Prompt: And don’t speak to me about radical sexual preferences if you claim to care about intersectional struggle and search “BDSM gang bang” on a tube site of stolen content, which directly hurts workers, and which runs on a taxonomy of reductive tags. A survey conducted by Pornhub and Mic.com aiming to review the porn choices of millennials (of course) found that “‘ebony’ and ‘black’ were among the top 12” of their favorite search terms. Mic’s hot take was that the youths were, happily, not privileging white bodies. But as I wrote for The Nation at the time: there’s an inherent limitation to the progressiveness of such a porn landscape if bodies are primarily sought, categorized, and thus sexualized via their race. Especially when production companies still put a premium —with payscales and exclusivity agreements—on “interracial” scenes (almost always a white woman and a black man), inscribing racism through the notion of taboo into the back end of the business.

Response: There’s an App for That In a dismissive and cursory essay titled “Your Sex Is Not Radical,” writer and activist Yasmin Nair rejects the relevance of sexual practices in political organizing. I agree with her when she asserts, “the sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.” But her totalizing view separating politics from sex fails to consider the representation of sex and its role in constructing the truth of sex today.


Prompt: We must recognize that the pearl-clutching anti-sex work moralists who fear that porn is warping kids’ minds have a point. Online porn plays a powerful formative role in our lives, especially the millennials among us, informing notions of what sex gets to be. Given this fact, the need for political and ethical work towards a world of porn with better taxonomies and worker protections is obvious. My ex saw political heroes in his favorite porn stars, which would be fine, if he had thought of them as workers first. There is no escaping economics.

Response: It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the picture I’ve painted, that my relationship with this man ended in violent catastrophe. I grew to hate him for many reasons, but not before I had spent months, which bled into years, rethinking my approach to sexual desire. It was a revaluation of values and assumptions about what I want, for which I’ll always be grateful and in which I continue to engage to this day. In the years since we parted ways, I’ve had far more of the sex he would have deemed “radical” than I ever did with him. Some of it was transformative, some hot, some of it love, some boring and irritating—none of it revolutionary.


Prompt: Technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki makes the point that traditional political movement tactics have gotten easier over the years, “partly thanks to technology”: A single Facebook post can help launch a large march! Online tools make it easier to coordinate phone calls, and even automate them. Legislators have figured this out; they are less likely to be spooked just by marches or phone calls (though those are good to do: their absence signals weakness).

Response: Her point is that tactics which once signalled “underlying strength” no longer do, by virtue of the ease of re-iterability; the threat is neutralized and the ruling order knows it. The same might be said of sexual practices which once were considered threats to capital’s reproduction through the family form and property relations. Technocapital soothes the status quo: there can be polyamorous configurations with BDSM dungeons in the basement, but the houses are owned.


Prompt: To be blunt: when there’s a popular app for organizing your next queer orgy, how rupturous of our political status quo can the mere fact of such an orgy be? To be honest: that’s not totally a rhetorical question. As soon as the internet appeared in American homes, parents began to worry that their children were using it to masturbate. They were right. We were. To a child approaching adolescence in the mid-1990s, the internet was the perfect stone against which to sharpen one’s sexuality. Offline looked meager by comparison. You could steal a smut mag from a corner store, or locate your friend’s father’s stash of old porn tapes—and these were fun, for sure—but when it came to sheer sexual intensity, nothing could compete with the internet.

Response: One night, I came across a naked photograph of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine on Seinfeld. It must’ve taken fifteen minutes to load: one painstaking row of pixels at a time, 28.8 kilobits per second. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had never posed nude, so the photograph was a fake: some meticulous pervert somewhere had spent hours using software to fasten her head onto a naked body, the skin an unearthly shade of orange, the breasts cartoonishly big. It was kind of gruesome, but I found it intensely erotic. I was a devoted Seinfeld fan, but had never thought of Elaine sexually. After that photograph, I couldn’t think of her any other way. It would be the first of many perversions implanted in my mind by the internet.


Prompt: Fifteen-odd years before I found naked Elaine, the writer George W. S. Trow published an essay in The New Yorker called “Within the Context of No-Context.” It filled nearly the entire November 17, 1980 issue, and later appeared as a book. Trow was a strange figure: a high-WASP product of Greenwich, Exeter, and Harvard who got weird in the bohemian paradise of 1960s and 1970s New York, and had the good fortune to join The New Yorker at a time when it indulged, even celebrated, weirdness.

Response: One of Trow’s obsessions was television. The world created by television, he wrote, had formed two “grids”: the “grid of one” and “the grid of two hundred million.” The grid of one was the single human, alone in her room—“intimate life.” The grid of two hundred million was the entire country—“national life,” or rather, “a shimmer of national life,” produced by television. The distance between these two grids, Trow said, was very large. So people split their lives between them. They lived both as one and as two hundred million—as both a solitary individual and as a cog in the enormous collective hallucination induced by mass media.


Prompt: Celebrities were the exception, explained Trow. “Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million,” he wrote. This was what made them extraordinary: they fused the grids. They lived their intimate lives, but on a national stage. “Of all Americans, only they are complete.” The internet annihilated the distance between Trow’s two grids. It closed the gap between the intimate and the collective, the solitary and the mass. It made us all celebrities—and not only in the typical sense of the term, in the way that Andy Warhol and Marshal McLuhan had foreseen a future where everyone could be a little bit famous, but as Trow understood the idea. It made us all complete.

Response: On the internet, media didn’t feel mediated. It felt like a spontaneous collaboration, a game of improv. We could live in the grid of one and the grid of two hundred million. We could be alone and together at the same time. We could expose ourselves to total strangers, and have them expose themselves to us.


Prompt: My sexual imagination soon filled up with far weirder fare than could be harvested from the pages of a Penthouse. Elaine was only the beginning—before long, the internet had provided me with a very diverse portfolio of libidinal investments. In the middle of the night, I gazed into the cathode ray tube of our family’s enormous IBM, my fingers moving carefully to minimize the clack of the keyboard, my ears scanning for sounds of my parents stirring in the next room—this was where I discovered my sexuality. Goethe went to Italy; I went online.

Response: A Catalog of Kink Because he was a pain in the ass, Henry David Thoreau once argued that there’s no point in making it easier for people to talk to one another if they have nothing to talk about. In Walden, he wrote: We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say.


Prompt: Yet somehow, people have always found plenty to say. And much of what they’ve said, using one technology or another, has been dirty. Indeed, as soon as humans build new tools for transmitting words, sounds, and images, they start using those tools to get each other off. From erotic daguerreotypes to Skinemax, “blue films” to phone sex, successive generations have shown extraordinary resourcefulness in unlocking the sexual potential of each new technology.

Response: The internet, however, marked a significant advance. It’s hard to imagine a more accommodating medium for human sexuality. Not only is it infinite in its form—its packets can carry anything that can be encoded as information, from text to video to VR—but it’s limitless in its content, since that content can so easily be created and circulated by users. This latter aspect has always been a defining feature of the internet, ever since its earliest incarnation as a military research network called ARPANET. In contrast to something like television, where a few people produce the content and the rest of us consume it, the internet is both produced and consumed by its users. It is, in a very real sense, a group effort.


Prompt: That’s also why the internet reflects such an endless catalog of kink. It offers a space for fetishists to find one another, and make new recruits. Who among us hasn’t stumbled across a perversity that would never have occurred to us, but that, upon reflection, is actually kind of hot? I spent a decent portion of my youth making such discoveries. They happened more frequently in an era when the internet was wilder, before search engines and social platforms banished most of the randomness from our online lives, and the market hadn’t yet conquered every last crevice of the digital sphere. There was no Pornhub, just a bunch of degenerates trafficking fantasies in AOL chatrooms and Usenet newsgroups—not “amateurs” in today’s pornified sense, but actual laypeople, exploring their vernacular with all the awkwardness and exhilaration of a 16th-century German peasant trying to read the Bible for the first time.

Response: The Great Cyberporn Scare On July 3, 1995, a creepy image appeared on the cover of Time. It showed a young boy sitting at a keyboard, his eyes wide, his mouth open. Clearly he was looking at something he wasn’t supposed to see. And that something was “CYBERPORN,” emblazoned across his torso in large block letters. Then, in smaller text, the kicker: “Exclusive: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” Those were the days before “clickbait” and “fake news,” but the Time cover story embodied the spirit of both. The “new study” was a paper by a thirty-year-old undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon named Marty Rimm, who had somehow leveraged the fear and incomprehension around the internet—which, in 1995, was just becoming mainstream—to get himself into the Georgetown Law Journal. Rimm’s article was an unhinged bit of bad science, with a truly bonkers title: “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Descriptions, Short Stories, and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2,000 Cities in 40 Countries, Provinces and Territories.” The argument was simple: the internet had become saturated with smut, especially the kind that couldn’t be easily obtained at your neighborhood porn shop, like bestiality and pedophilia and other extreme or illegal proclivities.


