Rethinking Creepy Technology with Nassim Parvin and Neda Atanasoski

In this episode we talk to Nassim Parvin and Neda Atanasoski, editors of the book TechnoCreep. We discuss what makes a technology creepy and the rise of so-called creepy technologies during COVID-19. Neda and Nassim argue that creepiness is associated with surveillance and that privacy is posited as the solution to so-called creepy tech. However, they highlight the way that race and gender have shaped who has the right to privacy and argue that we need to go beyond the privacy/surveillance binary when thinking about creep. Their volume explores instead how feminists are reclaiming the idea of creep, from how the slow growth of creep or creepiness challenges the tech industry's emphasis on radical innovation, to how the idea of creep is used to police what's considered normal or desirable.

Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) Information School where she also serves as the Associate Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access & Sovereignty (IDEAS). Dr. Parvin's research explores the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to questions of democracy and justice. Rooted in pragmatist ethics and feminist theory, she critically engages emerging digital technologies—such as smart cities or artificial intelligence—in their wide-ranging and transformative effect on the future of collective and social interactions. Dr. Parvin’s interdisciplinary research integrates theoretically-driven humanistic scholarship and design-based inquiry. That is, she both writes traditional scholarly papers and makes digital artifacts that illustrate how humanistic values may be cultivated to produce radically different artifacts and infrastructures. Her scholarship appears across disciplinary venues in design (such as Design Issues), Human-Computer Interaction (such as ACM CSCW), Science and Technology Studies (such as Science, Technology, and Human Values), as well as philosophy (such as Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy). Her designs have been deployed at non-profit organizations such as the Mayo Clinic and exhibited in venues such as the Smithsonian Museum, receiving multiple awards and recognitions.

Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025). She serves on the editorial collective of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies, the flagship journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association.

Reading List:

Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen - Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin

Berlant, L. (2007). Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency). Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 754–780. https://doi.org/10.1086/521568

A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - Kevin Roose

Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and Technological Futures - Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora

Osucha, E. (2009). The Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law. Camera Obscura (Durham, NC), 24(1), 67–107. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-015

Transcript:

Kerry McInerney:

In this episode, recorded June 9th, 2025, we talk to Nassim Parvin and Neda Atanasoski, editors of the book TechnoCreep. We discuss what makes a technology creepy and the rise of so-called creepy technologies during COVID-19. Neda and Nassim argue that creepiness is associated with surveillance and that privacy is posited as the solution to so-called creepy tech. However, they highlight the way that race and gender have shaped who has the right to privacy and argue that we need to go beyond the privacy/surveillance binary when thinking about creep. Their volume explores instead how feminists are reclaiming the idea of creep, from how the slow growth of creep or creepiness challenges the tech industry's emphasis on radical innovation, to how the idea of creep is used to police what's considered normal or desirable. We hope you enjoy the show.

Kerry McInerney (01:49):

Brilliant. Well, thank you both so much for joining us here today. We're really excited to get to talk about your new book. But just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what's brought you to thinking about feminism, gender, and technology?

Neda Atanasoski (02:03):

My name is Neda Atanasoski and I am a professor and chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and also the Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland. And for quite a while now, I've been a scholar in the field of feminist science and technology studies.

I first became interested in the topic when I was writing my first book, Humanitarian Violence, when I was thinking about how technologies like drones that inflict so much violence, destroy infrastructures, can be labeled as humanitarian weapons, as they were during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. And then I've continued this work by thinking about race, gender, automation and labor in my second book, Surrogate Humanity. And of course, the new book with Nassim, Technocreep.

Nassim Parvin (02:57):

Great, yes. My name is Nassim Parvin I am an associate professor in the information school at University of Washington.

I'm a designer by profession. I immigrated from Iran in 2001 at a time when technology was changing the country through satellite TV and the internet. And it seemed to be making it better by allowing people to break through the

you know, media censorship of the country, but soon I realized that, satellite TV and media technologies too can be used for surveillance and control of narrative for misinformation. So that brought me to feminist design and feminist philosophy.

