‘Good Tech’ and Technologies of Elite Capture
Under review at Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience
2025
This paper examines the utopian fantasies of technologies developed in the service of social good–or “good tech”–and situates their increasing purchase within the technology industry in the broader context of a global crisis of care. We explore how aspirations towards greater empathy, global connectivity, and diversity are captured by elite tech entrepreneurs in a “progressive neoliberal” strategy to raise capital in the name of disaffected and exhausted workers. Through an analysis of emergent AI-enabled accent modification technologies, which promise to relieve call center workers from accent-based discrimination by artificially modifying the sound of their voice, we locate the affective lures operating in their futuristic fantasies and marketing strategies. In a peculiar alliance where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire toward making globalization “feel good,” we trace the ideological conditions that allow the exploitation of offshore workers to be re-coded as the employment of diverse workers. Thus understood, good tech rhetorics are productive discourses that function both as a mechanism of value accumulation and as a counterinsurgency tactic—they constitute concrete “structures of feeling” that sustain attachments to the social reproduction of racial capitalism and the continuation of postindustrial, colonial dispossession.
(co-authored with Juana C. Becerra)
* Nominated 2023 Most Impactful Research Paper by the RAI Institute
My dissertation project, titled “Untimely Algorithms, Technology, Political Thought, and Futurity” is a methodological contribution to the critical history of algorithms. It traces an unconventional genealogy of the algorithm from the technological imaginaries of classical political economic thought to the neoliberal thought project. Through this historiography, I propose to locate the algorithm avant la lettre, as a particular site of contestation over the boundary of the economic and political, the role of the human in political life, and the production of revolutionary desire. To this end, this dissertation surfaces the “political unconscious“ our technological imagination in the 21st century, and asks how this inheritance imposes limits on our capacity to imagine a different future.
Sample Chapter:
“1. The Politics of Algorithms: Utopia, Despair, and the Limits of Political Imagination”
This chapter begins from the premise that the algorithm, as a concept, is a collective speculation toward utopia. More than a set of technoscientific practices, material infrastructures, or technological forces of production, the algorithm is also an intimate desire that has mediated political imagination since at least the socialist calculation debates. Tracing an unconventional genealogy of the concept, I depart from typical narrations of the history of the algorithm as a progression of scientific inventions from cybernetics to neural nets in the 1950s-70s; I instead stage the algorithm as a revolutionary desire articulated among socialist planners in the 1920-30s. Far preceding its formal and technical conceptualization, what would appear like a politically-neutral technical instrument, a method of engineering, or an abstract mathematical method is, rather, the unlikely site of the production of a particular passion: a desire called utopia, a yearning for another future, the dream of the technical capacity to materialize economic planning at large scale. Of course, that our contemporary conception of the algorithm has taken on a radically different and disenchanted form, follows precisely from the collapse of social planning into the reified figure of “the economy,” paradigmatically theorized by Friedrich Hayek through the metaphor of the information processor. Recruited and transformed as such by the neoliberal program, and materialized in the reality of high-tech capitalism (albeit in lackluster form), “the algorithm” has thus today become a mediator of its own account. I propose, then, to understand the algorithm as dispositif (Panagia 2019) and a libidinal apparatus of the neoliberal program. Where once the algorithm was a site of revolutionary desire, the concept now represents the ideological displacement of politics into technocratic management. The question becomes: with this displacement, might there still be an immanent horizon of possibility for the production of revolutionary desire?
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