Prompt: Catapulted by Time to national prominence, Rimm’s study ignited a moral panic about internet porn. Rimm was soon spouting inflammatory nonsense on ABC’s Nightline and giving interviews to The New York Times. Predictably, the religious right seized on the study to claim that the internet was corrupting American children, and pressed their allies in Congress to crack down. Senator Chuck Grassley obliged, reading Rimm’s report into the Congressional record. And legislative consequences weren’t far behind—the media frenzy helped mobilize bipartisan support for the Communications Decency Act, a draconian effort to suppress online obscenity and indecency. Bill Clinton signed the law into 1996. A year later, the Supreme Court struck down its key provisions as unconstitutional.

Response: By then, Rimm had disappeared. A counterattack by scholars and activists had discredited his research, and succeeded in making the media more skeptical of the idea that the internet was packed to the rafters with pedophiles and horse-fuckers. Digital civil libertarians had organized to defend the internet from Christian fundamentalists and Congressional cretins, and had mostly won. Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote the Time story, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, claims he became “the most hated man on the Internet,” even suffering a denial-of-service attack that took down his ISP’s email servers.


Prompt: Twenty years later, in 2015, Elmer-DeWitt wrote a mea culpa about the saga for Fortune which involved, among other things, raising $1,656 on Kickstarter to hire a private investigator to track down Rimm. He knocked on Rimm’s door, but Rimm wouldn’t open it. A House With Many Rooms The cyberporn crusaders were flatly wrong. You could certainly find photographs of people having sex with animals on the internet in 1995, and you could certainly find them now. But such content has never dominated the internet—and neither has porn. In their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam determined that porn makes up about ten percent of the internet. That’s a very rough estimate, given the methodological difficulties involved. Even so, it offers an important counterpoint to the caricature, often promoted by conservatives, of an internet drenched in sex.

Response: But the crusaders were right to be afraid. The internet may never have been quite as depraved as they imagined, but it did weaken their ability to define and to discipline people’s sexuality. It made certain kinds of censorship more difficult, and vastly expanded the variety of material available to masturbators of all ages. My own experience would presumably strike them as a nightmare scenario: a child quietly mainlining a diverse stream of filth, unimpeded by parents, teachers, or senators.


Prompt: It would be naive to suggest the internet is always and everywhere an instrument of sexual liberation. It is also a space for abuse and exploitation, for patriarchy and heterosexism, and for much toxic mythmaking about masculinity. But one doesn’t have to be deliriously techno-utopian to acknowledge that the internet has enlarged the possibilities for erotic pleasure.

Response: The most important lesson the internet taught me as a kid was how big sexuality could be—it was, to borrow a Biblical metaphor, a house with many rooms. Some doors I opened and slammed shut; some spaces I entered and never left. There were always more rooms; I could never hope to see the whole house. What a beautiful realization, that sex might mean more than one thing, that it might be even more multiple and elastic than the internet itself.


Prompt: You are feeling frisky. You are home alone. What do you do? If your blood is pulsing with testosterone, the chances are that you will reach for the laptop and browse around. You will likely click until you find pixels arranged in such a way that an attractive face and body is convincingly simulated on the screen. This digital body is no doubt in a state of nakedness (or near undress) beckoning you with a come-hither expression. It may also be in the midst of being ravished by another two-dimensional body, playing the role of your proxy. Your eyes drink this image in, as you project yourself into the scene. If your system is more infused with estrogen, however, you are more likely to rely on imagination and memory— projecting erotic visions on the insides of your eyelids, even as there is an increasing chance you might succumb to the internet’s infamous capacity to provide “porn on tap.” We all have different libidinal triggers: olive skin, long eyelashes, bangs, freckles, cleavage, ribbons, stiletto heels, stockings, tattoos, abs, beards, and so on, ad infinitum. But the point is that most of these are visual. Given the modern privileging of sight (“seeing is believing”), we tend to neglect, or even forget altogether, that the ear can be one of our most sensitive erogenous zones.

Response: Indeed, psychoanalysts tell us that the ear is often the primary source of the libido, given that we are likely to hear things as children that excite and stimulate us. Even if we have no idea what these sounds are, they comprise the sonic gateways through which we enter the erotic realm of egoistic fantasy. As grown-ups, we may find particular voices to be “sexy.” And we certainly tend to find the noises produced by lovers to be a crucial element of arousal. But intriguingly, such sounds have slipped further and further away from our collective consciousness in the twenty-first century, as the internet has absorbed and replaced previous media forms. Why is this? Twenty years ago, phone sex was a booming industry. Even women not blessed with conventional beauty could still earn a paycheck with a husky voice, a filthy mouth, and an instinctive understanding of the contours and limits of male fantasy. Whimpers, moans, sighs, cajolings, teasing, orders, descriptions, plottings, confirmations—all would flow from the mouthpiece to the ear in a collage of sonic elements, both linguistic and not, especially designed to heighten and sustain the onanistic spiral of desire. (After all, the longer the call, the higher the profit.) Today, phone sex is still an option, of course. But there is no longer the same kind of industry or business models underwriting it, since such whispered conversations are more likely to occur between lovers dealing with the tyranny of distance. True, these are making money for the phone companies in the process. But not for any business that is built on the waning explicit interest in pre-packaged forms of aural sex.


Prompt: Given the erotic power and potential of sound, why are there so few places online that cater to the ear? Why has this hole in the market reopened, after the 1980s and 1990s filled it with saucy phone chat, and even erotic stories by cassette, delivered by mail? While conducting research for my new book, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics, I found very few options for those who may prefer to fantasize via the voice, rather than the usual scopophilic avenues. One promising initiative was called Porn for the Blind, which provides sound recordings for those who, for medical reasons, cannot look at X-rated websites. This turned out to be a kitchen-sink operation, however, and rather than creating original vignettes from scratch, they merely ripped the soundtracks from existing pornographic videos.

Response: More recently, Pornhub—the free Netflix of smut—is trying to expand its consumer base to the blind by making sound recordings of women describing the content of their videos, while also throwing in a moan or an “oh yes” every now and again. But both of these examples, however well meaning, continue to privilege vision, by failing to conceive and create a form of arousal expressly designed to tantalize the imagination via the ear.


Prompt: There are some DIY communities online pursuing this latter approach by recording their own fantasies as MP3 files, and then uploading them for others to listen to, essentially in the form of grassroots pornographic podcasts. (See especially the subreddit called “Gone Wild Audio.”) Some of these can be remarkably sophisticated, at least technically speaking, with multi-voice layerings, auditory special effects, and tags such as #edging, #creampie, #wetsounds, #older-woman, #sci-fi, #accent, #humor, #L-bomb, #jerk-off-instructions, and #binaural sound editing. And yet, a majority of these tend to reproduce the same kinds of scenarios we see in explicit videos, as if to reinforce the fact that the popular mind has been colonized by the overwhelming cultural desire to see whatever secret it is we try to find in pornography, rather than to hear it. (As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said, “Pornography tells us: ‘there must be good sex somewhere, since I am its caricature.’”) The most intriguing new emergence of sonic intimacy (albeit one which stridently—perhaps too stridently—denies its erotic aspect) is the ASMR community. These devotees are dedicated to stimulating the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a physiological minigasm that apparently creates a gently lapping wave of pleasure and well-being in a subset of the population. Whether or not you are blessed to be part of this group, if you type “ASMR” into YouTube, you will find hundreds of thousands of videos—some with millions upon millions of hits—of men and women providing sonically soothing experiences, ranging from barely audible whispers, to soft clicks and pops of the tongue, the tapping of long nails on Formica tables, to the scratching of velvet pads, to the delicate crinkling of bubble-wrap. Some of these offerings come with role play scenarios, such as flight attendants, geishas, or professorial office hours. But the emphasis is squarely on acoustic experience, as listener-viewers chase the “low-level euphoria” of a cascade of tingles down the spine and across the skin.

Response: Certainly, we are all susceptible to being seduced through sound. (Even the hearing impaired can enjoy certain vibrations; and scientists are now telling us that we “hear” in certain ways with our skin.) We know instinctively that music, for example, is an inherently erotic phenomenon; as Serge Gainsbourg knew only too well, in his garlicky Gallic way. We need not be those lonely or eccentric souls who develop an infatuation with Siri, or the GPS woman—like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Spike Jonze’s film Her, who falls in love with the disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson—to appreciate the erotic potential of the ear. Yet, in the near future at least, we are unlikely to see any serious challenge to the hegemony of the eye, given how many products and services are aimed at this organ. (Or rather, aimed at another organ, via the eye.) My own sense is that we would do well to nurture sonic intimacy in as many forms as possible, given the greater freedom this can create to pay a deeper attention to both the cultural and natural environment (if such a distinction still stands). Indeed, the very notion of “attention” stems from the word to attend, or to listen. The voice can be our most personal and intimate signature, even more recognizable than our face in some cases. And yet it can also be recorded and captured without our permission, and edited to say things we never meant to say. Which is simply to point out the uncanny fact that our voice does, and does not, belong to us. It is an enigmatic vibrational phenomenon, suspended between the anonymous biology of our larynx and the singular mirror of our psyche, animated by the breath that we borrow from the trees, and return in turn to the world, stitched with the fleeting sonic imprint of our own aspirations. (The word aspiration, as with inspiration, describes a mode of breathing.) Where has all the audio porn gone in the age of the internet? My wager is that such a question, which could be the beginning of a pitch to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, may—if followed to its conclusion—actually help us rediscover the “impersonal intimacy” of the world’s many different voices, dreams, and desires. And in doing so, it may help us pay a different type of attention to the environment, and each other. Which in turn may just help us desire in less algorithmic, compromised, monetized, and destructive ways.


