Your Computer Is on Fire
About the Book
Technology is not broken — it was never designed to serve us all equally. Your Computer Is on Fire sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia.
This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix — and control — society. The 16 essays in Your Computer Is on Fire interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy.
Everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first — and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL.
Co-edited with Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip.
Praise for Your Computer Is on Fire
“An all-star collection of readable and complex stories, all aimed at ensuring the naïve view of neutral technology gets buried and, please, left in the past.”
“The book tech critics and organizers have been waiting for.”
“Technology is so embedded in our lives that we can sometimes forget it is there at all. Your Computer Is on Fire is a vital reminder not only of its presence, but that we urgently need to extinguish the problems associated with it.”
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