Your Computer Is On Fire ed. by Thomas S. Mullaney et al. (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Your Computer Is On Fire ed. by Thomas S. Mullaney et al. Ksenia Tatarchenko (bio) Your Computer Is On Fire Edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. Pp. 409. As the title indicates, this collection of essays calls on its readers to engage more directly with digital politics. The chapters range from Trojan horse programs to child pornography detection, from game design to keyboard interface, from mobile banking in Africa to ICT classrooms in India. In what follows, I outline the main argument and structure of the book, then consider its pertinence to the history of technology, and conclude with a comment on politics and the book's audience. The book's general message is that it is time to recognize and act upon the inequality, marginalization, and biases built into our IT systems. It is organized around three types of critique. The five chapters in the first section, entitled "Nothing Is Virtual," drive home a literal understanding of the "fire" in the title—namely, the materiality of the digital and the omnipresence of human labor kept invisible by discourse, corporate policy, and public expectations. Chapter titles such as "The Cloud Is a Factory" (Nathan Ensmenger) and "Your AI Is Human" show this emphasis on physicality and inequality. The second and third parts of the book focus on the relationship between online and offline realities. The six chapters in Part 2, "This Is an Emergency," point out the dangerous consequences of technooptimism and the structural problems that get amplified, not fixed, by [End Page 923] technology. For example, Mar Hicks proclaims that "Sexism Is a Feature, Not a Bug," Corinna Schlombs recalls that "Gender Is a Corporate Tool," and Halcyon M. Lawrence demonstrates how "Siri Disciplines." Having demonstrated that inequities are built into IT systems, Part 3, "Where Will the Fire Spread?," explores alternative ways of perceiving, conceiving, and imagining human-machine interactions. The five essays in this part examine emerging forms of hegemony as well as the potentialities for subversion. Janet Abbate convincingly demonstrates the limits of the "pipeline discourse" (blaming the educational system for not supplying underrepresented workers) and the related politics around coding campaigns for disadvantaged youths. Thomas Mullaney's "Typing Is Dead" is not only a story of Chinese typesetting, but of the conceptual disruption that preserved the material hegemony of QWERTY while liberating its functionality. The not-so-obvious choice to include two introductions and two conclusions (instead of coauthoring one of each) signals that the book is conceived polyphonically and as an invitation to debate. Responding to this invitation, how are the call for action and the more traditional historical approaches that both appear in the book related? Edited by three historians and a historically minded communications scholar, the book poses two related questions that preoccupy all T&C readers: Who is the public we want to reach with our work, and what are our narrative choices? Thomas Mullaney suggests that direct formulations, propulsive tone, and low word count or "uncompromising declaration of fact" are needed for our work to gain a greater traction with our colleagues and students in STEM fields. But a good half of the contributions to this book are based on academic books or articles, some of which were published in this journal. This fact challenges the point that "the time of equivocation is over," suggesting that writing for a wider public is an additional responsibility, not an alternative to the long-term intellectual labor. Students are the volume's audience of choice, and, indeed, this collection of essays will be of great help in STS surveys. Yet one point is worth highlighting: the book targets American students. Although the cases do range across the globe, the perspective is more localized, as is obvious in the expectations of certain background knowledge and the assumptions about the concern for democracy. The experience of having taught Chinese, Swiss, Russian, and Singaporean students over the last decade reminds me that the perception of technocratic fixes as a threat to democracy is not universal, and unequivocal declarations of fact may backfire. One essay stands out for its methodological virtuosity combining technological with...