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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
We're all generating massive amounts of data and money that gets funneled to very few people, and so this is not a tenable economic situation.
Wendy Sung:So much can change within such a short span of time. Writing on the digital is always historical at that point.
Cassius Adair:That first chapter grounds us in that materialist economy in this classical understanding of labor and economy and environment.
André Brock:There's something to be said about the ways in which women of color, in particular, get erased by that particular manifestation of technology as well.
Lisa Nakamura:Welcome to this podcast and appreciation to the University of Minnesota Press for putting it together. My name is Lisa Nakamura, and I'm a professor of American culture and digital studies at the University of Michigan. I'm thrilled to have three very distinguished guests come to talk to me about my new book, The How Women of Color Built the Internet.
André Brock:My name is Andre Brock. I'm an associate professor of literature, media, and communications at Georgia Tech.
Wendy Sung:Hi, I'm Wendy Sung. I'm an assistant professor at UCLA in the department of world arts and cultures and dance.
Cassius Adair:My name is Cassius Adair . I'm a assistant professor of media studies inside the Parsons School of Art and Design inside the new school at New York City.
Lisa Nakamura:I'm going to make this very brief, hopefully just enough for people to want to maybe read it. So I wrote this as a result of studying digital labor in the twenty tens when it became apparent all of a sudden that people could do work, in video games. So I was looking at gold farmers who were mostly Asian, male workers who were building characters that were very leveled up and selling virtual currency for real money because it seemed like this was a whole other way of creating value for people who couldn't work in the kind of traditional labor markets of The US. And, you know, that moment, led me to think about the question of women of color and how their work has been foundational to what we call today computing, that is to say the microelectronics and assembly work that makes any kind of signal passing device possible. Social media, which is now the number one aspiration for a lot of Gen Z.
Lisa Nakamura:Like, they they really do think they have a better chance of earning a living and doing well, being an influencer than they do, say, getting into law school or even going to college. And thirdly, virtual reality and web three point o. So this book is not really a comprehensive history of everything women of color have done on the Internet at all. Though most of the work, I am arguing, is done by women of color to sustain these kinds of economies, and so I was looking at three specific case studies that were inflection points for moments of material and economic development on the internet. So in the first chapter, I look at a semiconductor plant in New Mexico on an Indian reservation.
Lisa Nakamura:It was run by the Fairchild Corporation. Corporation. It was one of the most advanced plants they had. It created components for the space program that were very high reliability, and it was staffed a 100% by Navajo women, almost a thousand of them. And I was interested in this because it's the dawn of outsourcing.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? It's the moment that computers become accessible to consumers and not just to the military. It was a start of the consumer electronics moment, but it was also prototyping how it is that nonwhite women and nonUS women because, you know, Navajo people are internally colonized. They're in The US in a way, but they're not protected by labor laws. They don't have, recourse in many ways to other forms of employment because there was no very little other industry on the reservation.
Lisa Nakamura:So I was interested to see how Navajo women were figured as ideal electronics workers because of their handcraft and their innate skill as rug weavers. So this narrative is being built by the company on top of the work that the women are actually doing. The plant was closed by the American Indian movement, but I was interested in it because it's not mentioned in any history of Silicon Valley or very, very few. And if it is mentioned, it's as an example of a brief moment between insourcing and outsourcing. So to me, it's a really great example of how women of color are seen as innately suited to be the creators of the stuff that we use to create other things.
Lisa Nakamura:And there's a lot of interesting kind of racial discourse around why they, in particular, are the ones to make this value. And then later on, they're seen again as, like, nonmodern, nontechnological, non non skillful in a lot of ways. And in the second chapter, I look at a person who I think everyone's heard of but maybe doesn't know that much about, which is Tila Tequila. And I was interested in her because she was the first really successful influencer. I feel like Myspace is very understudied in the field of digital media studies and communication.
Lisa Nakamura:All of the archive is gone because Myspace didn't back it up when they tried to migrate it, which is very, you know, of its of a piece with the way Myspace works. And I was interested in the erasure of her contribution and its denigration as being just about sex, right, or just about the kind of talentless work of influencers. So I wanted to talk about her erasure as strategic in the context of how we wanna remember who built this industry. And like Navajo women, the story is there, but it's not there. It's apparent that this happened, but it's also not mentioned even in, you know, kind of in-depth histories of social media and economics.
Lisa Nakamura:She developed a music player, which was, you know, eventually banned. She was very innovative in the way she put together her page. A lot of people said they learned how to code from Myspace. It may be the last moment that people were actually under the hood with computers at all and understand much about what they're doing. We can debate that, but I've heard it said by many people who are Gen X and millennials.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? Like, I know what HTML is because I was trying to get, you know, Fallout Boy on my page, and that's the only reason. So I was interested in her status as a bisexual refugee and as an Asian American woman in particular because this is also the moment when there's no regulation of abuse or harassment online. And, I found that she was probably the first person to endure a real fire hose of abuse and had to moderate it herself. So now people can outsource that.
Lisa Nakamura:Platforms are a little more accountable. She may have been the first one to actually have to have full contact with that. So I talk a little bit about content moderation, also woman of color job. But in that chapter, I argue it's always been a woman of color job. It's just been an invisible job.
Lisa Nakamura:And today, outsourced to Ghana, outsourced to, you know, any country that really is desperate for money. In the third chapter, I was looking at virtual reality as one of those technologies along with crypto that and AI that were supposed to be the new economy in our, decade, and, really, of course, AI was the one. So it's always interesting to look at technologies that didn't quite get there and to see what the hype was around them. Like, why was this always perpetually going to happen but never really did happen? So I'm using that moment in the twenty twenties to talk about how DEI was trying to use was was used and being used by the tech industry, right, as a kind of alibi for why they need to exist because we're promoting new forms of connection and understanding, especially with people who would never tolerate your presence or who you don't respect.
Lisa Nakamura:And we are also, building identities as being interested in diversity. And from the point of view of now, it's hard to believe that the Nasdaq ever required companies in its exchange to have a diversity officer or to have a person of color on the board. But that was the law for a little while or rather their regulation, and then it was rolled back, and, of course, everybody got fired who was in those jobs. But there was a minute when tech was trying to be at the center of this conversation about DEI. So their earlier narratives about equality and democracy, we can all be the same on on online by hiding our identities, is kind of coming back only in a really odd way is now we can all be women of color in VR by walking in their shoes so we can really understand and get it this time.
Lisa Nakamura:And, you know, it's been completely reversed, all of that, but I wanted to capture that moment just to see the ways that women of color, again, at the heart of a economic strategy, even when that strategy doesn't work or is very, very short lived. Again, this is not every moment in time. It's just these three, which I thought were emblematic of these shifts in the way the digital is understood and computing is understood. So first, where do computers come from? Women of color.
Lisa Nakamura:Secondly, what is social media built upon? I think there's spaces of vulnerability for all young women, all young people, but especially young women of color, which has been kinda amply proven, more harassment, less profit. TikTok is a great example of this. In chapter three, the moment of hype and paradigm shift towards radical forms of automation, even the automation of identity, and you could say the automation of like racism itself. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:And the incorporation of that. So I just want to open it up to people here because you all have been an inspiration for everything here in so many ways. Mean, I especially Andre and, his pioneering work on ratchetry. And so when I was working on Tila Tequila, I thought about Andre right away.
André Brock:No pressure. No pressure. Let me go up a level. I really enjoyed reading this. As always, you are an extremely clear and cogent writer, able to capture theoretical perspectives and apply them to the subject positions of people who are implicated with technology.
André Brock:There's a reason why I've
Cassius Adair:been following you for the
André Brock:last twenty, thirty years now. I didn't say that out loud. I'm curious because I want to hear more about the connections between these three. It feels as if you're going from meso to micro to macro, which is an interesting way of progression. Right?
André Brock:You go from the bodies of these these laborers, and I would see that as an expression of craft to the body of this woman who is clear as performing self and realize that that self could be commodified. But that's not the same as being a laborer and a crafter. Right? And then this third space where the affect of race and identification through trauma is is available through VR. Right?