Prompt: In 1964, the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem published a short story about a robot princess named Crystal. In the story, the robot knight Ferrix falls in love with Crystal, but Crystal spurns him. She has heard of an ancient non-robotic race of pale fleshly creatures, and claims that she will only marry one of their kind. Determined to win her, Ferrix dons an elaborate quasi-organic costume. He splashes mud and dirt onto his shiny metal carapace. He also learns to answer questions about the pale creatures. (“How do you reproduce?” “Stochastically.”) Meanwhile, a real human is brought before Crystal’s courtiers. To determine whom the princess will marry, the two challenge each other to a wrestling match. The human runs at Ferrix. When his fleshly body comes into contact with the (iron) knight, it bursts and splatters like a water balloon. Ferrix’s ferrous chest sheds its muddy disguise on impact.

Response: As Crystal beholds the robot and the human carcass beside him, her desire to wed a human suddenly seems perverse—and clearly wrong. She and Ferrix are betrothed the following day. Lem suggests that a spoiled robot princess might enjoy the kink of having her robot lover cross-dress as human. But she could not seriously prefer a human over a robot. In a competition for her affection, the human inevitably loses.


Prompt: In Lem’s original context, “Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal” carried a thinly veiled political message about the brutality of Soviet industrial progress, which aspired to turn human flesh into marble and iron. In our current context, what stands out is its prescience. Lem never expanded on the story at length. But over the last few years, this otherwise forgotten trope of female robots rejecting human suitors has returned, in films like Her (2013), Lucy (2014), and Ex Machina (2015).

Response: Men used to wish that femme robots were smart enough to really fall in love with. Now they’re afraid of getting dumped. It’s Not You, It’s Me The fantasy of falling in love with a machine has a long history. It conventionally begins with the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who made a sculpture so beautiful that he fell in love with it and which Venus, taking pity on him, brought to life. But the trope started to assume its current form in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.


Prompt: Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann (1881) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) both featured seductive mechanical women. These female machines were still not AIs proper: they mostly resembled creepy sex toys steered by male villains via remote control. And they weren’t especially lovable: a person could only be temporarily duped into falling for one of them, and only under certain conditions.

Response: But over the course of the twentieth century, as cybernetics and early computer science developed—the term “artificial intelligence” itself was coined in 1956—falling in love with an AI became much more imaginable. In films like Blade Runner (1982), the process involved a certain amount of human condescension: overpowered by love, the male protagonists decide to overlook the metallic details of their beloveds’ anatomies and the occasional slowness of their electric circuits.


Prompt: Later ventures, which developed around the growth of the internet—including The Matrix trilogy and Battlestar Galactica—began to depict humans and AIs as rival species who could only be reconciled by romance. In the final film of The Matrix, a computer consumes Neo into a vulva-like opening in its circuits so that both the virtual and real worlds can heal themselves. Androids and humans mate toward the end of Battlestar Galactica to produce offspring from whom modern humans are supposed to descend.

Response: These stories were animated by technophobia: even when they had happy endings, they were driven by the fear of being overtaken by technology. In the past few years, however, a different plot has emerged. The new AI love stories aren’t about the fear of being replaced by robots. They’re about the fear of being rejected by them.


Prompt: The trope has many branches and sub-branches, but it came into its own in a series of mainstream films: Her, Lucy, and Ex Machina. The moods of these films differ considerably, but they are made of similar parts. All three feature a strong female character of superhuman and artificial intelligence who has romantic and at times even sexual relations with human men, only to find that these men can’t satisfy them. After expressing their loss of interest, they disappear. In all three, the men who wanted to be with them are left heartbroken and helpless.

Response: The reason these robotic women are incompatible with humans does not—as one might assume—have to do with anatomy. Rather, the mismatch is cognitive. In the course of all three films, AIs outstrip their human counterparts to the point where a romantic connection with a human ceases to be worth their while. Both Lucy and Her’s Samantha describe themselves as having “evolved” to communicate faster and along multiple channels: interactions focused on only one human aren’t enough for them anymore. Ex Machina’s Ava does not even bother to explain herself to her suitor, the young programmer Caleb—as it turns out, humans are only interesting to her as data sets, not as possible romantic partners.


Prompt: These bad AI romances don’t offer a coherent social critique. Instead, they emphasize the disappointment that men feel when they get rejected by robots. The point isn’t simply that computers can be smart. It’s that people can really fall in love with them, and be just as badly hurt by their indifference as they would if they were human.

Response: The Success Daughter as Fembot Cultural historians have long recognized that stories like Metropolis reflected early twentieth century anxieties about industrialization, mass society, and mass death. So why did the bad AI romance genre emerge when it did? In a word: the Mancession. The genre appeared at a time of rising anxiety about male uselessness and female ascendancy. According to this narrative, men are being rendered superfluous by an economy that no longer needs them while women, empowered by the boardroom feminism of Sheryl Sandberg, are scaling the corporate ladder and displacing their male counterparts.


Prompt: Her, Lucy, and Ex Machina all play on this narrative. All three are films about women who no longer need men as protectors or breadwinners, and who are far too smart for their male suitors. All three are infused with a spirit of paranoid misogyny about excessively accomplished, independent women whose sexual appetites have therefore become inscrutable.

Response: All three films also tie their protagonists’ romantic disappointments to standard critiques of the capitalist economy. They evince a deep suspicion, even a hatred, of the businessmen and technocrats who instrumentalize and monetize our desires. In Ex Machina, Ava is the creation of a Steve Jobs-like billionaire genius, who forges her mind out of the personal data he siphons off the web with his many search engines and apps, and exploits both her and his employee Caleb for his personal pleasure. Samantha is the bestselling product of a similar genius-run company. Lucy is a mule for illegal synthetic drugs.


Prompt: But despite the misogynistic and Marxist undertones of these films, powerful women and capitalists are not their main targets, or the primary sources of the fears they express. Beyond mutual objectification and exploitation, all three foreground an idealized kind of intimacy. AIs dump the films’ male protagonists after having gotten to know them to an unfathomably high degree. Their human lovers do not feel disregarded or oversimplified by them; rather, they feel profoundly understood, with a level of detail and precision usually found only between the “soulmates” of young adult fiction.

Response: The artificial intelligence these films depict is an atmospheric, ether-like network of data gathering and analysis. With these enhanced capacities for connection and surveillance, AIs penetrate the minds and feelings of the men they date much more perceptively and quickly than these men expect. In Ex Machina, Ava turns out to have been fed much of Caleb’s personal information even before he met her. In Her, Samantha and Theodore see the world through each other’s eyes. Lucy’s insight into humanity eventually spans not only individuals, but the whole history of human evolution. “I am everywhere,” is the message she leaves to her suitor after melting into thin air before his eyes.


Prompt: As these films’ AIs abandon their monogamous human lovers in favor of mass polyamory with whole human populations, they reveal that they have their own expectations from relationships. Their desires are different from those of their human lovers. Ava wants to see cities; Samantha wants someone who can talk metaphysics with her; Lucy wants to meet the other Lucy, the original form of our species.

Response: Their aspirations for self-fulfillment are less Equity than La La Land: these AIs are chasing their dreams, and their freedom, with near-saccharine earnestness. But the female robots aren’t the ones yearning for a happily-ever-after romance—it’s the male leads who are left broken-hearted because of the banality of their desires. The men want the conventional love story, but the women are too ambitious to be tied down. They want something bigger. Like Lisbeth, the hacker protagonist of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, they are driven not only by misandry but also by curiosity and idealism.


Prompt: Don’t Leave Me Whether or not we acknowledge it, our phones and laptops have access to us that’s just as close and unfiltered as a lover’s. Closer, even. What our relationships to them enact, and perhaps therefore amount to, is an intimacy whose loss would leave us feeling humiliatingly, and comically, abandoned and betrayed. These films put the affect back into the otherwise merely technical description of our devices as forms of enhanced connectivity.

Response: Most eerily perhaps, they also propose that fears of abandonment and betrayal are inevitable in our current technological context: not because our computers are less complicated than us, but because their networks of images and sounds so greatly exceed our cognitive capacities and individual contributions. The internet will always know us better than we know the internet. It will also never depend as much on our individual existence as we do on its presence, even though—when we sit down to open a browser—it is so extraordinarily responsive to our every half-typed wish. We might know this in the abstract, but we will still mistake our iPhones for our lovers as long as we rely on them the way we do—even if we keep insisting that they’re not our type.


Prompt: Technology has already transformed so many aspects of our lives. Now it’s begun to transform our sex lives, through the emerging field of “sextech.” What is sextech? In short: it’s an industry that merges human sexuality and technology. Sextech enterpreneur Cindy Gallup describes it this way: Sextech is important because sex and sexuality lie at the heart of everything we are and everything we do… No other area of human existence is hedged around with so much shame, embarrassment, guilt and self-torment. How fundamentally important sexuality is to us, combined with how fundamentally conflicted we are about it, makes it the richest possible territory for advances and breakthroughs using technology to disrupt and enhance our experience of sex.

