Transcript of episode 001 - How women built the internet

Bridget Todd: 00:04 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
I'm Bridget Todd. And this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Okay. So here's the story we get told about technology. Men build computers, and then they built the internet and women, we've been trying to break into this tech boys club ever since.
We pretty much always assume the default experience online is male and white. But women are using technology to build movements, create art, and connect with each other, despite dealing with some pretty vile shit, just for daring to be women online.
And even before that, women and other marginalized voices have always been at the ground floor of technology and the way it impacts culture. So that story we get told, it's bullshit. Tech has always been our domain. So why isn't it always easy to see it that way? Okay, let's take it back, way back. In the beginning, computers we're human. They were also women.
In the early days of computing, computer science was solidly women's work. Computing was seen as administrative or secretarial type position. It was such a women's job, but after world war II, computing power was even measured in "Kilo-Girls" which is understood to be roughly the calculating ability of a thousand women.
If you've seen the film Hidden Figures that chronicles mathematicians, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and engineer, Mary Jackson, then you probably know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: 01:28 That's John Glenn.
John Glenn: 01:30 What do you ladies do for NASA?
Speaker 4: 01:31 Calculate launch and landing, sir.
Bridget Todd: 01:33 And even before that, born in the 1800, Ada Lovelace is widely considered to be one of the world's first computer programmers. But we're more than just literal computers, women were involved in every single step on our journey toward computers integration into our everyday lives. And while the names like tech icons, like Katherine Johnson and Ada Lovelace might be familiar to you, we still need monuments to the marginalized artists, organizers, community builders, writers, and thinkers who shaped what it means to be online. So let's build them.
Claire Evans: 02:07 If you're looking for women in the history of technology, it really helps to look first where people are cared for.
Bridget Todd: 02:12 Claire Evans is an artist, tech historian and writer. Along with her partner, Jona Bechtolt, she's half of the impeccable cool Grammy nominated electro band Yacht.
Claire Evans: 02:21 (singing)
Bridget Todd: 02:30 Claire wrote the book on how women were erased from technology, computers and the internet, literally. Her book Broad Band, get it, shines a spotlight on the history of tech spotlighting the women who often go overlooked. Think of it as a radical act of archival so that no one will ever be able to say that women weren't always on the ground floor of technology. While the women led efforts of World War II, met the computing workforce was mostly female, eventually things changed.
Claire Evans: 02:55 The shift that you're describing between tech as feminized labor and tech as a site of masculine entrepreneurship and innovation, it happened in like the late '60s, early '70s through the '80s, the sort of generational changing of the guard that happened where the first wave of early women programmers, who came out of the programming efforts around World War II and enter the early computing industry and essentially defined it, because that's when the computing industry began and they were the only people who knew how to do programming. So of course they ran it
Speaker 5: 03:27 At air bases here in overseas, women soldiers perform over 25 technical jobs. War jobs now, but civilian careers later on.
Claire Evans: 03:37 As they kind of aged out and were replaced by the next generation and the industry itself exploded and became massively financially valuable, there was this sort of the baton didn't quite get past. There weren't opportunities for young women to come up and replace and fill the shoes of the women that came before them for all the sort of systemic reasons that you would imagine. And I think part of that comes down to just the fact that computing went from being something that was wild and new and more associated with the war effort to something which was relatively beginning to be established and which was a significant commercial enterprise.
Money of course is what changes things. And I think oftentimes people read my book and then they come and talk to me and they say, "Wow, men really ruined everything." But it's money. I mean, it's money that ruined everything. It's all of a sudden the stakes were different and the players were different and it was more cutthroat and there were less opportunities for people. Mistakes were made. Cumulatively and systemically that made it so that there began to be this unreasonable assumption that the tech was for men, which was then reemphasized and reiterated through marketing and popular culture.
And I think the work that advertisements for computers in the '70s and film and TV in the '80s did or making texting like a boys club it was really significant. I mean, I grew up in a time when movies like Weird Science were really popular, which is a movie about two nerds making a babe using the computer. It sets a pretty clear standard for what the culture assumes is the point of interest for this technology.
