Start reading In Defense of Solidarity and Pleasure | Firuze...

Many of us have seen the image. Black, Brown, Indigenous women gathered around a laptop or a computer or using a mobile phone, mesmerized by the promise of the sleek, modern-looking machine. It implies a story about technology providing new opportunities, knowledge, capital. But there is more to this image. Much more. In the summer of 2015, I traveled to San José, Costa Rica, to study the technology-focused organization Sulá Batsú. I expected to find depoliticized frameworks based on women’s “empowerment” and entrepreneurial talents, and visions and practices that centered technology as a magic wand that would cure all the world’s injustices. Yet what I found was quite the opposite: Caring relationships built on solidarity and tied to dissension, elastic organizational structures that accommodated feelings, an emphasis on collaborative design and process, and practices that were at once bound to technology while decentering it. Technology was not the magic wand. Relationships were at t

Many of us have seen the image. Black, Brown, Indigenous women gathered around a laptop or a computer or using a mobile phone, mesmerized by the promise of the sleek, modern-looking machine. It implies a story about technology providing new opportunities, knowledge, capital. But there is more to this image. Much more. In the summer of 2015, I traveled to San José, Costa Rica, to study the technology-focused organization Sulá Batsú. I expected to find depoliticized frameworks based on women’s “empowerment” and entrepreneurial talents, and visions and practices that centered technology as a magi