André Brock:But the bodies have have been digitized, for lack of a better word. Can you help me understand the connections you're making between the three, I guess, is what I'm asking?
Lisa Nakamura:Yeah. I think what I was interested in was, to start, forms of visuality and obfuscation. You know? Why is it that women of color are kinda paraded as subjects of, you know, to create profit with, right, or to create profit themselves. I think that Tila Tequila is viewed as someone who is very successful financially, but as I mentioned in the book, she had to do a GoFundMe to pay her rent in 2016.
Lisa Nakamura:So why is it that when profit is generated from women of color's bodies, it tends not to stick? You know? It tends to be funneled from them to really large corporations and credit for the innovation also given to these corporations. So, you know, I'm writing in chapter three about Oculus, which was bought by Meta, which is the the main, you know, owner, I guess, of what we think of as ARVR platforms. Not to say these are incredibly they're not OpenAI.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? But still the idea of consolidation, that if a platform exists, it has to be dominated by one person. I remember the browser wars in '20 you know, the February. Right? There was such a diversity of things that people could use.
Lisa Nakamura:So I'm interested in women of color and these different scales, but also as paradigmatic of the reason that it's such a radically, economically unequal industry, because it's not as if women of color are alone. Right? We're all generating massive amounts of data and money that gets funneled to very few people, and so this is not a tenable economic situation. Right? It it casts its life.
Lisa Nakamura:It cannot continue. It's just really unfair, and people are getting very, very angry about it. So I think a lot of the critique of capitalism is actually a critique of this arrangement, but people don't know to call it that. So, you know, we've been talking about the AI bubble in the financial news and how all of the profits, in the stock market for the last year and a half have been built on AI alone. Like, if we didn't have that bubble, there would be no growth at all.
Lisa Nakamura:So this is unsustainable, and it's underwritten by the suppression and, I would say, strategic forgetting of who's doing the actual work. So I think the act of memory is really important here and the act of seeing what we're not supposed to see, which is who's making the stuff that we're using. You know? Or in the case of Tila Tequila, who made it initially, created the conditions for other people to make it, who doesn't profit and who does. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:Who's getting paid and who isn't getting paid. So in chapter three, I talk about these poor voice actors, some of whom are white folks, right, who have to pretend to be autistic or, you know, black or disabled and have people abuse them so that other people can learn how to act right. You know? Like, this is this is like sin eating. It's, you know, just a very medieval idea about who does work so other people can feel good about themselves.
Lisa Nakamura:So, yeah, I think this is just a way to say, I'm looking at women of color because that's what I know, right, in my body as a person, but also as a scholar. But I do think this paradigm of looking to see what's not we're not supposed to see in regards to who's doing work applies probably to everybody who has any kind of interest in inequality. I mean, I would hope so anyway.
André Brock:Thank you.
Wendy Sung:Thank you so much for that, Lisa. In as I was reading this book, which, I mean, obviously, I love I already teach the indigenous circuits all the time in my class. I was really struck by the way that you use Japanese interment in your own personal history that I haven't seen actually in the rest of your work. It became this kind of instructive, like, historical touchstone throughout the book in the introduction and the conclusion. And I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how it comes to be this kind of blueprint or the kind of bookends for this book in particular.
Lisa Nakamura:Yeah. Thank you. Well, the short answer is I have tenure, so I can do that. But I think the the personal turn is just another form of transparency. If I'm talking about obfuscation, right, if I'm talking about who's hiding what or what kinds of motives are are not made clear to us.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? It seemed to me to be incumbent and maybe productive to make transparent what my interest in this is. And, also, just for people to understand that just because you see a middle class person of color doesn't mean that they haven't dealt with a lot of, like, genocidal aggression or, you know, racial violence from the state, like, within memory. So, you know, both sides of my family were interned. I had an uncle who died at 11 from meningitis in an internment camp hospital because there was really no care for kids then.
Lisa Nakamura:And yet you know? And my dad worked for Fairchild Corporation. So in a in a way, like, everything in here does come from personal experience. It's just very obscured. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:And we tend to try to hide that. We tend to try to write it off as something else, like throw Deleuze on top of it. Right? But I think that it might not be bad for us to make our own interests clear in these cases, and I I hope that people feel empowered to do that more because then the reader knows, like, why you care. Like, why are you invested in this?
Lisa Nakamura:So I came at each of these chapters in a kind of personal way. You know? I've watched Hila Tequila when I was, a young professor, and I tried to give a paper on her at Asian American studies in 2,008, and everybody hated it because she was just so derided and so hated. And I thought there's something here. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:We're in Asian American studies, and she's the most famous Asian American that is around right now. So is it is it like fear of the Internet or fear of ratchetry or fear of the popular? Like, I I didn't really know. Is it, like, Asian respectability? Like, it it seemed like it was all that, and then I didn't think about it for fifteen years.
Lisa Nakamura:So, you know, I think as an Asian woman, you cannot have but seen. Tila Tequila had some feeling about it. You know? And so I I tried to write about that. Like, pride, desire, shame.
Lisa Nakamura:Like, it was all kinda coming together, and I think that was what made her so popular in a way too. Like, we didn't know what to do with her. So more than one Asian American woman I have said, a Vietnamese woman said to me, we don't claim her. You can take her. You know, we'll put her in the racial draft.
Lisa Nakamura:Not that there is one. So, again, like, she's just such a touchstone, I think, as well for refugees too. Like, this is not a a success story in the traditional way that, like, literature and films celebrate as uplift for Asian American women. But I wanna know what you think about it, Wendy, because Teal Tequila was around when you were in a kinda even more formative media moment, probably.
Wendy Sung:Oh, absolutely. I watched Shot at Love with Teal Tequila all throughout graduate school. I was very, very interested in her. I mean, she is the OG, most public Asian baby girl. You know what I mean?
Wendy Sung:And I think that the Asian baby girl is now being recuperated among my students as, like, an actual site of subcultural resistance in a way. Right? And so I think if I were to teach that article today, I think people would have a very different kind of read on her than, you know, when she came out. Definitely. Definitely.
Wendy Sung:And that article was so helpful because there you're right. There is so much. Not only has she disappeared, right, and made it visible in terms of social media platforms and that kind of labor, but also within Asian American studies, there is an a very, very kind of territorial kind of respectability politics around her. Right? That I think that Celine Pernish Chamizu tries to kind of recuperate in her book of hypersexuality of race.
Wendy Sung:Right? To reconsider those kinds of dynamics, but has the kind of benefit and the legitimacy of kind of historical backward thinking. Right? And these kinds of historical archival texts that Teela Tequila does not. Right?
Wendy Sung:Like, her appearance on MySpace, and I I still remember vividly the GIF of her kind of dropping it like it's hot as, like, repetitive GIF That was her profile page, like her thing. Yeah. And I think that's it's a very different kind of recuperation, right, around kind of hypersexuality of race, when it becomes something that's so close. And I think that's, I think that's also something that I wrestle with, and I'm sure so many of us wrestle with in terms of writing about the near present or the present, right? That so much can change within such a short span of time.
Wendy Sung:Like, writing on the digital is always historical at that You are always anxiously anticipating this kind of bleeding edge of technological obsolescence, right, of the research, of everything. And so part of what I wanted to ask you was because you've been doing this for so long and you've seen this kind of process where you're writing on the really contemporary and the new kind of cutting edge and the kind of publication process is how it is, academia is how it is, it becomes so historical in this way that's so fast. And I'm just wondering how you deal with this. Right? Even when you're talking about, you know, everything that happened in 2020, you know, we're, we're only six years away.
Wendy Sung:It has been the fastest switch. Yes. Right. I think I have ever seen in terms of the pendulum coming back and forth. So I'm just so curious to hear your thoughts about this because I'm trying to write the conclusion of my book and trying to think about this kind of future retrospective or this kind of orientation towards the near present and how to cope with that, right, and the importance of that kind of very short kind of historical distance, but important.