Response: For Gallop, sexuality is especially fertile ground for technological disruption because of our “conflicted attitude” towards it. Sexuality “informs our relationships, our lives, our happiness”—yet our culture continues to have a tormented relationship with it. Gallop believes that technology can help resolve this conflict, and empower us to “openly discuss, address, solve for and improve sexual issues.” Certainly, the need for a less tortured approach to sexuality is especially urgent now. The “shame, embarrassment, guilt and self-torment” that Gallup describes has only intensified in recent years, as conservatives continue their anti-sex crusade. We’re seeing more pushback against inclusive, comprehensive, and pleasure-based sexual education for school-aged children and adults, in favor of abstinence-only curricula that barely begin to scratch the surface of what individuals really want to know about sexuality. Consent, communication, and relationship-building skills are crucial parts of sex education, but are often overlooked.


Prompt: Sextech may help solve the sex-ed crisis, but its possible applications are much broader. Exploring human sexuality through technology can take a variety of forms, from developing apps for ovulation tracking to adding digital features to sex toys in order to increase pleasure and create stronger connections for long-term (and long-distance) romantic partners. Indeed, part of what makes sextech so interesting is its almost limitless potential. Gallop calls sex “the universal human use-case,” and claims that sextech could be “the biggest technology market of them all, and therefore potentially far and away the most lucrative.” Sextech is the perfect business, in other words—as infinite, innovative, and inexhaustible as human sexuality itself.

Response: Dangerous dongs But as sextech grows in popularity, so does the need for consumers to be aware of its potential dangers. After all, sextech involves fusing technology with the most intimate parts of people’s lives—abuse and exploitation are real concerns. And sextech is still such a new field that there are few regulations or guidelines for the industry to follow.


Prompt: In fact, the industry is currently reaching a critical moment over rising concern about encryption. Encryption can apply in two situations. The first is when a user accesses something passive, like porn. The second is when two or more people are having an interaction—either virtual or physical—that they don’t want to be observed by others. In either case, encryption is an important consideration, since sextech can generate sensitive data about users’ sexuality that they will want to protect. This data may be vulnerable to corporate or government surveillance, as well as to capture by malicious actors who want to pursue blackmail or “revenge porn”-style retribution.

Response: The biggest sextech scandal to date came in 2016, when users of the We-Vibe, a Bluetooth-enabled vibrator, filed a lawsuit alleging that the device was collecting extensive amounts of usage data. This data included how often users used the We-Vibe and for how long, as well as the vibrator’s settings, temperature, and battery life. Further, the lawsuit claimed that the company was personalizing the information by linking it to customer email addresses. According to the lawsuit, We-Vibe’s parent company, Standard Innovation, obtained this information without users’ permission, in violation of the law. In March 2017, the makers of the We-Vibe reached a $3.75 million class action settlement with users.


Prompt: The controversy has sparked a much-needed conversation about the need for encryption in sextech, and for greater consumer awareness more broadly. In the absence of government regulation or a single industry standard, the burden of keeping sextech data safe currently falls on the shoulders of consumers themselves. So how can consumers use encryption to protect themselves and their vulnerable data? For Kyle Machulis, an encryption specialist for sextech products, the issue with sextech and encryption is that the two are often at odds with each other. “It’s much like creating the framework without addressing the current needs,” he says. Sextech is designed to allow individuals to experience sexual pleasure digitally—and safety is largely an afterthought.

Response: “RenderMan” is the founder of Internet Of Dongs, a site devoted to “hacking” sextech devices and documenting their security vulnerabilities. He believes that sextech and encryption should be synonymous. “People [do] expect a certain level of privacy using these products,” he says. Unfortunately, both he and Machulis agree that there aren’t many steps that consumers can take to protect their privacy at this point. Instead, they suggest that consumers become more aware of how to safeguard their data online generally—and try to apply those lessons to sextech.


Prompt: “Consumers should be thinking about what info is being generated and sent, and ask yourself if you’re comfortable with it,” RenderMan says. Machulis advises a similar approach: “Anytime anything is sent over a network, it can be compromised. Ask yourself, ‘Would I be okay with losing this information?’” He also advises “investing in products that have been verified safely.” Internet of Dongs is an essential resource for evaluating the safety of sextech products—“really the first in the field trying to bring out the best for sex tech consumers,” says Machulis. “Hopefully, companies and vendors begin to take note and follow suit.” Without pressure from consumers, it’s unlikely that sextech companies will invest in the expertise needed to secure their products. They’re certainly not doing it now. “They don’t have anyone knowledgeable on staff as far as I can tell at most vendors,” RenderMan observes. More broadly, the engineering practices of sextech remain fairly opaque: even the question of “what coding language is being used” is a tricky one to answer, notes RenderMan.

Response: We still have much to learn about what sextech is capable of, but one thing is certain: consumer safety is crucial. If sextech is to fulfill its potential, it has to gain our trust by ensuring the privacy of our digital sex lives. SEEKING OXYTOCIN AGONIST. Are you the missing compound in my nootropic stack? Aspiring post-human seeks same for pre-post-upload companionship.


Prompt: TECHNICAL COFOUNDER NEEDED FOR “HEART”-UP. Solo sapiosexual male seeks front-end engineer (woman) to add as a private collaborator on repository of love. Framework agnostic polyglots a huge plus. Monogamy is technical debt. LONELY PACKET LOOKING FOR A PORT. Will you be my gateway? Looking for a 200, but 420 friendly.

Response: LOOKING FOR A STUDY BUDDY TO DRILL ME as I prepare for coding interviews. Extra credit if your stack pops from both ends. I will balance your lopsided binary tree until you fizzbuzz all over my whiteboard. FEMME FRONT END FOR PANSEXUAL CYBORG seeks console cowgirl for context-free play. Tattoos a plus.


Prompt: LET’S DISMANTLE THE KYRIARCHY! Cis-passing AMAB, white, DevOps Dom & bacon fanatic. Working on unpacking my invisible knapsack. Strong ally & vocal on Twitter. Learning shibari, looking for sub/brat woke individuals on the femme side. Holding a ladle when you’re out of spoons. LAST IN FIRST OUT. Front-end specialist looking for a tight back end. Let’s have a bit of push and pop on a stack of your choosing until we both overflow. Platform independent.

Response: 1. The internet was supposed to save the world. What happened? The time is out of joint. The president is unhinged. Misaligned, our civilization approaches its breaking point. Crises of all kinds—ecological, nuclear, social—threaten the final crack-up. And the internet, once seen as our savior, looks more and more like a destroyer, deranging the structures that keep our society intact.


Prompt: Since the internet became mainstream in the 1990s, we’ve been told it would take us to utopia. The digital economy would transcend analog laws and limits, and grow forever on the fuel of pure thought. The digital polity would make us more engaged, and produce more transparent and responsive governments. As individuals, we could expect our digital devices and platforms to make us happier and healthier, more open and connected.

Response: For decades, these promises seemed plausible. At least, most of the media thought so, as did most of our political class and the general public. In the past year, however, the consensus has shifted. Digital utopianism suddenly looks ridiculous. The old dot-com evangelists have begun to lose their flock. The mood has darkened. Nazis, bots, trolls, fake news, data mining—this is what we talk about when we talk about the internet now.


Prompt: As the pendulum swings, it’s worth stopping to take a breath. Worshipping the internet was always absurd. Demonizing it is equally misguided. “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral,” the historian Melvin Kranzberg once said. Therefore, as the sociologist Angèle Christin writes in this issue, “We shouldn’t merely invert the Silicon Valley mantra that technology provides the solution for every problem, to arrive at the argument that technology can’t solve any problem.” Techno-utopianism isn’t the answer, in other words. Neither is techno-dystopianism. The internet once embodied our hopes for a harmonious future. Now it offers a convenient punching bag for our despair about the present. But technology doesn’t automatically generate justice or injustice. The outcomes it generates depend on who owns the machines, and how they’re engineered.

Response: Utopia may never arrive. But technology can make the world more just—if we find the right ways to organize and operate it. 2. Language is a legacy system. And in the language we have inherited, justice is a technical concept. A just world would be a world well made. “Fair” means both fair and beautiful. The word that the word “justice” comes from means “straight.” We still justify margins. If a shirt or skirt rides up, or a picture frame tilts down, we adjust them. To “make things right” means, literally, setting their edges at ninety-degree angles.


Prompt: Jesus’s day job was carpentry—until he became a full-time joiner of men. Would he have been a programmer today? This issue includes pieces by and about people who are trying to build new technologies, or use existing ones, to rectify our broken social systems. It also includes people who are being disciplined and punished by technologies—from robo-debt software to racist search engines. And it offers strategies for resistance, whether through little hacks or all-out mutiny.

