‘Good Tech’ and Technologies of Elite Capture
Under review at Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience
2025
This paper examines the utopian fantasies of technologies developed in the service of social good–or “good tech”–and situates their increasing purchase within the technology industry in the broader context of a global crisis of care. We explore how aspirations towards greater empathy, global connectivity, and diversity are captured by elite tech entrepreneurs in a “progressive neoliberal” strategy to raise capital in the name of disaffected and exhausted workers. Through an analysis of emergent AI-enabled accent modification technologies, which promise to relieve call center workers from accent-based discrimination by artificially modifying the sound of their voice, we locate the affective lures operating in their futuristic fantasies and marketing strategies. In a peculiar alliance where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire toward making globalization “feel good,” we trace the ideological conditions that allow the exploitation of offshore workers to be re-coded as the employment of diverse workers. Thus understood, good tech rhetorics are productive discourses that function both as a mechanism of value accumulation and as a counterinsurgency tactic—they constitute concrete “structures of feeling” that sustain attachments to the social reproduction of racial capitalism and the continuation of postindustrial, colonial dispossession.
(co-authored with Juana C. Becerra)
* Nominated 2023 Most Impactful Research Paper by the RAI Institute
My dissertation project, titled “Untimely Algorithms, Technology, Political Thought, and Futurity” is a methodological contribution to the critical history of algorithms. It traces an unconventional genealogy of the algorithm from the technological imaginaries of classical political economic thought to the neoliberal thought project. Through this historiography, I propose to locate the algorithm avant la lettre, as a particular site of contestation over the boundary of the economic and political, the role of the human in political life, and the production of revolutionary desire. To this end, this dissertation surfaces the “political unconscious“ our technological imagination in the 21st century, and asks how this inheritance imposes limits on our capacity to imagine a different future.
Sample Chapter:
“Algorithms & Revolutionary Desire: Utopia After the Socialist Calculation Debate”
This chapter begins from the premise that ‘the algorithm’ is a collective speculation toward utopia. More than a set of technoscientific practices, material infrastructures, or forces of production, the algorithm is also a collection of desires that has mediated political imagination since at least the socialist calculation debates. Tracing an unconventional genealogy of the concept, I depart from typical narrations of its history as a progression of scientific inventions from the 1950s-present. I instead center a technological imaginary of the 1910-40s, one forged between socialists and neoliberals to answer the question of central planning. That the promise of AI rings so hollow today, I suggest, owes to our inheritance of the political unconscious of these debates. The concept of the algorithm was forged within a fundamentally elite discourse, one that imagined utopia as a rational economic order (whether realized by technocratic management or by spontaneous coordination) that will always disqualify popular and proletarian modes of economic planning, e.g., a technological revolution without a political or social revolution.
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