Losh 2018

Losh, "Home inspection"

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/8282

"But what if we tell the story of innovation differently to rebut the canonical account of the solo white male inventor myth?"

"To understand how the histories of infrastructure can be reimagined I would like to transpose the trope of “home evaluation” from the feminized field of social work to the post-war context of big data and computational culture. In recounting this history, I would also challenge the idea that innovation is always synonymous with disintermediation by drawing on recent studies by feminist researchers examining the need for intermediaries in technocultural environments."

"in a gendered history of computer technology we should disambiguate invention and delivery, innovation and maintenance, and skill in programming and skill in managing networks in order to give more attention to the roles associated with connection, mediation, and caregiving. Informed by the perspective of science and technology studies and feminist theories of infrastructure, affective labor, and intersectional identities in work culture, it is possible to see Rees in ways that resist the conventional patriarchal innovation paradigm that excessively values inception over reproduction and care."

"While Bush presents a vision of disintermediation in which a machine types when spoken to, thereby displacing the disquieting girl in the scene, Rees offers a more sympathetic view of the role of intermediaries in the scene of computation and wishes to acknowledge the importance of their labor and its reproductive redundancies. When Rees imagined digital machines being used in many kinds of human-computer interactions — including at banks and insurance companies, for airline-reservation systems and air-traffic control, and in inventory control — she speaks of networks of relationships between intermediaries rather than, like Bush’s memex owner, the mastery of a man equipped with a tool."

"To tell better origin stories about technology in the context of the U.S. nation-state, we can also benefit from the theoretical frameworks of global feminists who challenge myths of disintermediation and acknowledge the material, embodied, affective, labor-intensive, and situated character of technology."