Your Computer Is on Fire

Your Computer Is on Fire is an anthology written against the recurring promise that the next technical fix will solve problems created by technology and society together. Its contributors trace computing through colonial administration, racial classification, gendered labor, corporate power, data centers, algorithmic discrimination, and the environmental costs of digital infrastructure. The title is deliberately literal as well as metaphorical: computers depend on mines, energy, buildings, supply chains, maintenance, and human judgment, even when interfaces encourage users to imagine a frictionless and immaterial cloud.

For feminist readers, the collection’s major achievement is to make hidden labor and historical exclusion central to technical analysis. Women and racialized workers do not merely need better representation inside an otherwise neutral industry; their work has long built computing while institutions erase it, deskill it, or position it as peripheral. Likewise, racist and sexist outcomes are not isolated bugs when systems are designed to classify populations, centralize authority, and optimize institutions already structured by inequality. The essays replace the heroic inventor and autonomous machine with networks of workers, users, standards, governments, and environments whose power is unevenly distributed.

As with many wide-ranging anthologies, the chapters differ in method and depth, and the book is stronger as a set of historical alarms than as a unified program for repair. Its emphasis on exposing technological myths must be extended through organizing, regulation, design justice, labor rights, and community governance appropriate to particular places. Some technologies have also changed rapidly since publication, but the historical method remains durable. The book teaches readers to ask what a system makes invisible before asking whether it is innovative—and to understand technological crisis as a crisis of institutions, extraction, and accountability rather than a fire engineers can extinguish alone. Two chapters make the collection’s shifts of scale especially clear. In “The Cloud Is a Factory,” Nathan Ensmenger traces a historical continuity between Sears Roebuck’s information-processing operations and Amazon’s cloud. The point is not that a data center is literally identical to an older factory; it is that digital services also rely on buildings, energy, logistics, maintenance, and organized labor. When users see only a frictionless interface, the production process and its costs can disappear from view.

Janet Abbate’s “Coding Is Not Empowerment” moves from infrastructure to employment. She examines the pipeline story that teaching more women and racialized groups to code will solve the technology sector’s lack of representation. That story can shift responsibility toward education while leaving employers’ recruitment, evaluation, retention, and promotion practices unexamined—and leaving narrow definitions of “merit” intact. Abbate also asks who decides what software should do and whose needs products prioritize. Her point is not that coding education has no value, but that access to a skill is not the same as a redistribution of authority.

Read together, these chapters show that the collection’s feminist question is not only whether women are present in technology, but how infrastructure, employment, and product agendas distribute resources and decision-making power. Pair the volume with Mar Hicks’s Programmed Inequality for a focused history of hiring and promotion in British public computing, or with Technically Wrong to follow institutional exclusion into product defaults and design harms. The anthology’s contributors use different methods; these are FemRes comparisons, not claims of influence between authors.

Abbate makes this institutional critique concrete in hiring: a whiteboard interview can reward rapid, solitary performance over the collaborative work that software teams actually depend on, while promotion systems often make that less visible work count for less. The result is not merely an unequal headcount but a narrow story about who looks naturally technical and whose labor merits recognition. Ensmenger’s infrastructure history and Abbate’s workplace analysis thus meet at the same question: which necessary work is hidden, and who has the authority to name its value?