new gender dynamics, is different from the way Alexa’s formal technical properties expand the worlds of consumption, which extend, intensify, and reorchestrate the labors of factory workers, box packers, drivers, and baristas. The technologies of Alexa, the light bulb, and Uber Eats are all tied to the production of social difference via different media logics. Through changes in pace, pattern, and scale, they set in motion and make different worlds possible. This is the invisible grammar of media that McLuhan universalized and tied to historical media epochs.7 Having a determinist approach to understanding media is not equivalent or on par with the violence of biological determinism or gender determinism. Instead, it means one thinks technologically about technology. Thinking technologically about technology demands one to think technologically about gender. As I have been arguing throughout this book, the Big Tech patriarchs do think technologically about both technology and gender. The way the Big Tech patriarchs understand technology is tied to the way they conceive of gender and other forms of social difference. They adhere to a tool-based approach to technologies in a way that corresponds to an extractive understanding of most of the world’s population in terms of their utility. The patriarchal machine logics of our dominant technologies are intrinsically oriented to time saving, productivity, family life, heterosexual economies of exchange, masculine inclinations to exit the social, and normative care. All of these orientations depend upon capitalistic and individualized notions of time, as well as a dependency on the inequitable gendered, raced, and classed labor of others. For a techno-feminist to think technologically about gender is to refuse this tool relationship, but it’s also to insist that women are not the sole subject or recipients of the goals of techno-feminism. It is to recognize that the technological is always a mode 136 chapter four === [PDF page 146] === of power within any social struggle. If a feminist philosophy of technology is essential to any future philosophy of media, it will be dedicated to vacating the gender binary and remain at odds with the goals of racialized patriarchal capitalism. Legacy Russell argues, “When we reject the binary, we claim uselessness as a strategic tool. Useless, we disappear, ghosting on the binary body.”8 Or as Rosi Braidotti argues, “The technologically mediated world is neither organic – inorganic, male – female, nor especially white. Advanced capitalism is a postgender system capable of accommodating a high degree of androgyny and a significant blurring of the categorical divide between the sexes.”9 Braidotti reminds us, “A strong theory of posthuman subjectivity can help us to reappropriate these processes... not only as analytical tools but also as alternative ground for formations of the self.”10 This demands that we recognize and wrestle out of the binary gender categories that are implicit to technologies and their corresponding media logics — all of which depend upon the extraction and utility of others so that wealth is delivered to the tech giant at the expense of our bodies, our relations, our lands, and our ability to live in common. Recalling that to be technologically determined is to be strategic and cunning in how one maneuvers through the patriarchal techno-logic, one must embrace the strategic uselessness of a technology that refuses to recalibrate and work well within the patriarchal techno-logic. Ultimately, this approach to a new technofeminist determinist mindset is hopeful. Big Tech breaks, discards, and renders obsolete the lives it sees as property, vessels, wombs, cogs, and tools. The disposable tools are ultimately then the ones that do not abide. Big Tech continues the legacy of slavery and the imposition of Western epistemology. As digital media practitioner and scholar Jason Lewis argues in “Making Kin with the Machines,” “The world created through Western epistemology does not account for all members of the community and has not made it possible for all members of the community to survive let alone flourish.”11 He points out that the Western view operates under what digital culture scholar John Cheney-Lippold calls an “epistemology of control,” in which both the human and nonhuman are understood to be rife for extraction and exploitation.12 This perspective is tied with colonialism’s relationship to capitalism and slavery. Vine Deloria Jr., a philosopher of the Dakota people, writes about the enslavement of the nonhuman “as if it were a machine.”13 Slavery defined its object as nonhuman, or subhuman — treating the person as if it were a machine. Media scholar Jared Sexton locates the technological forces of energy as an intrinsic part of the subjugation of Black people. The fact that this Broken Machines 137 === [PDF page 147] === system of labor was oriented toward the sustained life of white labor at the expense of Black life was not a simple process that could be understood in terms of Marxist theories of value. The endured hardship was psychic, somatic, and physical. He argues, “The energy regimes that structure material extraction were forced into black material and psychic life — of being energy for others, of putting sugar in the bowl, and in the muscles of white labor.”14 To acknowledge this as an energy regime is to understand the way the technological structure of power is intrinsic to processes of subjugation such as slavery. It demands contending with the way this energy regime has changed shape with newer technologies, and how this relates to the ongoing modern subjugation of Black life that continues today. Yet these Broken Machines do not just disappear from the scene; we’ve all seen the monumental heaps of e-waste that refuse to disappear. Computer science scholar Steve Jackson argues in his 2014 essay “Rethinking Repair” about the need for “broken world thinking.”15 He asks, “What happens when we take erosion, breakdown and decay rather than novelty, growth and progress as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use and effects of information technology and new media.”16 Moving from technological objects and systems to subjectivities, Legacy Russell similarly reframes this breaking down of technology and asks, “What does it mean to find life — and to find ourselves — through the framework of failure?”17 She suggests embodying error and “an all-consuming joyful failure within a system that never wanted us and that will not make space for us if we simply wait for it.”18 She urges us to push the structures of the gender binary further, toward a breaking point: “We travel beyond the beatific brokenness, asking: what’s next? Where to go from here?” She urges us to “recognize in this breaking, there is a beginning.” Russell offers an alternative to the most popular feminist solutions used to address the threat of discard or the experience of exhaustion induced by patriarchy and racialized capitalism — the solutions where people are made to become even better machines, and the overall message appears to be to remember to take time for rest, repair, and proper maintenance in order to optimize your capacity and be of use. Acknowledging an intrinsic brokenness to technologies and gender, Jenny Sundén writes that “gender as technological is a fragile, unstable machinery prone to breakage and breakdowns.”19 She goes on to say, “Continuous maintenance, upgrades, and reboots might move gender in the direction of an illusion of seamless technological transparency, or even organic wholeness. But it is in the crack, the break, the glitch, that the inner workings 138 chapter four === [PDF page 148] === of gender reveal themselves.”20 Big Tech Feminism is careful to make sure the crack, the glitch, the break, and so on are offered repair. Big Tech Feminism offers a ruse of an outside egress — step outside of the machine and its logics, but then please unwittingly reenter the same machine and logics. This common scenario for dealing with tech’s gender problem hides that resistant machine logics are possible. It hides that its broken machines will and do hold their own specific machine logics. Through the lens of the Broken Machine, it becomes possible to consider how social injustice takes on the logics of our reigning technologies, and one is able to discern how common critiques and attempts to address such inequities and struggles get inadvertently locked into patriarchal technologics. To locate a feminist media theory in the parts of the system where breaking occurs will offer a strategic position in the wake of Big Tech Feminism’s dominance over critical conversations about gender and technology. And so I join and gather the theorists mentioned above and ask, why opt for repair when you could work well at not working well — short-circuiting patriarchal, ableist, and racist network connections? The pettiness of inhouse racism, in-house misogyny, in-house ableism, et cetera, in all of its tiny bigness, presents a roadblock to the radical revisioning needed to bring forth a different world. I desperately want to get to that part where we can cultivate feminist techno-logics and redetermine our situations. I’m trying to wrestle with my own feelings of being a broken record — never getting to the part where I point to where and how feminist techno-logics are operating. And after all this, I’m still not there; instead, I have hoped to clear the way so that the Broken Machine is generative for you. In what follows I offer a feminism for all of the Broken Machines that allows for a new perspective on dominant and familiar gender struggles, but it enlivens and generates new forms of refusal that are attuned to what the dominant machine logics of our governing technologies foreclose and make possible. Broken Machines operate with a strategic media theory at hand. In the next section, I explore how the Broken Machine generator works, and I will demonstrate how it changes the technological terms upon which feminism intervenes in popular forms of gender struggle. In other words, I take a commonly recognized gender struggle within my media milieu— one that tends to rely on Big Tech Feminism advocating for more representation of women and eradicating bias in tech, and one where ethics stand in for a true techno-feminist intervention, offering repairs of its broken records that skip due to being stuck in this quagmire— and reframe it through the lens of the Broken Machine. In doing so, I hope it will inspire further Broken Machines 139 === [PDF page 149] === thinking on the medium-specific techno-logics of how power operates in culture. A Broken Machine Generator The Broken Machine’s discard status is energetic and alive. Broken Machines want to be supportive of most feminist interventions in tech, but they are not really compatible with many of the popular feminist battles and concerns that seem to be waged in their honor. Broken Machines do not want to argue for the inherent good of women or be included everywhere. The category of women represented as sole proprietors of feminism is precisely the type of biological determinism and turn to nature that they want to change. They recognize that so many of our newest technologies are based on the patriarchal idea of women and others as well-working machines, and they are not interested in being a tool. Broken Machines work in the interest of an overall techno-feminist project by refusing to be repaired or included in the patriarchal techno-logic. Rather than inclusion or exit, the Broken Machine has the power to inhabit and infiltrate as a means of exhibiting refusal to the patriarchy’s misogynistic and racist techno-logics. All-Male Panels The Broken Machines know that the frantic roll call of businesses, faculties, panels, advisory boards, and executives holding their conferences with an anxious nod toward a wave of inclusion initiatives is too often about showing a good face. Broken Machines snicker a little at the accusation of an all-white or all-male panel plaguing the tech world’s planning activities. Broken Machines know that a quick hire will not solve much because the real problem is the way these institutions treat so-called diverse people. These diverse people are hired to be representatives, but they are really like files — stored information, ready at hand, and on the table. In this case, people are already rendered as information in the context of the distribution of equity. It isn’t just that justice is unevenly distributed and received in a way that creates hierarchies, it’s also the fact that equity is what is determined when people are treated like legible information — they are categorized, sorted, filed, removed, retrieved, saved, and