If you look at basically any computer ad from the '70s and '80s print paper ads for anything from hardware to software services. It's either a model, a woman, sexy woman sitting on top of a mainframe or it's something explicitly condescending about how this machine is going to replace all the nagging lady data programmers in the office. There's a lot of really kind of dark marketing that is part of this.
And that's sort of created a generation that feels as though it's always been for them. And that sense of entitlement is really difficult to undo. But I think part of the work of kind of digging up this history is showing that if there is a boys club that exists in tech, it's an anachronism. It's a historical anachronism, a wrong that needs to and can be righted, hopefully in less than a generation.
Bridget Todd: 06:13 Speaking of generations, Claire, is a second generation computer nerd. Her dad was a coder at IBM. She grew up online and that means she grew up feeling like the internet was her hometown.
Claire Evans: 06:24 I came of age during an era where there was kind of an efflorescence of girls-centric, early web content and girls centric, computer games. But I never really was interested in that. I never thought of a computer as being explicitly for boys or for girls, any more than like the TV or the microwave was for boys or for girls. This was a thing. And what you did with it was more about expressing your individual interests and your individual personality down to really esoteric subjects, that it was about expressing your gender in any way.
But I do know that. I mean, I certainly remember the computer lab at school when I was a kid being pretty dominated by boys and having to kind of elbow my way in to play my games during lunch break or whatever. There certainly was this idea when I was a kid that boys liked computer games and girls didn't. But I think I was always more interested in finding ways to empower myself and learn new things using this amazing tool that happened to be in my bedroom.
Bridget Todd: 07:23 So what kind of games was little baby Claire playing?
Claire Evans: 07:26 My favorite kinds of games were trivia games. I love to play. There was this game that came with Microsoft Encarta, which is a encyclopedia CD-ROM that was like a trivia through the ages game. I loved it. I couldn't get enough of that kind of thing. Or there was a game a little bit later called You Don't Know Jack. That was, again, like a trivia, more of a game show style trivia game. I mean, I honestly, I really loved learning and I know it sounds like what it sounds like, but I love trivia games. I love like semi educational CD-ROMs like learning about anatomy. There was a Grey's Anatomy CD-ROM I was really obsessed with when I was a kid.
Bridget Todd: 08:05 By the way, we bonded a little bit here because nerdy educational games is something that young Claire and young me had in common growing up. If I did an hour of Mavis Beacon typing tutor, my parents rewarded me with 30 minutes of Math Blaster. Remember Math Blaster.
Claire Evans: 08:19 Math Blaster was legitimately really fun. It's funny that you bring up Mavis Beacon because I started a chapter on Mavis Beacon that I ended up scrapping because it was kind of like too tangential to the history of the internet. But the story of Mavis Beacon is really interesting. I mean, she was the woman on the box. A lot of people believe that she was like a real typing expert. But Mavis Beacon was a real person and that she was a champion typer. And there's all this kind of interesting lore around her.
There was a survey that was done in the '90s where people were asked whether or not Mavis Beacon was a real person and people like remembered seeing her on TV. Everyone thought she was real, but she was just this model that had been cast. I want to say she was working at the perfume counter at Saks or something. And the guy who made the game was like, "This woman is amazing. I need her. She has beautiful hands." And so she was on the box cover. She was this is Trinidadian model and she kind of... Her name was Renee Lesperance.
Bridget Todd: 09:12 Wow.
Claire Evans: 09:13 I actually pulled that out of my memory. But she didn't get a dime of course. I mean, because the world is garbage. But she left the States and no one's really been able to find her and she didn't get any royalties, even though her face, her likeness was really like a huge part of what sold that game or whatever that piece of software. It was really... I don't know. There's something really relatable about her, this idea that this woman was this typing genius that could teach you how to type.
Bridget Todd: 09:38 So Claire was pretty much always fascinated by computers and being online, but after a while, she started to feel like the internet was no longer her hometown. And where being online had once felt like freedom and escape, it started to feel different.
