The Inattention Economy: Race, Gender, and Technology with Lisa Nakamura

In this episode, we talk to Lisa Nakamura, Professor at the University of Michigan and author of The Inattention Economy: Seeing the Digital Labour of Women of Colour. Lisa reflects on how race, gender, and power shape the histories of digital technology, focusing on the often overlooked labour that has made computing possible. She discusses the work of Navajo women in semiconductor manufacturing, the role of Japanese Americans in early tech production, and why attention, care, and recognition matter for understanding digital culture today.

Lisa Nakamura is Professor of American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. Trained in cultural studies and critical race theory, her work examines race, gender, labor, and power in digital media and internet cultures. She is widely known for her research on the racialized and gendered histories of computing, online identity, and platform labor, with a particular focus on the often-invisible work of women of color in technology. Nakamura approaches technology as a cultural object that can be read, historicized, and critiqued, drawing on interdisciplinary methods to explore ethics, inequality, and more just technological futures.

Reading List:

• Resurrecting the Black Body:Race and the Digital Afterlife by Tonia Sutherland

• Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel by Loretta J. Ross

• Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade by Krystale E. Littlejohn (Editor), Rickie Solinger (Editor) with "Reproductive Futurism" article by Loretta J. Ross and Robynne Lucas

• Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for Social Justice, edited by Lynn Lewis, Loretta Ross, Hilary Moore, Roz Pelles, Vanessa Nosie, Betty Yu, Malkia Devich-Cyril, Priscilla Gonzalez, Terese Howard, Yomara Velez

• Reproductive Justice: An Introduction was the #1 listing in Women’s Studies on Amazon’s booklist in 2017, co-written with Rickie Solinger.

• Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practices, and Critique is an anthology co-edited by me as lead editor, along with Lynn Roberts, Erica Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure.

• Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez. The first-ever book on Reproductive Justice published in 2004.

• Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell

Transcript

Eleanor Drage (00:00)

I'm so excited to be speaking with you today, Lisa. I'm a huge fan and a bit nervous. I really loved your book. It was phenomenal. I'm so pleased to be able to speak to you about it ahead of it coming out and being read by everybody else. A real privilege.

Lisa Nakamura (00:16)

Yes, thank you so much for reading it.

Eleanor Drage (00:19)

So Lisa, can you tell us what you do and what brings you to the topic of race, gender, and technology?

Lisa Nakamura (00:26)

Well, I'm a professor at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and I've been studying race, internet, identity, and the culture that builds up around who people are and how they represent themselves since 1995, before there were images on the internet, before there was even really a web that people were using. I'm fascinated by how consistent some of the concerns around digital technology continue to be.

So the controversies around artificial girlfriends and AI right now — people were talking about meeting their girlfriends or wives or boyfriends on the internet in 1998 as if that was a completely odd thing to do. It's not as if moral panics or anxieties or fears that the world is coming to an end are new around questions of interpersonal relationships with real, imagined, or artificial other beings. That's been a huge interest to me ever since.

This book comes about because I wanted to know why some kinds of workers who've made the internet possible, who've made computing possible, who make it possible for us to buy devices at prices we can usually afford, are totally ignored, while other kinds of labor are unjustly and inaccurately represented as being the reason we have nice things.

Eleanor Drage (01:55)

Our podcast is called The Good Robot. Given what you've just said, can there be good technology? Is it even possible? And if it were possible, how would we go about building it?

Lisa Nakamura (02:06)

I think clearly, given recent events, technologies like vaccinations are important. Clean energy is important. Those are pretty unambiguously good, even though the truth is being bent somewhat in this country to imply that they're not necessarily unambiguously good.

With digital technology, it's such a mirror of the preoccupations, fears, and paradoxes in U.S. society. I will say U.S. because everybody else has to live with the United States’ bad decisions, fantasies, and sometimes good ideas. I wouldn't say good or bad. I would say digital technologies are symptomatic of the struggles America is going through right now around what counts as work, who deserves credit for what, and what kinds of identities and roles should stay the same.

The manosphere, tradwives — and what kinds of roles can change, and to what extent. I was writing this just as COVID was receding and Black Lives Matter was being whipsawed between adoration and vilification in a very short time. The internet reflected that very strongly. So it's good for understanding what's happening in the cultural imagination. Even though we think of technology and culture as separate, they're clearly not.

