“When you gaze long enough into Instagram, Instagram gazes back into you.”
Gender
The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as they’ll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. It’s really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different relationship to the technical side of their hobby and all of the political and tech history behind it, and especially how it relates to computer engineering. I was thinking about that dynamic while reading about the latest fracas around YouTuber Hank Green, who is taking time away from public life after being called out by his audience, when his AI use was perceived as being in contradiction with his public persona. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, here’s a good video summary.
Ultimately viewers are reacting negatively to Green’s admission of using AI to quickly aggregate research to drive his content creation, suggesting that he lost his own creative discretion amid a growing demand for online content. But in the meantime, his technical inaccuracies were paired with completely avoidable gender bias alongside the AI use, which drew additional scrutiny from technical experts. It wasn’t his first go-round with the knitting community, it turns out. Was the bias Green’s or facilitated by his use of the tools? Debate ensues.
“How internet misogyny parallels ‘real-world’ harassment” is a 2007 paper in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism by my old co-blogger, Jill, on her experience being harassed online by peers she knew IRL. Many parallels to current attitudes, all enabled and accelerated by digital networks and tools.
Another old article on the emotional toll of being an internet personality and a woman with a platform in the public sphere. I’m quoted briefly: I intentionally broke my social presence when I stepped away, which gave me necessary peace but made it harder to claim my work in this arena over time.
This one was okay. It felt like a series of earnest blog posts without a real throughline. Finished reading: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell 📚
I attended the Clayman Institute’s talk on Gender, Power and Artificial Intelligence earlier this month. They now have the session shared on YouTube for posterity. There are many topics and ideas here to chew on as this AI moment develops, and I recommend giving their angles some consideration.
Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again
Thursday, May 14, 2026
Stanford’s Clayman Institute ran a virtual panel this morning called “Gender, Power, and Artificial Intelligence,” with Safiya Noble (UCLA), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT), Angèle Christin (Stanford), and moderator Genevieve Smith, a Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The panel applied principles from feminist tech studies to the current moment, and covered how gender norms get encoded in data and reproduced by AI systems, and discussed whether the technology has real capacity for equitable design and implementation at scale.
Noble’s argument throughout is that the governance conversation has gotten too high-level and universalizing while the actual outputs of these systems have profound day-to-day consequences for specific people today. She named the role of AI in the recent gerrymandering of Louisiana and Indiana as examples, and called for tripling down on long-term social science research about AI’s impacts. She also pointed out that philanthropy is retreating from feminist academic and organizational work because that work originates from the same dynamics that critique philanthropy itself, precisely at a point when this research is sorely needed. A lot of money is moving in AI, and very little of it is funding the people best positioned to study how it impacts everyone downstream.
D’Ignazio was asked directly whether feminist generative AI at scale is possible. Her answer was no, with caveats, given who owns the technology today and the current emphasis on profit motive. She suggested it is more important to consider how to organize around our relationship to technology, and how we might approach questions of profit and ownership, policy and decision-making, and data and tech governance.
She provided an example of a reasonable use case by walking us through a project from her Data + Feminism Lab. The example is documented at length in her recent book “Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action,” where her team partnered with activists who scour news reports to document the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. The lab built a very lightweight AI-based approach that streamlines the scanning and identification of news stories as possible cases to include in their project, supercharging their work (note: very similar to how the NYT uses AI to analyze data for reporting). In this example, the AI’s job is task-scoped, democratically co-determined with the people who use it, and small. Smith picked this up: there is an idea baked into the current LLM moment that AI must scale to make it marketable, and the alternative is using purpose-built models that are right-sized against a body of work.
Christin spoke at length about how embodiment is one of the primary focuses of feminist theory, and how AI perpetuates the “disembodied” illusion of technology, and how this dynamic shows up in everything from the marketing to UX to user comprehension. This spoke to my thoughts on how the single-interface design of LLM chat reproduces Haraway’s “god trick,” knowledge that presents as universal while concealing the specific and situated position it comes from.
The parallel I kept returning to, listening to this, is one I think about often with my own cohort of early bloggers, women who grew up alongside the rise of the internet — and then the rise of ad tech. The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s was being shaped by several camps: writers, students, information architects, and user-centric researchers who saw it as an information access network and a space of possibility; entrepreneurs and opportunists who saw it as a channel for marketing, monetization and extraction; and a smaller boycott camp that wanted to limit and refuse the whole personal computing and digital revolution altogether.
It was generally considered weird to be a girl on a computer or a woman on the internet — so weird that many of our peers didn’t recognize us at all — and we were there anyway, making stuff, witnessing, learning, advocating, producing, influencing. So when I watch some of my old peers, many of whom are professional writers and academics today, treat LLMs as a question of refusal rather than a condition to engage with critically, I worry we are abdicating a responsibility at precisely the moment when our technical and rhetorical expertise applies. Their refusal has good logic: user-centric researchers and communities engaged extensively with the early internet and the extractive camp won anyway, so why expect a different outcome here?