Claire Evans: 09:52 It's this realization after many years of spending the lion's share of my waking life on the computer, that I didn't feel good anymore on the computer. And when I was a kid, I remember nothing but joy and discovery and excitement and self-identification and all kinds of positive things. And all of that had kind of fallen by the wayside. Some of that is just growing up and becoming aware that the world doesn't revolve around you and taking things for granted and getting blahzay about things. And maybe even getting out of step with what's going on in technology, because of course the tech culture evolves so quickly that I'm sure teenagers on Tik-Tok are having the same feelings of self-actualization that maybe I did CD-ROM games in the '90s. I hope so.
But yeah, I don't know. I think as an adult, all of that joy kind of went away, and the life online began to feel more like a burden or something that had to be accomplished in order to remain part of culture and remain engaged in the larger conversation around me and not something I did for fun or for joy.
I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that too. I think the overlap between digital life and real life, however, you want to define that has certainly changed a great deal in the last 15 years. When I was a kid, the internet was something other, it was something separate from the world as I understood it. It was an escape. It's not an escape anymore. I think if anything, real life is an escape from the internet.
Bridget Todd: 11:16 Okay. So if you're under 25, this probably means nothing to you because you've always grown up carrying the internet and a little square on your pocket. But humor me. I still remember my early experiences online. I was still a few years away from being lucky enough to have a computer in my bedroom. So going online meant logging on from the clunky family computer and what we call the computer room. And if my dad caught you with a soda down there, watch out. Once everyone was asleep, you could sneak downstairs and get online and do whatever you wanted.
I mean, forget just having a Coke in the computer room. You could be anyone. Those days of being anonymous online were kind of intoxicating freedom. For me and Claire both, but while being anonymous online back then meant freedom. Today, it's totally flipped. The real world is where you go to feel anonymous, not the internet.
Claire Evans: 12:04 Something I think about a lot like the position of anonymity, because I know that when I was a kid and I was hanging out in chat rooms and posting on message boards and surfing around the early worldwide web, I was free because nobody knew who I was and I could be anybody I wanted to be. I could create an avatar for myself or create a new identity for myself. I could pretend I was older than I was. And I was a different gender than I was. I could pretend all kinds of things. And everyone else was probably also pretending a little bit too.
The excitement of being able to kind of redefine who I was and try on new things was a really big part of the attraction of the early internet, I think for a lot of people. Now, of course, it's the opposite. I mean, we have to be who we are. We have to have our legal names on our Facebook profiles. The creative joy of anonymity has been replaced by a form of anonymity that is really different. Anonymity is now something that's weaponized to persecute vulnerable people on the internet.
It's not something that comes from a place of delight. I mean, there's very few instances I think of people who have anonymous profiles who are doing it because they just... For the fun of it. It's a different thing. You either are forced to hide who you are because you want to bother other people or because you are being bothered by other people.
So, yeah. So we're only anonymous now in the real world. We're only anonymous when we're walking down the street or at home doing the things that we do during our time off from the internet.
Bridget Todd: 13:34 She's right. The internet can be a not fun place, especially if you're marginalized. And because we've allowed those once foundational marginalized voices to be pushed so far outside of the tent of tech, it only reinforces that it's not our domain, that it's not where we'll go to have experiences that involve protection, care or freedom. It's a problem that has far reaching consequences, not just for women, but for everybody.
Claire Evans: 13:57 I think we as a culture begin to digest the consequences of creating this kind of boys club culture around technology. We will hopefully see that the clearest antidote is two diversify, these companies and platforms as quickly as possible. Again, I don't know. Capitalism is a mighty beast and it'll take a lot of work to kind of get at the heart of this problem in some of these massive tech companies, especially as they resist union efforts and resist deregulation and resist all kinds of positive benefits. Yeah. It's a long fight.
Bridget Todd: 14:39 Yeah. It is a long fight. We'll be right back after this quick break.
I was watching this video of you speaking to prepare for this interview and something that you said was, "If you're looking for the history of women in tech, it helps to look for places where people are cared for." And I guess to that end, what would it look like if care was built into some of these tech platforms from the very beginning.
