This is your smartphone on feminism

Maria Farrell admits that comparing smartphones to abusive men (they try to keep you from friends and family, they make it hard to study or go to work, they constantly follow you and check up on you) might seem to trivialize domestic partner violence, but, as she points out, feminists have long been pointing out both the literal and metaphorical ways in which tech replicates misogyny.

In the same way that patriarchy extracts "emotional labor" from women, tech extracts "attention labor" from users.

Farrell asks us to imagine what a phone that worked for its users (rather than corporations) would look like and how it would perform: "It wouldnt share our data with random companies that want to exploit or manipulate us, or with governments whose acts can harm us. It would tell us in plain language what its doing and why. It wouldnt run background software on behalf of organizations that dont work for us, and it wouldnt hide what it was doing because it knew we wouldnt like it. It wouldnt be pockmarked with vulnerabilities that hostile agents exploit and sell to the highest bidder. It would give access to our data as and when we wanted, but also not bug us too much with opt-ins. Thats because it would use machine-learning to understand and enact what we want, instead of to manipulate us into serving others first."

It's a vision I share, and, as Farrell reminds us, "Everything is impossible until it's inevitable."

Farrell's feminist lens brings many of the questions of surveillance, control, and late-stage capitalism into sharp relief. Read the rest