Technology CritiqueBooks

UnHerd columnist Mary Harrington introduces 'reactionary feminism,' critiquing modern feminism as serving only elite professional women. She argues technological progress commodifies women's bodies and reproductive abilities, calling for a fundamental reassessment of what 'progress' means for most women.

A powerful work by NYU professor, data scientist, and one of the few Black women AI researchers, Meredith Broussard. Reveals how tech neutrality is a myth and algorithms need accountability. From facial recognition only trained on lighter skin tones, to mortgage algorithms encouraging discriminatory lending, to dangerous feedback loops in medical diagnostic algorithms. Solution isn't making omnipresent tech more inclusive, but rooting out algorithms that target demographics as 'other.'

A pioneering work exploring feminism in the digital age, analyzing how the internet, artificial intelligence, and digital technologies are reshaping gender relations and feminist practice.

Through transnational interviews, Sarah T. Roberts reveals commercial content moderation: the automation and safety visible on platforms rely on secret, quantified, and outsourced human judgment.

Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy trace how voice assistants, domestic robots, and intimate technologies encode wifework into the future home, then propose a feminist reboot.

Kate Crawford maps AI through minerals, energy, hidden labor, training data, classification, and state surveillance, revealing the extraction and concentrated power beneath machine intelligence.

This collection rewrites computing history through colonialism, race, gender, environment, and labor, refusing to treat technical problems as merely engineering problems.

It proposes seven practical principles that bring power analysis, intersectionality, situated knowledge, and co-design into data work itself.

Starting from trans airport screening and disability justice, Sasha Costanza-Chock argues for design led by affected communities, placing benefit, ownership, and accountability above expert good intentions.

Drawing on fieldwork in Paraguay, Morgan G. Ames follows One Laptop per Child to show how technological salvation projects universalize privileged childhoods and erase teachers, care, and infrastructure.

Ursula K. Le Guin retells technological origins through the container rather than the weapon and imagines fiction as a bag holding people, relations, and ordinary continuance against linear progress and heroic conquest.

Ruha Benjamin names the “New Jim Code,” showing how automated systems repackage racial control as innovation and calling for abolitionist technological imagination.

Drawing on experience as both programmer and journalist, Meredith Broussard dismantles the belief that technology is always the best answer and maps the limits between computation, judgment, and public responsibility.

Through the making of Vectors and Scalar, Tara McPherson asks whether feminism can inhabit databases, interfaces, collaborative labor, and software architecture - not only content.

From early computing and programming languages to network directories and online communities, Claire L. Evans reconstructs women’s history as programmers, infrastructure maintainers, and creators of internet culture.

Safiya Umoja Noble begins with the stigmatization of Black girls in commercial search to expose how advertising markets, platform monopoly, and knowledge classification produce algorithmic oppression.

Investigating welfare, homeless housing, and child protection, Virginia Eubanks shows how automation disguises austerity as neutral efficiency and subjects poor people to continuous surveillance.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher analyzes how forms, product copy, defaults, and tech workplace cultures exclude gendered, racialized, and embodied difference from the “normal user.”

Marie Hicks rewrites the history of British computerization by showing how women’s computing labor was demoted from core expertise into low-paid, low-status work.

Cathy O’Neil explains how scoring, prediction, and risk models amplify existing inequalities across work, education, finance, and policing.

Janet Abbate traces the historical shift from women’s high participation in computing work to the formation of masculinized professional identity.

Judy Wajcman rejects technological determinism and argues that technology and gender are co-produced social relations.

Sadie Plant’s cyberfeminist writing links weaving, computing, women’s labor, and network culture as a key 1990s digital feminist text.

Judy Wajcman uses factories, housework, reproductive technology, and urban space to show that gender shapes technology while machines, skills, and infrastructure stabilize power.