Eleanor Drage (03:40)

It's interesting that you said vaccines are unambiguously good, and that we think perhaps good technology has to be unambiguously good, when there are always concessions we make with different technologies. Calling this podcast The Good Robot, we didn't try too hard. We could have said excellent technology or perfect technology, but good, especially in British English, can mean quite mediocre.

Lisa Nakamura (04:07)

That's great. When I think of good, I think of biddable — a technology that can be responsive to what people want, but not always. Like a good dog is a dog that usually behaves. I love British understatement. If the British had made the internet, it would be so different.

Eleanor Drage (04:11)

Yeah. A good boy. In what way?

Lisa Nakamura (04:32)

I think the level of literacy would be very different. There would be more emphasis on text and a certain kind of sarcasm or wit, though maybe I'm being stereotypical.

Eleanor Drage (04:43)

Do you think the hyperbole of the internet has something to do with American culture?

Lisa Nakamura (04:47)

Absolutely. Genres like reality television have been symbiotic with the internet, which is why I wrote one chapter about a reality TV star who started out as an internet influencer — Tila Tequila — to explain how someone can be both incredibly visible and completely forgotten.

Lisa Nakamura (05:14)

The paradox of being the most popular person on the internet and then someone everyone knows about but no one knows anything about shows not just the nature of fame in the new medium, but how women of color in particular are vulnerable to being exploited and dropped in the service of platforms that use their work and then discard them.

Eleanor Drage (05:36)

We'll come back to Tila. But to begin with, one group central to internet culture yet discarded were Navajo women. Can you tell us about the Indian women circuit makers who were told that producing circuits was part of the reproductive labor of expressing their culture, and that compensation didn’t matter?

It was framed as a way of maintaining Navajo culture. Can you tell us about these women?

Lisa Nakamura (06:12)

Yes, I would love to.

This is a chapter that covers the period between 1965 and 1975. So it's before the internet is really even going. I started with it because a lot of writing about the internet really does start with the 90s, with Netscape, and sometimes with the 80s, with writing about DARPA and the development in the 70s of a network that would bring together distant places to transmit information between scientists, usually.

I wanted to start in the 60s and 70s because the preconditions for computing were created by mostly women of color who sat over a microscope with tweezers, putting circuits together and testing them. Because the reliability rate for electronics used to be quite bad. I think most people don't remember. Of course they don't. But these things were made by hand.

They were not yet as automated as they are now, and they weren't as reliable as they are now. So in 1965, the Fairchild Corporation opened a state-of-the-art plant in New Mexico, in a part of the country that most people have never been to, which is the town of Shiprock, on a Navajo reservation.

They did this because they could produce chips that were needed for high-reliability applications like the Apollo space mission, which could not have any failure on it, below minimum wage. Because the Navajo Nation doesn't have the same requirements to pay minimum wage — it's a sovereign nation. At the same time, being within the letter of the law, they were producing defense components within the US border.

I was interested in this because there were a thousand people working there. They were almost all Navajo women who had never had jobs before, because there was no industry there before. So all this work is happening in a place where it's almost invisible to most people. And the main source of data and information sharing is still radio. Many people spoke Navajo.

The company itself was very invested in promoting this as an example of how enlightened they were, and how well they were exploiting what they described as the natural traits of a people they saw as being primitive, but at the same time very meticulous, and in some ways fitting the stereotype of what later Asian factory workers were going to be: quiet, docile, invested in craft.

At that time, this was seen as a racialized and gendered quality — that they made rugs, they made jewelry, therefore they would be good at making chips. These things are completely off in terms of how they're done and why they're done, and where people are sitting and how they're doing it.

I wanted to talk about this because it's another example of the disappearing and appearing woman of color in technology. They were doing this work as a precursor to the offshoring of almost all semiconductor and chip manufacture. Almost everything we make has been touched by an Asian woman in Malaysia or in China or some other country.

Yet that investment and that labor of women of color is invisible. Sometimes it's hidden inside of a device, but a lot of the time it's hidden in history. This incident was not written about much before I started exploring it. And I think it's because it's an anomaly.

If we think about who made Silicon Valley possible, we think about men in garages and teenagers working in basements. We don't think about thousands of Navajo women or Malaysian women painstakingly checking everything for eight hours a day to make sure that we could have radios, TVs, and eventually computers.

