Your Computer Is on Fire

Technology scholars declare an emergency: attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.

This book sounds an alarm: we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual: everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China.

Benjamin Peters is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Tulsa and affiliated faculty at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Mar Hicks is Associate Professor of History at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Kavita Philip studies colonialism, neoliberalism, and technoscience using history and critical theory. She is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine.

When Did the Fire Start?
Part One | Nothing is Virtual
1 The Cloud is a Factory
2 Your AI is a Human
3 A Network is Not a Network
4 The Internet Will Be Decolonized
5 Capture is Pleasure
Part Two | This is an Emergency
6 Sexism is a Feature, Not a Bug
7 Gender is a Corporate Tool
8 Siri Disciplines
9 Your Robot Isn't Neutral
10 Broken is Word
11 You Can't Make Games About Much
Part Three | Where Will the Fire Spread?
12 Coding is Not Empowerment
13 Source Code Isn't
14 Skills Will Not Set You Free
15 Platforms are Infrastructures on Fire
16 Typing is Dead
How to Stop Worrying about Clean Signals and Start Loving the Noise
How Do We Live Now? In the Aftermath of Ourselves