Claire Evans: 15:06 Well, we certainly wouldn't have social media as it exists today, right? I mean, I don't know. It's funny. I think that there's this kind of actual... What's the word? Maybe it's not possible to build things at the scale that the tech industry seems to demand while still emphasizing and prioritizing care. I think you look at the history of social media and I've profiled this community in my book called Echo, which was run by a single person in an apartment in New York, which a person who really deeply cared about her community and who was really invested in the wellbeing of her community and who kind of had the authority to kick people out who were being hurtful and who could mediate conversations and who was really part of the community.
And I think that kind of care is beautiful, and it's possible when your community is 2,000 people to 10,000 people maybe at most. It's not really as possible when you're communities in the billions, when your community is essentially the size of planet Earth. It's just so difficult to have enough and the right kind of emotional investment to take care of all those people.
It's impossible to enforce standards or rules across cultures and across subcultures, across languages. It becomes a folly, which is why social media platforms have outsourced the job of caring to these sort of traumatized content moderators who are not part of the community, who are not deputized members of of the dynamic community who are helping take care of their own, but who are instead being shown the worst of humanity who are suffering greatly as a consequence of seeing and working through all that material.
They're being paid to care, but we don't care about them. I think scale and care might be mutually exclusive, which means that the future of care in tech platforms might look really different than what we're accustomed to. I think we need to move beyond this idea of constantly growth hacking and trying to build the biggest, biggest, biggest communities, platforms, cultures, programs, systems in the world and instead focus on empowering people to create platforms and communities and services, which affect them and their peers in maybe like an interconnected network of smaller communities, which maybe a world of neighborhoods rather than one giant mega city I think it would be a lot more sane.
There are different forms of connecting with others. I mean, there's a time and place for kind of the speaker's corner where you can go out in the street and like yell your piece and everyone can hear you maybe, or you have the capacity to go viral or whatever it is that you want.
I mean, the one-to-many audience thing is valuable in certain instances, but most of the time when we're looking for meaningful engagement, community interaction in real life and online, it does happen in smaller groups. It happens with people that you either know or you share an interest with, or you share a geographical location with, or you share something with, something real. And I think part of the joy of the early internet was that because users were kind of spread all over the world, people came together not based on geographic location necessarily, but based on interest.
And most of those early internet communities were interest based communities. People who were really into Star Trek, people who were really into gardening. And there's something really beautiful about that because it reminds us what we have in common even when we're really different. Whereas now, we're supposed to kind of relate to the billions with absolutely nothing to hold to as a shared experience other than like basic civility and being human, which as we can see has eroded completely in the wild wilderness of the feed.
Bridget Todd: 18:51 Basic civility. So far we've sort of danced around the elephant in the room that Claire is hinting at here, which is that being a woman online sometimes means dealing with harassment. So if we're trying to write the history of women's experiences and contributions to the internet, do we include the reality that a lot of that history is involved having to deal with harassment? And if I'm being honest, I struggled with that when trying to put together this very podcast.
Claire Evans: 19:12 Yeah. I can totally relate to that. I mean, I kind of made a choice that I didn't want my book to be about fighting back against the trolls. I wanted my book to be a showcase for all the amazing things that people accomplished, despite the fact that they had to fight against the trolls or whatever their circumstances were. I think I was able to cop out from that a little bit because my book ends basically the collapse of the dot com bubble. And I'm not saying that harassment didn't exist before then, it certainly did. But things like Gamergate, the MeToo Movement, this sort of larger conversations that are happening as like consequences of systemic sexism in the tech industry and in the world sort of became a much, much uglier more recently.
I don't know. I have this mantra that is like, "Don't fight the darkness, bring the light and the darkness will disappear." I don't know. I think people need to see how much light there really has been and how many fascinating and beautiful, interesting dynamic contributions had been made by women throughout history. It's not always about being a victim.
I don't want that to be like a core part of the identity of the characters and the high profile in the book, because they're not. They're all tough as nails and super interesting and hardworking, and have done great things in this world. And maybe people didn't believe in them at the right time, or maybe people have forgotten some of their contributions, but that doesn't make them any less incredible.