Eleanor Drage (09:59)

Yeah, we just think of people with six-figure salaries in the present. This isn't taught in schools. It's not on our history syllabus. It's not taught as part of AI literacy — that's just the ABCs of ChatGPT. And you call this the inattention economy, this showcasing of what has not been paid attention to.

Lisa Nakamura (10:23)

Yes. I think that a lot of the inequality at the core of the digital economy springs from sources that are made obscure on purpose.

If we thought about actual hours spent on devices or platforms and who put them in, it's people like content moderators, system administrators, archivists, or people building things in factories. The people who get the credit often have put in very little time themselves.

This is not to say we need to return to a primitive idea of judging value only by who made what. But I think we've gone too far the other way. Just as in the 60s and 70s women were thought to be natural factory workers because they were patient and had small fingers, today white men are thought to be innovators because they have original ideas.

It's not that original ideas only exist in that realm, but they are somehow more sticky when we talk about white men than when we talk about Asian women or Latinx men, or almost anyone else.

Eleanor Drage (11:45)

And Kerry and I, my previous co-host, did a lot of research into what it takes to come up with an original idea in a company: what you need to file a patent, the space, the time to think, someone to listen to you and perceive your idea as original, etc. So that's all tied into this broader capitalist economy of ideas.

Anyway, I want to get on to this other aspect of the story of Navajo women that you tell.

Lisa Nakamura (11:52)

That's it.

Eleanor Drage (12:12)

You don't shy away from the elements of these stories that complicate and enrich what you call a straightforward narrative of economic exploitation and unacknowledged labor. For example, how many women took great pride in supporting their families.

I said in a previous clip that I did for The Good Robot and Cambridge social media a while ago that when my granny was working in Bletchley Park—she told everyone, and continued to tell everyone, that she was a secretary, when in fact she was what was called a computer, one of the women cracking the Enigma code.

That sort of hidden history seems to me like real exploitation, but to her, of course she wouldn't say what she was doing. She was working in service of the country and she was very proud of it. So there's a clash of feminisms between generations at stake there as well.

Lisa Nakamura (12:58)

I love that story, and here you are doing this. I think there are genealogies of investment and labor to build technologies that come from unexpected places and unexpected people, and are sometimes made obscure for practical reasons.

There were security concerns around cryptography that meant she couldn't go around telling everybody she had done this. I think sometimes these are willful omissions, however.

Because they question the idea of who deserves credit and who deserves compensation for different kinds of labor.

In the book, I talk a lot about the AOL volunteer lawsuit. America Online was started by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but the people who actually got it to run were often volunteers. They gave help for free: homework tutoring, teaching people how to log on, offering companionship, explaining how things worked. These were mostly women and kids, and they were paid in AOL hours.

This is a strange echo of factory towns where workers were paid in scrip, not real money, that could only be spent in that town.

People were glad to build the community. They had a utopian idea that they were helping people come together across distance, identity, and barriers. And in many ways, they did that. But they were not given profits. They were not even paid. Some were told they might get jobs in the company, but almost no one did.

Everyone was fired on the same day because AOL realized they were probably violating child labor laws, since many of the volunteers were children. This is the flip side of the child boy genius in the basement: a retired woman or a 12-year-old girl spending 80 hours a week on AOL, teaching people how to log on.

That story has a somewhat happy ending. The lawsuit was successful and community leaders received over 30 million dollars, but it was 20 years later, and not everyone who had done the work could be located. One argument I make in the book is that acknowledgement and apology are not enough. It is possible to repay people for the time they put into building platforms, so profit doesn’t only trickle up to a few people — which we know is one of the problems with Silicon Valley.

Eleanor Drage (15:59)

Before we get into reparations, which I think is a really important part of your book, let’s talk about the Japanese and Japanese Americans who made Santa Clara Valley the beating heart of tech, what we now call Silicon Valley. They were recruited from internment camps, and you tell this story about your family, including your maternal grandmother, Misao, who was sent from LA to do electronics work that mimicked the structure of the camp itself. So it’s not just internment camps, but how their structure is replicated later in tech production, and why companies were so invested in women aged 35 and under.

Lisa Nakamura (16:29)

That is a fascinating story. It came out of archival research I was doing in old Japanese American newspapers. Like many ethnic groups, they had newspapers in both Japanese and English.

This one was called The Rafu Shimpo, and my grandmother used to get it. I’d see it on the table and think, “What’s this?” I couldn’t read it. Some classified ads in the 60s and 70s were for electronics workers.