Wendy Sung:If we do get it wrong, right? There's still value in that, but, you know, there's still effort in that trying, but I'm still trying to kind of reconcile with it. I'm just curious about what also other people think too.
Lisa Nakamura:Yes. Yeah. I wanna hear what Cass and Andre think because they both work with near present, you were saying, archives. Like, people remember this stuff. They're still alive.
Lisa Nakamura:It's very different, you know, from other kinds of history.
Cassius Adair:Yeah. I was thinking that I'm I'm in the process of turning a chapter that I thought was gonna be a conclusion about the sort of, like, triumphant emergence of the trans woman as a sort of, like, non pervert new sort of, like, technical Mhmm. You know, model minority within the industry. And then, like, as soon as I finished that draft, we became perverts again. Right?
Cassius Adair:So it just became this And so the chapter now is just a it's just like a straight up history of, like, the last three years of the Obama administration. It's so narrow. But it does teach you a lot. Like, the argument now I'm having to make is something like what seemed to be a liberal or neoliberal or sort of faux progressive alliance between capital and the state and this sort of multicultural imaginary set the grounds for the contemporary alliance between a neo fascist state and the tech industry. What has not changed is the tech industry's desire to have proximity to the state in order to beat back basically antitrust legislation.
Cassius Adair:That is the game here. And so it seems in the rearview mirror, like, oh, all the thinking I was doing about inclusion and the sort of neoliberal consensus on which we can do tokenism or whatever. That is a sort of smokescreen itself for the fact that all this is about avoiding litigation and about being able to buy up all of your competition and drive towards monopoly. So it's interesting to think about that sort of layer as a sort of aesthetic strategy on the part of the state and of the corporation, and also having to reanalyze the meaning of that stuff and be like, shit, it was actually, they were bad the whole time. But they used the bodies of marginalized people to just basically very Potemkin like prop up their monopolizing for a couple of years.
Cassius Adair:And it did trick people, right? Like, it feels like we should all be like good enough social critics to be like, well, that's what corporations do. And we're all Marxists. Like, we don't agree. But it really was a moment where people felt, I can learn to code and get ahead, or I can learn to code and feel some kind of economic security.
Cassius Adair:I can have health insurance for the first time if I just joined this industry that's offering me a bridge to the middle class. And I think that, you know, on the one hand in the rearview mirror is really, like, sad and tragic. But also, there's something about the cruel optimism of that moment that feels really important to crystallize in our histories. So to me, like the way that I read that final chapter is something like, wow, you can see that some people believe that they could be doing the right thing by doing something that, one, if we just think about it as vulgar Marxist, clearly is not going to work. Also, if we think about it from the perspective of a slightly advanced historical perspective in 2026, we know it's not going to work.
Cassius Adair:But the question really becomes why did they believe that this could be a strategy that would undo some of the entrenchments of racial capital that haven't been magically undone by any prior technology? Technology. TV was also supposed to bring us the news into our living room and let us sort of observe the other. Of these things have happened in the history of media. Right?
Cassius Adair:So at rate, I think it's a fascinating question about how do we grapple with a moment that gives us access to almost a sort of grief about a neoliberal optimism. At least for me, I'm like, I don't believe that anymore. Whatever 18 year old me that voted for Barack Obama is now like, Oh, you should have known better. Right? But we affectively did not.
Cassius Adair:And that's important to historicize that affect, I think. And really understand and grapple with what it meant that we thought we could do something better by using these tools. So that chapter really speaks to what I'm trying to write, but also what I'm trying to get my students to feel, which is something like, we weren't all stupid when we thought, won't it be great if we have these apps or these programs that can be more efficient, that can bring people together? Won't it be great when I can talk to my cousin on Facebook and who I haven't seen in a long time? Right?
Cassius Adair:We weren't sitting there being like, I can't wait to give all my data to Facebook so they can then win democracy, right? Like there was a real dream there, I think. And I think that's important to, if we really want to get under the hood in terms of like what values tech is selling to us, it's important to know what those are and how they feel, and how marginalised people I think are especially targeted by that optimism. That wasn't a question.
Lisa Nakamura:Cass, that's amazing. I mean, what you're doing is explaining why it is in plain sight the tech industry got to be 100% white and male or 100%, you know, East Asian, South Asian, white and male in the moment of liberalism, the moment of like, this was happening at the same time. Like, it's not a paradox. It's of a piece. Like, it's really not a contradiction.
Lisa Nakamura:You can't steal something that people are giving you. So the question, I think, was how to deal with the near present archive, how to do the research that we do. And I think only one person has not spoken on that.
André Brock:Who would that be? I have been running into roadblocks for the last few years and pitching book projects that focus on older histories of the Internet. Even despite the success of Charlton McElwain's Black Software, I find that the couple of publishers I've talked to, they want topics that are current. And in that way, they would kind of reflect our students who are basically trapped into an endless now where the internet is literally only the technologies that they've used since they, you know, got woke, not woke in the conservative sense, but the way they remember themselves come to life. Right?
André Brock:And this came most crucially, this most vividly to my understanding when I was arguing with people about Kamala at 24, and a young lady pointed out to me that, you know, she couldn't vote for Kamala because of genocide. I'm like, there's been, Israel has been conducting genocide against the Palestinians since the 1940s. She's like, well, I just now saw it on TikTok. Right? And so the immediacy of the platform, right, does a lot to erase the memories of anything that could have gone before.
André Brock:And, you know, Lisa, you and I've talked about this a lot. I think the way the interface is set up, particularly phone interfaces, where when you switch apps, it switches interfaces, and it switches interactions between the user and the application. And so what was on the screen before is completely wiped out. Matter of fact, it even gets dropped from memory after a while, it has to refresh. Right?
André Brock:And I think there's something to be said about the ways in which women of color, in particular, get erased by that particular manifestation of technology as well. It's kind of hard to maintain a focus on structural dimensions of inequality and power when every time you open an app, it's all new. Right? And I'm thinking about this too, in terms of customer service, which used to be a woman dominated field, and now it's dominated by AI, right? Still keeps the AI voices.
André Brock:But if you ever make the mistake of closing that window or going to a different tab, you come back and that thing has been erased all over again. Right? And there's no such thing as where you can be on hold with an AI agent and will restart the conversation many at any time. Right? And I'm bringing that up in part to try to stitch together the three things that you have here, the three case studies you have here.
André Brock:Because I think in terms of materiality, the efforts of the indigenous women for the Fairchild backpourri have been erased because we can't it's really difficult to get these students to think about the materiality of the devices that they hold and how that materiality enables the virtuality. And similarly for Myspace, people often forget that Myspace modeled itself on Black Planet, right? And so when you have a woman who's coming from The Philippines, and the ways that The Philippines and other Southeast Asian cultures are deemed at the lower strata of Asian hierarchy, Asian and South Asian, right? It makes sense then that she became popular on an app that modeled itself after black people in a way that allowed her ratchetness or excess of life came to be. But it also makes sense that because of the fleeting nature of social media apps at that time, there used to be an acronym Y A S N, yet another social network.
André Brock:And we were tired of signing up for them, Right? And so she quickly gets subsumed, even though she goes on to MTV fame and all this other stuff, she quickly gets assumed as Facebook begins to dominate the space. You know, Dana wrote about this in Race After the Internet. These students fled Myspace for Facebook. So she was doomed in part because of her race and part because of her sexuality, but mostly because of that structure of the app that she became most famous in to obscurity at some point.
André Brock:The funny thing is and I've talked about this with you before, Lisa. We've been talking a long time about whiteness having an interpreter flexibility that is denied to the bodies of non white people. Right? So Logan Paul is still a thing. Right?
André Brock:Right. And somehow, these white men and some of the younger white women have still managed to have these influencer careers long after the apps that we originally found them on have become defunct, where the brown folk are not able to do that as well. So, Tila's health issues, her decline can be traced to the obsolescence of the platform that she came in, but in part that obsolescence is a part of modernity, where whiteness gets to continue reinventing itself and people of color get locked into it. And so, I'll stop this monologue shortly. Right.
