When I think about disposability, I think about namelessness. I think about whose pictures are taken in refugee camps. Or whose stones without names you look at at a mass grave, or just a ditch for that matter. To be disposable is to be nameless in somebody’s eyes.
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In 2011, the cultural critic Emily Nussbaum reflected on the flowering of online feminism through new publications, social media conversations, and digital organizing. But Nussbaum worried, even if you can expand the supply of who’s writing, will that actually change the influence of women’s voices in society? What if online feminism was just an echo chamber?
Generally people don’t see the skirmishes that are always always always going on in the background to preserve where we are now in terms of laws against sex discrimination or laws that would promote sex equality. But compared to where we were when the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, we are very much better off in terms of equality of rights being guaranteed by the law, because so many laws that did discriminate on their face are off the books as a result of the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment.
The best justification we have for killing fifty-six, fifty-seven, whatever billion land animals and a trillion sea animals every year is that they taste good. And so, in a sense how is this any different from Michael Vick, who likes to sit around a pit watching dogs fight, or at least he used to?
In 2009, when we began this initiative, there weren’t really that many women around to play these games. They were usually, “I’m the musician. I’m the one who carries the standard. I’m at home making food.”
I often try to tell people that Google is not providing information retrieval algorithms, it’s providing advertising algorithms. And that is a very important distinction when we think about what kind of information is available in these corporate-controlled spaces.
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite standing up here. I have spent the last few weeks with anxiety about how I needed to inspire a revolution and a lecture that was twenty-two minutes or less.