Queer relations with technology and machines

Masters remotely. 

 

In quarantine, this has been an incredibly isolating year. This sense of isolation was frequently remedied (and exacerbated by) technology. During this pandemic, the surveillance state, especially during the BLM protests last summer and the uprising at the Capitol Building, has grown exponentially. In February, Texas was hit with a snowstorm that effectively shut the state down for over a week, and brought to light how the economy is consistently prioritized over human life.  Due to the nature of the pandemic, myself, and millions of others, have been reliant on technology for information and images in these moments. Because of this same technology, I have also been privy to moments that showcase the indomitable nature of the human spirit. So much of the activism that has arisen in the last year is at the hands of (digital) queer and POC activists. Through technology, large swathes of populations are mobilized by these activists to try and combat oppressive normative and neoliberal forces. Banking applications like Venmo, Cashapp, and Paypal have been utilized to provide mutual aid for underrepresented communities. The police are being counter-surveilled by users and their smartphones.

 

On a personal note, this year has been one of intense (and sometimes painful) growth.  My own constantly evolving sense of queerness, both in myself and my surroundings, has blossomed. In looking around, I see moments of queerness spring up from within the banality of the everyday. These moments are almost always linked to outpourings of joy and love. 

 

At some points it felt like I was watching the world crumble through my computer screen. At other times, it felt ridiculous to be working on this website. As I’m coming to the close of this project, I’m realizing what continually brought me back to it, what kept it “worth it” to me, was the nature it’s subject and construction. An amorphous entity that was always expanding and not confined to a page. I found comfort in the constant questioning that this project forced me to perform. I had to train myself to look for the ways that people, narratives, and technology were pushing back against dominant power structures. This project forced me to look at the approaches that creators and activists are taking to envision a different world, a world that is by no means perfect, but one that is tearing down the societal rigidity of a nuclear family, of “straight time,” of the borders between machine and humans, of the boundaries that separate “the real” and the simulated. So many of the examples I use are tied together by love—loving a human, an operating system, a stranger, a constructed family. The manners in which this emotion, and others, can transcend boundaries of the real and simulated, of memory banks and synapses, and how these tie together to make a better world. 

 

This project has been especially fruitful for me as I attempt to grapple with the notion that I will soon be joining “Corporate America.” In addition to working on this project, I’ve also spent the last two years interning at a tech startup here in Austin, Texas. Throughout this internship I have learned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM or paid advertisements). At times this has felt more than a little soulless, seemingly rigging the system to extract capital from users. However, if this project or my time at UT has taught me anything, it is that it’s not as straightforward as simple extraction. As with everything, there is choice involved, and more often than not users behave in a fashion that befuddles the technology, leading to skewed data and inconsistent narratives. In relation to myself and the tech field, I view myself as something illegible, and in the words of Jacob Gaboury, as "an aberrant third-ness within an otherwise normative system of relations” (153). While it can be frustrating working in the tech field, being witness and subject to moments of toxic masculinity and comments that assume my desire to marry a man, settle down, and have children, I am continually fascinated by the way the technology manifests and responds to the minutiae of choices that it registers. In once more referencing Gaboury’s “Becoming NULL: Queer Relations in the Excluded Middle,” there is an urgent need