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. For FemRes, 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.