Open events

This talk outlines the 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? 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. As we take a deeper look at their machinations and their technological designs, 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. Rather, they imagine technologies as environments in which to cultivate, manage, and extend their power. But you and I, we are apparently the tools. This talk asks how feminist media theory should respond to all of the truly insufferable tools.