“Women in Tech” is a Cover Up for the Tech War Machine
When we look at the technology industry, and we look at the phenomenon, as a whole, of women in tech, and we start to look at how it is FUNCTIONING as a SYSTEM, within the industry, we start to learn some pretty interesting stuff.
Here’s my thesis: the women in tech movement has always been and served an important FUNCTION for the larger tech industry. It was supposed to make life and technology better for everyone. And instead, it’s turned into a way for tech to absorb all manner of possible and actual confrontation, to submerge tension between itself and its workers, and between civilians and the industry; and to disguise its nature as a war machine, and indoctrinate women into it. “Women in tech” is this comforting, soft, progressive-feeling aura around tech; it uses the idea of women being inherently good and just, to create an illusion of goodness and justness around the field that absorbs critique and resistance. Under the banner of women in tech, a number of things that seem bad on the surface are… laundered. The women in tech movement absorbs the ugliest stuff in the industry, and that is the ONLY reason why it is allowed in any way to continue to function in an industry that HATES women.
The most glaring of example is Girls Who Code, an organization that teaches young girls, as young as middle school and below, how to code, because boys are often exposed to computer technologies earlier. Then further down the line, they will eventually join the tech industry (trained *for free* from a very young age, great!). Full stop: Girls who Code is sponsored by fucking Raytheon. It is sponsored by Lockheed Martin. Which means that children as young as three — yes, three, yes they teach girls as young as 3 — are already being in-calculated into a culture where technology just happens to be driven in large part by weapons production — it cuts off the debate of “should we build weapons” before it even gets going. It is so naturalized, and that naturalization is occurring along every step of the “get women into tech” pipeline. If you can pull that off, than you can literally stop anti-war tech resistance in infancy. And you are literally training little girls to eventually drone bomb other little girls all over the world. It has a sickness to it, an almost moral depravity to it — what is that smell…. What is that feel …. fascism.
This is a perfect example of how “women in tech” launders the reputation of the shady things it does and the shady shit it works with. When I came to the Valley, women in tech conferences were already being sponsored by hosts of intelligence agencies and weapons companies and financial institutions and surveillance companies, as well as huge numbers of companies that had a bad reputation for actually mistreating the women that they worked with, INCLUDING startups that had had actually major sexual misconduct investigations, as well as ones that were broadly know to have highly publicized allegations of systemic misogyny (GoDaddy). The conferences and organizations, in their greed for money and lack of principles, bring these companies on and NOT ONLY perform a sort of reputation laundering, but also sets it up to deliver more women into those exact same companies and machinery.
The entire women in tech movement subverts and buries the idea that the *operative* thing here is a war conflict and the building of a war machine. It’s just “getting more women in tech”, “improving the pipeline”, “increasing diversity and inclusion”; these are held as inherently good and also the fix for every problem in the industry, and so it makes weapons production by children look progressive and liberal and like its gonna help the future of society. Lol.
The “front” of the organization is women in tech, but what is actually running the machinery in the backend is weapons companies, surveillance companies, venture capitalists, sexuallynabusive companies, etc. This is true across the entire sector, where behind almost literally every single women in tech thing, you can see right on the “Sponsors” page who is shelling over hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being involved — and that includes influencing the programming, so that girls are being taught various skills, programming languages, etc. BY WAR CRIMINALS in preparation for them to build weapons.
Holy SHIT that is a huge payload to be burying inside a summer camp for fucking third graders, or a career fair for 19 year old college students trying to envision what their careers could look like.
There aren’t other alternatives — nothing is independent anymore because the only way to get funding is from tech corporations, after those same corporations deliberately killed off an alternative women in tech moment that was funding things independently. The entire women in tech THING is *solely* an apparatus of the industry that is *solely* controlled by it and that actually includes a giant ecosystem of local and regional camps, programs, classes, meetups, conferences and events, bootcamps, online learn-to-code modules… you are talking about what is actually a really big ecosystem, that contains the totality of supposed efforts for gender equality in tech, which means there is no effort for gender equality in tech, period, because one thing the tech industry fucking hates, is gender equality. This vast ecosystem has grown up over the past 10 years; in the same time, the actual number of women in tech has not improved, just to give you a sense if this program is even meeting its most basic of supposed “goals.”
Tech maintains its dominion over the ecosystem. If something new or independent does show up on the scene, it is usually captured by tech money in one form or another; alternatively, tech loves to hire up anyone in the industry who starts to get a little too loud and then folds them back into the corporate structure, where it crushes any material chances of these women getting anywhere, especially because there is no consistently large movement to connect to, that is actively working on creating change in the company in a way that’s sole definition doesn’t revolve around the success of an individual. This is just a front. This is just an op.
Corporations created Lean In — not feminists. Lean In is not a feminist message, it is the message of a tech industry trying to find ways to align itself with growing pressure to increase representation in this field. It’s almost a way of saying “you can come in, but just to be clear, you need to sacrifice your entire life to this, you have to sacrifice your values to build the things they want, you have to lay down any resistance efforts, you have to become a weapons-building-psychopath, because that is what it means to be a woman in tech.”
Anything you put into the women in tech movement, it comes out Lean In. Weird!
This is not the movement we started or that we hoped for when we were organizing the women in tech movement in the early days of the cloud computing bubble, where we were organizing against rampant industry rape, against the gender wealth gap, against social media that was leaving girls and women open to all kinds of predation, harassment and abuse, sometimes life-threateningly so. What you see now is not a “women in tech movement”, this is a hybrid monster of psy-ops that is now acting like a moat of protection against social dissent. At this point, women in tech IS a corporate psy-op, where they can perpetuate a never ending cycle of co-opting any possible formation of an anti-tech coalition and just holding it captive inside this totally controlled bubble.