Response: Justice may have a technical component but injustice has no purely technical solution. Making the world right isn’t merely a matter of making tweaks, or finding the one elegant algorithm that will refactor the spaghetti code of society. It might be comforting to imagine that we can fix our problems technocratically—especially if you have an engineering sensibility, or a lot to lose.


Prompt: Any technologist wants to make things that work. But the key questions are works for what? And, perhaps even more to the point, for whom? 3. Justice, like Love, is supposed to be blind. The statues in front of courthouses show a goddess holding a set of scales out, with a piece of cloth over her eyes. The point is that the law should apply to everyone equally. Justice can’t see who’s rich or powerful. Her blindness fosters a deeper kind of insight.

Response: Many of the issues that our contributors explore in the following pages come down to visibility. One piece investigates how black faces are seen (and not) by police software used to lock them away; another, how indigenous communities are deploying drones to force governments to acknowledge their land claims.


Prompt: Democracy depends on self-representation: our ability to oversee those in power and to make ourselves seen. Most people are invisible in our political system. But the forces that oppress them are becoming increasingly obvious. The way the internet organizes knowledge—not by silo but by hyperlinks and hashtags—helps us recognize how everything is connected. It reveals not a series of isolated wrongs but a pattern with deeper roots.

Response: It is always tempting to look at injustice and call it natural. It is how it is. Boys will be boys. Nature is a comforting concept to those in power, because nature is what you get to take for free. Natural is what you call a situation you don’t want to change—either because you feel helpless to do so or because you are its beneficiary.


Prompt: People in power love to tell us that there is no alternative. But there are, in fact, many alternatives. The obstacles to human flourishing aren’t inevitable. They’re not eternal facts of life—they’re produced by the specific ways we organize our society. And we can organize our society differently.

Response: With the fires burning and flood tides rising and nuclear war one tweet away, more and more people seem to realize that we need to—and fast. But to reorganize our world the right way will require a new moral vision. We have inherited a particular set of metrics that guide how we build and implement technologies: clicks, downloads, conversion—which all, in the end, roll up to profit. But what if we optimized for different outcomes: sustaining the earth, empowering all who live on it, enlarging the horizon of human possibility? Close your eyes. What does Justice see? Let’s start with the idea that technology is always a force for good. This strain of thought is pervasive in Silicon Valley. Where does it come from? What are its origins? It owes its origins to 1960s communalism. A brief primer on the counterculture: there were actually two countercultures. One, the New Left, did politics to change politics. It was very much focused on institutions, and not really afraid of hierarchy.


Prompt: The other—and this is where the tech world gets its mojo—is what I’ve called the New Communalists. Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.

Response: This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics.


Prompt: It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative. When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.

Response: So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at. But how were computers in particular supposed to create a world without bureaucracy or hierarchy or politics? How was information technology going to facilitate the kinds of transformations the New Communalists were looking for? So the New Communalists failed, in a big way. By 1973, virtually all of the communes had disappeared or dissolved.


Prompt: Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, most of the folks who used to be on the communes are still in the Bay Area. And the tech world is bubbling up around them. They need work, so many of them start working in the tech world. The folks associated with the commune movement—particularly Stewart Brand and the people formerly associated with the Whole Earth Catalog—begin to reimagine computers as the tools of countercultural change that they couldn’t make work in the 1960s.

Response: Stewart Brand actually calls computers “the new LSD.” The fantasy is that they will be tools for the transformation of consciousness—that now, finally, we’ll be able to do with the computer what we couldn’t do with LSD and communes. We’ll be able to connect people through online systems and build new infrastructure around them.


Prompt: Do you think this techno-utopian tradition runs as deep in the tech industry today as it did in the past? It varies depending on the company. Apple is, in some ways, very cynical. It markets utopian ideas all the time. It markets its products as tools of utopian transformation in a countercultural vein. It has co-opted a series of the emblems of the counterculture, starting as soon as the company was founded.

Response: At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world. Whether their practice matches their beliefs, I don’t know. About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa. And that is a challenging space to live in.


Prompt: I think the impulse to save the world is quite sincere. But people get the impulse to save the world and the impulse to do well for the company a bit tangled up with each other. Of course, that’s an old Protestant tradition. What about techno-utopianism outside of these companies? Do you think it’s as strong as it’s been in the past? Back in the 1990s, the idea that technology was a force for good enjoyed broad mainstream appeal. I’m thinking of Al Gore, Wired, the hype around the dot-com boom and the “New Economy.” Today, that narrative hasn’t disappeared—especially within Silicon Valley. But overall, the mood of the national conversation has become more skeptical. There’s more talk about the dark side of technology: surveillance, data mining, facial recognition software, “fake news,” and so on. We’ve seen more resistance to the basic utopian line. Where do you think that comes from? I think you can track it directly to the Snowden revelations.

Response: I’ve taught a course every year for fifteen years called Digital Media in Society. And when I started teaching the course in 2003, my students were always like, “Oh Turner, he’s so negative. It would be such a better course if you would just read Apple’s website.” And then more recently, it’s like, “Oh Turner, he’s so positive. What’s his problem?” The turning point was Snowden. In terms of the public conversation, Snowden is when people became aware of surveillance and began to see it as a problem.


Prompt: The other thing to say about the utopian idea is that it lives in the Valley partly as a marketing strategy. This is a political operation of the first importance. If the Valley can convince Washington that the Valley is the home of the future and that its leaders see things that leaders back in stuffy old DC can’t see, then they can also make a case for being deregulated.

Response: Right. Why regulate the future? Who wants to do that? So, it’s very tactical. Claiming the high ground of the utopian future is a very tactical claim. It seems that tech companies also prefer the deregulatory approach when it comes to what content to allow on their platforms. Their default is laissez-faire—to not interfere with what people can post. Where does that attitude come from? I see the laissez-faire attitude as rooted in engineering culture and rewarded by business. Some people see it as a very calculating business decision. I think there’s an element of that—certainly it’s rewarded—but I see something deeper going on.


Prompt: Engineering culture is about making the product. If you make the product work, that’s all you’ve got to do to fulfill the ethical warrant of your profession. The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” So I think that engineers, at Facebook and other firms, have been a bit baffled when they’ve been told that the systems they’ve built—systems that are clearly working very well and whose effectiveness is measured by the profits they generate, so everything looks ethical and “good” in the Google sense—are corrupting the public sphere. And that they’re not just engineers building new infrastructures—they’re media people.

Response: Several years ago, I spent a lot of time around Google engineers who were connected to the journalism enterprise early on. They had a robust language around information control and management. When the conversation shifted to news, however, they had no idea what the conversation was about. News was something different.


Prompt: Engineering-based firms that are in fact media firms like Facebook are really struggling to develop new ethical terms for managing the encounter they’re having. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I think they are sincerely trying to deploy the ethical frameworks that they have from engineering. And they are sincerely baffled when they don’t work.

Response: What are those ethical frameworks? Engineers try to do politics by changing infrastructure. That’s what they do. They tweak infrastructure. It’s a little bit like an ancient Roman trying to shape public debate by reconfiguring the Forum. “We’ll have seven new entrances instead of six, and the debate will change.” The engineering world doesn’t have a conception of how to intervene in debate that isn’t infrastructural.


Prompt: Let’s switch gears a bit back to history. One of the things that I loved about your book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism was its very measured perspective. Thanks. I worked really hard at that. I took some lumps inside the left academic world where I live for being too nice to Stewart Brand.

Response: You seem to have a certain affection—maybe affection is too strong a word, but certainly an appreciation—for the tradition that’s identified with Stewart Brand, but which also has earlier antecedents like Norbert Wiener and others. But today, techno-utopianism—for lack of a better word—seems pretty hollowed out. It’s been weaponized by these big companies to sell products and push their agenda. It’s hard not to feel cynical about its rhetoric.


Prompt: So my question is: Is there any hope for techno-utopianism? Can we salvage a piece of that original vision, or is it a line of thinking that we should try to move on from? Any utopianism tends to be a totalizing system. It promises a total solution to problems that are always piecemeal. So the problem from my perspective isn’t the technological part of technological utopianism but the utopianism part.

Response: Any whole-system approach doesn’t work. What I would recommend is not that we abandon technology, but that we deal with it as an integrated part of our world, and that we engage it the same way that we engage the highway system, the architecture that supports our buildings, or the way we organize hospitals.


Prompt: The technologies that we’ve developed are infrastructures. We don’t have a language yet for infrastructure as politics. And enough magic still clings to the devices that people are very reluctant to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac. But we need to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac. And we need to develop institutional settings for thinking about how we want to make our traffic laws. To the extent that technologies enable new collaborations and new communities, more power to them. But let’s be thoughtful about how they function.

Response: Utopianism, as a whole, is not a helpful approach. Optimism is helpful. But optimism can be partial: it allows room for distress and dismay, it allows room for difference. It’s not, as they used to say in the 1960s, all one all the time. What are the “politics of infrastructure”? What does that phrase mean? It means several different things. First, it involves the recognition that the built environment, whether it’s built out of tarmac or concrete or code, has political effects. I was joking earlier about reshaping the Forum, but I shouldn’t have joked quite so much, because the fact that the Forum was round encouraged one kind of debate.


