Today's episode is a conversation with Mindy Sue, an American designer and researcher whose work focuses on public engagement with digital archives.

She is best known for her book, The Cyberfeminism Index, and is currently a professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA.

We spoke with Mindy about a feminist history of the internet, the role of sex workers in the making of new technologies,

the idea of algorithmic visibility, and the future of gender sexuality on the internet.

So, Mindy, you're actually in the midst of a pretty long tour for your book right now,

the Cyber Feminism Index.

So maybe like a good place to start is, for the layman, not me, of course. What is

cyber feminism? What is your definition of cyber feminism? So for me, cyber feminism kind of goes

back to the origins of its names. This prefix, when cyberspace was coined, it was in William Gibson's Neuromancer,

the science fiction novel. And this book was really important. It kind of predicted the sensory

networked online landscapes that everyone's talking about today with Metaverse and etc.

But it was also very characterized by the male gaze. So you have Fbots and cyber babes and depictions of women in like assistant or robotic-like roles.

So when women were then moving into personal computing in 1989, VNS Matrix and Sadie Plans coined the phrase cyberfeminism as a way to kind of provoke what cyberspace

could be. And then you have all these feminists and marginalized communities creating these very

techno-utopic or dystopic spaces. So for me, cyberfeminism is really about that provocation. How can we critically use

technology? And what does feminism really look like in a digital landscape? Okay. So it's safe to say

it's like feminism in the cyberspace. Exactly. Okay. I guess that's pretty obvious. And then I guess

part of it, if I'm understanding right, is also kind of like a co-opting almost.

So that's really interesting, I think, in the context of something like social media or an OnlyFans.

Like I think OnlyFans is a great example of that because it's now being used almost for not the opposite of what it was intended for, but mostly for sex workers.

And then on social media, like, I guess if I'm thinking about like Instagram specifically and just the way that,

because like the whole genesis of this podcast was the fact that we got kicked off of Instagram.

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