deleted. In the same vein, beyond the all-male panel, the Broken Machine does not demand to be seen, captured, or accounted for in every media form. They recognize that technologies of empowerment that have us talking, displaying, shar140 chapter four === [PDF page 150] === ing, and staying in the house are still technologies of power.21 All of this sharing and confessing is not liberating, nor is it a sign of equity, but it is indicative of the technological facilitation of confessionals and their coercive power. When it comes to popular discussions of representation and diversity, the status of the file surreptitiously emerges and reveals itself. This institutional practice of file retrieval reveals a disingenuous intent, and the Broken Machine recognizes that to be used as mere representation is also to be filed away. Broken Machines might have paused a little after President Trump’s executive order to dismantle all radical and wasteful dei programs and preferences was displayed on the White House website. Was dei always just a web page? Detection Microaggressions occur when internalized racism and sexism reveal themselves in minor comments. The stress and anxiety this causes can make your heart skip a beat, and the echoing words of these comments can sting. These microaggressions accumulate and leave one worn down. Broken Machines identify with designer and scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock’s explanation of how microaggressions work: “Metaphorically, they are the fabric, molecules, or smallest-level building blocks that constantly reproduce, replenish, and strengthen larger systems of oppression.”22 Writing about hands-free soap dispensers that discriminate by only recognizing white skin, Costanza- Chock locates microaggressions as part of the technology’s design: “This minor interruption of daily life is nevertheless an instantiation of racial bias in the specific affordances of a designed object: the dispenser affords hands-free soap delivery, but only if your hands have white skin. The user is, for a brief moment, reminded of their subordinate position within the matrix of domination.”23 But the Broken Machine does not want better automated soap dispensers, recognizing that better dispensers are also indicative of better technologies of capture and subjugation to be utilized by Big Tech patriarchy. There is something else happening here that is lurking in Costanza-Chock’s description of this technological power dynamic and the microaggression of exclusionary soap dispensers. It isn’t just a hurt feeling that wears one down, it is how the microaggression is picked up by a Broken Machine’s warning system — the detection. Broken Machines have a more intimate knowledge ingrained in them due to living with a beacon that alerts them to the potential initiation of more violence. To be excluded by the technology of the soap dispenser is a reminder of a larger Broken Machines 141 === [PDF page 151] === field of technological power where white skin is the prototype for some very basic technological designs. But the field of power that they are being reminded of goes beyond the soap dispenser, and they can detect what else lies in this field. For example, with the experience of being Black when pulled over by police for a minor traffic infraction, the beacon really goes off and alerts the individual to the potential of murder.24 Detection is not a uniform practice for the Broken Machine. It demands one to be mediumspecific and recognize the various machine logics and different registers by which racialized violence operates. Some Broken Machines must scan and detect and be aware when they find themselves within the media complex of police cars and traffic lights. Some Broken Machines must scan and detect when they walk anywhere at night. Some Broken Machines must scan and detect simply when they are out. Buffers A buffer is a storage device used to hold data as it is being moved from one place to another. Broken Machines know what it means to buffer. The Broken Machines have already grown accustomed to being filed away, but they also occupy the position of providing a cushion to reduce shock and damage for someone else on the level of global catastrophe and calamity. Transdisciplinary geographer Kathryn Yusoff argues in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None that Black and brown bodies take up the burden of exposure in buffering the violence of our modern world. She writes, “If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to Black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism.”25 To be a buffer is a type of social inequity where one takes the first hit in order to lessen the impact upon privileged classes. Buffering is invisible labor performed by Broken Machines. In Understanding Media by McLuhan, a light bulb is not recognized to be a medium until it starts to flicker and threatens to stop working.26 Being in a space with a flickering light calls up the anticipatory feeling that there might soon be an abrupt end to one’s workday activities. Without electricity, all the devices, appliances, and workstations will soon become inoperable. For some, it is a welcome relief from the demands of the day, but for others it provokes great anxiety. It is not unusual to walk around 142 chapter four === [PDF page 152] === a space when the power has gone out and flick switches out of habit. You might also stare at the diminishing charge bar on your phone or computer. Your heartbeat quickens. What kind of day will this be? The point is that one hardly registers how this electric world sustains them until the power goes off. Infrastructure is invisible until it starts to break down or the scaffolds disappear. We saw slight recognition of the buffering techno-logics of Broken Machines during the global covid -19 pandemic. The covid -19 pandemic brought essential workers to the fore — those who were suddenly visible once the pandemic halted all other forms of movement. The invisible labor of others is only remarked upon when it is suddenly absent. During covid-19, when everyone was banging pots and pans for frontline workers, what became evident was that it was the first time many had ever realized a front line even exists. This front line, however, is not exactly new. It was only that these pot-and-pan bangers realized that their lives were indebted to these human buffers. Feminists, factory workers, Black people, migrant laborers, and Amazon’s mechanical Turks — a motley crew of the potentially nonabiding buffers under the current power regimes — are all like flickering light bulbs, technologies on the verge of breaking down. It is the buffers who hold the true power of interrupting the flows of business as usual. Their existence already beholds the threat of disruption and always will. Mansplaining Mansplaining has been a popular epidemic for quite some time, but it was finally named by writer Rebecca Solnit in 2008, in the essay “Men Explain Things to Me.” For Broken Machines, mansplaining is not just boring and annoying. Mansplaining is too often understood to be an example of patriarchy’s outdated etiquette that can be solved by taking one’s own turn at the mic or speaking louder, but Big Tech patriarchy, and certainly the white male executives, see it as a means of advancing the patriarchal techno-logic— for them it is actually a media strategy that has a specific temporal and spatial bias similar to all other types of media technologies, immersive or otherwise. The way mansplaining operates is that it drains one’s capacity by taking up one’s time and space. As storage devices for great amounts of his information, the Broken Machines’ repositories simply have no more file space. Understanding mansplaining through the lens of the technological can shift the feminist critique away from this being an issue related to civic Broken Machines 143 === [PDF page 153] === discourse and etiquette, and shift attention to the more innocuous means by which power is exerted technologically within the patriarchal techno-logic. Silicon Valley has now introduced automated mansplaining by way of ChatGPT. We should not be so surprised. This technology makes complete sense in a culture that engages in the patriarchal pastime of entering more and more mediocre, unnuanced racist/sexist data into the system in order to explain the world back to us. In the university setting we are asked to engage in focus groups for the responsible use of extensive large language models (llm s). I am not a neurosurgeon. The medical school might have good reason for engaging, but me? I think I speak for other Broken Machines in the humanities and social sciences when I say I don’t want to play around (responsibly) with the use of llms. Can you imagine that what we are being asked to do is play responsibly and nicely with a cheating man splainer? Play around with him, talk to him about a few things, learn how he works, understand why he is here and why he is the way he is? We can’t help that he exists, and our students are going to look up to him regardless, so we will need to live with him. We can teach him ethics! ChatGPT will take the bias module training offered by the university’s Diversity Office. Mr. gpt can be reformed through our institutional practices! Professor gpt is on your new department committee, but you will have to still do all of the work he is assigned. #MeToo What has been surprising about the #MeToo movement is not the sheer number of women who have been assaulted. This is a truth most women already know, and although it is always shocking to learn of who else, when, and where, it is hard to keep being surprised. The true surprise of #MeToo was for the patriarchy and its techno-logic. What #MeToo ultimately revealed was how the perpetrators of sexual violence did not think that women — as machines in relatively good working order— would talk among themselves or turn against them. There is no greater threat to the abuser than to learn that victims talk to other victims, that women talk to other women — in other words, that machines would talk to other machines. You can almost hear the haunting sound of the machines taunting the patriarchal order. The sound of the true new machine learning went something like this: “Me too. Me too. Me too.” The power of #MeToo was not in the content of the hashtag and the story it disclosed. It was in how the hashtag subverted the patriarchal techno-logic of the enclosure facilitated by the 144 chapter four === [PDF page 154] === tweet and the Facebook post. Perpetrators were on notice, their fate tied to the threatening machine logics of a victimized Broken Machine coupled with Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and digital news. At any point, temporally speaking, they could be named. Binary Assistance Broken Machines do not operate under the logics of binary gender and normative relations of care; therefore, they are not compatible with the larger system of assistive technologies. While others might be quick to point out that technologies are gendered, Broken Machines do not care so much. They do not see themselves in these new machine assistants. If they did, you would hear more passive-aggressive disputes with Alexa: “No no, Alexa, please let me do that.” Broken Machines are not so worried about the gender of assistive devices or whether sex robots come in diverse shapes and sizes. Broken Machines will not insist on better representation alone, recognizing that taking that argument to its logical end would mean that this sorority (Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Erica) needs to be equitably met by a frat house of assistive technologies (Chads, Brads, and Alexander Mackenzie II’s). The Broken Machine resists getting short-circuited with all the concern over stereotypes. They want more than remuneration for their labors. They want more than to not be subjected to violence. They want more than to be valued and recognized in a superficial way. They are not waiting for a program to promote gender equity and diversity. Saniye Gülser Corat, unesco’s director of the Division for Gender Equality, said in an official public statement, “Obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices,” and “the world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether A.I. technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”27 Broken Machines will not take directives from industries or political organizations that take these inherently sexist and racialized regimes of assistance and automation as a given part of the social good. Broken Machines are not interested in being in an edi, dei, ide, eid, a diversity-and-inclusion poster for a diverse military arms trading company or for your new