I’ve long had what I would call a techno-feminist disquiet when I look at the technologies that surround me. So many of our everyday technologies depend upon extractive economies that demand the assistive and immediate labor of others, as they spew hate/misinformation and truly create insufferable living conditions for so many. All these insufferable tools limit more collective ways of being in time and social space together: is this really all we have? Was this all there was to design? The feminist response to all of this has been to study it intensely – to whistle-blow and beg for more attention to the actuality of this technological dynamic. Feminist responses also tend to call for reform and regulation of our tools, to seize them for feminist ends while also devising ways of better managing technology.
My new book Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (2026) traces the ascension of the tech bro and the extension of patriarchy. It argues that we need to be careful with this discourse of technologies as tools. This tool-based approach is a distortion that corresponds to an extractive understanding of most of the world’s population in terms of their utility. The way the Big Tech patriarchs (our Zucks, Musks, Thiels, and Bezoses) understand technology is tied to the way they conceive of gender and other forms of social difference. My book uncovers how the Big Tech patriarchs operate with an intelligible facet of media theory that they wield strategically in order to maintain a governing form of power that I term the patriarchal techno-logic. The Big Tech patriarch doesn’t really think of technologies as tools, but rather, as environments in which to cultivate, manage, and extend their power. One of the places I see this most clearly is with alt-right understandings of gender and alt-right formulations of technology, which are tied together by a fraught relationship related to maintaining the submission of the tool. Turns out this fraught relationship to the instrumentalization of the tool is evident in dynamics I had not even anticipated.
It has been fascinating to be part of this forum to see how religious imaginaries pervade imaginaries of new media, showing up routinely often in uninterrogated ways. I do not say much of anything in my book about religious imaginaries or AI alignment. Insufferable Tools is in fact mostly about becoming incompatible, thus misaligned, with the patriarchal techno-logic. As part of my participation in this forum, I did my due diligence and set out to find God in my work. All it took was a little CTRL+ F action and find God I did, but in a somewhat compromising position. God lurks within the patriarchal fantasies about technology, but adjacent to another figure: an essentialized, reproductive woman. I went looking for God but found Mommy instead. To be more precise, I found a tech bro who simultaneously wants to play God and still needs Mommy to reproduce the world. This tension is now manifest in our most common machines.
When I went looking for God in my published pages with CTRL+F, the machine provided a list where God was embedded in the media theories I was thinking with, but never in my own words. Here is what I found.
God appears on page 121 of my book in a quote by Paul Lafargue, author of The Right to Be Lazy (1883) and a nephew of Karl Marx:
Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderfully inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless, the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.
Here, we can see that technology is indeed the ultimate savior that can rescue man from toiling and deliver to him instead autonomy and freedom. Adam and Eve must toil in their post-Eden ultimate fate until machine-as-Jesus saves humanity from work.
God appears on page 61 of my book in a passage from MIT Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Processing and Human Reason (1964): “It seems to me that, as well as the delusion of playing God, the envy of women and their ability to bear children is also a driving motive.” For Weizenbaum, it seems that this uterus envy reveals an envy around reproduction in two different cases: the seven days to make the world or nine months to make a baby. Weizenbaum was the creator of ELIZA, the first natural language-processing computer program. He had a turn of conscience in the 1980s, arguing that the field of AI was problematically dominated by men. In trying to account for this gender imbalance, he typified his fellow AI researchers as having uterus envy.
I found God on page 86, again with Weizenbaum, but this time with the caveat that women are not interested in playing God: “I have not found a compulsive woman programmer and there must be a reason for that. Is there a connection between compulsive programming and the drive to play God?”
I would answer yes! Patriarchy is a system of power that depends upon and benefits from the utility of people and machines in order to thrive. It also depends upon a world of abundant assistance and care. “Women” and “men” have different roles in this patriarchal technological paradigm composed of discrete and binary genders. The addition of God and Mommy, another gendered binary, reveals the tech patriarch’s technological determination to quell his anxiety about being able to reproduce and instrumentalize the world. And so, just as there are new tools on the market that are designed with this dynamic in mind, so too there are new formations of the tech-bro.
There is an ever-evolving cast of inductees into the Big Tech Patriarchy Hall of Fame, who are trying to make sure the tools will continue to submit. Since 2025, we have met misogynistic and racist Clavicular, and his looksmaxxing regime dedicated to optimizing attractiveness through a combination of diet, exercise, surgery, skin maintenance, and jawbone smashing. We have encountered the DOGE boys, who gutted federal DEI grants with the help of ChatGPT. Netflix’s top 10 films includes Louis Theroux’s deep dive into the manosphere. We are living in an AI moment, but also in what appears to be a renewed biological drive for power coming from the trenches of a wounded white cis-male redundancy epidemic.
