The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet

Revealing the unheralded contributions of women of color to the foundation and development of the digital economy

The Inattention Economy challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing--the microchip era of the 1960s and '70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s--Lisa Nakamura illuminates these women's instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.

From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Nakamura highlights how women's gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism's benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives.

Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women's labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet.

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Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Cultures and the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of several books, including Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet and Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minnesota, 2007).