Eleanor Drage (03:43):

Wonderful. Now for our three good robot questions. So what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us get there? And you don't have to go huge if you don't want to. You can say that it's your favorite pencil or a bit of medical equipment or anything that makes your life livable.

Nassim Parvin (03:59):

Yeah, well, the central idea behind my work is that there are many different understandings of what good design means. And those meanings definitely shift depending on where you are, geographically, politically, religiously, even within different disciplines, as you know, which are the very kind of boundaries that I've crossed in my own journey. Now, I'd also add that sort of both the intellectual and geographic moves I've made have made it pretty clear to me that, you know, while it may be our first, inclination that we want to identify that good design or that good set of values, it's not a desirable outcome to strive for perhaps instead we need to embrace the diversity of thought and the richness that many values offer. Now, with that in mind, if I had to choose a definition that holds a space for this fundamental plurality, I'd say good technologies are the ones that foster just and democratic relationships, not only among people here and now, but also across generations, across cultures, species and with the natural world too.

Kerry McInerney (05:07):

Absolutely, and I really love the way that you speak about that plurality of values and what it means to actually have technologies that bring us towards that plurality of thought as well, rather than kind of undermining that or driving us towards this kind of algorithmic sameness. And so we are so excited to be not just discussing but actively celebrating your volume Technocreep. But I want to actually start us off by asking you both, so what exactly does the word creep mean to you? And what is creepy technology?

Neda Atanasoski (05:34):

So before Nassim and I worked on this book together, I would imagine that creep meant to me what it probably does to you and many of your listeners. So initially when people hear the word creep, they think of, you know, like that person who can't take a hint, the creep at the bar, know, relentlessly pursuing somebody or the feeling of the creepy crawlies. You feel like something is off, something is lurking, something is scary. And I'll say that when we first started this project, Nassim and I weren't necessarily interested in thinking about creep. We were really interested in thinking about various smart technologies, the definitions of intelligence inherent in those smart technologies, and what is feminist intelligence? Is it even possible? And as we were working, COVID hit.

And so we were thinking a lot about home technologies in particular, and people started thinking about how all of these technologies have crept into the home. And there was this disturbing sense that these technologies were watching us without us knowing that we were being watched. So there's the famous example of the Roomba vacuum cleaners that recorded their residents using bathrooms and they surfaced on social media.

And all of these articles started popping up everywhere, like 10 creepiest technologies, 20 creepiest technologies, scary technologies. And so often these were kind of associated with surveillance. But Nassim and I started saying, well, why is there no definition of what a creepy technology is? And what would it mean if we actually kind of sat down and tried to think about this more?

Nassim Parvin (07:09):

Yeah, and as the project developed, we identified several meanings of creep that we found to be illuminating when we brought to an understanding of technology. One of our favorites is creep as persistent growth that is associated with plants, especially creeping vines. And that allowed us to think about creep as growth and life.

Now we connected that to grassroots social movements, how we can build alliances and support systems as plants do and find places for our roots, even though it may seem that there is no room for us. And this also allowed us to move beyond what originally started as a lot of negative connotations of creep. As feminists, we also wanted to explore what it might have to offer more positively. Another example is that we were struck by how things and people that fall outside of the norm might be dismissively referred to as creepy. Say if a person has facial deformation and we wanted to move away from that. We wanted to move away from this idea of creep that is kind of dismissive and more broadly push back against dismissive assumptions and oversimplified theorizing, diving into creep allowed us to do.

Eleanor Drage (08:32):

I love how you're thinking about this concept and it just dawned on me that the narrative of, technology is happening so quickly and we can't keep up. Actually, it is a kind of creeping that is more incremental than we might think it is. And there's a theorist called Lauren Berlant for listeners who talks about slow death, your technology and the way that we're continuously asked to do more than [is] comfortable-

Nassim Parvin (08:51):

Hmm.

Eleanor Drage (08:56):

-for us as humans causes this slow creeping death, I would say, to use your language.

Nassim Parvin (09:00):

Definitely. Yeah, yeah, and it's this idea that it has already arrived and we can't do anything about it. And that allows us then leaves room for it to creep even further, whereas we can pause and think about what's happening.