All of these masculine figures may appear to be driven by an essential masculine impulse that they cannot help because of their gender, but we should think rather in terms of how they can very much help it. I must pause here to state very clearly: there is no natural or essential negative quality inherent to the category of men in tech, in the same way that there is no virtuous feminist politics inherent in the category of a “woman in tech.” In the interest of my desire for a techno-feminist corrective to patriarchy, we must start by delinking essentialized and binary gender from the design of the world. There is a longstanding structural relationship between technology and patriarchy that needs to be uncovered and dismantled. We must think of Musk and Bezos, DOGE boys and Clavicular, and the figures hiding in the dark web as technological phenomena in and of themselves.
In Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), he argues that modern man is who he is because of the dominant technologies of the time – our media provide a means of communication for the population, but also determine how one thinks, the forms of thought possible, and the types of social organization that result from the internalization of a medium’s formal properties. In Empire and Communications (1950), Harold Adams Innis painstakingly went to great lengths to reveal, in a history of media such as railways and papyrus, that the power of a civilization or empire depends upon a balanced temporal and spatial dynamic of a civilization’s dominant technologies. Technologies that expand and extend spatial power must also be balanced by technologies that offer lasting duration in time in order for a civilization to persist. We must understand patriarchy as an empire that requires the same strategic spatial and temporal balancing that Innis attributed to the power of civilizations. We must locate the technological social character who is investing in and devising technologies that allow for the spatial expansion and also the longevity of patriarchal power.
Consider someone like Jeffrey Epstein in this context. It is hard not to be distracted by the various media moguls, media theorists, and tech investors he kept as friends. This is not a mere coincidence related to economic power. Epstein was fascinated with transhumanism, which includes not only artificial intelligence but also genetic engineering of the human population. His long-term plan was to impregnate women at his New Mexico ranch so that he could seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk’s pronatalist stance, with his 14 children, seems to fit the same bill. The extension of man requires the utility of others in order to realize this extension. The Patriarchs of Big Tech have always assumed not just that the latest technologies are society’s disposable tools , but so too are feminists, immigrants, queer people, black and brown people, Indigenous people, and the list can go on. Inherent in this assumption is also the admission that the tech bros’ own material lives and identities are dependent upon the availability of others to submit, serve, and abide.
Maintaining power requires tinkering and calculation. What particular balancing of space and time is required for the extension of patriarchal power? How does it manifest? What does it look like? What does the technological extension of a type of male identity and sustained future of patriarchy look like in terms of the balancing of space/time? It looks like what we have: the spatial world of terraforming Mars, living in a seasteading community, and a luxury apocalypse bunker combined with the temporal desire to optimize life for some populations, investing in cryogenics and the desire to spread one’s seed. Together this spatial and temporal extension of power is also a form of inoculation and retreat, a protective womb, and in this case also protected and away from all the expendable tools. The would-be God is just a mewing man-child, seemingly sovereign in his domain: but let us understand that this domain is not even really his, it is his Mommy’s Basement.
It is worth noting that there is a shared aesthetic across man caves, luxury bunkers, tech company workspaces, and the renderings of future outer-space habitation. All these spaces are fitted with the accoutrements of Mommy’s Basement, replete with upscale La-Z-Boy recliners, giant TVs, and access to snacks. Insufferable Tools traces how the tech company workspaces that have given us Uber, Foodora, and Alexa are developed in tech workspaces that recreate the creature comforts of a suburban American mom’s basement. If you peek inside the workspaces of most successful tech companies, you will find ping-pong tables, napping pods, and bottomless snacks. This scene seems to have provided the impetus for today’s gig economy and range of assistive devices that rescue and take care of the compulsive programmer, a gig economy that has been designed by tech bros to fulfill all the labor one’s mommy/imagined mommy no longer does for them. These are all forms of never-ending inexhaustible assistance: “mommy drive me, feed me, remind me, stay with me.” Google’s official policy for its Mountain View headquarters stipulates that food must be within 200 feet of its employees at all times. Google is not alone in offering napping pods; Uber does the same in its offices. Capital One Labs, the bank’s experimental software firm, goes further, incorporating themes of childhood-basement adventures into its office design, building in nooks and crannies that employees can climb into to retreat.
What sense of the world is cultivated in these spaces? How does uncomplicated safety and abundance coupled with inoculation and retreat get programmed into the devices we hold closest to our bodies? Big Tech replicates the gendered media infrastructure, in which its structure of desire was first articulated. To return, then, to this refrain: was this all there was to design? Is this all we get – technology direct from Mommy’s Basement? Yes, it would appear so, as we are now learning the hard way.
In 2025, the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, started saying more publicly that AI does in fact pose an existential threat to humanity. He suggests that, as AI surpasses humans in intelligence, it needs to be reframed and retooled to look after us, be nicer to us, and care for us. He states, “If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me.” This reads as a desire for a new alignment, a realignment rather than a recognition of the misalignment in our gendered worlds and technology. Stuck in the recursive loop of tech’s patriarchal paradigm and its very essentialized notion of gender, and asking for Mommy once again. Perhaps, to break a few of these cycles, I might ask this: What if she doesn’t want to?
