I was searching for this blog post because it is mentioned in our reading, Nakamura, "Queer female of color: The highest difficulty setting there is? Gaming rhetoric as gender capital." I found it on my FB feed a while back, and remembered it and had to share. My friend posted it, and there were such comments like "it's so sad and true," and "I cried," etc. It did get a lot of hits and went viral, I'd say at least on FB. :)
Sure, apps are like boxes of crayons -- one for just about everything -- but at least the creators of this one takes a slightly different spin on their main targets. NJM
Here's Scalzi's other blog post about the "Straight White Male" it is also mentioned in the article I mentioned in my earlier post. They are both very compelling.
There was this great project last year that asked girls to ask what they liked best about either themselves or their bodies and the responses were so cool. One girl really loved her feet because they could take her anywhere!
Simultaneously, though, we must understand that Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other profit-driven companies are not neutral platforms for these conversations.
tech industrialists are the Rockefellers of this century, with profit, not innovation or the social good, as their primary motive
The lobby group FWD.us, brought to us by founders and investors of Facebook, LinkedIn and Spotify, among others, famously supported the Keystone XL oil pipeline with millions in pro-pipeline advertising
Peers.org, an initiative launched by "sharing economy" companies like the home-subletting site Airbnb, have resisted government regulation, even as disability advocates fear services like the "rideshare" service Uber are increasing inequality between people with and without disabilities
they're doing everything they can to avoid paying taxes
gentrification
San Francisco has lost at least 40 percent of its black population since 1990, more than any other major city
But the fact is tech companies continue the practices of devaluation of racialized and feminized labor on a global scale
There are no easy answers
Another answer is for tech workers to, in tech lingo, disrupt the industry's exploitation by developing alternative tools for connecting us all. Firefox, LibreOffice, PirateBay, Wikipedia and WordPress are all widely used technology-based tools created by organizations that don't count profit as their foremost objective.
More important, we can organize with and support the media and activists that already are doing this work, like the Bay Area's POOR Magazine
What would happen if people submitted their google requests in person. (Can't let this go w/o noting that Google is a middle aged white guy).
NSFW: language