Bridget Todd: 20:40 Definitely. That's one of the things I love about your book. As we speak, I have an Ada Lovelace sticker on my computer at this very moment, but I feel like your book really allows for these figures to be full complex 360 degrees of who they were not just boil down to some sticker or poster or platitude.
Claire Evans: 20:57 Yes. I love that you clocked that because that's a really big thing for me. I've been interacting with this a lot since the book came out, this kind of inspirational poster version of the history of women in tech or like the sticker on the laptop version of women in tech. And I totally get it. I mean, we have such a hunger for representation in this history that we want to try it out. These women as perfect idolizable heroes and they are heroes, but they're heroes because of the complexity of their lives, not just because Ada Lovelace wrote the "first computer program".
I think she's interesting for so many more reasons than that. And I don't think that the opposite of a great man in history is necessarily a great woman in history because that's just reiterating the same thing. That's just laying all of the power and clout and influence at the feet of exceptional individuals, rather than acknowledging, A, the collective nature of innovation and the complicated collective nature of history in general, and without acknowledging the complexity of individual people and all of the things that they do.
I mean, I don't want to develop a superficial relationship with a character from history. I want to know them. I want to really know them. I'm not necessarily super inspired and empowered by knowing that someone who came before me was really, really good at what they did and they were perfect. That doesn't help me. That doesn't make me feel like I can do things.
I mean I come from a world of music and punk rock, and there's nothing more empowering than seeing someone just like you do something kind of badly, and you think to yourself, "Hey, I can do that too." That's punk. So I kind of wanted to do that. I wanted to show that, Ada Lovelace was a genius. No doubt about it. But she was also a drug addict and she was also like prone to illness and really conflicted about being a mother and had a really weird relationship with her own mother and never knew her father.
And all this stuff that it really humanizes her and makes her accomplishments more relatable in a weird way, because greatness emerges out of conflict and out of people's individual. The complex combination of strife and inspiration that makes people who they are. Their sorrows and their bad habits are just as important as their aptitude, and their inspirational brilliance.
Bridget Todd: 23:16 It is punk rock.
Claire Evans: 23:20 It's also really interesting. I mean, for me doing this survey of women throughout history because my book spans about 200-ish years. What it means to be a feminist or to be a sort of a feminist icon. It changes a lot from generation to generation. Look at Grace Hopper, for example. I mean, she's sort of this classic feminist icon, but she didn't think of herself as a feminist. She was actually kind of contemptuous of the idea of women's lib like didn't thought it was kind of... I don't know. She thought it was like whiny. And she really like actively resisted the characterization that she might've faced any challenges whatsoever in an all male environment.
She just wouldn't acknowledge that that was a possibility. And I think does that make her less of a feminist icon? I don't think so. I mean, I think we have to reach people within their time and understand why they might be seeing the world in the way that they see the world and understand them within their own context. And that's hard sometimes. History is messy. And sometimes doing it means holding multiple contradictory positions in your mind at the same time. That's the joy of it anyway.
Bridget Todd: 24:27 More There Are No Girls on the Internet after this quick break.
History is important. It's also tenuous. The fact that there could be entire movement spearheaded by women online that go forgotten today is just an example of why we need to fight to make sure that we're including nuanced depictions of women and the contributions to history in our archives, because they could disappear a lot quicker than you might think. Even Claire's favorite woman fueled online movement, a cyberfeminist arts movement of the '90s was almost a thing that went totally forgotten.
Claire Evans: 25:05 I'm really into this sort of mid-'90s cyberfeminist art movement because it sort of feels... I'll just give a broad strokes for your listenership. I mean, it was this sort of arts, culture, literary movement in pretty much coinciding with the development of the worldwide web and the arrival of the worldwide web is what brought women online really in a major way for the first time. The internet as a military and scientific research structure was pretty male dominated. But as soon as the web and the personal computer combined women took over men in terms of the population of the internet.