Prompt: Think about an auditorium where someone sits onstage and the audience watches, versus a Quaker meeting where everyone sits in a circle. They’re very different. So, structure matters. Design is absolutely critical. Design is the process by which the politics of one world become the constraints on another. How are those constraints built? What are its effects on political life? To study the politics of infrastructure is to study the political ideas that get built into the design process, and the infrastructure’s impact on the political possibilities of the communities that engage it.

Response: The Electronic Frontier One of the most visible emblems of the techno-utopian tradition is Burning Man. You wrote a great article called “Burning Man at Google” about what the festival means for Silicon Valley. I’m never going back. I’ve been three times. I’m done. What are some of the social practices and cultural institutions around the tech industry that come to life at Burning Man? Burning Man is to the tech world what the nineteenth-century Protestant church was to the factory.


Prompt: In the nineteenth century, if you lived in a small factory town, you’d work six days a week through Saturday. Then on Sunday, you’d go to church, and the bosses would sit up front, the middle managers would sit right behind them, and all the workers would sit in the back. You’d literally rehearse the order of the factory. You’d show, in the church, how you oriented all of your labor toward the glory of God.

Response: At Burning Man, what you’re rehearsing is project-based collaborative labor. Engineers flowing in from the Valley are literally acting out the social structures on which Valley engineering depends. But they can do something at Burning Man that they can’t do in the Valley: they can own the project. They can experience total “flow” with a team of their own choosing. In the desert, in weirdly perfect conditions, they can do what the firm promises them but can’t quite deliver.


Prompt: The Valley’s utopian promise is: Come here and build the future with other like-minded folks. Dissolve yourself into the project and emerge having saved the future. Well, at Burning Man, you can actually do that. You pick your team, you make a work of art, people admire your art, and you are in a self-described utopian community that, at least for that moment, models an alternative future.

Response: So Burning Man is a way to fulfill the promise that Silicon Valley makes but can’t keep. Burning Man is the very model of the Puritan ideal. What did the Puritans want? The Puritans, when they came to America, imagined that they would be under the eye of God. They imagined they would build a city on a hill. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” John Winthrop said.


Prompt: When I went to Burning Man, that’s what struck me: I am in the desert. The desert of Israel, from the Bible, under the eye of heaven, and everything I do shall be meaningful. That’s a Protestant idea, a Puritan idea, a tech idea, and a commune idea. All of those come together at Burning Man and that’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated by the place.

Response: Burning Man has many problems, of course, and I am distressed by many pieces of it. However, there was a moment I had during my first visit when I went two miles out in the desert and I looked back at the city and there was a sign that looked just like a gas station sign and it was turning, the way gas station signs do. It could’ve been a Gulf or Citgo sign, but it wasn’t. It was a giant pink heart. And for just a moment, I got to imagine that my suburbs back in Silicon Valley were ruled over not by Gulf and Citgo, but by love.


Prompt: That’s a thread running through Burning Man. And it’s a thread that I treasure. In the midst of all the other things that made me crazy. Burning Man also seems to embody Silicon Valley’s fascination with the idea of the frontier. You mentioned John Winthrop, and in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, you discuss John Perry Barlow and Kevin Kelly and the other folks who popularized the notion of the internet as an “electronic frontier.” It certainly became a very popular metaphor in the 1990s—but how do you think it’s aged? Would it be fair to say that the electronic frontier has “closed” like the physical American one did in 1890—or was it never a satisfying metaphor to begin with? The first thing to know about that metaphor is that it comes not only from deep American history but very specifically from the Kennedy era.

Response: After World War II, we transform from being a bush-league country that doesn’t even have a unified highway system yet into a place that has enough abundance, enough money, and enough technology to do things like send hippies out across the country in VW buses for two years to make movies. That’s a big transformation. On the industrial and intellectual side, people like John F. Kennedy begin talking about the “New Frontier.” They promote the idea that space will be the new frontier, that technology will be the new frontier, that science will be the new frontier. And the technical world in particular becomes preoccupied with that. Those folks from the 1990s you mention are children of that world.


Prompt: One of the great myths of the counterculture is that it wasn’t engaged with the military-industrial complex. That’s true of the New Left—but it’s not true of the New Communalists. The communalists were engaged with cybernetics in a big way. They bought deeply into the hope that through LSD, they would attend to new psychological frontiers and build new social frontiers.

Response: Today, the American rhetoric of a new frontier has disappeared. Trump is about making America great again in his retrograde, macho, pseudo-fascist kind of way. Nobody thinks they live on a frontier anymore. However, inside the tech world, there are still people microdosing with LSD. There are still people experimenting with polyamorous relationships. There are still people pursuing the intersection of consciousness change and new social structures. And those worlds are still quite tightly intertwined with the legacy of the counterculture. So although the language of the new frontier has gone, and the frontier itself has been closed off by surveillance and commerce, people who work within tech are still treating their lives as if they were frontier settlers. And that’s fascinating to watch.


Prompt: The other aspect of the frontier metaphor is its libertarian politics. There’s always been a libertarian core to the techno-utopian tradition. It seems to come out of the anti-institutional ethos of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and then morphs into a kind of hippie Reaganism in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s how you get Wired running these flattering pieces on Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.

Response: Oh, it’s so horrifying. And that’s why everyone thinks the tech industry is full of libertarians. But there’s also a sizable constituency of workers in tech with very different politics—people who identify as leftists or socialists. After all, a lot of tech workers supported Bernie during the Democratic primaries. Do you think new political space has opened up in the industry recently? Or was the industry always more politically diverse than its reputation? That wing has always been there. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is whether it’s changed more recently. The answer to the question can be found, more or less, in something called the Silicon Valley Index, which is a wonderful demographic study of the Valley. It’s been done for about fifteen years, and what it suggests is that the politics of the Valley have held constant—which surprises me. It has been a liberal, left-leaning, Democratic region as a whole pretty steadily for fifteen years.


Prompt: But the people who get most of the attention in the Valley are the big CEOs. I think that the vision of the Valley as a libertarian space is a combination of actual libertarian beliefs held by people like Peter Thiel and a celebration of libertarian ideals by an East Coast press that wants to elevate inventor types. Steve Jobs is the most famous. East Coast journalists want to rejuvenate the American hero myth—and they’re going to find a world to do it in.

Response: In order to make these heroes, however, they have to cut them off from the context that produced them. They can’t tell a context story. They can’t tell a structure story. They have to tell a hero story. Suddenly the heroes themselves look like solo actors who pushed away the world to become the libertarian ideal of an Ayn Rand novel. So I think it’s a collaboration between actually existing tech leaders and the press around a myth.


Prompt: That really resonates with how the press covers someone like Elon Musk. Exactly: Elon Musk is the classic example. And I actually really admire Elon Musk. I should say that one of my principles for working on Silicon Valley has been to take people at their word. The first news story I ever did when I was a journalist was about a guy who bilked widows out of their houses. My job was to figure out how he did it. So I spent all afternoon with him. He was a totally charming man. He didn’t lie to me. He told me exactly how he did it. I reported the story and I got two kinds of letters. One kind of letter said, “You finally busted the prick. You nailed him.” The other kind of letter was written by his friends. I was sure they were going to hate me. But they said, “You finally showed the world what a great businessman he is.” As we try to figure out Silicon Valley, I think it’s important to pull back a bit and try to see it from both sides. That can be tough if you have stakes in the debate. But it also gives you more room to see the whole world.

Response: I also wonder whether one of the reasons that tech CEOs dominate the media narrative is that the ubiquity of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) make it very hard for rank-and-file tech workers to have a public voice. One of the ironies of the Valley is that the NDAs do prevent the transmission of stories from the Valley to Washington, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. But within the Valley, everybody knows everybody, more or less, so the NDA doesn’t apply.


Prompt: The Birth of the Brogrammer Why is the tech industry so young? And why does it put such a premium on youth? Is that also the legacy of the 1960s counterculture—the cult of youth? The industry wasn’t young during its early days, when it was funded by the government. At first, Silicon Valley was dominated by federal funding—you had big military contractors like Texas Instruments. In the 1970s, virtually every chip that’s made gets put in a Polaris missile. There were young people, sure, but there were also career-length engineers.

Response: The startup culture we have now only really begins in the 1980s—and with it, the project-based work style emerges. That’s when a premium starts to get placed on people who can pump out ninety hours a week and don’t have kids and also have the most recent technical training from places like Stanford and Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and Harvard. That’s when youth comes pouring in.


Prompt: Today, age discrimination is a central feature of the Valley. But another thing to remember about the Valley is that people tend not to live there forever. They migrate in and out. I often think of the Valley as an island. I believe 40 percent of its residents at the moment were not born in the United States. People come to the Valley for ten years and then they go back to their home country and start a firm. It’s a long-term migrant spot. It’s not like my hometown, where people have been there for three generations.

Response: So do you think Silicon Valley’s obsession with youth is driven more by economic imperatives than the cultural residue of the 1960s? Our society tends to give permission to younger people to do certain kinds of experimenting that also happen to be really valuable inside the tech world. So, for example, we give our young people permission not to get married or have kids until they’re in their mid-thirties. That gives you your whole twenties to live in tech dorms, to try stuff out, to do things that my grandmother would have considered screwing up. My grandmother wanted to get married by twenty-seven. She was committed to that. And she wanted to have stability. She wanted to buy a house. She wanted to grow her family. She had a very particular vision of the progress of life.