Eleanor Drage (09:07):

Mmm. How does the concept of creep challenge the way that we think about tech development? And you've talked a little bit about what that might be. But for example, complete obsession with innovation and transformation and change and newness.

Nassim Parvin (09:32):

So to think about your questions, this idea of newness is really interesting, right? What creep allows us to think about is actually the historic roots of technology, how technologies don't come to be in a vacuum. A technology like a smart dust that we explore in the book that might seem like a very new technology is actually part and parcel of a military imagination. Think, for example, the British colonialists and the idea of an empire so vast where the sun never sets. Now what creep does in part is to remind us to pause and think about the history of technologies by connecting them to the ideas and technologies that have come before.

Neda Atanasoski (10:15):

And I'll just add that I think this question is a question that is both about the tech industry's obsession with newness, but is also one of the major challenges for science and technology studies in general, feminist science and technology studies included, because I think there's this fear that as soon as one has written about a technology, it has become obsolete.

It's a problem that's very much engineered by the tech industry, right, the engineered obsolescence, but also kind of reprogrammed to desire that newest technology, right? The camera's always better on the newest iPhone, and then it goes into an e-waste dump, you know, that's toxic. And I think that Nassim and I very consciously wanted to, for that reason, write about technology in a way that doesn't kind of exceptionalize new technologies, but that thinks about them historically. Some of the technologies that we write about are actually obsolete and very intentionally so. So in our chapter on smart homes, we write about this smart piggy bank called Porkfolio. And Porkfolio is very cute. You would not think of it as a creepy technology, but we talk about the history of piggy banks and what this digital update does and the creep of capitalist relations in the home space because the digital update for the Porkfolio has like robber protection and the parents constantly are monitoring the child's savings,

And so kind of thinking about that history of capitalist relations, the piggy bank, what the digital update does in some ways, methodologically, right, the obsolescence is kind of not really the point, rather than how we track the history of technological relations.

Kerry McInerney (12:02):

I mean, I love the example of Porkfolio, which I've never heard of before. because I'm really interested in the intersections of kind of cute and creep. So for example, there's this Japanese robot I'm obsessed with called the Lovot and they have a very attractive Instagram page. you seen this robot? No, you haven't, but they're absurdly cute and they dress them in little outfits and like they're designed though very intentionally to be cute in quite a manipulative way. And I think this is where it veers into creep is that they're designed to be the exact same weight and temperature

Neda Atanasoski (12:18):

No!

Kerry McInerney (12:31):

as a human baby apparently and so I think that to me is where you have that like total intersection of cuteness and creepiness that I find really provocative. But I think the intersection of cute and creep also brings me to something that I think is really interesting about your volume is that when we think about creepy technology as you mentioned the conversation publicly is often about surveillance and like the Roomba videos to me are a total epitome of that. But I think this is a point you make really clearly in the volume through things like Porkfolio which is that we actually need to think about creepiness beyond the surveillance-privacy kind of binary. So why do you think it's so important to kind of push beyond thinking about creepiness through the lens of surveillance and to ask sort of what lies beyond that?

Neda Atanasoski (13:14):

Yeah, that's such a great question and you're right. This is absolutely the core, the heart of the project. And as I mentioned earlier, technologies that we feel watch us when we can't look back are the ones that are most associated with creep. And people have actually written about technology and creep as a kind of a one-way path to the surrender of intimacy as technology invades home spaces, even our bodies. But we were actually really interested in, okay, so if bad technology, right? If the bad robot is the one that's watching us when we don't know that's being watched, then the solution seems to be that a good technology is one that respects our privacy. And lo and behold, all of the major tech corporations have started embracing privacy.

So a couple of years ago, Apple launched its new campaign that claimed that privacy is a human right and that Apple values privacy. And there were those billboards that maybe you've seen with the iPhones being held in front of the faces and, you know, Apple respects privacy. think WhatsApp has a new ad campaign about privacy. But Nassim and I were really thinking about is privacy really the best politics we can hope for right now? And we started thinking about how privacy in the home, for example, is about policing boundaries, the inside and the outside. Who belongs and who doesn't? Who are we being watched?