And so there was this beautiful efflorescence of a radical feminist thinking in art that coincided with that, because I think a lot of these, especially second wave feminists were coming out of the late 1970s world of consciousness raising and "brown burning". We're really excited by the possibility of this new medium that would allow them to kind of do consciousness raising on a global scale and reach women and feminist all around the world and kind of create new spaces, define their own spaces and do all kinds of fluid and exciting experimentation about identity and gender and all the things that are really fun and interesting.
So they made a lot of radical art. There was some wild CD-ROM games and wild, early websites, great manifestos. The Cyberfeminist Manifesto is one of my favorites texts of all time. It is truly wonderful. It definitely comes from a time before comments sections because the language is just so bold and raw, and like radical, and kind of gross, and just wild. And that kind of free, exciting experimentation in a new medium was just really beautiful to look at in the rear view.
It had its own problems, of course, like everything and it kind of disappeared pretty quickly after the world wide web became kind of normalized in culture, and the artists who contributed to that movement all went off and did their own things. But it's an interesting moment, I think when feminists sort of saw the world wide web as an opportunity and not necessarily as, I don't know, a place that was sort of a social system which would replicate the social dynamics of the culture that they existed in already.
Bridget Todd: 27:17 Okay. So I learned about the cyberfeminist movement from reading your book. I'd never heard of it before, and I'm someone who's looking for these kinds of things. I'm actively on the lookout for women doing cool shit online, and yet it went totally overlooked by me. So it's wild to me that this huge movement began and ended and all of these cool women making this radical art in the '90s online, and I had never even heard of it.
Claire Evans: 27:38 It's ultimately what motivated me to write the book because I'd had the same exact experience. This is a classic like Wikipedia moment that I had. I was looking for something else. I found myself, I don't know how on the Wikipedia page for this art collective, VNS Matrix who wrote the Cyberfeminist Manifesto that I mentioned earlier. And I was like, "What? How do we not know about this?"
It's one of those like late night Wikipedia deep dives, where I was like I'd followed some long chain and I was there. I was like, "What is this? How was there this crazy like cyber punk, feminist art movement that I didn't know about?" Because I felt the same way. I always felt really invested in these histories. I've been writing about these histories for a long time.
I thought I knew kind of everything about the early internet or not everything, but I thought I knew like the broad strokes, the most interesting stuff that had happened, and I completely missed it. And I think it's a combination of the fact that as a movement, it was relatively short lived. It happened at the very beginning of the world wide web. The world wide web has a remarkable tendency to erase and rewrite itself by definition. That's what it does. And it just like blipped right under my radar.
And I was like, "How many more of these stories are there? How many more of these moments in history have I completely missed by virtue of just looking at the wrong part of the internet or looking at the wrong time period?" And I think there's something really kind of fascinating and maddening about writing histories of technology and specifically histories that involved cultural movements and human beings doing stuff on the web because the web is so fluid and so amorphous, and so impermanent.
Outside of the Wayback Machine, there aren't that many tools for seeking out what was on the web 10 years ago. And it's not that long ago. It's really not that long ago, but yeah, it's slipping out from between her fingers. And it's wild to me that we have Babylonian, Cuneiform clay tablets that we can still read, but I can't tell you what was on women.com in 1991. That seems wild to me.
So I think this idea that I had wanted to capture as much of this history as I could before it all disappeared and try to identify as many of these movements, people, contributions before they okay from under all our radars, it gave this entire project a sense of urgency for me. It made me feel like I had to move quickly before the internet exploded basically.
Bridget Todd: 30:01 Yeah. And I think a big part of why your work is so important is that aspect of archival so that no one will ever be able to say that women weren't there because they weren't included in the archive. We can say, "Oh, no, no, no. Women were always here since the very beginning. Here's the record of it."
Claire Evans: 30:14 I'm always hesitant to draw this line between like men and hardware and women and software, but I do think that hardware is much easier to historicize. It's way easier to put an old computer in a glass case, in a museum and say like, "This computer is really important and these guys made and here it is." It has a material presence that is permanent, that is going to continue to pollute the world until the end of time. But software and culture work, and games, and communities and all these things, which are so much more difficult to hold on to, oftentimes they're associated with women's work, and oftentimes they're forgotten because they're hard to hold onto. They're not things.