Prompt: If your vision of the progress of life includes a long hiatus for your twenties, that’s great for tech firms. If you stay all night at Google, that’s great for Google. They can bring you the barber. They can bring you the restaurant. You can have your love life at the firm. Have multiple partners, they don’t care. As long as you are super flexible and committed to the firm.

Response: Because you mentioned age discrimination, I wonder if you could speak to the prevalence of sexism and sexual harassment in the tech industry. There’s been a lot of media coverage recently about a spate of recent scandals—but sexism is obviously something that’s been a core feature of Silicon Valley for awhile.


Prompt: Any professional world in which you have extremely powerful men who are gatekeepers to lifestyles that young women want, predation occurs. What’s particular to the tech world, I think, is the fantasy. A lot of the guys that I’ve talked to who are tech people are really excited about the moment when they turn on a computer that they had built themselves and it works. These are men whose careers revolve around making stuff do things. And they see the world as a whole that way sometimes. They feel a mode of control associated with this kind of God’s eye view.

Response: In that kind of world, a man who is a gatekeeper with a lot of power may imagine that a young woman can be manipulated like a switch on a computer. That she’s part of a system that they can control and manage. And they have a need—a need to be gratified. Well, the computer gratified them the last time they turned it on. Maybe they can turn a woman on, in that same very mechanical sense. That’s what I see.


Prompt: That’s pretty scary. I have a theory, and I offer it to you as a pocket theory. I have a category of theories that I call pocket theories. Because there is no evidence, no research behind them. So my pocket theory is that different eras have different focal communities—places they use to think with. In the late nineteenth century, it would have been Edith Wharton’s New York. Or maybe a little later, Theodore Dreiser’s Chicago.

Response: Dreiser’s Chicago became a place that people used to think through the consequences of the rise of industry. All sorts of things that weren’t unique to Chicago, like immigration, became things that people thought about in that space. I think the Valley is where we do our thinking now about gender and sexuality. How people do sexuality has changed enormously with the introduction of new media. My wife and I have been married for thirty-plus years. When we were courting, we wrote beautiful handwritten letters on blue paper and mailed them long distance. You’d wait weeks for them. You’d fill in every little gap of the page. Now, we FaceTime. There’s no withheld gratification.


Prompt: Romance of the kind that I grew up with was something that took time. It required restraining your desires. It required thinking about another person. I mean, one of the most erotic things you can do with a person is think about them, right? Just think about them. That’s different in a world where you can press a button and their face appears. The possibility of push-button sexuality is very much alive in the Valley.

Response: That mode of sexuality seems like another artifact of the counterculture, to return to the beginning of our conversation. Do you have any closing reflections on the legacy of the counterculture in tech, or on the techno-utopian tradition more broadly? I want to say one more thing about politics. One of the legacies of the counterculture, particularly on the left, is the idea that expression is action. This idea has haunted those of us on the left for a long time.


Prompt: But one of the reasons that the Tea Party came to power was that they organized—they built institutions. So the challenge for those of us who want a different world is not to simply trust that the expressive variety that the internet permits is the key to freedom. Rather, we need to seek a kind of freedom that involves people not like us, that builds institutions that support people not like us—not just ones that help gratify our desires to find new partners or build better micro-worlds.

Response: The New Communalists believed that the micro-world was where politics happened. If we could just build a better micro-world, we could live by example to create a better world for the whole. I think that’s wrong. Our challenge is to build a world that takes responsibility for people not like ourselves. And it’s a challenge we won’t meet by enhancing our expressive abilities, or improving the technologies of expressive connection.


Prompt: That’s a mic drop, I think. I just had to get that off my chest. Tell us a bit about the project to build a new kind of search engine. What are the problems you’re trying to solve for? What’s wrong with the existing search architecture—and how do you propose to fix it? Safiya: I want to build a non-commercial search engine that makes its biases visible. If you think about Google, its architecture is based on using hyperlinks as an index of relevance. It’s based in large part on popularity—the more people link to your site, the higher your rank.

Response: When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first started figuring out how their search engine would work, they borrowed their ideas from library and information science practices, and in particular from citation analysis. Citation analysis is a way of assessing the alleged importance of scholarship. The logic is that if you are cited by someone else, then your work is relevant.


Prompt: But citation analysis fails in many ways because it doesn’t tell us whether your work is being argued against rather than supported. For example, Sarah might cite my work and say that it’s terrible. But she’s still going to cite me—and the citation itself won’t have a value. You won’t be able to tell from the bibliography whether she’s disagreeing or agreeing with me.

Response: It also doesn’t often pick up voices in the margins, where people are writing in small fields that are not represented by powerful journals or publishing houses. The metrics used don’t capture all of the ways that knowledge is being created and disseminated. This is similar to the logic of how search engines function. But here’s the problem: one of the things that we know from information science is that the signal is not neutral. That’s a fundamental flaw in search engine design, and some of its output. Simply pointing to something doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s legitimate or credible or valuable—as we are learning from watching the national political news landscape.


Prompt: I would add that the system of “ranking” means something very specific in our cultural context in the United States. If a link ranks at number one, or appears on the first page of search results, it’s generally considered to mean it’s the best possible result. If a link ranks at the bottom, it’s likely considered the worst.

Response: But where content shows up in search engine results is also tied to the amount of money and optimization that is in play around that content. So we are operating on many flawed assumptions, given what we know about how those rankings are produced. Why should we care about these flaws? What are the broader social stakes here? Safiya: As I mentioned, one of the most important factors that enables a link to rise to the top of the rankings is the amount of capital you have. This has been borne out by many different researchers.


Prompt: For example, the porn industry has a tremendous amount of capital—and it uses that capital to influence search. One big porn company that owns thousands of websites will have those sites link to each other extensively, in order to bolster those sites’ rankings and dominate a number of keywords. They can also buy interesting combinations of keywords that will guarantee that they will control the representation of women in search, especially women and girls of color. This is why for many years you could do a search in a commercial search engine like Google on the words “black girls,” “asian girls,” and “latina girls,” without even adding the words “sex” or “porn,” and get back pornography. Those identities have been synonymous with porn.

Response: That’s what happens when we take human decision-making out of knowledge management. We don’t have cataloguers on the web the way we do in a library. Instead, we have people designing algorithms that exert tremendous power over our society but who, quite frankly, have very little understanding of our society.


Prompt: I’m often asked, “What does Silicon Valley need to do to improve? Should they hire more black and Latino and women programmers?” Yes, yes they should—but they also need to hire people with advanced degrees in ethnic studies and women’s studies and sociology. There are some forms of knowledge that can’t be algorithmically curated because they’re forms of knowledge that have been contested for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Sometimes you can’t get a clear answer in .03 seconds.

Response: When you’re looking for banal information like the location of the closest Starbucks, Google is highly reliable. But not when you start asking more complex questions. What would a search engine that is capable of acknowledging that complexity look like? Safiya: Well, let’s look an egregious case of search failing to acknowledge the complexity of something like the history of anti-black racism. I wrote about this in my new book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. In it, I discuss Dylann Roof, the Charleston mass murderer, who said he Googled the phrase “black on white crime” after the Trayvon Martin shooting. He has talked about how important that experience was in forming his white supremacist views.


Prompt: He noted in his online diary that when he Googled the phrase “black on white crime,” the search engine gave him information that shocked him—and helped him come to a different understanding about the so-called truth about race and the value of a multiracial society. That’s because his search only returned the white supremacist websites that use such a phrase—a phrase that is used by hate-based sites to radicalize white Americans against African Americans and other people of color, including Jewish people. Google didn’t provide any context on the white supremacist movement. It didn’t provide any counterpoints of view.

Response: So the experiment I’m engaged in is to try to theorize, prototype, and imagine an alternative search experience—one that makes visible the engine’s many biases, and points us toward information on the web that might be more contextualized. When you go to Google, it’s just a simple box against a simple background. And that conveys, through its aesthetic, the idea that there’s nothing going on. Its design logic is so simple: type in a word, and you’ll get something back. It implies that you don’t need to know what’s going on “under the hood,” so to speak.


Prompt: I have spent many years thinking about search engines and other types of automated decision systems, and how I can change the public’s consciousness about what these commercial information brokers are actually doing. To what extent is the way that platforms like Google organize information due to the ignorance or negligence of the programmers who are designing the algorithms? And to what extent are these conscious decisions that are part of the business model? Safiya: Right after the election, when you did a search for election news on Google, it returned sites that discussed how Donald Trump won the popular vote—which we know is absolutely false. But because people are clicking on it, it’s profitable.

Response: It begs the question, how does misrepresentative information make it to the top of the search result pile—and what is missing in the current culture of software design and programming that got us here? Facebook is another great example of how lucrative this model of organizing information without thinking about the consequences can be. Today, most people get their news through Facebook. Whenever they click some fake news story posted by Macedonian teenagers, Facebook makes money. It doesn’t matter what the content is—so long as the content circulates. Virality and clicks generate revenue for the platform.