André Brock:The last thing I wanted to say was the last chapter is interesting to me, and part because of my interest in techno culture. And a friend of mine wrote two articles that seem deeply significant to me for this last chapter. She wrote an article about online tourism, and she wrote another article about glitch races, both of which are mentioned in this book. I'm just bringing them up because I get a chance to talk to Lisa and I haven't in a while. Right?
André Brock:And I was curious that even as you work really hard to center both of those things and talk about VR as a vehicle for empathy, I don't know if you remember all the conversations we used to have about Second Life and how people were doing online tourism and saying, you know, occupy the body of a black avatar for a day so you can see how they get interacted with other people. And I'm like, I think that neatly falls into both of those categories as a way to presage what this company and Facebook were doing when they said you can portray environments of trauma in order to inhabit the experiences of brown folk without having to be about folk. The classic Paul Modi quote, everybody wants to be an n word, but nobody wants to be an n word. Right? So I'll stop.
André Brock:I'm monologuing. But I just wanted to try to bring those three together. Thinking through glitch racism, online tourism, whiteness' interpretive flexibility, but also Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, right? Or whiteness is bounded by the identity of the African American whiteness in particular, which I think it's fair to say these books are largely focused on American whiteness, right? Are bounded by a love for and a hatred of the capacities of the black body, the brown body, the woman's body in ways that allow white men to maintain that interpretive flexibility and to create quote unquote experiences, or even critical environments where they can denigrate the capacities of the women who contribute to them as well.
Lisa Nakamura:Wow. That's so well put. I mean, that's a kind of precis of the overrepresentation of white whiteness, which Sylvia Wynter, you know, I think puts very well. It's not so much that, you know, everybody else is underrepresented, though I think as we've talked about, often there's misrepresentation or, you know, erasure, but rather there's just this massive overrepresentation of one group of people and their experience, which is then built upon the erasure of other people. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:So this doesn't just happen along the axis of race. It happens along the axis of sexuality and of class, I would say, well. When you mentioned second life, believe me, I was thinking about it because that was such a long time ago, and a lot of the, meta chat applications do not look any better than Second Life. In fact, they're much worse because at least you had legs in Second Life. So what happened that you can take a worse product and remarket it as being the cutting edge twenty years later?
Lisa Nakamura:I mean, in some ways, this is a playbook for how it is that tech always gets to act like it's new. You know? So people who study the near present of digital culture are in some ways doing what we're always being asked to do, which is to look at what happened before and explain to yourself, like, where have I seen this before? I think a lot of people get that deja vu using apps. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:Like, like, this didn't we do this quite a while ago? I mean, World of Warcraft also had a lot of these things going on where people were building differently raised avatars and then living out these fantasies of Indianness or, you know, blackness or whatever. So, yeah, by no means new. I think the question for me is always why now? Like, why is this particular fantasy coming back in this moment?
Lisa Nakamura:Like, who is it serving? What is it giving that needs to be given and couldn't be got any other way? So I think as, you know, digital media scholars, as Wendy's saying, it's always a kind of race. You feel more hectic because things are gonna change. Like, your work on Twitter, Andre, when the minute they came out, I'm like, thank god for this book because this moment's over already.
Lisa Nakamura:There is no chronicle of what this was. Right? Those tweets are gone. Like, yours you have the only record of that, and it's so valuable. Other forms of culture don't really get to disappear this way, for better and for worse.
Lisa Nakamura:So, on the one hand, what is you're saying? We're always kinda looking over our shoulder like, oh my god. Like, who else is writing on this this minute? And how am I gonna make this a contribution to the study of humanity, not just the study of Internet? Right?
Lisa Nakamura:Well, at the same time, no one's writing on these things. At least it it seems to me sometimes that what we do is seen as niche even though it's, like, way more engaging in terms of actual people using these things. You know, you've heard me all go on about how really, really obscure, things sometimes get a lot more attention than things people are using every day. Right? It it almost disappears because it's ubiquitous.
Lisa Nakamura:It's every day. And that makes it harder to study, weirdly, right, because it's seen as not valuable or unimportant. So when you talked about pitching to a publisher, let's talk about the history of, like, technology. What could be more interesting right now, honestly? It's my question.
André Brock:It's that question of the endless now and how the screenshot remains one of the best forms of capturing any digital moment. Right? You can't rely on APIs. You can't rely on on scraping. You can't rely that they'll allow you to even pull stuff.
André Brock:And so the screenshot is the is the tool, but I don't think I answered the actual prompt, is working through this post president. Just If only just to say, I think Wendy said it really well, we're always a step behind. And, you know, we've talked about this before, Lisa, it's like, by the time we write about something, it's two years out of date. If it's a book, it's four years out of date. Right?
André Brock:And yet that we're pushed to continue to make it seem like this is something that's new and of interest. That's a really hard road to hoe. No Shakespeare scholar. Sorry. No Shakespeare scholar is being asked to keep up to date with what's going on in Shakespeare.
André Brock:And yet here we are. Right? I wanna say one more thing, and I'm curious for all all of us on the screen. Does it make a difference that we're doing this from a media studies lens?
Lisa Nakamura:You know, when you ask that, it makes me think of how media studies has always borrowed from so many other disciplines. Like Asian American studies. Wendy and I clearly come from that, you know, lineage, scholarly lineage, and queer and trans studies and, you know, American studies. I think when we go to our conferences, we aren't all from the same place at all. And that's probably one of the strengths of of doing this kind of work is you I feel like we are less bound by methods.
Lisa Nakamura:You know? We'd get to, in some ways, create our own methods, which is a a privilege and a problem. You know? So I had a short method section, which I never do. Like, I feel like that's not our job to have a method section, but I did it this time because I made some weird choices, and that's why you need it.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? Because people don't understand why you don't have any actual teela tequila tweets or any pictures of her. And sometimes you just need to be overt and say, like, this is why I didn't put that in because that's actually pretty abusive. You know? Like, there we should start having some ethical lines and standards that we use.
Lisa Nakamura:Not that we make anyone else use them, but that we're clear for ourselves what those are, what we're gonna put in, what we're not gonna put in. And I wanted to throw this one to Cass because you're actively writing now, which I am not. And that question of, like, how do you deal with subjects who may already be stigmatized, already, you know, exposed to a lot of harm, you know, yet at the same time, you wanna read them closely and you wanna read them carefully.
Cassius Adair:Yeah. I appreciate that. I mean, one of the people who I was most scared of writing about passed away, and I I had this horrible moment of, okay, now I get to write without her watching me. And then also, that's such an academic y feeling, right? To be like, oh, I'm treating this person with so much of a subject or an object and not like an interlocutor that there's some kind of relief there.
Cassius Adair:Just wanted to like, I noted that sort of ethical lapse in my researcher brain and was like, Okay, I need to put that aside. But I think there's also like, one of the things I'm really trying to do when I'm working with folks and interviewing them for this book is giving them a lot of agency about how they're portrayed. To the point where like, I'm trying to write a method section that basically is like, you are never going to be able to verify, like any of the data, you outsider or like peer reviewer that I have in this book. Like some of this stuff was given to me over signal by somebody whose name I don't know. Or like, here's an interview that like, I am not allowed to even let somebody else transcribe because the person who I'm speaking with is like, I'm taking all of my Google money.
Cassius Adair:I'm doing some illegal shit with it. This is my sort of ethical penance for having been part of the tech industry. Now I need to go serve my anarchist trans community. And I don't wanna tell you where we are. I was like, okay, cool.
Cassius Adair:I don't even know if I can write about any of that, but the sort of ideological transformation needs to be in the book. So how do I almost there's almost an evidentiary problem. And that evidentiary problem in the contemporary moment, I think of like real targeted surveillance of people who are doing kind of any type of anti state behavior, in some ways, like importantly mirrors the earlier historical problem that I face in the book, which is people who were not out as trans when they were doing the work that they're doing. And so they appear in the archive differently than they appear in any sort of verifiable, like, life outside of the archive, right? So it might be somebody who is whose name and gender is very different.