We fetishize things and tech culture really revolves around this kind of object, fetishism. We get the new device every six months and we imagine that by getting the new device, everything that ever came before disappears. It keeps existing, and it's really important to remember that that tech is not just about objects and it's not just about platforms, it's about what we do with those objects and platforms. It's about the ways that we bring those things to life. It's about the ways that we make meaning out of those things and build community using those things. That's what actually matters. That's what actually has an impact on human culture, not just human market economics.
I think that oftentimes that's forgotten and at the same time that's also the site where a lot of women's contributions are made. And so those things kind of get brushed aside, but they're just as important if not more important than making iPhones.
Bridget Todd: 31:47 Okay. So I have this theory that by gatekeeping, who is and isn't "someone" in tech, that's really just this way of keeping out all of these marginalized figures who maybe weren't coders, right? People who were artists or thinkers, or organizers or activists who were using the internet and really cool ways. It's a way to keep those folks out of the tent of tech. And I think it's important that we understand that just because you maybe aren't a coder doesn't mean you haven't had an influential or important impact on how we understand tech and culture. The tent is huge.
Claire Evans: 32:16 Yeah, of course. I'm like what good is code if no one's using it? What good is that? What good is the technology if no one uses it? I think you're totally right. I think people sort of try to define what tech means in a way that allows them to remain at the top of the totem pole. But really, I don't know. I mean, making things is just the beginning. I mean, I think people in tech know that because users are the most powerful force for innovation, that there is. I mean, the Twitter at reply and the hashtag, those came from user suggestions. The world wide web itself, it was never meant to be a communications platform or a cultural platform. Users made that what it is.
So I think we often underestimate the role that users have in the system. And you put something out into the world, people decide what they're going to do with it. They give it context, they give it meaning. And then that sort of cycles back and the people who are designing those tools then have to take that and move forward with it. It's part of the process of developing a technology and it's not often considered to be part of it, but it really is. That that labor is invisible, but very real.
Bridget Todd: 33:25 Being a woman online can be tough, but it's not without hope. Claire's work as a musician grounds her in a very specific kind of hope around technology where tech sometimes present an adversarial foil to humans. Time and time again, we humans find a way to turn that conflict into something beautiful that reaffirms our existence.
Claire Evans: 33:44 There have been many instances in the history of music when a new technology has come along, that extensively is there to displace the musician. For example, the drum machine or the synthesizer. These are tools that were designed to replace session musicians with an easier cheaper version, kind of automation of their labor. In fact, even in the '80s, the British musicians union tried to ban synthesizers. But what artists and musicians did was instead of allowing those tools to replace them, they took control of them.
They took drum machines and they took synthesizers and they invented Detroit techno and they invented new wave, and they invented hip-hop, and they invented electronic music as it exists today, and its many manifestations. They kind of took the thing that was threatening them with displacement and incorporated it into what they were doing and made it essential to who they were and used it to invent something new that they were integrally as human beings involved with.
And I think that that act of kind of like, I don't know, like jumping on the grenade or something is like a really beautiful thing that artists always do willingly or unwillingly when they are faced with new technology. And I think when new technology comes along, you always have that choice. Are you going to let it displace you? Are you going to let it intimidate you? Or are you going to take it, jump on it, find some new use for it and make it part of who you are and give it back to the world in a new form?
That choice is always present. And I think that's what I try to do in my work across the board. And I think it's the only way that we're going to kind of keep on top of all of this technology. And I think it's also very human. I think it's what people always do. We are always trying to create systems of meaning and beauty out of what is coming up ahead, and I think that will never change.
Bridget Todd: 35:30 When you think about it, isn't that what it means to be a woman online? We're given the worst, but somehow we keep making art, keep connecting, keep building those little monuments to who we were and who we are. We keep saying, "Hello. I was here. You won't erase me."
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more podcasts from iHeart, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.