Institute for the Good Use of ai to Hide What ai Is Doing in That War Institute. Broken Machines can follow the sources of financing and the political economy that have a suspect dependence upon the unqualified use of the qualifiers good and diverse. Broken Machines suggest that we first deal with why all of this automated assistance is integral to the dominant understanding of what techBroken Machines 145 === [PDF page 155] === nologies are for in the first place. Without this discussion, all we are left with is trying to make our automated worlds of assistance into something of a Dove Soap commercial. Feminist techno-logics cannot flow from better dei within militaristic technology companies or from the cultural battle over better gender representation for our assistive technologies that have been designed to aid in the violence of exploitation and overconsumption. Battery Life Broken Machines are concerned with how social inequities are exacerbated by the everyday technologies that depend upon oppressive labor arrangements. These very same technologies foreclose the possibility of engaging in other types of living, laboring, or loving together. Broken Machines do not think disconnection is the answer either; they don’t opt to flee the scene. Any act of disconnection is blind to its own conditions of possibility, and such a disconnection, more often than not, is reliant on the labor of others to be made possible. This individual act of withdrawal can be a voluntary activity for the self, but Broken Machines wouldn’t suggest that one’s lifestyle choices are worthy of a name for communal politics. At the same time, Broken Machines do not opt to be repaired and plugged back into technological conditions of possibility encouraged by patriarchy. The Broken Machine refuses to use the batteries they’re selling us — all the Fitbits, Foodora orders, and Uber rides. The Broken Machine sees techno-culture organized around the logics of charging stations and other technological amenities as a means of keeping consumers plugged in and subservient. Convenience, time-saving, and reveling in the novel temporal modes of new technologies are a techno-capitalist and patriarchal ploy to exert control over the populace. The Broken Machine knows this. The Broken Machine recoils at the dominance of the gig economy, realizing that gigs are substitutes for other forms of kinship and sociality. Broken Machines have the capacity to take on others who are drained, as they seek communal care rather than returning to those original power sources. A Broken Machine gets energy from alternative sources, eschewing energy from the tech solutions pushed by patriarchy. Selfie-Care Broken Machines do take care seriously, but they do not participate in nor celebrate patriarchal capitalism’s individual self-care program — what I term 146 chapter four === [PDF page 156] === selfie-care. For selfie-care is seen to foreclose the radical potential of living in common as it operates as a mechanism to further enclose the commons in the name of feminism. The self-care/selfie-care political spectrum is easy to plot. #Selfie-care is a photo of a pair of feet floating in a pool of sudsy water being worked on by the repetitive motions of the manicurist at the nail factory. On the other end of the spectrum, you might find people engaged in communal forms of reproductive labor so others can eat, sleep, and rest. Care in the commons is actually not so digitally noteworthy — this is a type of care that the medium cannot capture and quickly brandish via hashtag. In other words, there is a stark contrast between selfie-care facilitated by technologies of capture and the political forms of communalism that cannot be captured technologically. Selfie-care is deeply tied up with the patriarchal techno-logics of contemporary culture. Selfie-care comes by way of online self-diagnostic quizzes, clickbait lists, and BuzzFeed tips. Selfie-care lists things one must do: dance, eat, breathe, hydrate, touch a tree, send a nice email. Self-care becomes a lifestyle choice for a productive, healthful life, whether you are an activist or a capitalist. Unlike selfie-care, self-care is not about the private domain of the self, it’s about the maintenance of the conditions of possibility for people to be cared for in common, and it is at odds with this enclosure of the world that selfie-care induces. Selfie-Care is indicative of the politics of the enclosure. The radical potential of self-care is impeded by the need to document it, publicize it, and enclose it in a list or a hashtag. Anything that cannot be done by a device or another person, you’ll note, now becomes worthy of the label self-care. For example, all this talk of hydrating as a form of self-care! Hydration feminism is at odds with the Broken Machine and speaks to a long history of infinite resources being made finite and scarce, enclosed, and colonized via discourse. Broken Machines are not interested in being hydrated as a political goal — what a monumental sign of technical incompetence it is to offer water to a machine anyway. Suddenly, basic things — like drinking a cup of coffee, going outside, breathing, touching nature, or calling a friend— become scarce resources instead of something we all have access to. Consider how the phrase “touch grass” is a directive within the open internet culture where so much of the world outside the screen is imagined to be pockets of enclosures. “Touch grass” means someone needs to reconnect with the real world, that they’ve been spending too much time online. Similarly, bed rot is a TikTok form of self-care where one stays in bed for the day as they eat snacks, watch tv, and scroll through devices. Bed rot is not just Broken Machines 147 === [PDF page 157] === a technological phenomenon because it is documented and announced by the bed rotter on their social media, it is also a technological phenomenon because the bed rotter has access to the world via remote control — Uber Eats, streaming, Alexa, and other forms of handheld leisure. Forced-Quit Virtue Signaling The Broken Machine is concerned that her fellow feminists’ inclination toward screaming into the social media void is not a form of feminist digital activism but rather an indication that one is not quite on top of how patriarchy’s techno-logics of power operate. Social media platforms operate with a spatial bias tending toward the force-quit and canceling function of others. These sorts of quick quips are at odds with, and out of balance with, the temporality of abolitionist politics and socially restorative justice required across our communities. Broken Machines are careful not to lay claims about their own virtue, or the lack of virtue in others on social media, because they never quite know who and what forms of labor they might be overlooking in their rants about how silence is complicity. How would they know if Broken Machines are in fact doing the good work of not working well elsewhere, well beyond the spatial bias of the newsfeed, timeline, or post? Why would one demand that all activities be legible to them? The Broken Machines know about fake news, having been the subjects of misinformation for so long. They plug into coalitions and recognize there is a division of labor within feminist struggle. This division of labor is capacity-building. The Broken Machine recognizes that everyone cannot cover all bases simultaneously. And so they do not assume that from the confines of their spatially biased media that they have the ultimate vantage point upon which to assess the labor and activism or political actions of others. The call-out tweet does not automatically work as a resistant occupation on the platform as intended, but rather it is part of the patriarchal techno-logic of settling space. Tweets are content, but they are also space-binding media that work well to mark out or settle upon the timeline of others like uninvited guests. The Broken Machine, however, recognizes that canceling people, void screaming, and colonization might share some overlapping patriarchal techno-logics. 148 chapter four === [PDF page 158] === The Message of the Broken Machine Being challenged by the machine world is one of the patriarch’s deepest fears. This is why Broken Machines have enduring power and potential. We must begin with the premise and the knowledge that new technologies will not just simply redistribute power equitably within already-established hierarchies of difference. The idea that they will do this exemplifies a utopian naivete, and this is the type of patriarchal technological determinism that got us here to begin with. But the Broken Machine, however, does threaten to redistribute power, and that is why patriarchs imagine they are in need of replacement. The Broken Machine has the power to incapacitate and challenge the machinations of Big Tech, given that Broken Machines are not interested in rebooting or retooling our technical systems to be more accommodating, diverse, or equitable. We live in a techno-culture where the tool-based notion of technology reigns, but at the same time, the actual tools who hold the most power are the ones that will refuse to work well. Broken Machines have the capacity to usher in alternative machine logics — a new message. They are media that refuse to fall in line. Let us think of all the flickering machines and the new logics they threaten in that flickering they do. Like the flickering light bulb indicating that the power is failing, the Broken Machine signals the end of business as usual. The biggest dream I have about co-opting the status of the Broken Machine is a future where it is no longer just a privilege reserved for Alexa to not compute and shut down. The line between a broken record and an error message is long and unequally dispersed. I have watched in awe as some people effectively respond to instances of racism and sexism in a way that appears akin to sending out a failed delivery message. I have also witnessed others being punished for their inability to compute and keep up with the machine logics of patriarchy and racialized capitalism. Ultimately, what the Broken Machine changes is what counts as social difference in relationship to technology. What we must resist are not machine logics in general; we must resist the current machine logics we live among — the ones that conceive of people and technologies only in terms of their utility. We must resist machine logics that are intentionally oriented toward draining people of their capacity. This draining is a political reality that so many political philosophers have taken up, with references to bare life, slow death, and necropolitics, to name a few.28 The Broken Machine offers a feminist technological determinist take that can run along- Broken Machines 149 === [PDF page 159] === side these political theories. I hope, too, it can be understood as a feminist technological perspective that is accessible across the disciplines that do not usually take up the technological. Likewise, I bring to my own discipline of media studies an assertion that there is no world outside of technological power, and so the well-meaning impetus to attend to it, reform it, and give it some ethics misses the opportunity to refuse it. You can in fact inhabit the patriarchal techno-logic as a means to refuse the Big Tech patriarchy. To inhabit it is to understand the media environment. The patriarchal technostructure is not a technological problem that reforming tech can solve, and so Broken Machines should be armed with a techno-feminist media theory like the one outlined in this book. My hope is that the Broken Machine and the techno-feminist media theory of feminist technological determinism will offer maps and routes to a new technological destination — one that is beyond reformation and pushing toward refusal. 