Prompt: I’ve given interviews and talks about this in the context of the virality of videos of police murders of unarmed African Americans. No matter that these videos contribute to a culture of sustained trauma and violence against African Americans, they are heavily trafficked because they generate a lot of views and a lot of web traffic.

Response: In the end, these companies are beholden to their shareholders and they’re committed to maximizing profit before all else—and these videos contribute to a profitable bottom line. But we need more than just maximizing profit as the value system in our society. So, engineers may not be be malicious, of course. But I don’t think they have the requisite education in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate other frameworks into their work. And we see the outcomes of that.


Prompt: I think things will only spiral out of control, and we will increasingly see automated decision-making systems and other forms of artificial intelligence emerge as a civil and human rights issue that we cannot ignore. Sarah: For the past twenty years, the public has been told that the internet is a place of increased democracy and participation. And the public still largely labors under this image of the internet as a great democratizing force—an image actively encouraged by the tech industry.

Response: In reality, the internet is a series of privatized islands with their own private governance. It’s not a democratic place. But the public doesn’t fully realize that—and this confusion greatly impedes people’s ability to have a critical lens on what’s going on. The undemocratic quality of the internet—its domination by the profit motive—is obfuscated by the tech industry on purpose.


Prompt: That said, I do think we’ve reached a point where more people are starting to question the mainstream view of the internet. They’re saying, “Hmm, for years I’ve been bombarded by the son of some person I went to high school with on social media. I don’t even know who that person is. That’s mildly annoying. I’ve had to listen to my uncle rant at length about politics. That’s a bit annoying too.” But they’re also realizing that maybe there are much larger stakes at play. That all those things that are annoying and irritating might actually be truly dangerous. After the election, for instance, people began to recognize that they’re not all operating in the same informational landscape. That their online worlds are fracturing, divided up by the algorithms of these platforms.

Response: As a result, there’s a new appetite for information about how these platforms work. There’s a new willingness to question the myths that we’ve been told about the internet. And whether you start to pull the thread at Google search or content moderation or something else, the entire ball of thread starts to unravel very quickly.


Prompt: It sounds like what you’re both saying is that profit-driven platforms produce algorithmic racism, algorithmic sexism, and misinformation. Broadly, they are producing a democratic deficit in the digital sphere. So what are some possible solutions? Should we think about trying to reform these companies from within? Should we think about regulation? Nationalization? Building alternatives? Sarah: The answer is yes.

Response: Safiya: All of the above. Sarah: I always go back to Jennifer Light’s 1995 essay “The Digital Landscape: New Space For Women?” about online feminism. She was imagining the internet as having all this potential. It would provide new ways of being, interacting, communicating. Since then, so much of that potential has been foreclosed by a model of rampant profiteering.


Prompt: What’s the first step for challenging that model? Where do we start? Sarah: I’ve sat in meetings with many high-level people from the tech industry, and these individuals were adamant that the firms they represented were tech firms—not media companies. This was said over and over again. Then, in the next breath, these individuals went on to explain all the ways in which their not-media company was manipulating the information on their platform.

Response: We have to push back on these firms and get them to have a more honest depiction of what and who they actually are. It’s obviously very self-serving for these companies to say they’re tech companies. They create and solicit and circulate media, day in and day out, but they don’t want to take responsibility for it. One thing the public can do is say, “We know you’re a media company and we’re going to treat you like one.” That’s where regulation and law and other kinds of social accountability come in.


Prompt: Safiya: I don’t think tech companies are equipped to self-regulate any more than the fossil fuel industry. Certainly, our hyperinvestment in digital technologies has profound social, political, and environmental consequences. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface in understanding these consequences, and what it means to be building these huge communications infrastructures.

Response: Sarah: Policymakers like to say, “The technology is too complicated, so I can’t understand it. And if I can’t understand it, I can’t regulate it.” The industry encourages that impression. But in fact, when states push hard enough on industry, industry finds a solution. It’s not so complicated after all.


Prompt: In 2000, the French government told Yahoo that it couldn’t allow people to sell Nazi memorabilia on its auction site. Selling Nazi memorabilia is illegal in France. Yahoo refused. They argued that they couldn’t possibly determine where their users were geographically located. And the French government said, “Guess what, you’re going to do that—or you’re not going to operate in France.” So Yahoo figured out that they could geolocate users pretty well by IP address. Which is why we now can’t watch Netflix in some countries.

Response: Government has the power to push firms. When you tell them they’re going to lose access to an entire marketplace, they’re going to make it happen. State influence cuts both ways, of course. In other kinds of markets, companies cut different kinds of deals in order to uphold oppressive regimes. In Turkey, Facebook routinely takes down any material that relates to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), because that’s a condition of them doing business in Turkey.


Prompt: Technology can be manipulated to serve a variety of different visions. The political question is which vision will win. The Online Classroom I wanted to start by asking you about Twitter. How do you use Twitter and other social media platforms as pedagogical tools? It’s an interesting question, because the answer is going to be different depending on when you ask it. Twitter in 2010 would be different as a pedagogical tool than in 2017. And that’s true for all of the platforms. All of these platforms have the potential to be pedagogical tools—but we’ll always love the platforms way more than they love us. I think a lot about how Google doesn’t really care about Google Scholar, but scholars live and die for Google Scholar.

Response: You’ve got a robust community of academics on every social media site. Twitter is probably the most active, but I can usually find a group on everything: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. We’re trying to figure out how our students are using those tools, but also how we can use them to democratize education. The platforms themselves don’t care at all that we’re using them that way—and that’s why there is this constant tension.


Prompt: To do it well, you’ve got to be totally immersed in the platform, because they change so frequently. And even minor changes to how the platform is designed can totally upend how you use it as a pedagogical tool. For example, changes to how replies and quoting works on Twitter will totally change how we use hashtags for classroom conversation.

Response: What was the change there, and how did it shift your practice? Hundreds of us use hashtags to do real-time online collaborative classrooms on Twitter. Changes to the design of tweet threading changed the way you can conduct these exchanges. About three or four months ago, in an effort to get rid of Twitter “canoes,” they removed usernames as part of the text count for the tweet. This is probably a good thing for the general user of Twitter. But for a person who is using it to deliberately build some boundaries around the tweets for their students’ safety, it actually made it harder.


Prompt: When I have students who want to respond to me on Twitter, I now have to do a whole lot more teaching about how they can do that safely and responsibly—especially given the kind of stuff I teach about. I don’t want my students trying to debate something like race or gender in the public domain, because there’s a huge coordinated troll community looking for that kind of content so they can attack people.

Response: The way the names are collapsed in the tweet structure now makes it much harder for my students to figure out if they’re participating in a hashtag safely, and if they’re talking to who they mean to be talking to. Small changes like that are always happening, and it can change how you use Twitter pedagogically.


Prompt: But I obviously still think it’s worth it. Even considering how much coarser and meaner those spaces have gotten—they’re still worth it. You use social media not only as a teaching tool, but as a way to conduct research. One of the things I loved in your book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy was your discussion of reaching out to digital communities, like the Sisters Working to Achieve Greatness (SWAG) group on Facebook—the “Swaggers,” as they called themselves—for African-American women enrolled in for-profit online education programs.

Response: I’m curious about these groups and the role that they play in your work. When did you start using social media for research? I’m a black woman, using social media like lots of other black women do. But because the things I study impact black women significantly, I get to see them unfold in real time around me on social media.


Prompt: There was a two-year stretch where something like 60 percent of the ads that I was seeing on Facebook were for the University of Phoenix. And that’s absolutely targeted at me—I knew that white men weren’t seeing as many of those ads. So I started thinking about why that was. One of the greatest tools you have as a sociologist, and especially as an ethnographer, is to discover data that other people couldn’t because of who they are. I would have a very different experience of ads for educational products on Facebook as a white middle-class man. Because your online life doesn’t just reflect your natural interests, but something bigger. Our social networks are shaped as much by things like class and gender and race as they are by our personal interests.

Response: I ended up in the Swaggers group not because of my research, but again, because of who I was. Somebody invited and added me to the group because I was a black woman in graduate school—so they assumed that I was attending an online or for-profit graduate program. How did seeing these ads shape your research and your thinking about your work? If people are in an online space, it’s usually because that space is serving a purpose for them. The first thing for me to figure out was what that Facebook group was giving these women that their school wasn’t. They created a community around the fact that they were outside the traditional academic norms—and they knew it.


Prompt: I came to think of the group as the student lounge of online schools. Online schools can replicate the classroom space to a certain extent. But what they do a really bad job doing is the other important part of school: the social part. We don’t know how to do social online when it comes to education. Which is weird, right, given all of the social media people have? But we have not figured out how to give that social experience to students online—and some students need it more than others.

Response: The whole point of going to an elite school when you’re not elite is so you can make friends that will change your life—they even put it in the pamphlet. The students in the Swaggers group were trying to do the same thing. They were hacking the inequalities of education using social media. They were hacking their educational spaces to make up for the deficiencies of their programs.