Your Computer Is on Fire

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Forthcoming from the MIT Press Contents Introductions Your Computer Is on Fire Nothing Is Virtual This Is an Emergency Where Will the Fire Spread? The Time for Equivocation Is Over Acknowledgments Notes When Did the Fire Start? We Didn’t Start the Fire It Was Always Burning We Didn’t Light It, but We Tried to Fight It Notes I Nothing Is Virtual 1 The Cloud Is a Factory Notes 2 Your AI Is a Human Intelligence: What It Is and How to Automate It The Case of Commercial Content Moderation and the Humans behind It Social Media’s Identity Crisis Humans and AI in Symbiosis and Conflict Notes 3 A Network Is Not a Network Introduction The Soviet OGAS Network: Neither Nervous System nor Hierarchy The Chilean Project Cybersyn: A Political Revolution in Miniature The US ARPANET, or How Not to Build a Survivable Cybernetic Brain Comparing Network States Conclusion: Why Networks Defy Their Designs Notes 4 The Internet Will Be Decolonized Information Is Power, But Must Technology Be Neutral? Mapping the Internet The Internet as a Set of Tubes: Virtual and Material Communications The Internet’s Geographic Imaginaries This Is a Pipe: The Internet as a Traveling Tube Other Infrastructures Technology Is People’s Labor This Is Not a Pipe: Alternative Materialities Power’s Plumbing Notes 5 Capture Is Pleasure Capturing the Undetectable Apprehending Is Embodied Sensing Seeing Like an Image-Recognition Algorithm The Pleasures of Capture Notes II This Is an Emergency 6 Sexism Is a Feature, Not a Bug Computing Firsts, Computing Fails Building a Broken System Lowering Standards to Create an Elite Fake It until You (Can Get a Woman to) Make It Empire 2.0 A Bug After All Looking Forward by Looking Back The Power of the Stories We Tell about Technology Notes 7 Gender Is a Corporate Tool IBM’s Progressive Labor and Gender Relations in the United States Mr. Watson’s “IBM Family” IBM’s Gender and Labor Relations in Germany Labor Organization in IBM’s German Subsidiary Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes 8 Siri Disciplines Voice Technologies Are Not Revolutionary Siri Disciplines Yes, Accent Bias Is a Thing Freshwater Yankee: From Assimilation to Alienation Language as a Tool of Imperialism In the Digital World, Not All Languages Are Created Equal A Rallying Call for Change Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes 9 Your Robot Isn’t Neutral Introduction Your Robot Is a Stereotype Why Are All the Robots White? Your Robot’s “Brain” Is Running on Dirty Data But My Robot Is for Social Good! Conclusion Notes 10 Broken Is Word “Here Indeed Was a Medley of Problems”: Arabic and the Typewriter “Something of a Pathological Case”: Arabic Script in Computer Software Beyond Technical Fixes: What Are the Better Questions? Notes 11 You Can’t Make Games about Much “Skinning” Games Playable Models Operational Logics Past the Limits? Notes III Where Will the Fire Spread? 12 Coding Is Not Empowerment Decoding Supply-Side Arguments: Is the Internet a Series of Pipelines? Belief in Meritocracy Considered Harmful Purpose: If Coding Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Conclusion: We Can Aim Higher Notes 13 Source Code Isn’t A Short Primer on the Programming Language Hierarchy The Sociopolitical Implications of Untrustworthy Machines The Thompson Hack in the World Coda: Fully Countering Trusting Trust Notes 14 Skills Will Not Set You Free Locating Skills Training and Protests in Seelampur Overturning Representation: The “Muslim Women” and Computer Training The Women across the Street: Disrupting Narratives of Discipline Conclusion Notes 15 Platforms Are Infrastructures on Fire Temporalities of Infrastructure Second-Order Large Technical Systems: Platforms as Fast Infrastructures Platforms and the “Modern Infrastructural Ideal” Three Platforms in African Contexts Conclusion Notes 16 Typing Is Dead The False Universality of QWERTY Universal Inequality Escaping Alphabetic Order: The Age of “Input” The Keyboard Is Not the Interface Conclusion Notes Afterwords How to Stop Worrying about Clean Signals and Start Loving the Noise Errors and Approximations How Not to Travel among the Disciplines What Should We Do? After the Fire Notes How Do We Live Now? In the Aftermath of Ourselves Notes Contributors Index