Worries about the so-called “pussification of Silicon Valley” are not at all new. In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Becca Lewis. Her work reaches far back in American history to trace the nexus of gender, technology, and entrepreneurship, such that what we find today seems a foregone conclusion. In today’s wide-ranging discussion we talk about the central figure in this history—George Gilder, whose first book, Sexual Suicide, and subsequent forays into technology, conservative politics, and capitalism included much of what we see today in things like the echo chambers of misinformation of Fox News and the alienated “freedom” of Elon Musk’s SpaceX City. Who are these men, who Becca says, “leave behind the messy physical flows of women’s bodies in favor of the streamlined capitalism of male genius”?
Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University Department of Communication and an incoming assistant professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her work examines the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online. In September 2024, she received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published flagship reports on far-right online broadcasting, media manipulation, and disinformation. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as The Guardian and Business Insider. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.
BECCA LEWIS
I think I've always been interested in the far-right end of technology, or I should say for several years that’s what I’ve been studying. However, I kept feeling that gender was understudied in these elements.
When I was studying the alt-right online, the focus more than anything else was frequently on white nationalism and the racial dynamic. The scholars whose work really inspired me, like sociologist Jesse Daniels, showed how the racial dynamic was always interconnected with the gender dynamic.
As I started following breadcrumbs and looking at certain figures, it became clear that gender was at the heart of their worldview, and there was no getting around it. There were absolutely elements around race and immigration and all sorts of different topics, but in many ways, gender was the core of the worldview, and everything else emanated from there.
I think I was interested in it, but it wouldn't have been the main topic except for the fact that I was interested in the rise of the right in Silicon Valley, and it turned out gender was right there. It's like his influence can be seen in so many different spheres that at this point, so many of my friends and colleagues start to roll their eyes when I say George Gilder played a role in this too.
George Gilder was a figure of interest to me because he was known as a journalist in the nineties who wrote about the Supreme Intellect of Silicon Valley, and his name has been forgotten now. However, if you look at the coverage from around that time, he really crops up everywhere. He was like a TechnoEvangelist, a guru who recommended which technologies should be adopted and which shouldn't. He was on the cover of Wired Magazine, which was the hip digital culture outlet of the decade.
He was also a long-time social conservative. Originally, he was a much more moderate Republican, and his first book was called The Party That Lost Its Head, which criticized the Barry Goldwater conservative Republicans. By the early seventies, William F. Buckley took him under his wing and brought him into the fold of social conservatism. He even went out to Arizona to meet Barry Goldwater, undergoing a big transformation and deciding he wanted to become America's number one anti-feminist.
He wrote the anti-feminist tract Sexual Suicide, which garnered a lot of press coverage at the time for being shockingly misogynist. It was all about the horrors of feminism and the welfare state and how he thought these things upended gender norms and the primacy of the nuclear family.
In the 1980s, he remade himself as a supply-side evangelist and Reaganite, who helped shape Reagan's economic policies. He really has been all over the place. By the time he got to Silicon Valley, people were saying, "Oh, we can forget about his past. He’s gone from place to place." Now he’s a techno-evangelist, but what I'm trying to show is that actually, his ideas about gender carried through all the phases of his career and were really influential for him.
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Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.
Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:
“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times. This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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