150 chapter four === [PDF page 160] === Conclusion A Techno-Feminist End to the Insufferable Tool This book has argued that the patriarchs of Big Tech have a suspicious relationship to media theory. The Big Tech patriarch is the tech titan who owns X or Amazon and also the one who likes to explain technology to me — the one who takes a lot of pleasure in defining tech culture as well as advising our culture and global leaders on how to react to technological transformations. Perhaps he is not always a he, but the understanding of technology they promulgate benefits patriarchy and, with it, capitalism and ethno-nationalism. The Big Tech patriarch is a contemporary phenomenon that stands in the way of a just technological future. The Big Tech patriarch operates with an intelligible facet of media theory that they wield strategically in order to maintain the patriarchal techno-logic. I come to this project with the understanding that there is a technological structure of power that organizes all social relations. Technology is not an addendum to human experience but rather an environment within which social and political life unfolds. The dominant technological ordering is patriarchal. This is not just because of a gendered imbalance in the distribution of power but rather because so much of the technology that organizes the day is compulsively oriented to a particular mode of relating that serves patriarchy: domestication of time, individual regimes of productivity, normative family life, essentialized gender identity, heterosexual and homonormative economies of exchange, and the overarching masculine inclination to use technology as a means to exit the social, to name a few. === [PDF page 161] === I have argued that the patriarchal techno-logic depends upon a social understanding of technology as tools. Big Tech patriarchs promote a toolbased understanding of technology in a way that corresponds to their extractive perception of most of the world’s land and population in terms of utility. The way Big Tech patriarchs understand technology is tied to the way they conceive of gender and other forms of social difference. Culturally, we are limited by a notion of technologies as tools at the expense of understanding the possibilities of technology beyond utility. As a feminist concerned with technology, I feel hampered by never getting to that moment when feminist techno-logics can flourish — when conceptions of technology beyond productivity, extraction, expansion, domestic normativity, and so on can exist. And thus this book operates as a plea: Feminist approaches to technology must rid themselves of the imposing tool imaginary and the limited world it cultivates and is oriented toward. I do understand how odd it sounds for me to suggest that technologies are not tools. That technologies are tools is a commonsensical notion that dominates the popular imagination, and it is a concept that is found in feminist interventions into patriarchal tech culture. It is perhaps better for me to put it this way: A myopic focus on technologies as tools is responsible for the racist, classist, extractive, and sexist technological imaginary that we currently navigate. In the case of the Big Tech patriarch, this tool-based approach to technology has been used as a deliberate means to gain power. Is this really all that we have? Was this all there was to design? The technological landscape for navigating the day is filled with gizmos and gadgets that foster narrowing social worlds built upon capitalistic and individualized notions of time and based on an inequitable system dependent on the gendered, raced, and classed labor of others. The pull of the normative day and its restrictive rhythms, routes, and paths dominates. My technofeminist disdain and displeasure with these quotidian technologies, coupled with the feeling that feminist techno-logics are so far out of reach, is what compelled me to write this book. To close the gap between the patriarchal techno-logic and the seemingly far-out-of-reach potential for feminist techno-logics, I have offered a techno-feminist media theory I understand to be a feminist technological determinism that aims to do more than just explain how patriarchy and technology work. It offers a strategic feminist politics where one can inhabit and challenge the machine logics of patriarchy while fighting to stay incompatible. By inhabiting the patriarchal techno-logic, the hope is that we can begin to conjure and usher in 152 Conclusion === [PDF page 162] === new machine logics that can quell and move beyond the technological extensions of patriarchy. In the end, this book is also a call for a deeper media analysis at the core of myriad forms of political struggle, whether feminist, queer, anticapitalist, and so on, and for political and social thought more generally to take seriously the technological as a structure of power. The book makes clear that the import of feminist technological determinism as a type of media theory has a utility beyond what is considered to be the world of tech or the study of media and technology or communication systems. This theory demands an approach to technology that does not treat technology as a tool but rather pays attention to how technologies might foster and bring about specific environments in which social relations unfold in such a way that they are committed to a nonbinarized notion of gender and oriented toward the cultivation of feminist techno-logics. I see this book as a contribution to a long tradition of feminist theorizing about technology and patriarchy, and I remain inspired and indebted to this tradition. But what I hope to have been able to have done is to offer a marked shift and make clear that the political project of techno-feminism must remain distinct from Big Tech Feminism, taking more seriously the recursive dynamics of our dominant technology’s role in structuring how we come to know our media and ourselves, how we come to understand gender, and other power dynamics more generally. The ability to reckon with the recursive fact of technology informs and makes distinct feminist technological determinism from other feminist approaches to technology. A refusal to submit to patriarchal techno-logics is what makes this form of technological determinism feminist. As I come to the last paragraphs and take final stock of the patriarchal techno-logic, documenting one last time the machinations of the insufferable tools in power and the technologies they wield in order to cultivate an environment that upholds white ethno-nationalism, patriarchy, and a sense of life and lands only in terms of their utility in maintaining a reign of power, which is a utilitarianism not of the good life but of mass suffering: Los Angeles and the Canadian Prairies have been burning for weeks. Every event I go to includes some asinine conversation about what people are doing with ai. It seems we too are supposed to stay hydrated, and California and Saskatchewan need water yesterday, but ChatGPT is thirstier than your “water of the day” influencer. Musk and Trump are threatening to annex Canada while Trump has initiated a trade war between Canada A Techno-Feminist End 153 === [PDF page 163] === and the United States, while the United States has sided with Russia and is going after Ukraine’s minerals. Canada is feeling super nationalistic — flags are flying, and freedom convoy chic has become fashionable. The genocide in Palestine endures, but so many still refuse to name it or relay their understanding of basic math — one with death tolls where one is certainly greater than another but no one seems to have the tool of calculation at their disposal. But yes, if only people could just talk and civilly discourse. Many Jewish students, friends, and colleagues too suffer from this supposed war of two sides they don’t want waged in their name, but when they do talk about the supposed other side’s right to life, they are doxed by the weaponized accusation of anti-Semitism all because of their commitment to what is good and just. This is all current climate, the ultimate tool talk, propelled by an idea about technology and culture focused on civil discourse and misinformation at the expense of reckoning with the fact that insufferable tools are harnessing the patriarchal techno-logic to stay in power. The techno-feminist project I have in mind has zero desire to board a spacecraft or become a deep-sea explorer to visit the Titanic wreckage in a submersible. Of course, it is easy to refuse things that you haven’t exactly been invited to do. But feminist technological determinism is not a politics that is rooted in being left behind by patriarchy. It is a techno-feminist politics that is okay with refusing the compulsory traps of a limited life. As for the things I’ve been invited to do — I’m not planning on buying crypto, and I will continue to recoil at the emergence of qr codes and a sociality that expects my phone to be smart and always present in my hand. I’m never planning on accommodating ChatGPT or talking to anyone seriously about the ethical use of ai in my own world. I don’t know how to use your Ring doorbell, and it freaks me out that you have one. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of gifts offered in the form of a gig. I could make a longer list here, but my point is not to distinguish between good tech or bad tech, the tech we need and the tech we don’t, or the tech I use and the tech I won’t. The list would undoubtedly be as obnoxious, contradictory, and confusing as the one I’ve already provided. Instead, I want to simply point out that reforming and rewielding while becoming tech-savvy is its own project, but it is also often an impediment to the political imaginary I think is required for techno-feminist futures to flourish. Please do not confuse my disdain for compulsory technological traps that extend the patriarchal techno-logic as evidence of me being untechnical and technologically unsavvy. Instead, I prefer to be committed to live as much as possible 154 Conclusion === [PDF page 164] === by way of a feminist techno-determinist perspective where technology is understood not as a tool but rather as an environment in which social relations unfold. What environment should and could be cultivated must be at the forefront of thinking through a future feminist techno-logic. It is certainly a techno-logic that would not depend on all of this suffering. As for gender, the media theory I have offered here also offers a mode of thinking through our technologies that does not also require certain demographics to endure life tethered to the expanding reproductive social order in this world of assisted overconsumption and of technologically guided pillaging and extraction. It is an understanding of technology that is committed to a new orientation — toward the cultivation of eventual feminist techno-logics that could put an end to the insufferable tool. A Techno-Feminist End 155 === [PDF page 165] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 166] === Acknowledgments On December 11, 2024, in a post on X, Elon Musk referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as an “Insufferable Tool” that wouldn’t be in power much longer. Strange, I remember thinking; it is only insufferable tools that seem to be in power. More importantly, I finally had a title for this book that had been sitting finished and title-less for far too long. But Insufferable Tools owes nothing to its Musk muse or any of the other tools that made it necessary to write. This book owes everything to the intellectual sparks I was lucky enough to encounter in a decade of traveling talks and engagements in Amsterdam’s Institute of Network Cultures, London School of Economics, usc Annenberg, Weimar for the Digital Bauhaus Summit, Blackwood Gallery at utm, the Canadian Embassy in Berlin for Transmediale, Cornell University, Milieux Lab Concordia Montreal, Carleton University, Re-Fig in Edmonton, Haus der Kulteren der Welt in Berlin, University of Pennsylvania – Annenberg, University of Waterloo, aoir in Montreal, Goette Institute Prague, Oslo Centre for Advanced Study, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Digital Democracies Institute at sfu Vancouver, Humboldt University Berlin, Tuning Speculation in Toronto, moca in Toronto, Virtual Grounds @ The Centre for Social Innovation Regents Park Toronto, New York University, University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, University of Siegen, savac Toronto, University of California – San Diego, Fonderie Darling Montreal, Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Aoyama Guikin University in Tokyo, University of Tokyo, Console-ing Passions in Calgary, digs Lab at Concordia University Montreal, Deutsches === [PDF page 167] === Haus New York, the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, tinc Seoul, the Loop Alternative Art Space in Seoul, unh Women’s Hospital Toronto, the McLuhan Centre, and the cca in Toronto. And in these spaces, it was the time spent with so many people that allowed the ideas in this book to stick to the page. I thank Baruch Gottlieb, Judy Wajcman, Sarah Murray, Marc Steinberg, Jack Bratich, Sarah Banet- Weiser, Christine Shaw, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Christen Stippel, Xlights (Sue Jeung and Lingxiang Wu), Ji-Yoon Yang, Toko Tanaka, Junichi Miyizawa, David Cecceto, Jeremy Braddock, Mads Pankow, Sebastian Olma, Jonathan Sterne, Cait McKinney, Carrie Rentschler, Charles Acland, Stephanie Dugay, Espen Ytreberg, Helge Jordheim, Anna Lauren Hoffman, Maya Ganesh, Orit Halpern, Liam Cole-Young, Jody Berland, Miranda Brady, Chris