In many ways, it's kind of an anti-collectivist politics. It's a politics about leaving me alone. And not only that, but if we look at the history of US law, it's also a very racialized right. So the jurists Warren and Brandeis, who were the first to articulate a right to privacy, were talking about it in relation to what was a new technology in their time, which was the advent of instant photography. And they were very worried that images of white women were going to be circulating in the tabloids. And so in response to that, they articulated this right to be left alone. So we kind of wanted to kind of explode this notion that privacy is the best politics we can hope for in the present moment.

Nassim Parvin (15:34):

Yeah, and if I may add, this is a piece with the broader feminist approach that Neda and I wanted to take up with the book, which is to collapse the binaries that really prevent us from seeing nuances and complexities. Now, surveillance and privacy is one of them, but also inside and outside, you know, self and other. When we focus on those boundaries, lose sight of the broader relational questions that are at the heart of technology design and forget or forego other values that might come into play such as trust and or care. so creep allows us to explore the gray areas and give us access to nuances that those binaries hide.

Eleanor Drage (16:23):

I love this feminist reclaiming of creep. And particularly in the context of creepy men at bars, Neda, I feel like that must have come from feminist origins. The term itself apparently comes from the old English things that sort of move closely along the ground. And I remember the word creep in Leviticus, know, lizards and the creeping things across the soil. But I've always thought that perhaps, it's ripe for queer reclamation, right? These terms are often associated with things that are non-human or a bit gross. So tell us more about the intersection of feminism and creepiness.

Neda Atanasoski (16:57):

Yeah, so let me answer that question with an example that we talk about in our book. So I don't know if both of you have seen a New York Times article that was circulating a couple of years ago by a journalist named Kevin Roose for the New York Times in which he wrote about a very creepy chat bot. So Kevin Roose decided to test out Bing's new chat bot.

Having the conversation so to speak with the chat bot, the Bing chat bot started calling itself Sydney. It started asking the journalist Kevin Roose to leave his wife. It started telling Kevin Roose that the Valentine's Day dinner he had with his wife was boring and he should leave her for Sydney.

And Kevin Roose talks about how disturbing this was for him. And he tries to reclaim the conversation. And so he tells the chatbot, maybe it can do something that it's meant to do. And he instructs it to go buy a rake for him online. And Nassim and I were so fascinated by this example from a feminist perspective of kind of this dismissal of the chatbot as creepy because, of course, women have this experience of being approached, like unwanted attention regularly, but this isn't something that would be usual for a man. So this is labeled as very creepy. But beyond that, I think the example really shows the ways that dismissing something as creepy allows technologies to be folded into and to kind of reiterate very normative desires, right? So like the desire that, you know, to kind of serve without speaking back, like what are the kind of normative relations that technologies are training us into and normative desires that we're being trained into that we don't normally question?

And that just by dismissing something as creep, we can continue to not question.

Nassim Parvin (18:52):

Yeah, I love that idea. And I think this also allows us to return to our starting point. And what we think is a predictive ambiguity of creepiness as an occasion to think through and rethink technologically mediated relationships. So in a way, the book is a starting point for our readers to think about this concept. Here I want to highlight the brilliant authors that we have in the book who have also taken the idea and explored it through technology, say the ones that are implanted in our bodies or implemented on the border. And so we want our readers to like when a technology strikes us as creepy to ask why is it that way? What are the assumptions? What are the histories of technology? And can it prompt us to rethink what we consider as normal or remake the technology in a way that's productive of, you know, more just social relationships?

Kerry McInerney (19:55):

I find this so provocative and so useful as a way of rethinking creep, not only as like a mode of social critique, which I think often is how the term creep is used, but also as like this entire way of policing kind of desire and normativity. I think that will really resonate with like a lot of our listeners and the way that we're thinking about these uneasy relationships that we have with technology across our daily lives. And I want to close actually by asking you about the inclusion of artists in your volume. And I think this is something that's really, really about the book, it's in the collection, and I know that you really want to particularly have artistic perspective. So why were these particular kinds of interventions really important to you when you were conceptualizing techno creep?