But Noble’s work on algorithmic bias attributes that failure not to engagement, but to the institutional and financial disadvantages that user-centric approaches operated under relative to gargantuan commercial interests. David and Goliath. That gap does not close through abstention. Understanding the trade-offs around tech, producing knowledge and analysis that does not depend on investors and marketers to frame the platform and the questions, requires presence. Refusal cedes so much ground.
Overall, the recommendations from the panel were practical. Noble called for people with capital (and the political will to spend it) to consider how to put money toward socially responsible research and development. D’Ignazio called for alternative funding infrastructure outside of venture capital logic, and pointed at European digital sovereignty models as worthy of consideration here. She also gestured at the popular AI Skeptics reading group as one current example of mad-and-commiserating-as-organizing that is creating safe psychological space for people to talk about AI and its tradeoffs. Christin’s recommendation was community organizing, on the grounds that LLMs are unpopular with a lot of people who feel there is no space to say so, and that finding those spaces is itself worthy because it provides shared language and awareness of others’ knowledge and experiences.
Personally, it was refreshing to hear reflections on the work (and the feelings) of being inside institutions that are being reshaped by AI, and being responsible for some of how that reshaping gets communicated and absorbed. I’m thinking about the incredible value of interdisciplinary governance, and how the commitment to governance is a specific position, and all the margins to consider.
Further reading:
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism. The foundational text on applying intersectional feminist thinking to data science practice.
Catherine D’Ignazio, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Extended case study of the grassroots data activism project D’Ignazio described on the panel.
D’Ignazio et al., “Feminicide and Counterdata Production.” Research paper on the counterdata methodology behind the femicide tracking project.
D’Ignazio et al., “Data Feminism for AI.” Conference paper extending the data feminism framework to questions specific to AI systems.
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. Noble’s study of how commercial search engines reinforce racism and sexism through their ranking systems.
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988). The original essay where Haraway introduces the god trick and the case for situated, embodied knowledge against the view from nowhere.
Some contemporary thoughts from Ana Rodrigues on the perennial question of being a “woman in tech.”
I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, crass and vulgar, but in the big leagues all the same. Reading the Auf der Maur bio reminded me that a lot of the punk scene was steeped in ideas about social roles and archetypes and oriented around upending them – or at least giving them a healthy challenge. This subculture was also populated by poets and artists in the classical sense. The retro polish around ’90s pop culture has flattened that texture, but it was genuinely a thing.
The era also introduced the woman rock star, introducing women who wrote and performed with full creative authority, not just as muses, groupies or singers. The reception from fans and critics was mixed, and the discourse around Courtney Love in particular was gross and volatile. Most of the positions she was vilified for read as entirely unremarkable today. I was a teenager during all of this, too young to meaningfully participate, but the aesthetic dominated my early adolescence. At the time I loved Tori Amos and PJ Harvey like kids now love Chappell Roan. What I forgot over time is how literary the era was, and how romantic, both in the literary sense and in relation to the New Romantics of the 1980’s. Big culture lessons for a starry-eyed teenager.
L7’s music is not that deep – it’s metal for meatheads, by design – but their politics and presence were. While poking around, I found that L7 was one of four bands featured in the 1995 documentary film Not Bad For a Girl, which was co-produced by Love and Kurt Cobain. The film focused on several all-female indie punk bands and won Best Documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996. I’ve never heard of it before now. It got middling reviews from critics then, and it’s not available streaming in full in English, unless you’re viewing it here at this dubious Google Drive link – which I will do and report back.
Mindy Seu on It’s Been a Minute talking about the history of women on the internet.
Amid renewed calls for the death of feminism, or of millennial feminism or whatever (TERF alert), I found this old victory lap from the era where it looked like new media had permanently paved the way for a newer, fresher publishing industry. It also tips the hat to Jezebel’s place in the fray, “the first online women’s publication to successfully combine feminist writing with a for-profit motive.”
I’m collecting mentions of the old blog while they still exist bc lot about this cohort is hagiography written well after the fact. I don’t think I saw it way back when, from the first time I “quit blogging” in 2006 by Rebecca Traister. As ever, a big part of social media is quitting social media.
Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.
Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.
I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.
While poking around for some examples of media coverage of the early blogosphere, I found this mention from the time Liza Jervis of Bitch Magazine did a guest stint at Feministe. For context, Feministe hosted regular guest blogging seasons where we opened our comparatively gigantic platform to much smaller bloggers. What we didn’t pay in money, we could offer in audience and attention, with mixed results. Several people who guest blogged found the audience and attention experience terrible – which began its own media cycle.
