just finished the intro chapter of this and i'm fucking levitating the amount of underlines and giant !!!s in the margins and i'm only 30 pages in lmao
confronting the organisation of capitalist technology to both shape, reproduce, and galvanise the socially-constructed binaries (man/woman, white/non-white, civilized/savage, "reason/emotion, culture/nature, body/mind and so on.") that underpin the extractive logics of capitalism; the imperial function of mass media to propagandise those logics; the "masculinist desire to both "extend one's power across space and time" and the "gendered balance of feminized care and misogynistic exit out of the social that is intertwined within technological objects used for navigating the day"...
it feels unfair to compare them, but even in the intro this is the feminist tech critique that's everything laura bates's 'the new age of sexism' decidedly was lacking.
"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."
some more quotes from the intro chap under the cut:
"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. 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."
"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. [...]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."
"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." 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.”"
"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."
"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 so-called 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. (emphasis mine)"