Russill, Christine Jacobsen, Andrew Herman, Craig Robertson, Melissa Gregg, Ali Na, John Clarke, Alison Powell, Tereza Stejskalova, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Nicholas Taylor, Stephanie Fisher, Mél Hogan, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Ezekial Roman-Dixon, Alex Monea, Kelly Gates, Lisa Nakamura, Shannon Mattern, Paula McDowell, John Durham Peters, Andrew McLuhan, Marika Cifor, Daniela Rosner, Wendy Chun, Jessalynn Keller, and Lawrence Grossberg. When in 2022 I finally sat down to put all these pieces together, I was lucky enough to encounter a different system of ongoing intellectual support and inspiration. Since 2001 I have not had an idea I didn’t run past Ganaele Langlois first. I thank her for twenty-four years of an ongoing media theoretical conversation and her friendship. To Rianka Singh, who has remained a consistent interlocutor for the past decade and because of her rigorous wit is always my go-to, “Is this idea stupid?” person. To Cait McKinney, who shared with me in the online international search effort for the Titan submersible and in our conversations convinced me that Barbie had a place in this work. For Liam Cole Young, for an enduring side-eye email exchange about technological determinism. To the late and wondrous Jonathan Sterne, who took to my project like it was also his to advise — I am forever grateful for his investment, for no other reason than that he wanted me to finish this and put it out there. To Chase Joynt, for an outof-the-blue email in 2019 that I reread over the years to remind me that I was indeed onto something both intimate and intellectual in this project. While it took five years for you to arrive in person (on that horse), I’m so glad you’re finally here. I am so lucky to work in one of the most collegial and intellectually inspiring day jobs. I wrote the entire first legible draft in the year I became 158 Acknowledgments === [PDF page 168] === director of the Institute of Communication Culture Information and Technology in 2022. I thank all my colleagues at the institute for making this a job I love. But for engaging with me while writing, which sometimes meant just sitting next to me in writing sessions or showing enthusiasm for this project and asking me how it was going and sharing reading, news clips, ideas, and stories, I thank Dan Guadagnolo, Kate Maddalena, Julie Chen, Tero Karppi, Lilia Topouzova, Nicole Cohen, and Alessandro Delfanti. At U of T at large, I also thank M. Murphy for their friendship and commitment to what is good and right and for being an instant and unwavering friend for the past decade. To T. L. Cowan and Jas Rault, who have a gift for facilitating theory in action — I will never forget that making Toronto exits often requires someone to hold your snow boots. Elspeth Brown, thank you for making cdrs my home during dark winter mornings, but also for your guidance — you probably didn’t ever realize what kind of mentor you have been for me. I want to thank Boris Chrubasik and Jacob Gallagher Ross for sustaining me in relation to our admin roles through laughter in ways we can never talk about! This acknowledgment is indeed a bribe that I have agreed to. Thank you to Reka Gal for the ra work over the many years of devising this project and as it transformed year after year. Erin MacKeen, for taking delight in helping me with the final images and for your constant lol “this is my job” refrain. To my beloved writing group, Dana Seitler, Tess Takahashi, and Michelle Cho, and our Korea Town jaunts — there would simply be no movement to my words on pages without all of you. Thank you for always being in project with me and allowing me the space to come to this group as I am with my barf drafts and streams of consciousness. Elizabeth Ault, what an honor to work with you. To me you will be more than my editor and biggest champion at Duke University Press. You are also a timelord. Thank you to Clorinde Peters and Alex Wagner for copyedits to earlier drafts. Jeremy Packer, the condition for the possibility of my writing time, for your endless reassurances and your desire to make sure what we build together is always beautiful, true, and open to transformation. As we move on and away from one another, I thank you for all of it. Zyla and Dahlia: No, I’m sorry to say my book still isn’t done. You should probably stop asking. It was very rude of you to pick Insufferable Mom as our Wi-Fi network. Acknowledgments 159 === [PDF page 169] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 170] === Notes Introduction 1 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 46. 2 Kharpal, “Elon Musk Pokes Fun at Jeff Bezos’ New Moon Lander.” 3 Marcus, “Elon Musk Trolls Jeff Bezos After SpaceX Beats Blue Origin.” 4 Dessem, “Why Does Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Look So Much Like a Penis?” 5 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. 6 Vigdor, “Bezos Thanks Amazon Workers and Customers.” 7 Trump, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government dei Programs and Preferencing.” 8 The popular circulation of McLuhan is evidenced in these articles that appeared in Wired, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the larb, and the Guardian: Levinson, “Five Views of St. Marshall”; Thill, “July 21, 1911”; Wolf, “Channeling McLuhan”; Wolf, “The Wisdom of Saint Marshall”; Wolf, “McLuhan Lives”; Arlen, “Marshall McLuhan and the Technological Embrace”; Austen, “Early Media Prophet Is Now Getting His Due”; Farokhmanesh, “Marshall McLuhan, Man Who ‘Saw the Internet Coming’ ”; Klein, “I Didn’t Want It to Be True”; Naughton, “Thanks Marshall”; Pooley, “How to Become a Famous Media Scholar”; Ripatrazone, “A New Medium for Marshall McLuhan’s Message”; Ross, “The McLuhan Metaphor.” 9 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 39. 10 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 39. 11 Spigel, Make Room for tv. 12 Braithwaite, “Smart Home Tech Is Being Turned into a Tool.” === [PDF page 171] === 13 Levin, “James Damore, Google, and the YouTube Radicalization of Angry White Men.” 14 Hanrahan and Peters, “The Anthropoid Condition.” 15 Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking. 16 Morozov, “The Naked and the ted.” 17 Ford, “Elon Musk on the Future of ai.” 18 Pao, “The Perverse Incentives That Help Incels Thrive.” 19 Helmore, “Epstein Reportedly Hoped to Develop Super-Race”; Stewart et al., “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race.” 20 Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, 166. 21 See Lucy Suchman’s fantastic contextualization of techno-feminism in relation to cyberfeminism, technological determinism, and the shortcomings of sts in approaching gender as a conceptual category that needs as much rethinking as technology in Suchman, “Wajcman Confronts Cyberfeminism.” 22 Wajcman, TechnoFeminism, 107. 23 Wajcman, TechnoFeminism, 111. 24 Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body; Cockburn, “The Material of Male Power”; Hicks, Programmed Inequality; Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology. 25 Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body. 26 Lewis, Abolish the Family. 27 Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, 167. 28 Keyes, “The Body Instrumental.” 29 Keyes, “The Body Instrumental.” 30 Hui, “One Hundred Years of Crisis.” 31 Syms, “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.” What does it mean that Sili con Valley’s design for the future is to inhabit the destination on the other end of someone’s escape hatch? While exit to another galaxy is an enduring trope within the speculative fiction of Afro-futurism (see Jayna Brown, “A World on Fire,” on Sun-Ra), the launch of SpaceX and the Tesla Roadster to Mars indicates something of a competition over one’s exit turf. As T. J. Demos argues in Beyond the World’s End, “With the neoliberal corporate military-state complex determined to occupy and settle the very space that many Afrofuturists have long sought in science and sonic fiction as an emancipated destination to escape colonized Earth, such starry-eyed fantasies stand to become grim off planet industrial realities in years to come” (153). The world of competing exits revolves around a differential economy of utility where tech is envisioned to either alleviate or offer a way out of this economy. 32 L. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 53. 33 Snelting, “Feminist Server.” 34 J. Davis, “Draft of Empathy Manifesto #1”; L. Russell, Glitch Feminism; 162 Notes to introduction === [PDF page 172] === Towns, “Toward a Black Media Philosophy”; Towns, On Black Media Philosophy; Whittaker, “Origin Stories.” 35 Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 17. 36 Wajcman, Pressed for Time, 165. 37 Joynt, Vantage Points, 12 – 13. 1. The Woman in Tech 1 As cited in Wong, “Segregated Valley.” 2 Bernard, “Silicon Valley’s Very Masculine Year.” 3 Bernard, “Silicon Valley’s Very Masculine Year.” 4 Kneese, “Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves.” 5 Lu, “Travis Kalanick Probably Regrets Saying This.” 6 Tiku, “How Big Tech Became a Bipartisan Whipping Boy”; Wong, “Segregated Valley.” 7 Tiku, “How Big Tech Became a Bipartisan Whipping Boy”; Wong, “Segregated Valley.” 8 Merchant, “Life and Death in Apple’s Forbidden City”; Wong, “Segregated Valley.” 9 Merchant, “Life and Death in Apple’s Forbidden City.” 10 Roberts, Behind the Screen. 11 “Best Places to Work for lgbtq Equality.” 12 S. Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular.’ ” 13 Banet-Weiser, Empowered. 14 L. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 45. 15 Woods, “Asking More of Siri and Alexa.” 16 Moran, “Racial Technological Bias and the White, Feminine Voice.” 17 Withers, “I Don’t Date Men Who Yell at Alexa.” 18 Withers, “I Don’t Date Men Who Yell at Alexa.” 19 See also Dreyfuss, “The Terrible Joy of Yelling at Alexa,” which discusses how yelling at Alexa can be therapeutic. 20 Witt, “Digital Assistants Shouldn’t Only Be Women.” 21 Wakefield, “Female ai-Voice Reinforces Bias, un Report Says.” 22 “The Alexa Personality.” 23 “The Alexa Personality.” 24 “The Alexa Personality.” 25 Cited in Pringle, “Battling a Culture of Sexism.” 26 Lance, “Amazon’s Alexa Now Stands Up for Herself.” 27 Pringle, “Battling a Culture of Sexism.” 28 Fessler, “Amazon’s Alexa Is Now a Feminist.” 29 Strengers and Kennedy, The Smart Wife, 163. Notes to Chapter one 163 === [PDF page 173] === 30 Fan, “Reverse Engineering the Gendered Design of Amazon’s Alexa,” 63. 31 See the case of Care2 in Strengers and Kennedy, The Smart Wife, 156. 32 Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer; Hicks, Programmed Inequality; Kramarae, Technology and Women’s Voices; Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits.” 33 Tsotsis, “Why No Women Want to Be on a ‘Women in Tech’ Panel.” 34 Quoted in Bilton, “The Women Tech Forgot.” 35 Rosner, Critical Fabulations; Plant, “The Future Looms.” 36 Hicks, Programmed Inequality, 179. 37 See also Nooney, “The Uncredited.” 38 For a compelling history of the back-and-forth switcheroo, see Bivens and Haimson, “Baking Gender into Social Media Design”; and also Kraemer, “The Gender of the Interface.” 39 Hochschild, The Managed Heart; Sharma and Singh, Re-Understanding Media. 40 Hochschild, The Managed Heart. 41 Weizenbaum, “The Image of Man in Artificial Intelligence.” 42 This history is documented in significant detail in Rushkoff, “The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods.” 43 Brand, The Media Lab, 55. 44 Ellcessor, “The Care and Feeding of 9-1-1 Infrastructure.” 45 As quoted in E. Wiseman, “Sex, Love and Robots.” 46 Nagle, Kill All Normies, 90. 47 The text of this discussion can be found at cupocity303, “Women Who Own Smartphones Lose the Ability to Love.” Much of Roosh’s pro-rape content has been taken off the web. 48 This obscure Roosh quote is no longer available on multiple websites but can be found, with another broken link, at “Quote: Women Who Own iPhones Lose the Ability to Love.” 49 Weinberg, “The Rationalization of Leisure.” 50 Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking. 51 Nolan, “Milo.” 52 Cadman, “Will the Sexbot Make Women Redundant?” 53 Castillo, “Trump’s Pick for Labor Secretary.” 54 Gault, “Amazon Introduces Tiny ‘ZenBooths.’ ” 55 See Merchant’s critique in “ai Can’t Fix What Automation Already Broke.” 56 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds. 57 Peters discusses this in this interview in Hanrahan and Peters, “The Anthropoid Condition.” 58 McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 35 – 37. 59 McLuhan and Zingrone, Essential McLuhan, 24. 60 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 115. 61 As quoted in Conley, “The Passenger,” 203. 