The reality is that having a platform on Al Gore’s unregulated internet means you face a lot of gross commentary from in and outside the proverbial house. Invitations for guest blogging were happily accepted, but the attention wasn’t reliably durable for writers and their goals. This reflection in Salon, “In Defense of Ladyblogging,” recaps what it’s like to have a massive platform on the open internet: “For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quickly.” This is a limited telling, but there are some nuggets here that forecast the commentary around Lindy West’s book – particularly around the pressures of being smart in public while also being a person who wants to be liked and included.
If digital millennials are interested in what was being written about them when they were going off on Tumblr, they should read “Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age” by Jessalynn Keller.
Another cool and relevant resource related to digital feminisms, “Digital Black Feminism” by Catherine Knight Steele. This work pulls narratives from existing literature about Black women’s technology beginning in the 19th century, linking ideas, fields and methods across the work of many writers.
While poking around for other academic sources on feminist blogs, I found this article from 2016, “The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet.” The complete article is embedded in the page.
In 2007, S&F Online dedicated an entire issue to feminist blogs with essays on race, anonymity, access and audience. The blogs are mostly dead links now but the academic record holds up. Important names: Clancy Ratliff, Tedra Osell.
The first woman I found online was Shelley Powers of Burningbird, around 2000-2001. Then, if you wanted to read women writing about technology (or anything else) with any critical depth, you had to go looking because those writers were not respected or recognized by brick and mortar institutions.
An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.
Some thoughts:
- When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
- I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
- You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
- The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.
Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.
On the intersection of memoir, feminism and the Internet pile-on.
I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces.
Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. Incidentally, they come from the same cohort we loosely refer to as “feminist blogging,” though both would probably bristle at the description. And both use autoethnographic methods to leverage their personal lives to tell bigger stories about social, cultural and economic dynamics (a common method among feminists, where the personal is often made explicitly political). Lemieux goes further by including a series of essays by other Black single mothers at the end of her book, expanding the frame from memoir into something more collective, a full bloom.
West’s book has gone ultra viral over the last few weeks while Lemieux’s has found significantly less footing. West’s work is being spectacularized in real time, while Lemieux’s support has been mostly grassroots, respectful (thankfully), and largely limited to Black media outlets and NPR. This reproduces one of the oldest patterns in feminist media: a white woman’s confessional work circulates as universal or spectacular (West is being treated like a spectacle currently, which is great for sales and visibility but comes with negative trade-offs), while a Black woman doing rigorous, arguably more structurally ambitious work gets categorized as niche, an outlier. That this is happening within the very audience that would generally name and critique this dynamic in any other context makes it worth sitting with.
While I respect both authors and their bodies of work, I am looking forward to Lemieux’s book because I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a publisher and an audience for serious, foundational work like this. I suspect it will prove relevant long after the viral moment is over.
Lean In girlbosses out, burned out babes in.
A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are overwhelmingly male and concentrated in a few institutions, and generally assert the inevitability of disruptive AI as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Anthropic and others are anticipating that career ladders where women are concentrated will be impacted, some claiming professional women’s jobs will dry up or disappear entirely.
I looked over his podcast guests for the last year and noticed that among his tech-focused guests, almost all white, almost all men, almost none of them are women. A rough count of eight podcasts (nine if you stretch) with accompanying commentary only produced two women, both economists. Klein’s brand is the guy who does the reading, the big ideas guy. So it’s worth asking what he’s reading and whose ideas he considers big. While he probably wouldn’t disagree with Gebru or Crawford or Noble on the substance, his current body of commentary is pulled toward the perspectives of people who have the most to gain from the technology’s expansion and the least exposure to its costs.
McKenzie Wark for Verso Books on Donna Haraway, in 2015: “Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, or appeal to something outside of it. But this would be to remain stuck in the stage of romantic refusal. Just as Marx fused the romantic fiction that another world was possible with a resolve to understand from the inside the powers of capital itself, so too Haraway begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international. One not just of laboring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making.”
Where are the women? A brief history of women in the computer sciences.
My life is work right now, so I’ve been training my reading and writing habits in that direction in the hope it will be additive. So when a friend who works in tech suggested I pick up some Ellen Ullman, I snapped it up. Ullman was a programmer who wrote about her experience as a woman in tech in the 1990s, a diligent personal accounting of the early days of Silicon Valley that foreshadows so much of what people are worried about today. Through her first person account of life as a programmer, she consistently reminds the reader that computers are made of boxes and wires, with choices made by mortals (often imbued with dreams of immortality) written on chips and tape, and are limited to only know what we tell them. The Y2K essay was an especially welcome reminder in the era of “singularity” — we’ve been here before.