Cassius Adair:I'm writing about Sandy Stone, and you cannot get Bell Labs to admit that they employed Sandy Stone. And I'm like, I can give you I can go look in the census data. I can go find her, like, birth name. I know what name she was employed under. And they're just like, we don't have those records.
Cassius Adair:I was like, come on, know you do. Like, I know you do. You know what I mean? But it's just because there's so many layers of like, transformation, of obfuscation, of flight away from capture that these trans people are, you know, kind of enacting. To some extent, my whole method section is like, you just have to trust me.
Cassius Adair:Like, you just have to trust me that the women on the internet are who they say they are. You have to trust me that people were feeling like they were trans employees even when they didn't look like it. That they feel like their technological contributions are trans contributions, even if they like appear on their company rosters as like white dudes wearing pocket protectors and like look so boring and so normal and no one would ever discriminate against them at work. And then they're like, I did experience discrimination. I'm like, on what basis did you, looking like a white man, experience discrimination?
Cassius Adair:But there, I have to take them seriously. They're sort of subjective experiences of marginalization seriously. But yeah, I think that writing question, like, I think in some ways I'm like perversely comforted by the fact that we live in a culture where the logical chain of evidence is already in doubt. It's like broadly, like we as scholars get to turn to fabrication and fabulation and speculation and more imaginative critique as a way to ethically combat the fact that the official accounts of things right now are increasingly fake. Right?
Cassius Adair:So we're like, okay, what kind of knowledge are we producing? Like the state is lying to us. All these corporations are lying to us. There's so much vaporware. Is AI even real?
Cassius Adair:Like all of these things are these sort of fantasies. And so we can say, what is the counter story that we're telling? We can ask people to take that sort of like ethical and political argument seriously. And we can ask people to suspend a little bit of disbelief in the service of a really important counter narrative. Cause they're already suspending disbelief when it comes to like, I don't know, how many COVID-nineteen cases are there right now?
Cassius Adair:I don't know. How many people are we killing in Iran? I don't know. We have to just make a claim that what we are doing in our work is important and valuable and real, even if so and so who's peer reviewing it doesn't get to read over all my files, like doesn't get to see your screenshots of Tila Tequila. I don't know.
Cassius Adair:It's just like, it's a weird moment to be making arguments based on evidence. It's almost like I have to argue for the legitimacy of a whole worldview as a precondition. I guess that's what I see you doing, I think, the opening section of the book where you're like, I have to argue for the legitimacy of a woman of color analytic on the history of technology for you to take any of these case studies seriously as important interventions. And that's why that opening chapter, I feel so powerful, because you are looking at these different sectors, these different time periods, these studies that would otherwise look incommensurate. And so the analysis and the framework that you're doing to establish a woman of color analytic as a central one feels like the most important contribution that enables the rest of us to say, No, this weird thing that I'm writing about, I promise it's important.
Cassius Adair:Right? Because it lets you reorient the scholarship around that point of view.
Lisa Nakamura:Wow. Thank you, Cass. That is eloquent. I wish I'd written that. But, yeah, I think that's very much the case.
Lisa Nakamura:Like, being able to see something which is being purposely hidden from you hopefully helps you see other things. I'm I was hopeful that these case studies wouldn't seem just random things that were interesting to me. I think that they are all emblematic of these paradigm shifts in technology. So they're not even about, like, when could women of color vote or, you know, what was the first convention of women of color. Those histories exist.
Lisa Nakamura:Like, we even talked about them, like the bridge this bridge called my back. Right? There's wonderful histories of women of color activism, which, actually this this is not. It's more what do we get to do if we look at women of color in spaces where they're said not to be. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:Because they're, in fact, just ubiquitous. Like, they really, really outnumber what we would call engineers. No. Right. I know your thoughts about engineers, but the, you know, the conditions of possibility for engineering are like cheap materials because you can't do experiments if everything costs a lot of money.
Lisa Nakamura:It has to be super cheap. Right? And it has to be everywhere. I mean, just in the broader sense of reproductive labor, you can't do innovation without somebody making your lunch. This has been a suppression in Marxism since the beginning.
Lisa Nakamura:What is labor? Right? Is is it only paid labor? I think as you say, like, we're trying to establish reality. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:Or what happened? Let's just say what happened in a moment where everything is radically in question. Is this made by AI? Is it real? Is this a real person?
Lisa Nakamura:Is it a fake person? I mean, Andre, you and I remember in the nineties how it was really hard to publish stuff on virtual worlds and virtual communities because people would say, well, how do you know this person is who they say? Like, how do you know that this person is actually from here? This age, like, well, it's not really about that. It's really more about, like, what are this vast number of people doing all night long on these networks that they're paying for?
Lisa Nakamura:How are they living their lives? And now we see this as important, just as anonymity is almost impossible. Just to validate what you were saying, Cass, I think that, you know, women of color as an analytic really is about seeing what you're not supposed to see. But I think also, like, queer and trans studies is that and, you know, other areas. Just as we're seeing these things defunded, that's not coincidental.
André Brock:Come on, Wendy. Sure I'll turn the monologue.
Lisa Nakamura:Writing about vision a lot, right, with the facial recognition stuff?
Wendy Sung:I am. It's still a nascent project, right, the second project, but I'm still trying to think about these kinds of moments where I'm thinking about immigration documentation of Chinese, immigrants during Chinese exclusion, and how immigrant documentation becomes implemented because of kind of anti Chinese sentiment and how Chinese immigrants use that way, the kind of logics of non recognition through inscrutability and indistinguishability to trick kind of immigration officials. So, you know, having these fictitious stories, using these kinds of logics of non recognition to their own advantage, so at the same time that there is visibility, there is the record, there is the archive, it also becomes this kind of site of facial evasion in which it becomes, right, like this kind of evidence of data regulation and this kind of data regime and at the same time an invasion of it simultaneously. And so I am interested in this kind of appearance and non appearance, this kind of simultaneity that happens. Teal tequila is, like, the most famous Myspace.
Wendy Sung:You know what I mean? If you talk about Myspace, teal tequila is it, Right? But then it becomes completely effaced in terms of the scholarly literature, which gives her legitimacy, validity, kind of all of these things. But no one can forget Teal Tequila. So she becomes this interesting figure of both hyper appearance and also disappearance at the same time.
Wendy Sung:It's not that we don't remember her. It's just this kind of reluctance to remember her in a particular way and her labor in a particular way.
Cassius Adair:I'm curious who is the contemporary Tila Tequila? Like, who is the figure who holds that space in our students' imaginations? Who's a real, like, platform star? Like, who's used TikTok better than anyone else?
Lisa Nakamura:Oh, good question.
Wendy Sung:I guess Addison Rae?
André Brock:Maybe. Yeah. Not exotic enough.
Cassius Adair:Yeah, right. This is the thing. It's like, there's all these like white women influencers who just created like these trad wife careers. Whiteness and thinness are so valued by TikTok. I mean, part of why I'm thinking about this is because your chapter convinced me that Tila Tequila should be understood as a innovator of the economy of influencing.
Cassius Adair:And was an early adopter in such a way that she was actually too early, right, to profit in the way that she should have. Like, she should have had brand deals, right? A contemporary version would be selling sunglasses and making bank off of that, even if it was pennies on the dollar per view. But like, where's that economy now? And who does it latch on to?
Cassius Adair:And what types of subjects can do that?
André Brock:Reality stars. So I'm thinking Alondria from the last season, was it Love is Blind? I never can remember the name. So the right? Love Island.
André Brock:Right? And so she's managed to work herself into commodification commodification in a way that has been interesting, where she's starting to get modeling contracts and stuff like that. But her interiority is not on display in the same way that Taylor's was. I mean, this is one of things I really loved about that chapter where you were talking about how she created a form of digital intimacy in a space that previously had not been known to talk about intimacy at scales. Right?
André Brock:And so I don't know if I maybe I think Cardi is actually the right answer. Cardi will go on and talk about her love of history and do political critiques and talk about her baby daddy and talk about sex and then turn around and she'll be doing photoshoots and high couture, right, or twerking with the next young star. So, yeah, I think Cardi is the closest thing we have to where Tila is at this moment.