The world’s largest conference for women in tech, is called the Grace Hopper project. Grace Hopper directly contributed code to the Manhattan Project, which means that she is, materially, a mass murderer in the most elemental sense of the term - she knowingly built weapons of mass deaths, as well as did countless other computer scientists and engineers. The fact that this is our birthright as an industry, should not be lost on anyone.
Apt that her name adorns the largest women in tech conference, and that of course, it is absolutely full of weapons company sponsors, banks, surveillance startups, etc. This was happening in fucking 2014, and I think around that time it had sponsorship directly from the CIA there; the conference marketing team even, without any self-awareness whatsoever, created some cutesy joke about how CIA is always watching or something, and *posted it on Twitter*; just to show you the absolute level of comfort and welcome that these agencies enjoy in the women in tech ecosystem. These are agencies that kill women and children in other countries literally constantly; it severs the connection of women from their shared gender oppression around the world. This is absolutely terrifying where you consider the number of countries and democratic/socialist/communist regimes that have been violently overthrown by the CIA; to say nothing of the scale and scope of the surveillance apparatus they operate in tech with the support of the entire technology industry. Just joking around with the CIA!
Women in tech is a buffer to absorb all kinds of different social movements. Women in tech has been a hyper visible issue, and part of that is because of the high profile attacks on them which then become, in many cases, global news. This makes women in tech seem like entirely and monolithically a sympathetic party, precluding the concept of a bloodthirsty war criminal — which is what many of them are.
Women in tech also seemed to provide a way for the public to understand tech itself, through an issue/framing it was familiar with. I think it has been one of the few things about the industry that has been meaningfully grokked in the mainstream, utterly a mystery to many; stemming from, in large part, a false belief that they have to be computer scientists to understand it, and the idea that these topics are too complicated to deal with (this is obviously a manufactured phenomenon).
And you also have the mainstream looking at the situation and possibly have various concerns about the technology industry itself, and then you have this women in tech movement, and it looks like something is being done about it. There is a public sense as well, that hey, tech has some bad parts, but they’re working on changing, and we are getting people in who are going to get in there and change it and make it better. So the “women in tech” illusion actually has the PUBLIC function of laundering the tech industry reputation to a public that doesn’t know any better, and projecting an image of change and progress and liberalism that is simply not reflected in material reality.
Mainstream women have all kinds of cause to be absolutely furious with the tech companies. Revenge porn has been absolutely devastating to women. Girls growing up have been subjected to unfathomable harms and injuries in relation to the internet. Grooming and pedophilia initiated online has ruined countless lives starting at a very early age. In the 90s, there was a still unacknowledged crime wave as pedophiles poured onto platforms at the same time computers and the internet were being shoved into middle-class schools and were also in the home due the availability of the personal computer. Girls have been put in juvenile detention with tech-built surveillance.
The first wave of victims from the early internet are in their 30s and many of them are starting to come to terms with what they experienced as youth; that could drive a massive amount of energy towards tech companies, who need to be held financially responsible to victims (#GiveYourMoneytoWomen). Specifically regarding sexual violence and the internet, we have this same idea that hey, women are being treated badly online, but hey, we’re getting more of them into tech and they will stop it. They don’t know that the tech industry excels at crushing any internal efforts at reform; the women getting into the industry are actually stopped completely from changing anything at all, which is why you see the industry continue in statis on these issues despite the seeming whirlwind of activity that surrounds women in tech.
There’s major labor issues that specifically impact women stemming from tech. There’s the AI on the job that detects union activity and the tools that monitor your performance. There are huge numbers of women working in contracting positions for tech companies, who are not directly employed by the company (and thus they don’t get stock and other benefits), but work for contracting agencies whose workers are massively underpaid and have been subjected to ruthless union busting. Communities of brown and Black women have been bulldozed by the tech state. There are a lot of concerns about reproductive rights in the wake of the loss of Roe v. Wade, about the information that tech companies are collecting and what they are or will do with it.
And if you are concerned these issues that effect so many women? Well, we are getting more women into tech, so you can trust that something is being done to solve the problem! If you really feel the need to do something personally, you can even donate to a women in tech non-profit, or buy the girls and teens in your life a computer, or send them to coding school. Women in tech provides a never ending carousel around the same central point, which is a corporate-controlled pipeline that results in the same percentage of women in the same number and types of roles, producing no material changes to the experiences of women users or the impact of tech empire on society, on country, on a global scale. The harm tech has done to women has followed along with Moore’s Law, but it’s not slowing down.
Meanwhile, women in tech is a whole fucking cottage industry at this point, and who knows how many women actually *are* getting their jobs, platforms, etc out of this cottage industry, which again, is funded fully by tech. It gives women vanishingly little reason to meaningfully beef with, confront, attack, etc. The tech industries when they have the perception that they are PART of it and working on REFORMING it and under the arrangement of that nature, no progress has been made.
Tech is a rising fascist state; some of its worst operations have been concealed by “women in tech Inc” for far too long. Women in Tech Inc has been covering up the industry’s warcrimes, and even now, it is covering the emergence of a fascist tech military under the banner of “American Dynamism” — they’ve been very careful to make women a face of it from jump. Weird!
Going forward, we must relieve ourselves of the delusion that there is a women in tech movement that is doing anything material; this is a tech-owned circus specifically designed to squash and absorb criticism, to normalize programming for fascists, and put a happy face on a bomb. There is no women in tech, there’s just another face of fascism. A lie.
Act accordingly. A movement of women against tech will come from the outside. Those inside the bubble, picked their side a long time ago.
Let them go.
We’ll see them in the tribunals after the war.