Caroline Bassett - Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures

A passionate guidebook to feminist theorising that refuses data as self-evident patterns and theory as beautiful abstractions, while insisting on the generative power of writing, fabulation, and future making.

Lucy Suchman, author of Feminist STS
and the Sciences of the Artificial

This wide-ranging and imaginative book makes a compelling case for a feminist techno-politics which challenges to the core the masculinist grip of computational culture and science. Its also a book which pays fine attention to the process of writing.

Angela McRobbie, author of Be Creative:
Making a Living in the New Culture Industries

Digital Barricades:
Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics

Series editors:

Professor Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Dr Joss Hands, Newcastle University Professor Tim Jordan, University of Sussex

Also available:

Shooting a Revolution:

Visual Media and Warfare in Syria
Donatella Della Ratta

Inhuman Power:

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjosen and James Steinhoff

Cyber-Proletariat:

Global Labour in the Digital Vortex
Nick Dyer-Witheford

The Digital Party:

Political Organisation and Online Democracy
Paolo Gerbaudo

Gadget Consciousness:

Collective Thought, Will and Action in the Age of Social Media
Joss Hands

Information Politics:

Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society
Tim Jordan

Sad by Design:

On Platform Nihilism

Geert Lovink

Unreal Objects:

Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities
Kate ORiordan

Technological Feminism
and Digital Futures

Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember, Kate ORiordan

First published 2020 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember, Kate ORiordan 2020

The right of Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kember and Kate ORiordan to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of any copyright material in this book. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4049 4 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4050 0 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0565 2 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0567 6 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0566 9 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

For our mothers

Crisis and conflict open up opportunities for liberation. In the early twenty-first century, these moments are marked by struggles enacted over and across the boundaries of the virtual, the digital, the actual, and the real. Digital cultures and politics connect people even as they simultaneously place them under surveillance and allow their lives to be mined for advertising. This series aims to intervene in such cultural and political conjunctures. It features critical explorations of the new terrains and practices of resistance, producing critical and informed explorations of the possibilities for revolt and liberation.

Emerging research on digital cultures and politics investigates the effects of the widespread digitization of increasing numbers of cultural objects, the new channels of communication swirling around us and the changing means of producing, remixing and distributing digital objects. This research tends to oscillate between agendas of hope, that make remarkable claims for increased participation, and agendas of fear, that assume expanded repression and commodification. To avoid the opposites of hope and fear, the books in this series aggregate around the idea of the barricade. As sources of enclosure as well as defenses for liberated space, barricades are erected where struggles are fierce and the stakes are high. They are necessarily partisan divides, different politicizations and deployments of a common surface. In this sense, new media objects, their networked circuits and settings, as well as their material, informational, and biological carriers all act as digital barricades.

Jodi Dean, Joss Hands and Tim Jordan

We wrote this over a longer time than we intended. The benefit of this was that we had extended conversations with many more people face-to-face, virtually, at our respective institutions and far beyond. Wed especially like to acknowledge the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Sussex Humanities Lab, both of which hosted writing sessions, and in the case of the Lab, public presentations. Susanna Paasonen read an early draft and cooked us dinner thanks for both. Joan Haran was also an excellent reader. Thank you very much to our anonymous readers and reviewers whose feedback helped us understand the nature of the intervention we made. Specific thanks to Maggie Williams for telling us about the Brockengespenst phenomenon.

Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures is an angry feminist intervention disputing the masculinization of computational culture and cultural theory. It draws on feminist genealogies, traditions of writing and approaches to science and technology in order to provide an alternative to heavily material and object oriented turns and to the masculinism, scientism and anti-feminism that dominate both cultural and knowledge production.

The book highlights the need to contest the regressively gendered and very often sexist politics of digital media forms, practices and study. It stresses the need to counter ideologies of scientism and anti-feminism and to reconnect feminist practices of thinking and writing with the contemporary problematic in order to re-conceptualize digital media and broader technological futures, pervasive mediation and increasing automation.

Technological transformations are accelerating in the world. There is a tendency in digital technology and innovation to celebrate the new, to rely on the technical fix and to promise futures in which good consumers are empowered. Discourses of big data dominate in political, economic and educational fields as well as in practices of media consumption. At the same time, the fields of digital media and digital humanities scholarship have a tendency to venerate technical forms and essences and to adopt gendered writing and citation practices. This is marked by, for example, the way that critical theory is considered separate from feminist thought, and the way that the material turn, object orientation and scientism is valourized. In this context, it is important to intervene, to offer a critique, and to contest those writing practices and politics. This book does so by foregrounding feminist traditions and contributions to media and cultural theory. Its aim is to offer alternative modes of knowledge production and to outline intersectional feminist values and visions of digital media and technological futures.