Lisa Nakamura:Yeah. There is a desire for a kind of wayward woman of color sexuality, which is irrepressible, which says the quiet part, which is really, in many ways, unpredictable and lawless, but that can quickly turn around. And so I I kinda worry sometimes for people who are performing this role, which is so vital for other people to see. Like, as you were saying, like, white women are not subject to it in the good and the bad sense of the word. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:They're the kind of domesticity that's available to them is not this kind of, you know, transgressive way of, like, making food, which Cardi B will do. Or, like, it's no coincidence that Cardi B and Tila Tequila both did sex work. I think that they have both mentioned that. Like, their roots of social media are in sex work. So Black Planet only got to survive because it became a dating site.
Lisa Nakamura:Asian Avenue stole Tila Tequila from her own kind of semi porn site, and Myspace had a law against people doing brand deals. Right? Like so it's it's not a coincidence that women of color are subjected to these kinds of suppressions where they're building a space and a niche that other people can, in fact, go ahead and make a brand deal or spin off their own brand of pots and pans. I'm thinking of the pioneer woman somehow as somebody who's the earliest trad wife. You know, someone who went from blogging, I think she was a mommy blogger, to now having a partnership with Target.
Lisa Nakamura:You know? It feels like that was fast. And I don't think she could sell nudes, honestly. When I think about what women of color influencers can do, right, if they really, really need to sustain a living, that's the next thing. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:OnlyFans or things like that. So do you remember the Octomom?
André Brock:Mhmm.
Lisa Nakamura:I heard that she was on on OnlyFans. I'm like, that makes so much sense. She's another woman of color. You know?
André Brock:Technically. Yeah. I'm thinking too of the ways in which K pop and J pop girlies are not nearly as open. They're exploited and commodified for sure. Right?
André Brock:But not in the same way as Teal Teal O'Lakes. I think you you really hit a really fantastic point where you talk about how all that labor that Teela did was stuff that people hadn't really aggregated as digital labor before and made it into this kind of understanding of what a celebrity or micro celebrity influencer has to do in order to be seen and perceived and adored. And now, particularly for K pop and J pop, they have entire industry machines behind them that do a lot of that work. I would argue Cardi probably gets in trouble with her label on a regular basis because she's relatively unfiltered. Right?
André Brock:But many other people are so much everything is Taylor Swift, is everything is artificial, almost automaton. And so that's really interesting to me as well.
Lisa Nakamura:That was a huge paradox to me doing some empirical research on social media. So I just wanted to know, like, how big is this industry? Like, who's actually in it? Like, what are people looking for? So if you're a young person, you're gonna read this book and think, everyone knows that.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? Of course, everybody follows an influencer who's a person. But in fact, that's actually kind of a recent thing. So some of the survey data I looked at said the thing that young people value the most about influencers' authenticity, which was surprising. I thought it was gonna be, talent or beauty or, you know, influence.
Lisa Nakamura:No. It is authenticity, which is why the unfiltered, the unmedia trained moment is really the viral moment.
Cassius Adair:Yeah. It's the get ready with me economy. It's like putting someone in your bedroom. And, like, that's such a also a sort of, like, a mirror of a world in which like we were using FaceTime and Zoom to communicate at a period of, you know, pretty important developmental stage for young people, I think, in the history of digital mediation. My students are really interested in throwback aesthetics, a sort of like retro internet.
Cassius Adair:Everybody is pretending to be off these platforms. Everyone wants to think about the real. Like, there's a real pushback against that mediation right now that I'm seeing. Like, I told my students, we're gonna make some shitty sound art, and it's not gonna sound beautiful, and it's not gonna be perfect. And I don't want you to edit stuff.
Cassius Adair:They're like, yes, we want the raw. So it's like this simulacrum of the rawness is what's selling because they're sick of the glossy brandedness, but then it's really easy to resell and repackage authenticity. Right? As Teal and Tequila showed us all, taught us all. They're really trapped between searching for authenticity and then only finding authenticity through the filter of the platform and then getting kind of stuck.
Cassius Adair:What do I do now? I'm like, well, actually probably log off. But I understand why you don't want to. I also don't want to. I love the Internet.
Cassius Adair:And also, we shall log off.
Wendy Sung:I mean, I think there's a reason why, like, the early aughts are now trendy. My students are obsessed with these kinds of early paparazzi shots, Paris Hilton, like the McBellini aesthetic that has now turned around. You know what I mean? Like speaking about like this early internet, like this kind of fetishization of the authentic or what they perceive to be the authentic, even though obviously these paparazzi shots are all called by everybody and these are deliberately staged. But yeah, I think there is this kind of like, how can we seek this?
Wendy Sung:How can we have this? I mean, I was thinking about, you know, when you were talking about the immediacy of these kinds of platforms, I think there's a reason why, and I'm going to old media, like The Pit and Adolescent are real time shows that people are obsessed with. This kind of hour by hour kind of unfolding that battles the kind of hyper immediacy, the kind of doom scrolling, the kind of slow tempo is, like, comforting as much as it is distressing, you know, in these environments. But they are, I think, seeking that. Like, they don't know what how to do it and how to access that.
Wendy Sung:But my students are always trying to talk about being in the now, the meditative, like, all of these things. That is really fascinating to me.
Cassius Adair:I mean, they're picking up on a sort of like faux spirituality version of that too, which is being deeply sold to them by wellness culture, which is itself a product of the of this, like, form of Internet.
Wendy Sung:Well, wellness is the gendered formation of tech pro, like, optimization. Right? It's, like, the corollaries between, like, what's his name? Brian something who, like, infuses his own blood with his sons. It's, like, the opposite.
Wendy Sung:It's it's or not the opposite. It's the it's a corollary of, like, the women's kind of wellness tech bro kind of variant.
Cassius Adair:Yeah. I mean, think that's part of why this is sort of riffing, but why that first chapter about the Navajo women and Fairchild is so core to this book because it grounds us in that materialist economy, right, into like raw, like rare earth metals, right? In this like very immediate, very sort of classical understanding of labor and economy and environment, that if we get too far away from that, then we do have these endless conversations that are all about sort of like, is the internet bad for people? Well, the novel was bad for people back in the It's all this sort of like surface understanding of circulation and production and performance. When it's like, really, what is happening underneath here is massive exploitation of surplus populations who have been made exposed to violence, right, being dealt with in very similar ways to patterns of factory work that had been excellent for the previous two centuries.
Cassius Adair:So it's like, we see racialization, we see labor exploitation, we see environmental exploitation, we see a sort of like colonial frame. If we don't end up with that sort of material analysis, then yeah, we can have a conversation about is it better to be like a wellness lady or like watch your meditation videos? Or is it better to like get your money? Or like, is that selling out? But like none of that stuff is as important as where did this stuff come from?
Cassius Adair:It came from people doing exploited labor with very little remuneration for a company so that they could take over. We need to start there with our political analysis.
Lisa Nakamura:That's awesome, Cass. I mean, the next book project I'm working on is gonna be with a large group of people doing a book jam, and it's gonna be about the fear of Asian tech. I know another one. And it's about it's about the semiconductor industry and the move to Asia as a kind of geopolitical move to combat communism, which is why we're in the situation now we are, where people like AI is, you know, the Chinese. We have to worry about them more.
Lisa Nakamura:But it's also about Asian American social networks, which I feel like have been very slept on. You know, Myspace tried to buy Asian Avenue, and they were told to fuck off. Right? Because they were just too disorganized and not technologically savvy enough to be a good buyer. So if we look back at this now, like, Myspace was the also ran to AOL, but it was really Asian Avenue that was the also ran and was the model for every other social network.
Lisa Nakamura:They were the first social network to have friending. You know? So you had profiles, but you didn't have friending before you had Asian Avenue.
André Brock:Mhmm.
Lisa Nakamura:So, there's this strong kind of imbrication of Asian labor as another substrate of the Internet, which doesn't get talked about, both at the level of who's making the stuff we need to Internet, but who made the stuff we now take for granted as the conditions of relation on the Internet. Right? That was Asian American communities, many of whom were in the diaspora. They're like, thank god. I'm talking to another Asian.