People were coming back from the war and looking for jobs after being incarcerated for up to three years. My dad’s side of the family was in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, behind barbed wire, living in barracks with three other families.

Some jobs were for airline attendants, some for data entry. It’s interesting how these new information jobs were described. Some wanted military experience. My grandmother applied for a job as an assembler. They wanted women 35 and under. She was 50, but she got the job because IDs weren’t closely checked.

This was a vulnerable group of people who had lost everything. Farms were gone. Lives had to be rebuilt from scratch. The stereotype of Asian women as quiet and non-political fed into the idea they would be ideal assembly workers. This was in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

I found this work through traditional archives like newspapers, and through personal materials my uncle saved. This shows why using personal history matters — sometimes artifacts don’t exist in public archives because groups are deemed unimportant, or because archives reflect who donates them.

Scholars like Tanya Sutherland write about Black archives and what doesn’t make it into them. It’s political. As researchers, we’re lucky to have time to look at less traditional materials.

Eleanor Drage (19:32)

It’s a beautiful example of auto-ethnographic work. My students often ask how to do this kind of research using family histories. Another reason to read this book.

Quickly, tell us about her son.

Eleanor Drage (19:56)

Hiroshi Joe worked at Bird’s Eye as well. This is a staple American frozen foods company. What’s the relationship between these industries, internment, and electronic labor?

Lisa Nakamura (19:57)

This is a story I didn’t know until after my uncle died during COVID. He was born before internment. After three years in camp, my mother’s side of the family had no money to return to California.

Bird’s Eye Farms in Seabrook, New Jersey, offered to transport people from camps and give them jobs. They ended up moving east and lived for five more years in another camp, called dorms, filled with displaced people.

His social security card listed “Dorm A, Seabrook Farms.” He didn’t really have a home, just another camp. It took eight years to return to Los Angeles.

This wasn’t typical, but it shows how incarceration has long-term consequences. That side of the family didn’t participate in the digital economy the way my dad’s side did, who returned to Santa Clara County. My dad worked at ITT and Fairchild, so I already knew something about that factory.

Eleanor Drage (22:19)

Fairchild was one of the first chip manufacturers to outsource production to Asia. What does that moment tell us about race and the internet?

Lisa Nakamura (22:25)

It’s everything. Colonization always moves toward the cheapest and most distant labor. When things go wrong, no one has to see it.

I was surprised to find chips made in San Rafael, Maine, and Mexico. But Asia was the cheapest. Silicon Valley became one of the first industries to make this labor almost exclusively female and concentrated in one region.

That makes resistance difficult. We now see similar patterns in places like Nigeria with AI data cleaning and content moderation. This dirty work, physical, psychological, emotional doesn’t happen here, but we benefit from it.

Eleanor Drage (24:13)

The same goes for recycling and sustainability initiatives that make wealthy countries look cleaner at the expense of others.

Lisa Nakamura (24:16)

Exactly.

Eleanor Drage (24:34)

It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Problems move elsewhere, which makes activism difficult.

Lisa Nakamura (24:46)

That’s what imperialism does. It moves things around, making some visible and others invisible to cut off resistance.

Eleanor Drage (25:18)

Why do the lives of people outside the factory or lab matter to the history of computing?

Lisa Nakamura (25:32)

I wanted to counter the fetishization of famous innovators. We scrutinize every detail of their lives. We should pay as much attention to people equally responsible for these technologies.

Many workers knew they were building rockets or space technologies and were motivated by national service. This logic of sacrifice often attaches to femininity. That’s why I was interested in this podcast.

Eleanor Drage (27:40)

Care labor is well theorized in feminism. Empathy is racialized and outsourced. You also talk about the term “women of color.” Where does it come from?

Lisa Nakamura (28:16)

I was interested in how academics label people in ways they wouldn’t label themselves. The term re-emerged through Tumblr and younger women claiming it.

Loretta Ross explains it emerged from political organizing, not love for the term itself. It’s imperfect and still oriented around whiteness, but its return around 2020 coincided with renewed global interest in racial justice.

Political engagement among women of color is high, even if many reject the term. That energy made me want to explain why this group has been the bedrock of the tech industry.

Eleanor Drage (31:41)

You’ve been listening to The Good Robot and our interview with Lisa Nakamura. For the second half of this conversation, please head to our bonus episode.