62 In Conley, “The Passenger”; Conley, Spatial Ecologies. 63 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 183. 164 Notes to Chapter one === [PDF page 174] === 64 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 216. 65 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 34. 66 This quote from media theorist Ganaele Langlois comes from a private email thread between us when we were discussing my ideas of what a feminist reading of Kittler would look like. Langlois answered this question in a more profound way than I could even conjure. 67 McKinney, Information Activism, 7. 68 McKinney, Information Activism, 69. 69 Plant, “Binary Sexes, Binary Codes.” 70 Wiener, Uncanny Valley, 69 – 70. 71 Kramarae, Technology and Women’s Voices; Rakow, Gender on the Line. 72 McConnell, “The Profound Sound of Ernest Hemingway’s Typist.” 73 K. Brown, “ ‘Black People Figured Out How to Make Culture.’ ” 74 Whittaker, “Origin Stories.” 75 Whittaker, “Origin Stories.” 76 Sharma and Singh, Re-Understanding Media, 187. 77 Sharma and Singh, Re-Understanding Media, 187 – 88. 2. The Tools in Mommy’s Basement 1 Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. 2 See Hesselberth, “On Leaving Academia and the Need to Take Refuge.” 3 Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian.” 4 Vivos marketing copy, https://www.terravivos.com/. 5 Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology. 6 Wajcman, TechnoFeminism, 111. 7 McKay and McKay, The Art of Manliness. 8 Mortimer, “Yanis Varoufakis Is Forced Out by eu Chiefs.” 9 Dolnick, “The Man Who Knew Too Little.” 10 Bondy, “How Vital Are Women?” 11 Lusinski, “17 Millennial Women Reveal Their Self-Care Routine.” 12 Weeks, The Problem with Work. 13 See Hester, Xenofeminism, as the most succinct elaboration of this point; and Hester and Srnicek, After Work. 14 See, for example, Eve Tuck’s groundbreaking article “Suspending Damage.” 15 Spigel, Make Room for tv. 16 Grose, “The Primal Scream.” 17 Mies, The Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour, 59 18 Mies, The Social Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour, 59. 19 See Yiannopoulos, “The Sexodus, Part 2.” 20 Straughan, “Honey Badger Brigade Mission Statement.” 21 Straughan, “Honey Badger Brigade Mission Statement.” Notes to Chapter two 165 === [PDF page 175] === 22 Kay, “Abject Desires in the Age of Anger.” 23 Peterson, 12 Rules for Life. 24 Taufik, “Why Cleaning Your Room Is the Secret.” 25 Frauenfelder, “The Proud Boys’ Masturbation Policy.” 26 Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 116. 27 Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance. 28 Sturges, “Sex Robots and Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman Review.” 29 Thompson, “Tristan Harris.” 30 Thompson, “Tristan Harris.” 31 Thompson, “Tristan Harris.” 32 Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 116. 33 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. 34 In Pepita Hesselberth and Joost de Bloois’s edited 2020 collection Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Arts, Theory, I provided a review of the text in a coda titled “Staying Power,” where I located the different ways exit/escape/ withdrawal are formulated by the various contributors. Elena Loizidou argued that withdrawal must be activated elsewhere and not in dialogue with the institutions of foundational politics, including the carceral state and the normative lexicon of liberal politics. I suggested that Yasco Horsman’s argument that one must agitate was located here. I suggested that Darin Barney held that the actual task of critical theory in this regard is to attend to the forms taken by politics in this mode of withdrawal and to discern the qualities of the condition it reflects. In this vein, Clare Birchall, to me, offers one such tactic: tactical opacity. She fine-tunes Marxist calls for exodus and argues, instead, that flying under the radar of the demos is not an equalopportunity activity given there is no universal sovereign subject. Likewise, withdrawal isn’t a practice of living for an isolated political self, as editor de Bloois points out, but instead a “form of illegibility that enables us to be present and absent at the same time,” oriented to an understanding of political life as collective and differential. Similarly, Isabell Lorey adds another feminist fine-tuning of the call to exodus by reminding us that withdrawal is never a onetime cut. 35 Cleaver, “Work Refusal and Self-Organisation,” 10. 36 Berardi, “What Is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?” 37 Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 18. 38 Papadopoulos et al., Escape Routes. 39 Lovink and Rossiter, “Ten Theses on Non-Democratic Electronics.” 40 Witheford, “Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society.” 41 As Bonnie Honig argues in A Feminist Theory of Refusal, that refusal is an arc and not a singular act. Honig defines the arc of refusal as “leave, suspend use in festival, hide-out, rehearse some new moves, corporealize different habits, intensify use, try out a new world, imagine it, make it real, join up with others, fight with each other, care for each other, come back and claim your 166 Notes to Chapter two === [PDF page 176] === right to the city too” (107). For Honig, one must always return to a worldbuilding practice. 42 Vrasti, “Work and the Politics of Refusal.” 43 Mengesha and Padmanabhan, “Introduction,” 5. 44 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 177. 45 Campt, “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity.” 46 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 176. 47 Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 217. 48 Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 214. 49 Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 214. 3. And the Machine World Will Deliver Him His Wealth Epigraph: Aziz Shamim, quoted in Carson, “Silicon Valley Startups Are Obsessed with Developing Tech.” 1 Carson, “Silicon Valley Startups Are Obsessed with Developing Tech.” 2 Maney, “Silicon Valley Needs Moms!” 3 See also media scholar and anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll’s take on Sense Mother, which overlaps with a lecture of mine that includes Sense Mother and is also cited in her article “The Sense Mother.” I was lucky enough to talk to Natasha on more than one occasion about our interest in Sense Mother. 4 Freeman, Time Binds. 5 Jarrett, Feminism, Labour and Digital Media, 5. 6 Historian Lisa Duggan, in “The New Homonormativity,” refers to this trend as “homonormativity,” which is the proliferation of a culturally specific way of being gay that is sufficiently in sync with existing gender, class, racial, and cultural norms to be considered acceptable. 7 Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” 8 Hobart and Kneese, “Radical Care.” 9 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 247. 10 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 39. 11 See also Sharma and Singh, Re-Understanding Media; Towns, On Black Media Philosophy; and Towns, “Toward a Black Media Philosophy.” 12 On baby monitors, see Zeavin, “Family Scanning.” 13 See also Abdelbaki, “The Racial Labour Geographies of Amazon.” 14 Cowan, More Work for Mother; Penny, “In Labor”; Sharma, “TaskRabbit”; Woods, “Asking More of Siri and Alexa”; Zeavin, “Family Scanning”; Zeavin, “Hot and Cool Mothers”; Shade, Gender and Community in the Social Construction of the Internet. 15 Forlano, “Maintaining, Repairing and Caring for the Multiple Subject”; Gregg, “Getting Things Done”; Huws, Labor in the Global Digital Economy; Roberts, Behind the Screen. Notes to Chapter three 167 === [PDF page 177] === 16 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; McLuhan, Understanding Media. 17 Atanasoski and Vora, Surrogate Humanity. 18 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. 19 Miller, “I’m Leah Busque.” 20 TaskRabbit, “Everyday Superheroes of Taskrabbit.” 21 TaskRabbit, “Everyday Superheroes of Taskrabbit.” 22 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 29. 23 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 29. 24 TaskRabbit, “Everyday Superheroes of Taskrabbit.” 25 TaskRabbit, “Everyday Superheroes of Taskrabbit.” 26 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 145. 27 Cant, Riding for Deliveroo, 85. 28 Cant, Riding for Deliveroo, 85. 29 Cant, Riding for Deliveroo, 96. 30 Cant, Riding for Deliveroo, 102. 31 Cant, Riding for Deliveroo, 104. 32 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 23 – 24. 33 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now. 34 Thorburn, “Cyborg Witches.” 35 Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory. 36 Monea, The Digital Closet. 37 Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 122. 38 Fraser, “Crisis of Care?” 39 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 123. 40 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 84. 41 A. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 201. 42 Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy and Other Studies. 4. Broken Machines 1 See the viral TikTok: “You Know Who Is Not in the Bottom of the Ocean Women,” TikTok, https://www.tiktok.com/discover/You-know-who-is -not-in-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-women. 2 Gatimi, “Why Were There No Women in the Titanic Submersible?”; Brewer, “No Women in the Water.” 3 The following articles reference baked-in biases as a means to account for the relationship between technology and the perpetuation of systemic inequalities: Bivens and Haimson, “Baking Gender into Social Media Design”; Boffey, “Baked-In”; Corbyn, “Microsoft’s Kate Crawford”; Crawford, The Atlas of ai; Epps-Darling, “How the Racism Baked into Technology Hurts Teens”; Ireland, “The Costs of Inequality”; Scartascini, “When Inequality Is Baked into the System”; Wood and Noble, “Human Biases Are Baked into Algorithms.” 168 Notes to Chapter three === [PDF page 178] === 4 Specia, “Siri and Alexa Reinforce Gender Bias.” 5 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 10. 6 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 23 – 24. 7 In The Gutenberg Galaxy he writes, “The Romans carried out the alphabetic translation of culture into visual terms. The Greeks, whether ancient or Byzantine, clung to much of the older oral culture with its distrust of action and applied knowledge. For applied knowledge, whether in military structure or industrial organization, depends upon uniformity and homogenization of populations” (23). In his Understanding Media the grammar becomes more clearly a system of knowledge and power related to dominating media technology. 8 L. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 54. 9 Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” 35. 10 Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” 35. 11 Lewis et al., “Making Kin with the Machines.” 12 Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data. 13 Deloria, Spirit and Reason, 13. 14 Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness.” 15 Jackson, “Rethinking Repair.” 16 Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” 221. 17 L. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 44. 18 L. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 45. 19 Sundén, “On Trans-, Glitch, and Gender as Machinery of Failure.” 20 Sundén, “On Trans-, Glitch, and Gender as Machinery of Failure.” 21 Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 22 Costanza-Chock, Design Justice. 23 Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, 45. 24 Costanza-Chock, Design Justice. 25 Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, xiii. 26 McLuhan, Understanding Media. 27 Specia, “Siri and Alexa Reinforce Gender Bias.” 28 Agamben, Homo Sacer; Berlant, “Slow Death”; Mbembe, Necropolitics. Notes to Chapter four 169 === [PDF page 179] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 180] === Bibliography Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. mit Press, 2017. Abdelbaki, Rawan. “The Racial Labour Geographies of Amazon in Canada’s Greater Toronto Area.” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 34, no. 1 (2024). https://alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/22563. 