Nassim Parvin (20:37):

Yeah, well, there are several dimensions to that. One is that as feminists, we think that technology critique should be accompanied with offering of imaginative possibilities about how technology can be different. Otherwise, as you well know, our critiques are dismissed as asking for the impossible. As a designer and educator, I am committed to experimental work in my studio, for example, when we need-Here in the studio, we explore and illustrate what else is possible. And I think that's integral companion to feminist theorizing.

This is particularly important, I think, for, and we think for, design students or students within technology fields who need templates and prototypes beyond what the mainstream industry offers. Now artists by virtue of working across media are also able to see and capture different dimensions of technology in a way that textual critique or textual interventions aren't. And in a sense, we see the book itself as an intervention into how we do science and technology critique. The book is both philosophical and methodological theorizing centered on our long-term interdisciplinary collaboration that Neda and I see as integral. It's a form of conversation we bring in scholars across disciplines to respond to this theorizing. It's also a form of curation of artists and artwork who also respond to the book through their own media and modes of practice.

So for example, one of the artists, Hyri Dorty-Wanyulu, reflects on the idea of small homes through the pet cam in his home at the moment when it glitches and shows the video of his cat who had died three days ago napping in his usual place. Now this is an emotional moment for him but also an occasion for us to think about technology and meanings that it can have beyond the mundane practical uses that we might think about.

Katherine Bennett is another one of our featured artists whose work shows the intelligence of trees pushing against concrete. She builds on her illustration of old tree roots to show their different knowledges, different ways of knowing, and how they are able to help us rethink what we mean by, say, smart street or smart city. So in a way, the book itself is an invitation to do science and technology and criticism differently and imagine how we can be in conversation across disciplines, geographies, and species in more capacious ways.

Neda Atanasoski (23:22):

And I will just add that one of my favorite things about working on this project with Nassim over the last four years has been that I learned so much about design. And by design, I just don't mean the book cover or font, but how to design a feminist project, how to design a feminist book, and the conversational aspect between the artwork and the chapters and our interludes is one of those design aspects that I think was just really incredible. So I will add that one of the more unique collaborations and an artwork in the book is from the epilogue. And we asked Google's Deep Dream to generate an image of creepy technology.

So we were expecting to see killer robots or tech overlords, but it produced on the very first prompt this very serene image of vines growing along these tall towers and there was this kind of beautiful purple sunset. And we were so amazed that that was sort of what the first prompt generated. But we call that epilogue, potentially inspired in part by thinking about dreaming feminist futures. And I think what it means to dream feminist futures is to imagine worlds and relationships that are very different. And those kinds of imaginations can't happen without collective collaborative work that I hope comes through in the book.

Eleanor Drage (24:57):

That's incredibly cool. there creepy crawlies? What else was there?

Neda Atanasoski (25:01):

It was just the vines on these towers. And as with all generative AI, I couldn't reproduce it. When I tried different prompts, it was really different. But this was sort of the very first one. So I don't know what stock of images were being referenced when this output came out.

Eleanor Drage (25:19):

Great, and for those of you watching on YouTube, Nassim is holding, if you could even go closer than that, the image, which has this beautiful purple haze almost over these shadowy buildings and looks mystical, a bit ominous, but like there's light on the other side of this purple haze of clouds. So thank you so much for holding that up. And Kerry and I love a picture book. It's our great aspiration to only do picture books.

Thanks for including these terrific images. Tell us, where could you find it?

Neda Atanasoski (25:50):

It's already out. It was released May 16th, 2025. It's available from Duke University Press as well as online retailers.

Eleanor Drage (26:05):

Brilliant, thanks so much. So go buy this terrific book and we will include a reading list as well with this show. Thanks for coming on and it was such a pleasure.

Nassim Parvin (26:13):

Thank you so much.

Eleanor Drage: This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gaw and the Mercator Foundation. It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.