Lisa Nakamura:Like, I live in Iowa. I'm an adoptee. Like, I don't know any other Asians. So, you know, thank god that you are all here. But to go back to what you were saying, Cass, I think that when white folks' jobs are influenced a lot by AR gotten rid of, this might be a revolutionary moment where the material conditions are such that alliance is not just possible, but maybe necessary.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? You can actually convince people now that we have some common common cause against the enemy, which it's not really the machine. Right? It's the industry which wants to reduce the number of paid bodies to as small as possible. I mean, that's always been the way these industries have worked, which is very different from industries that came before it.
André Brock:In what ways was your concept of woman of color troubled differently across the three chapters? I'm asking this in part because you mentioned the ratchet in chapter two, and, you know, I like to talk about the ratchet as an excess of life. But I also know that you and I have had conversations about whether or not there's Asian joy. Right? Right.
André Brock:And so did Tila Tequila's performance of self, of queerness, of sexuality, trouble the woman of color concept from a particularly, is it Southeast Asian, right, perspective, from a queer perspective? What differences does the joy or lack of joy in inhabiting virtual bodies of people of color without being that race bring to it? And then for the Fairchild workers, I don't know if they even consider themselves people of color. And so what what were your difficulties in ascribing that particular framework to them? And how did you manage to resolve that?
Lisa Nakamura:I think this question of what's strategically useful for a group that's so stigmatized, they barely are allowed to have any kind of political voice at all. Right? So women of color came about as a term because the Black Women's Caucus had a platform and an agenda for a democratic convention. And there are other women of color who said, can we join you Because you have something coherent and powerful, and we want to be part of that. And they're like, sure.
Lisa Nakamura:You know? So it wasn't like everybody got together in a room and decided that we were gonna all be women of color together. It's more we have a political problem right now, representation, so let's just put aside our issues and decide we're all gonna unite under this agenda. So, I don't think most women of color that I'm writing about would identify with that at all. Maybe none of them, actually.
Lisa Nakamura:But I think as Cass was saying, it's more of a it's more a way of seeing. Right? It's a subject position that whether you claim it or not, maybe one that you occupy or even an economic position that you occupy, whether you're aware of it or not. And that's why economic positions are so powerful. We're often not aware of them and what our interests are, and that's also, I think, very much on purpose.
Lisa Nakamura:But Asian joy, what do you think, Wendy? I mean, we've been told this I'm in a very Asian stage of my life right now. Right?
Wendy Sung:Like, it seems very positive. That mean? What does
Lisa Nakamura:that mean? You seen this you on you you met me at a very Asian moment in my or Chinese moment in my life. I'm sorry. Have you seen this on Instagram? No.
Lisa Nakamura:About, you know, like, MAO jackets from the Adidas brand and people drinking hot water and trying to smoke squatting in the sea.
Wendy Sung:Oh my god. Wait. So tell me wait. Tell me more. What was the question?
Wendy Sung:Sorry.
Lisa Nakamura:You're too busy actually doing scholarship to be aware of these things. It's a kind of meme that, you know, Chinese culture is trendy, that their their apps are better, their tech is better, you know, their standard of living is better. It's just cooler than it ever was, I think, to be Chinese.
Cassius Adair:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Wendy Sung:Wow. Okay. This is a big shift from the Korean dominance that we've seen over the past few years with K pop and everything.
Cassius Adair:Yeah, there's a lot of white leftist fetishization of China as a way to think of an alternative economy. And we need we need, we meaning like the white people. So maybe I'm stitching together what you said before of like, when the social contract with white workers is broken, right? That's when that's when shit pops, right? It's like, oh, you can't even get out of exploitation by being like a white person anymore?
Cassius Adair:Come on. That's what we wish we had a handshake deal over here. But I think that also is leading people to look for imaginaries that they can like appropriate and integrate into themselves. I noticed a very annoying number of white ultra Marxists on the online left who are like, well, what we really need to do is like, get rid of the propaganda about China and just adopt wholesale. Like, it's the model of this of the socialist economy.
Cassius Adair:But I think that's also a way of like, not having to grapple with living in a multiracial nation state, right? And just trying and like not having to solve the extent problem, right, of racial hierarchy is the imaginary, right, of that we can import someone else's political economy onto the base of The United States, which is already so sort of radically unequal. I think this is also a little bit about Maoist memes where people are like, I've got a problem with my landlord. Someone's like, I have a solution. It's just a picture of Mao.
Cassius Adair:The economic inequality is so stark that people are just like casting about for a revolutionary savior figure and finding it weirdly in, you know, but this is also like, wait, like how the American left is always looking for an out from solving its own problems.
Lisa Nakamura:You know, this is my next book project, actually. There's a meme on TikTok of people raw dogging reality where they just sit and look at nothing for thirty minutes. Like, oh, wow. You discovered meditation. You know?
Lisa Nakamura:But you're not calling it that. You're just calling it raw dogging reality. So I think it's this new kind of orientalism, and it's a reaction to AI. Like, what is real? What can I trust?
Lisa Nakamura:Nothing. Like, nothing. So I'm gonna sit here with my thoughts like we used to do in the old days. And this idealization of, like, the oriental is very much about as well China's decision not to have US tech platforms around. So people used to say, oh, this is terrible.
Lisa Nakamura:China's censoring the Internet. This is the worst thing ever, but they don't have the same issues around capture and surveillance. They have different issues. Right? But they're not the same ones that we have.
Lisa Nakamura:So looking back, like, that seems like a really smart thing to do. But I remember people saying, oh, China's gonna be left in the twentieth century. You know? They're not on the Internet. Like, they're completely rejecting modernity.
Lisa Nakamura:So seeing it come back in these new forms, like, oh, I've discovered meditation. I wanna get off the platform. I wanna, you know, have a real life and, you know, hold space for people. Like, this is really the coming together of the woke ness that got to survive as wellness and the kind of idealization of a kind of noncapitalist way of living, which is completely, actually, people don't know anything about. Like, they're imagining China.
Lisa Nakamura:They really haven't been there or know much about it.
Cassius Adair:And both people see our maps of trains, and they're like, I really want trains. I really want public infrastructure. And I'm like, I agree. I also would like to do that. What I don't believe, right, is that a top down command economy is going to be the magic solution to reorganize this part of North America without an attendant massive racial redistribution.
Cassius Adair:Like if we leave everything, racial hierarchy in place, and then we say, now the state gets to control distribution of resources, I don't think we're going to magically have liberation. But I do think that people want trains and public goods, and people already feel so surveilled and so shitty that they might as well have that happen by somebody who they nominally are elected by some kind of workers council as opposed to by Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, who has absolutely no claim to come from any sort of democratic process. But that also is a little bit of a question about what is the way forward? The way that we've been using tech in Minneapolis to fight ICE is radically decentralized. It's like an anarchist zine come to life in Minneapolis right now.
Cassius Adair:It is not the, like, large scale command economy, big infrastructure, leftist abundance horizon.
Lisa Nakamura:Well, that answers the joy question in a lot of ways, I think. Right? Like, what's the joy in protest, or what's the joy in resistance? It's not in reproducing the ways of resistance that other people are using. You know?
Lisa Nakamura:It has to be, in some ways, effective. It has so it's a little less efficient. Like, that's also how meditation works. But, you know, I was thinking about Asian joy, and that's why I wrote this chapter, Andre, thinking about ratchetry. Because ratchetry is another way to say the joy of a transgressive sexuality from someone who isn't supposed to be here.
Lisa Nakamura:That's what that is. It's something that isn't supposed to be here, but that is, and embodies a profitless way of feeling. And that's what people make a lot of money off of oftentimes, but not the people who are having feelings, the people who are platforming those feelings. I think we are at an interesting moment of, you know, the respectability of Asian entertainment. You know?