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Bibliography 203 === [PDF page 213] === This page intentionally left blank === [PDF page 214] === Index Note: Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. abolition of housework, 119 accumulation: capital, 103; primitive, 75; social cooperation and, 110 Afro-futurism, 162n31 Ahmed, Sara, 97, 107 ai (artificial intelligence), 18 – 19, 42, 52, 57, 62, 128 – 30, 145, 153 – 54; assistance, 23; assistants, 41, 47, 101; companions, 29; companionship, 80; early, 51; generative, 44; video, 58 Alexa, 20, 28, 40 – 45, 47 – 50, 74 – 75, 130 – 31; bed rotting and, 148; Broken Machines and, 145, 149; feminists and, 56; social difference and, 136; social reproduction and, 117 alt-right, 12, 20, 54 – 56, 80, 86, 140 – 41, 144; sexodus movements, 29 Amazon, 1, 6, 38, 47, 49, 146; gender politics of, 44; mechanical Turks, 143; Prime, 6, 11, 20, 49; Ring cameras, 8, 105, 154; ZenBooth, 56, 57 f. See also Alexa; Bezos, Jeff Andreessen, Marc, 15, 20, 32 apocalypse bunkers, 20, 68, 91, 92 f Apple, 43, 54 apps, 29, 100, 107, 119; dependent labor and, 7; family and, 111; gender and, 79; gig economy, 112; Mechanical Mom and, 101, 118; Mommy, 117; neoliberal feminism and, 74, 104; third-party, 40 artificial ecology, 52, 58 – 59 assistive devices, 29, 41 – 42, 145. See also Alexa Atanasoski, Neda, 107, 117 automation, 23, 57, 62, 69, 82, 94, 100; Broken Machines and, 145 autonomy, 29 – 30, 67, 93, 95 – 96 Babbage, Charles, 62 baby monitors, 105, 167n12 baking, 129 – 31 Balsamo, Anne, 22 – 23 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 39, 64 Barbie, 41, 44, 125 – 27 Barbie (Gerwig), 124 – 25, 131 bare life, 149 bed rot/bed rotting, 66, 147 – 48 Berardi, Franco (Bifo), 93 Berland, Jody, 132 Bernard, Zoe, 32 === [PDF page 215] === Bezos, Jeff, 1 – 6, 7 f, 13, 18, 20, 32, 33 f, 88 f; space and, 67 – 68; womb envy and, 52 Bhattacharya, Tithi, 117 bias, 129 – 31, 133, 139, 144; baked-in, 130, 168n3; gender, 47, 125, 129; racial, 141; spatial, 16, 134, 143, 148; temporal, 134, 143 Big Data, 101 Big Tech Feminism, 28, 34 – 35, 38 – 40, 46, 51, 64 – 65, 102, 110; baking and, 129; care and, 118; gig economy and, 108; repair and, 34, 56 – 57, 81, 139; technofeminism and, 153 biological determinism, 136, 140 Black fugitivity, 96 Blue Origin, 2, 3 f – 4 f Borgerson, Scott, 19 Braidotti, Rosi, 137 Brand, Stewart, 52 Branson, Richard, 2 – 3 Breitbart News, 16, 55 Brexit, 29, 66, 82 – 83, 97 Bro App, 53 bro culture, 12, 91, 100 – 101, 117 Broken Machines, 128 – 29, 138 – 50 Brown, Jayna, 162n31 buffers/buffering, 142 – 43 Busque, Leah, 108 Cadman, Andrew, 56 Campt, Tina, 96 Canada, 63, 127, 132, 153 – 54 Cant, Callum, 113 – 15 capital, 28, 49, 93, 110, 121; accumulation, 103; gendered normativity and, 29, 118; information age, 94; overthrowing, 109 capitalism, 9, 14, 39, 47, 75, 81, 102, 108, 121, 131, 142; colonialism and, 137; crisis of care and, 103; digital, 114 – 15; end of, 111; ethical, 25; exit from, 67, 97; labor and, 56; Marxist Going His Own Way and, 94 – 95; neoliberal, 103; patriarchal, 30, 101, 117, 137, 146; patriarchy and, 73, 119, 138, 149, 151; platform, 111, 116, 117; postmodern, 93; techno- 206 index capitalism, 9, 44, 128. See also racialized capitalism care, 29 – 30, 58, 61 – 62, 67, 70 – 71, 74 – 78, 97 – 98, 100 – 107, 118, 127; Broken Machines and, 146; in the commons, 147; crisis of, 75, 102 – 3, 109, 119; economy of, 26; enclosed, 104, 118; enclosure of, 74, 103 – 4, 109, 117; feminized, 28; gendered, 44; gig economy and, 122; labor, 49, 107, 115, 117; for machines, 121; necessary, 95, 108; normative, 89, 101, 136, 145; for others, 20; politics of, 46, 116, 119; programmed, 53; radical, 75, 103; trans, 24; work, 103, 113, 115 – 16. See also self-care; selfie-care Carpenter, Edmund, 132 Chang, Emily, 36 ChatGPT, 144, 153 – 54 Cheney-Lippold, John, 137 Cleaver, Harry, 93 Clinton, Hillary, 84 Cockburn, Cynthia, 86 Coe, Imogen, 43 colonialism, 128, 137; settler, 74 – 75 computing, 45 – 46; engines, 62; personal, 69 content moderators, 6, 38, 106 Corat, Saniye Gülser, 145 Cortana, 41, 145 Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 141 covid-19, 72 f, 77, 143; vaccine, 14 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 106 crypto, 154; community, 68 cyberfeminism, 21 – 22, 61, 70, 162n21 cyborg feminism, 22 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 96 Damore, James, 12, 20, 39 Daub, Adrian, 17, 54 Dawood, Shahzada, 123 Dawood, Suleman, 123 Davis, Angela, 119, 121 – 22 dei (diversity, equity, and inclusion), 6 – 7, 35, 42, 69, 141, 145 – 46 Deliveroo, 114 – 15 === [PDF page 216] === Deloria, Vine, Jr., 137 detection, 141 – 42 difference, 48, 64, 105; as baked in, 130; gender, 40; hierarchies of, 149; politics of, 30. See also social difference disconnection, 146 Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 61 diversity, 32, 42, 49, 141; ai and, 44; Alexa and, 45; in Big Tech, 34; gender, 43, 145; hiring based on, 12; lack of, 38; of podcasting, 14; at rtx Raytheon Technologies, 39; techno-diversity, 25 – 27; at Uber, 57 doge (Department of Government Efficiency), 2, 23 domestic abuse, 16 doomscrolling, 29 DoorDash, 115 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 94 economies of exchange, 71; domestic, 53; heterosexual, 8, 98, 111, 136, 151; homonormative, 151 eliza, 51, 86 Ellcessor, Liz, 53 Ellul, Jacques, 58 enforced monogamy, 81 environmental harm, 10, 142 epistemology of control, 137 Epstein, Jeffrey, 19, 20, 52 Erica, 41, 145 equity, 7, 32, 34, 48, 56 – 57, 129, 131, 141; distribution of, 140; gender, 43, 57, 95, 145; at rtx Raytheon Technologies, 39; social, 142. See also dei (diversity, equity, and inclusion) ethics, 11, 25, 88, 130, 135, 139, 144, 150 ethno-nationalism, 14, 151, 153 eu (European Union), 66, 82 exclusion, 32, 125 – 26, 141 exit, 29, 66 – 71, 80, 83 – 84, 87, 93 – 95, 98, 101, 140, 162n31, 166n34; aesthetic, 91; misogynistic, 28; patriarchal, 85; women and, 73 – 74, 77, 84 (see also she sheds). See also sExit exodus, 93 – 95, 166n34. See also sexodus Facebook, 6, 25, 31, 36, 39, 66, 144 – 45 family, the, 74, 77, 99, 102, 111; abolition of, 98, 109, 114; crisis of care and, 119; productivity and, 109; structural power of, 121 Fan, Lai-Tze, 44 Federici, Silvia, 96, 118 femininity, 116; toxic, 81 feminist politics, 5, 22, 39, 71, 75; Alexa’s, 47; of refusal, 98; strategic, 134, 152; techno-feminist politics, 111, 154 feminist techno-logics, 11, 58, 98, 139, 146, 152 – 53, 155; the machinic and, 27; of refusal, 30; utility and, 26; womb envy and, 60 Fessler, Leah, 43 Fitbits, 29, 74, 98, 100 – 101, 105, 146 Foodora, 100, 114 – 16, 146 Forbes, 36 Fournier-Tombs, Elanore, 42 Fowler, Susan, 36 Franklin, Ursula, 132 Fraser, Nancy, 102 – 3 Freeman, Elizabeth, 102 Gates, Bill, 19 gender, 16, 20, 23, 75, 81, 86, 107, 110 – 11, 118, 125, 128, 131, 136, 153, 155; Alexa and, 43 – 45, 47, 49 – 50; bias, 47, 125, 129; Big Tech and, 5 – 6, 35, 51, 152; binary, 5, 11 – 12, 23, 26, 29, 40, 59, 113, 137 – 38, 145; covid-19 and, 78; discrimination, 42; economy of, 98 – 99; equality, 10, 34; equity, 145; essentialism, 4, 12, 58 – 59, 67, 127, 137; exit and, 67, 98; homonormativity and, 167n6; identity, 8, 11, 30, 36, 98, 151; beyond identity, 122; machine, 44, 48; McLuhan and, 105; normativity, 23, 40, 46, 64, 137, 151; norms, 42, 44; politics of, 8, 23 – 24, 33, 35, 44 – 45, 60, 114, 116; race and, 114 – 15, 130; representation, 38, 146; social experience of, 69; stereotypes, 41 – 42; sts and, 161n21; technology/tech and, 9 – 10, 13, 15, 21 – 24, 28, 33 – 35, 39 – 40, 51, 57, 60, 62, 64, 67, 106, 116, 126, 129 – 30, 136, 138 – 39 index 207 === [PDF page 217] === genocide, 39, 154 Germany, 14, 23, 72 gig economy, 53, 100, 106, 111 – 15, 118, 121 – 22; Broken Machine and, 146; Mechanical Mom and, 108; social reproduction and, 117 Google, 6, 12, 31, 39, 51, 88 – 89, 90 f – 91 f Grubhub, 100 GynePunk collective, 96 Hagerman, Erik, 72 – 74 Hall, Stuart, 39 Haraway, Donna, 22 – 23 Harding, Hamish, 123 Hardt, Michael, 94 Harmony, 41, 88 Harris, Tristan, 88 – 89 Havelock, Eric, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 58; standing reserve, 5, 25 Hester, Helen, 76, 165n13 Hicks, Mar, 45 – 46 Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakaha opulani, 103 Hoffman, Reid, 19 Honig, Bonnie, 95, 166 – 67n41 housework, 119, 121; wages for, 47 – 48, 75, 96, 114 – 15, 121 Hui, Yuk, 25 hydration feminism, 147 identity, 25, 28, 41, 64, 114; categories of, 86, 115, 130; construction of, 20; gender, 8, 11, 98, 111, 115, 151; gender beyond, 122; male, 33 Illich, Ivan, 27 imperialism, 16; intellectual, 131 incels, 12, 19, 86 inclusion, 7, 25, 34 – 35, 39, 42, 45, 49, 57, 66, 125; exit and, 95, 140; politics of, 95; technology and, 130; of women, 21, 34. See also dei (diversity, equity, and inclusion) Innis, Harold Adams, 15, 19, 24 – 26, 33, 132, 134 inoperativity, 95 208 index Instagram, 2 f, 15, 36 instant gratification, 47, 68 internet, 4, 54, 69 – 70, 147; early, 69; escape into, 97; feminist, 26; Musk and, 1; trolls, 15, 80 intimacy, 29, 104, 110, 118 Ito, Joi, 19 Jackson, Steve, 138 Jafa, Arthur, 62 James, Selma, 96 Johnson, Bryan, 32 Joynt, Chase, 27 – 28 Kalanick, Travis, 36 Kennedy, Jennifer, 44 Keyes, Os, 24 – 25 kinship, 119; Alexa and, 41; alternate forms of, 109 – 10; gigs and, 146; queer, 112 Kittler, Friedrich, 58, 60 – 61, 134, 165n66 Kleeman, Jenny, 88 Kleiner Perkins, 12, 19, 86 Kneese, Tamara, 36, 103 labor, 8, 30, 38, 56, 62, 84 – 85, 94, 102, 105, 113; Alexa and, 49; Broken Machines and, 142; care, 49, 107, 115, 117; decentralized, 114; dependent, 7; devalued, 39, 47 – 48, 99, 117; division of, 95, 148; division of sexual, 59; domestic, 110; of exit, 95; feminized, 116; gender and, 26; gendered, 46, 48, 64, 114, 116, 122; gendered division of, 29, 121; housewife’s, 116; indentured, 27; industrial, 62, 137, 145; laws, 80; machines and, 121, 128; manual, 107; of mothers, 53, 100 – 101, 114, 117; organizing, 93; of others, 112, 136, 143, 146, 152; platform, 116; of poor white women, 39; reorganization of, 106; sexual division of, 98; social division of, 115; of social reproduction, 50, 67; of technologies, 51; unacknowledged, 13; uneven distribution of, 78; white, 138; withdrawal of, === [PDF page 218] === 97; women’s, 45, 59, 128. See also reproductive labor Lafargue, Paul, 121 Lakshmin, Pooja, 79 Langlois, Ganaele, 61, 165n66 Levy, David, 53 Lewis, Jason, 137 Lewis, Sophie, 111, 116, 119, 121 life-giving, 59 – 60, 117, 126 – 28, 130; technologies, 51, 59, 117, 126 – 28 Lifehacker, 109 light bulb, 13 – 14, 19, 48, 63, 136, 142 – 43, 149 LinkedIn, 19 LiveBetter, 100 Lovink, Geert, 94 Lyft, 8, 98 machine logics, 18 – 19, 27, 29, 58, 117, 132, 135, 142, 153; alternate/alternative, 54, 149; of Broken Machines, 144; digital media’s, 94; feminist, 30, 107, 127; governing, 63; patriarchal, 105, 136; of patriarchy, 149, 152; resistant, 139; of territorial expansion, 133 man cave, 77, 78 f, 80, 91, 97 manosphere, 54, 80 mansplaining, 143 – 44 Mars, 20, 29, 33, 45, 67 – 68, 133, 162n31 Marxism, 94; autonomist, 93; feminist, 96; Hegelian forms of, 121 Marxist Going His Own Way, 94, 96 masculinity, 32, 34, 69; production of, 28; tech, 5; tools and, 80; toxic, 6, 49; wounded, 91 maternal mandate, 29, 98, 100, 107; of Mechanical Mom, 101 – 2, 108, 114, 116 McConnell, Kathleen, 62 McKinney, Cait, 61 McLuhan, Marshall, 1 – 3, 6, 9, 25 – 28, 58, 106 – 7, 132 – 36, 161n8; Andreesen and, 15; extension, 17, 105; The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, 19, 169n7; light bulb and, 13 – 14, 48; The Mechanical Bride, 2 f, 60; media theories of, 24; Musk and, 14, 18; Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1, 104, 142, 169n7. See also “medium is the message, the” McMullen, Matt, 88. See also Harmony Mechanical Mom, 98, 100 – 102, 105, 108, 114, 116, 118 – 19, 122 media studies, 1, 15 – 16, 36, 42, 53, 65, 69, 132 – 33, 149; feminist, 10, 39, 44, 129 media theory, 13, 15, 17, 63, 107, 128 – 29; Big Tech patriarchs and, 6, 11, 20, 151; Canadian, 131 – 32; extension, 17; feminist, 9, 21, 23, 27, 139; gender and, 155; of gender, 58; masculinist, 34; philosophy of, 10; techno-feminist, 9, 11, 21, 24 – 25, 30, 51, 58 – 60, 150, 152; technological determinist, 133, 135, 153; woman in tech and, 35, 58. See also Innis, Harold Adams; McLuhan, Marshall “medium is the message, the,” 13 – 14, 106, 134 – 35 Mengesha, Lilian, 96 Merchant, Brian, 57 – 58, 164n55 Meta, 6, 23, 31 – 32, 38. See also Zuckerberg, Mark #MeToo movement, 43, 70, 144 MGtOW (Men Going Their Own Way), 80, 94 microaggressions, 129, 141 Mies, Maria, 59, 80 Minsky, Marvin, 19 misogyny, 16, 31 – 32, 34, 39, 44, 64, 70, 128; in-house, 139; toxic, 53 mit Media Lab, 19, 52 Mommy’s Basement, 85 – 86, 89, 91, 97 – 98, 101, 108, 124 Moran, Taylor, 41 Morozov, Evgeny, 17 motherhood, 99 Mumford, Lewis, 135 Musk, Elon, 1 – 5, 7 f, 13 – 14, 18 – 20, 32 f, 37 f, 135; Canada and, 153; gender and, 23; space and, 1, 5, 67 – 68, 123, 133; womb envy and, 52 Nargeolet, Paul-Henri, 123 nasa, 3, 4 f, 38 index 209 === [PDF page 219] === Negri, Antonio, 94 neoliberal feminism, 39, 117; white, 104 Netflix, 53, 73 – 74, 88 Neuralink, 2 New York Times, 72 – 73, 78, 79 f Nikolić, Boris, 19 normativity: chrononormativity, 102; domestic, 152. See also gender: