Overview

Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economy The Inattention Economy challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing-the microchip era of the 1960s and '70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s-Lisa Nakamura illuminates these women's instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users. From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Nakamura highlights how women's gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism's benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives. Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women's labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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9780816699063

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Reviews

""A groundbreaking rereading of the entire history of the internet, The Inattention Economy is a monumental work that shifts the terms by which we understand its genesis. Calling for redress and reparations for the women of color whose work was exploited in the internet's creation, Lisa Nakamura presents a bold and compelling interrogation of digital racial capitalism.""--Grace Kyungwon Hong, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference ""The Inattention Economy contributes a crucial analysis of the history of digital technologies: the way these technologies have been systematically built out of the embodied labor of women of color. Lisa Nakamura brings new life to 'women of color' as a politically potent category in discussions of new technologies, using it as a prism to diffract the strategic resistance women continue to employ despite ongoing exploitation and erasure.""--Kalindi Vora, author of Reimagining Reproduction: Essays on Surrogacy, Labor, and Technologies of Human Reproduction

Author Information

Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures and the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of several books, including Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minnesota, 2007).

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