Lisa Nakamura:Like you say, that really hyper curation of K pop stars who are never gonna be on OnlyFans. Right? That's not a path for them. And at the same time, a kind of I think, Wendy, you're writing about this too. Like, a kind of strategic forgetting of how Asians came to be here.
Lisa Nakamura:Yeah. I know some of you have books that are sitting in the oven waiting to come out. But I would really like it if everyone could give like one, two second explanation of what they're writing now.
Wendy Sung:So I'm working on two projects actually. The first is a book called Violent Virology, Racial Violence in the Making of New Media, which really looks at these hypervisible instances of anti Black racial violence and the intersection of new media and trying to think through how new media technologies really are extractive and instrumentalize these kinds of sites as a way to prove their social and cultural worth and how we can think about these kinds of moments as producing new modes of witnessing and remembering, but also kind of how they're implicated in our ideas of freedom, technological advancement, and racial progress. And then the second project that I'm doing is really trying to think about the Asian face as a technological object. Like I kind of mentioned earlier, how I'm still working on it. I'm just gonna stop there, actually.
Wendy Sung:I'm just gonna stop there.
André Brock:That just reminds me of Snow Crash and Juanita and Snow Crash who created the avatars and his version of the cyberverse by talking with her grandmother about the how the face is the perfect interface for conveying information. I was gonna say, they said this book has some cyberspace potential in it as well. The alright. But I was thinking about remember you know, you remember this, course, but I can't remember the name of it. That book you wrote on visual culture where you were looking at The Matrix and Interfaces.
Lisa Nakamura:Oh, Digitizing Race, is
André Brock:that Yes. Okay. Yeah. All right, Cass, your turn.
Cassius Adair:I was still working on this long book about the history of trans people and big tech, starting in the 1950s and thinking about Sandy Stone running around Bell Labs and trying to get her hands on early transistors. And then the final, final chapter now, hopefully will actually be the final chapter, is just looking at trans tech workers as they are fleeing the industry. Some of them are fleeing the country. Some of them are just feeling demoralized. Some of them have had all their DEI support cut.
Cassius Adair:But mostly, it's just about the job not being fun anymore. And transness was always sort of seen as this extra that you can sprinkle on top. Someone said, in the conditions of zero interest rates, you can buy a lot of weird things and invest in them that you wouldn't otherwise if you had to pay for it. And trans people are one of those things you can get when there's zero interest rate. And so all these trans people came in and tried to to do weird stuff at work, and now they're getting crushed and they're trying to bail this moment of inclusion and capture.
Cassius Adair:Then finally, it just sort of dissipates. And I'm also working on this weird collaborative syllabus with a couple of people trying to think about what would a class geared at computer science or data science or information studies students look like that introduced them to the profession or the field from a critical lens? And how could we teach that out across a couple of different places? So we're trying to write what are students coming in with? What are their assumptions around tech?
Cassius Adair:What are their assumptions around the kind of choices they're going have to make? And how do we arm them with historical knowledge to try to make better choices? We secretly think and also switch majors. But you know, like at the very least, like how do we immerse students in a historical critique of the industry from the job. So that's kind of a side project I'm working on with a couple of people, but I'm excited about it.
André Brock:So I haven't written anything worth talking about for over a year. The book project that's on hold is, I needed to extend some stuff from distributed blackness, and I chose the black technocultural matrix, and I wanted to add a seventh category of aesthetics. And so the next book is focusing on a blues aesthetic as a frame for black digital practice, where I can incorporate materiality, sensuality, joy, cultural critique, and all these things as a way to understand what's happening, not just on black Twitter, but on black threads, on black LinkedIn. And so I spent a lot of time reading aesthetic stuff. I spent a lot of time reading blue stuff.
André Brock:I watched centers five times now. When I get back to it, I'm sure it'll be nice to return to it. In the meantime, I keep accepting projects that I have no business doing. So a chapter on technology for an Afrofuturism reader, paid article on hip hop and music blogs and DSPs, and just yeah. Way too much stuff.
André Brock:Way too much. Oh, look. I put y'all to sleep where I froze y'all one of the time.
Lisa Nakamura:Oh, no. No. Well, I think I think we're out of time.
André Brock:Yeah. I heard next book.
Lisa Nakamura:I kinda did already. You know? There's a collaborative book on Asian tech and semiconductors, and then another book on meditation. Think the Asian tech book will be out in a year because we're gonna write it really fast. The other one is gonna take a long time to write because it's interviewing priests about how they're using Zoom and stuff like that.
Lisa Nakamura:So, you know, I was kinda joking about the rediscovery of meditation by young people. But from what you're saying, Cass and Wendy, like, this is really a thing.
Cassius Adair:Oh, truly. Yes. My students want to think about dissociation in a way like positive or negative, but they are into some spiritual stuff. Especially my students of color, actually. I think there's just been like an aggregate demand and extraction from them that they are like, I would like to opt out of this actually.
Cassius Adair:Like, this is a pattern that I'm seeing in my classes really hard right now.
Wendy Sung:It's probably not fair because I am in a department called World Arts and Cultures and Dance. And like some of fellow faculty actually teach meditation as a course. So I have a kind of skewed sample pool in terms of my undergraduate students. They are very crunchy, and they're very into this stuff. So
Lisa Nakamura:And you guys are in New York and LA, right? Like, I wonder what's happening more in the middle right now.
Cassius Adair:The Minnesotans where I live, we're, I mean, we're like really, we've had to be analog. We're all learning how to read maps. Because it was really clear that ICE could trace you from your phone if were following them. And also, people needed to track where multiple vehicles were at the same time. And so people just got physical maps, and were moving with a whiteboard and were marking where the cars were on a physical whiteboard, and then they could erase it so that nobody could get the data of where the observers were and where the cars were every day.
Cassius Adair:So the analog turn in terms of like resistance to state surveillance is like super real here. If the pattern that I've seen in my classroom, and the pattern that I see in my city of people feeling overwhelmed and depleted by corporate technoculture on the one hand and captured and surveilled by state surveillance on the other hand is any indication, the future is going to be in weird small tech, little mesh networks. The group chat is the engine of organizing. It is not the platform. I think we're gonna get really weird and hyper local, and that's gonna require a reanimation of the physical present that maybe that's what we'll need meditation for.
Lisa Nakamura:Yeah. Well, you guys are too young. Maybe Andre isn't too young to remember the time where if you wanted to see somebody, you had to tell their friend. Like, if you went to college, no one had a phone. Right?
Lisa Nakamura:You had to say, like, can you tell so and so I wanna meet up with them after the thing. Right? And that was the only way. So right now, I'm living in a Buddhist monastery in San Francisco. And if you wanna talk to someone, you have to go up to them and talk to them with your mouth.
Lisa Nakamura:Right? And it's so weird. It's so strange.
Wendy Sung:Stops. Right.
Lisa Nakamura:It's very stressful, But it's exactly what you're talking about, Cass. Like, it's not actually a new thing only in relation to now, and most people don't remember it. They've never done it before.
André Brock:Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been a joy. I love these types of conversations, and I hope whatever I said was helpful.
Cassius Adair:I loved it. I can't wait to teach it. Every I think I'll teach all the chapters separately, and then also as a book project to think about how to create a container for really disparate sites that flows really beautifully together, and also how to integrate the personal into a narrative that is not directly autotheoretical, but just that old school sort of women of color grounding in the self, grounding in the sort of like materiality of the body works so beautifully here. It doesn't feel 80s. It feels contemporary and it feels necessary for the framework.
Cassius Adair:So I can't wait to sort of think with that too.
Wendy Sung:I know. I can't wait to teach it. The graduate students are gonna lose their minds. Well, because they're gonna look at the kind of methodological diversity, but also the kind of wild promiscuity in terms of discipline, right? Like you are really grounded in Native and Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and Black Studies.
Wendy Sung:The fact that you can layer all of those, have a cohesive kind of framework and tackle technology in these ways is truly, I mean, it's really special.
Lisa Nakamura:I appreciate that.
Narrator:This has a University of Minnesota Press production. The book, The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet by Lisa Nakamura, is available from University of Minnesota Press and in an open access edition available on our website. Thank you for listening.