normativity OceanGate, 123, 124 f, 126. See also Titan Ong, Walter, 132 OpenAI, 2 Padmanabhan, Lakshmi, 96 Pao, Ellen, 12; Reset, 19, 86 Papadopoulos, Dimitris, 94 patriarchal techno-logics, 6 – 10, 13, 20, 23 – 26, 34 – 35, 61 – 64, 78 – 79, 108, 131, 135, 137, 150 – 54; Alexa and, 48; Barbie and, 127 – 28; Broken Machines and, 139 – 40, 148; call-out tweets and, 148; of exit, 70; feminist politics and, 134; machine logics and, 54; mansplaining and, 143; #MeToo and, 144; Mommy’s Basement and, 98; selfie care and, 147; SExit and, 67, 71; strategic goals of, 50; Titan and, 125 – 27; woman in tech and, 34, 39, 46 patriarchy, 12 – 14, 25, 27 – 28, 33 – 34, 62, 64 – 65, 66–67, 70, 95 – 98, 127 – 29, 134; Barbie (Gerwig) and, 124 – 25; Big Tech, 12, 23, 122, 133, 141, 143, 150; Big Tech Feminism and, 39 – 40; Big Tech patriarchs and, 151; Broken Machines and, 146, 148; capitalism and, 119; centrality of, 9; crisis of care and, 75; exhaustion and, 138; feminism and, 49, 64, 74; feminist technological determinism and, 154; gig economy and, 112, 121; machine logics of, 149, 152; mansplaining and, 143; media as womb envy and, 58 – 59; #MeToo and, 144; Peterson and, 16, 81 – 82; racialized capitalism and, 47, 115; reproduction of, 29; she sheds and, 77; tech, 5, 14, 33; tech and, 210 index 46; techno-logics of, 10, 40, 131, 140; technologies and, 105, 133, 151 – 53; technology of, 24; technostructure and, 101; Titan and, 125 – 26; women and, 84 PayPal, 20 Peters, John Durham, 17, 51 – 52, 58 – 59, 164n57 Peterson, Jordan, 16 – 17, 20, 81 – 83 Pichai, Sundar, 7 pink-collar workforce, 41 Plant, Sadie, 21, 61 platform economy, 111, 113, 116 podcasting, 14, 16, 20, 86 politics, 20, 94 – 95, 166n34; abolitionist, 148; of autonomy, 29; of care, 46, 116, 119; communal, 146; crip, 129; of difference, 30; of efficiency, 26; of the enclosure, 147; of exit, 67; feminist, 10, 22, 39, 47 – 48, 71, 75, 98, 115, 134, 152; feminist techno-politics, 34 – 35, 40, 48, 70; of gender, 8, 21, 23 – 24, 33, 35, 44 – 45, 49, 60, 114, 116; gendered, 8, 29; of inclusion, 95; necropolitics, 149; neoliberal, 64; of night, 48, 64; of race, 26, 95, 114 – 15; of recognition, 97; of refugeand-retreat, 65; of refusal, 98; of representation, 26, 35, 115; sexual, 82; of social reproduction, 112, 122; of technodiversity, 26 – 27; techno-feminist, 111, 154; of technology, 129 – 30; technopolitics, 49; of utility, 29, 93, 98; of virtuousness, 76; of white nationalism, 82; of withdrawal, 71; women in, 126. See also feminist politics popular feminism, 28, 39, 46, 64, 102, 118 Povich, Maury, 71 power, 16 – 17, 19 – 21, 26 – 27, 29, 62, 68 – 69, 71, 80, 111, 133 – 35, 169n7; American, 31; of Big Tech Feminism, 35; Big Tech patriarchs and, 6 – 7, 9, 13, 20, 152; Broken Machines and, 128, 140, 146, 148 – 49; Canada’s, 132; capitalist, 67, 97, 102; of disengagement, 130 (see also Alexa); of electronic universe, 45; of the family, 121; gender and, 23, 31, 105; infrastructures of, 25; Innis’s media === [PDF page 220] === theory and, 15, 33; institutions of, 94; masculine, 125; of Mechanical Mom, 116; media, 14, 24, 33, 132, 135 – 36; of #MeToo, 144; Mommy’s Basement and, 86; of nationalism, 97; patriarchal, 13, 34, 39, 46, 54, 67, 69, 84; patriarchal techno-logics and, 6 – 7, 9, 143, 148, 154; podcasts and, 15; of refusal, 44, 48, 93; social relations of, 48; spatial, 33; techno-feminist, 30; technological, 142, 149; the technological as, 134, 136 – 37; technological structures of, 9, 34 – 35, 40, 57, 63 – 67, 70, 98, 103, 119, 121 – 22, 138, 151, 153 (see also patriarchy); technologies, 51, 58 – 60, 129, 145; technologies and, 136; technologies of, 141; technologies as structures of, 105; tools, 59, 117, 129 precariat, 102, 115 precarity, 81, 93, 116 Pringle, Ramona, 42 productivity, 8, 98, 109, 111, 118, 136, 151 – 52 programmers, 32, 53, 89, 106; women, 12, 45, 86 Project Include, 12 Proud Boys, 82 – 83 Puzder, Andrew, 56 Quartz magazine, 43 quit lit, 66 qr codes, 154 race, 15, 24, 32, 56, 62, 129 – 30; politics of, 26, 95, 114 – 15 racialized capitalism, 11, 24, 47, 75, 101, 128, 131, 138; patriarchal, 115, 130; machine logics of, 149 racism, 12, 34, 67, 105, 128, 133, 149; ethical, 25; in-house, 139; internalized, 141 rape, 54, 86, 164n47 Reddit, 15 – 16, 80, 86 refuge, 65, 68 – 70, 89, 123 refusal, 11, 66, 70, 73, 93 – 97, 104, 135, 153, 166n41; Alexa and, 48; Broken Machines and, 129, 139 – 40, 150; exit and, 29; feminist, 29, 44, 95, 98, 108, 122; feminist techno-logics of, 30; housework and, 119; Indigenous, 95; living wage and, 75; popular, 102 – 3, 108 – 9, 116, 121; techno-feminist, 127; of technology, 24; of work, 93, 110 remote control, 7, 16, 68, 148 repair, 10, 24, 46, 57 – 58, 63, 129, 138; Big Tech Feminism and, 34, 56 – 57, 81, 139; Broken Machines and, 140, 146; of the social, 99; tech, 122 representation, 11, 25, 40, 45, 49, 66, 93, 141, 145; gender/gendered, 38, 47, 146; lack of, 126; media, 135; politics of, 26, 95, 115; white liberal logics of, 97; of women, 139 reproduction, 5, 75, 77, 119; of daily life, 49; of life, 52, 59; machinic, 117; material conditions of, 96; of patriarchy, 29; of the social order, 47, 69, 76, 116; technological, 18, 52, 54; women and, 53, 85; of workers, 46, 102; of the world, 54. See also social reproduction reproductive labor, 46, 48, 67, 96, 115, 147; socially, 78, 89, 115 – 17 Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Sharma and Singh), 48, 62 – 63 Rich, Adrienne, 99 – 100 robots, 41, 80, 119; sex, 56, 69, 80, 88, 101, 106, 117, 145 Rogan, Joe, 14, 23 Roosh V, 54, 86, 87 f, 164n47 Rossiter, Ned, 94 Rush, Stockton, 123 – 25. See also Titan Rushkoff, Douglas, 52, 164n42 Russell, Legacy, 26, 40, 137 – 38 Sacca, Chris, 36 Sanchez, Lauren, 33 Sandberg, Sheryl, 39 Saujani, Reshma, 45 Schmandt, Chris, 52 – 53 second shift/double day, 48, 64 self-care, 10, 66, 73, 75, 81, 91, 111, 146 – 47; feminist, 77; masculine, 82 index 211 === [PDF page 221] === selfie-care, 146 – 47 Sense Mother, 100, 167n3 sex, 41, 53, 67; with machines, 107; organs of the machine world, 1, 5, 14, 56, 108; robots, 56, 69, 80, 88, 101, 106, 117, 145 (see also Harmony) sexism, 12, 31, 34, 36, 41, 149; Alexa and, 43; internalized, 141 sExit, 67 – 68, 71, 75, 84 – 85, 91, 97, 101; enclosure of care and, 103; fantasy, 94; pandemic, 78, 80 sexodus, 29, 80, 82, 86, 97 Sexton, Jared, 137 she sheds, 74 – 75, 77, 97, 103 Siad, Ladan, 62 – 63 Silicon Valley, 17, 38, 49, 53, 62, 73, 100; bunkers in, 68; incels in, 19, 86; libertarian impulse of, 67; mansplaining and, 144; senior-ranking women in, 31; tech bros of, 135; technological solutionism of, 118; venture capitalists in, 15 Simpson, Audra, 96 – 97 Siri, 41, 145 Slate magazine, 4, 41 Snelting, Femke, 26 Snowflake, 54, 55 f social, the, 73, 99, 101; exit(ing) out of, 8, 28 – 29, 67, 70 – 71, 98, 136, 151; gender and, 22; reproduction of, 119; technology and, 18, 151; Uber and, 46 social difference, 6, 24, 35, 51, 63 – 64, 149, 152; experience of, 10; production of, 136; technology and, 133. See also gender Social Dilemma, The, 88 social factory, 93, 115, 119 social justice, 9, 11, 70 social media, 16, 38, 72, 88, 100, 125, 147 – 48 social reproduction, 59, 75, 94 – 96, 102 – 3, 110 – 11, 117 – 19; care and, 118; commons and, 109; countersocial reproduction, 119; devalued status of, 47; labor of, 29, 50, 67, 115; machinic, 116; politics of, 112, 122 212 index solidarity, 41, 47, 105, 114 – 17; digital, 25; feminist, 105, 119, 121 Solnit, Rebecca, 143. See also mansplaining South Korea, 66 – 67 sovereignty, 29, 67; male, 97 space flight, 8, 26, 97 SpaceX, 1 – 3, 4 f, 125, 127, 162n31 Stephenson, Niamh, 94 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne (Sandy), 24 Strengers, Yolande, 44 Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, The (Manson), 66 Suchman, Lucy, 162n21 Sundén, Jenny, 138 surveillance, 6, 8, 94, 106, 108; cameras, 129; technologies, 16, 39, 105 Syms, Martine, 26 Taskrabbit, 98, 100, 108 – 11, 117 TechCrunch, 45 tech giants, 1, 6, 19 – 20, 36, 80, 88 techno-diversity, 25 – 27 techno-feminism, 8, 10 – 11, 20 – 23, 39, 51, 64, 70, 136, 162n21; Broken Machines and, 128; machine logics and, 107; political project of, 153 technological, the, 13, 23, 105, 136, 149; mansplaining and, 143; refusal and, 30; as a structure of power, 134, 153 technological determinism, 129, 131, 133, 135, 162n21; feminist, 9, 11, 30, 122, 128, 131, 134 – 35, 150, 152 – 54; patriarchal, 149 technological social character, 15, 18, 19, 20, 104, 107 technological solutionism, 112, 118 techno-logics, 127, 135; of Broken Machines, 143; of patriarchy, 10, 40, 126, 131, 140; of power, 148. See also feminist techno-logics; patriarchal techno-logics techno-structure, 100 – 101; patriarchal, 102, 108, 111, 114, 122, 127, 129, 133, 150 Tesla, 1 – 2, 36, 38, 162n31 Theil, Peter, 20, 67 – 68 Thompson, Nicholas, 88 – 89 === [PDF page 222] === Thorburn, Elise, 116 TikTok, 15, 66, 136, 147, 168n1 time, 11, 15, 27, 57, 66, 108, 111, 134, 138; captalistic and individualized notions of, 8, 136, 152; domestication of, 151; free, 118; management, 68, 105, 107, 109, 117; mansplaining and, 143; Mechanical Mom and, 102, 118; of others, 30, 105, 117; patriarchal, 126; power and, 19; reproduction and, 75; she time, 77; social experience of, 16, 104, 135; social organization and, 49; structure of, 14; technologies and, 29, 33, 48, 63, 98, 104, 106, 119 Titan, 123 – 27 Toronto School, 132 transhumanism, 19 Tronti, Mario, 93 Trump, Donald, 6 – 7, 20, 29, 55 f, 72 – 73, 84 – 85, 141; administration of, 35; Musk and, 2, 23; Puzder and, 56 Trump, Melania, 76 – 77, 76 f Tsotsis, Alexia, 45 Uber, 8, 36, 37, 46 – 47, 57, 89, 100; drivers, 112, 114, 116 – 17; rides, 146 Uber Eats, 20, 98, 102, 105 – 6, 108, 115, 136, 148 unesco, 42, 44, 47, 130, 145 utility, 5 – 6, 11, 26 – 27, 39, 80, 95, 102, 106, 136; beyond of, 152 – 53; dispensable, 128; economy of, 30, 162n31; inclusion and, 34; male, 82; of others, 34, 50, 65, 69, 82, 97, 105, 108, 137; politics of, 29, 98; of technology, 25, 50, 149; of women, 34, 45 – 46, 58 Vaneigem, Raoul, 94 van life, 8 Varoufakis, Yanis, 71 Virgin Galactic, 3 – 4 Virilio, Paul, 58, 60 Virno, Paolo, 93 Vivos, 68, 92 Volkanovski, Alex, 32 f Vora, Kalindi, 107, 117 Vox, 32 – 33 Vrasti, Wanda, 96 wages, 48, 113 – 14, 119; for housework, 47 – 48, 75, 96, 114 – 15, 121 Wajcman, Judy, 21 – 22, 27, 68 – 69 Weber, Brenda R., 81 Weeks, Kathi, 75, 110 – 11 Weinberg, Lindsay, 54 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 51 – 53, 86, 89 Weston, David, 120 f white ethno-nationalism, 14, 151, 153 white nationalism, 14, 82, 97, 134 Whittaker, Meredith, 62 Wiener, Anna, 36, 62 Williams, Raymond, 133 – 34 Wired, 1, 41, 88 – 89, 161n8 Witt, Leslie, 41 womb envy, 51 – 53, 58 – 60 women, 12, 17, 73, 77 – 78, 103, 125, 127 – 31; assistive devices and, 41; Big Tech and, 28, 34, 36, 50; Big Tech Feminism and, 38, 139; Broken Machines and, 140; care work and, 113; of color, 57, 94, 113; communication and, 61 – 62; Deliveroo unions and, 114; emancipatory politics and, 22; Epstein and, 19; housework and, 48; labor of, 39, 45, 59; machine logics and, 117; machines and, 144 – 45; as machines, 85, 140; Mechanical Mom and, 102; Men Going Their Own Way and, 80 – 81; men’s rights groups and, 66; negative stereotypes of, 44; refusal and, 95; in Silicon Valley, 31; tech investors, 31; techno-feminism and, 136; technological reproduction and, 52, 54; technology and, 21, 24, 40, 51, 58, 87; Titan and, 125, 127; as tools, 60, 82; Trump and, 55 f, 84; utility of, 34, 45 – 46, 58; working, 116 Women in Tech, 31, 36 women/woman in tech, 5, 10, 28, 31, 34 – 39, 45 – 46, 56, 64 – 65; Alexa and, 49; inclusion of, 21, 34; media theory and, 58 index 213 === [PDF page 223] === work, 8, 14, 48, 57, 109 – 11, 118 – 19, 122, 134; alienation from, 93; balance and, 77, 79 f, 102, 111; care, 103, 113, 115 – 16; ChatGPT and, 144; clerical, 54; coder’s cave and, 91; domestic, 121; gig, 23, 109, 112, 114 – 16; of Mechanical Mom, 114, 116; mothers and, 102 – 3, 106, 110, 117; politics of care and, 116; refusal of, 93, 110; of reproduction, 75; of social reproduction, 94, 117; tech, 45; technologies and, 56, 58; women’s, 45, 47 workers, 57 – 58, 106, 114 – 15, 121; Amazon’s, 6, 47, 56; brokenness and, 128; class perspectives of, 36; essential, 143; factory, 56, 136; gig economy, 112, 114 (see also Deliveroo; Uber); maternal man- 214 index date and, 107; remote, 8; reproduction of, 46; short-term, 109, 116; suicide and, 38; tech, 39, 115 X (Twitter), 2 f, 4 f, 15 – 16, 25, 36, 131 – 32, 145, 151; Black Twitter, 70 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 16, 55, 80 yoga, 57, 73 YouTube, 15 – 16, 92 f Yuk Hui, 25 Yusoff, Kathryn, 142 ZenBooth, 56, 57 Zoom, 78 Zuckerberg, Mark, 6, 7 f, 12 – 13, 20, 23, 31 – 32