translations/Feminist_ninja_upgrading_intersectional_feminism_with_the_hacker_class/upgrading_intersectional_feminism_with_the_hacker_class.1.eng.srt

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Upgrading intersectional feminism with
the hacker class

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Part 1: Evolution of feminist cyborgs

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"By the late twentieth century, our time,
a mythic time, we are all chimeras, 

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theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism — in short, cyborgs.

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The cyborg is our ontology;
it gives us our politics.

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The cyborg is a condensed image
of both imagination and material reality,

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the two joined centers structuring any
possibility of historical transformation."

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When the queen Elizabeth
of the United Kingdom

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sent her first email in 1976,
there were no feminists on the internet,

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it was just a military science project.

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A Cyborg Manifesto is considered
the beginning of cyberfeminism 

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because Donna Haraway's position
was unique.

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"I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position

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a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl
was made possible

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by Sputnik’s impact
on U.S. national science-education policy.

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I have a body and mind as much constructed 

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by the post–Second World War arms race and Cold War

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as by the women’s movements.

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There are more grounds for hope
in focusing on the contradictory effects

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 of politics designed to
produce loyal American technocrats,

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which also produced
large numbers of dissidents,

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 than in focusing
on the present defeats." 

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A Cyborg Manifesto was published in the Socialist Review magazine in 1985.

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Only 2000 hosts were connected to the internet

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and they were limited to a military, administrative and academic elite,

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predominantly bourgeois white cis men.

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Apple was already marketing itself
as the freedom warrior

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with an expensive commercial directed by Ridley Scott, 

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aired during Super Bowl 1984 with an Orwellian theme.

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"The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, 

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is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,

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not to mention state socialism.

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But illegitimate offspring are often
exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.

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Their fathers, after all,
are inessential."

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Just when capitalism declared its global victory and the "end of history" in 1991,

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the internet was made available
to the general public as World Wide Web.

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That year Judy Wajcman wrote
"Feminism confronts technology"

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and VNS Matrix,
the first cyberfeminist collective was founded

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who published "a cyberfeminist manifesto
for the 21st century" that claimed:

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"we are the virus of the new world disorder

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rupturing the symbolic from within

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saboteurs of big daddy mainframe

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the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix

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the VNS MATRIX
terminators of the moral codes

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mercenaries of slime"

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Around the same time 

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Sandy Stone wrote "Will the real
body please stand up?"

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emphasizing the realness of "virtual reality"
and how the internet facilitates

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crossing over borders of gender
and other socially structured identities.

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She says: "My interest in cyberspace
is primarily about communities

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and how they work."

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Cyberfeminist communities were blooming on the web with radical ideas

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but websites were still static

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and internet users were less than 0.5% of the world population until 1995, 

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when Bill Gates was already the richest person on the world.

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Carmen Hermosillo fue una de las primeras adeptas de las comunidades del ciberespacio

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"Está de moda sugerir" escribió

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"que el ciberespacio es un tipo de isla de los benditos

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donde la gente es libre de expresar y entregarse a su individualidad.

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Esto no es cierto.

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He visto mucha gente exponer
sus emociones, sus entrañas online

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y yo misme lo hice hasta que vi me había mercantilizado a mi misme."

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At the beginning
of the new millennium 

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with 5% of the world population connected
to the net, Darcy DiNucci introduced

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the Web 2.0:

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"The Web will be understood
not as screenfuls of text and graphics but

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as a transport mechanism, the ether
through which interactivity happens.

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It will [...] appear on your computer
screen, [...] on your TV set [...]

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your car dashboard [...] your cell phone
[...] hand-held game machines [...]

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maybe even your microwave oven."

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Ahora, con la fibra óptica conectada directamente a tu casa

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suponiendo que cuando llegue al poste de teléfono no vuelve a ser cableado,

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sino que sigue siendo fibra,

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puedes hacer cosas como descargarte una película entera en unos minutos,

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cosas de este tipo.

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Todas tus comunicaciones vendran
en formato tcp/ip,

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lo que significa que serán todas digitales, serán todas paquetes de datos

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serán todas conmutables.

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Y podrían ser televisión, radio, ordenador, teléfono y cualquier tipo de comunicación

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vendría en forma de paquetes,
paquetes tcp/ip.

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Probablemente tardará entre 10 y 20 años
a desarrollarse

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pero ya está siendo desarrollado con éxito en pruebas de mercado.

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A mi me gusta,
pero eso no quiere decir nada.

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Blogs and microblogs gradually spread among cyberfeminists 

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and signalled the next era.

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Tarana Burke started Me Too
on Myspace in 2006

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but it took some time before it caught on.

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Sheryl Sandberg leaned in to become
"the Typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism"

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 first by building the business model of Google,

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then moving on to become the Chief
Operating Officer of Facebook.

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In 2021, internet penetration rate, the industry jargon for internet access,

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is at 65 percent of the world population.

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In Europe, North America and Japan it's
around 90 percent.

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To understand Donna Haraway's words

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"Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert"

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we just have to look up from our smartphones

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and see that everyone else is also looking at their smartphones.

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Even the people who still don't have internet access are ruled by the internet.

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No organism is left free from cybernetics,

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the science of command
and control through communication.

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We are all cyborgs even if we
don't want it or don't even know about it.

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“Just as political economy produced a homo economicus 

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manageable in the framework
of industrial states,

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cybernetics is producing its
own humanity… 

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Political economy reigned over beings by leaving them free to pursue their interest;

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cybernetics controls them by leaving them free to communicate…

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The stated ambition of cybernetics
is to manage the unforeseeable,

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and to govern the ungovernable instead of trying to destroy it.”

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As internet becomes omnipresent with smartphones and social media,

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popularity of political movements are increasingly dependent on

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their online presence and activity.

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Accordingly, feminism is growing,

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accelerated by new communication technologies.

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This is not to say feminists
are stuck online.

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From Rojava to Mexico,
we are as militant as ever.

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Transnational feminist strikes have been bringing millions of people into the streets 

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and this would have been much harder to organize without the latest technology.

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On 25 November 2019, a feminist collective
from Chile, Las Tesis,

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shared their artistic protest performance
“A rapist in your path” on social media.

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Within days, the performance with its full choreography and lyrics

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was reproduced away from keyboard 
by feminists all over the world.

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Feminists in Turkey were
violently detained by police for performing it, 

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which prompted women members of parliament from oppositionary parties

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 to perform it in the Parliament of Turkey.

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This level of embodied memeification
was unprecedented.

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With this perspective, even what is called “hashtag feminism” like #MeToo 

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can’t be seen as a solely online phenomenon, 

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because its causes and consequences are away from keyboard.

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In truth, it's very hard to tell the difference between online and offline

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since the spread of mobile internet.

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If the biggest problem of cyberfeminism
in the beginning, was access, 

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the critical problem of contemporary cyberfeminism is control.

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Today most feminists have access
to the internet 

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and rely on it heavily for feminist activism but very few among us know about

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how the technology and the political
economy behind it actually works.

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And more so since the pandemic, if you want to be active in the feminist movement 

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you will probably be required to use proprietary software 

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for social media, video chats, cloud storages, etc.

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You may be disqualified
from participating in assemblies

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if you refuse to use
google forms and zoom.

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You may be left out of organizations

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if you refuse to use
whatsapp, telegram and google drive.

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You're voice may not be heard
or considered relevant

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if you refuse to use instagram, twitter and youtube.

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You may be perceived as a killjoy within feminism 

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if you refuse to use any of these apps

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because they're not just considered practical
but also "free".

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But these supposedly free apps are making the richest white cis men inordinately richer

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and disproportionately powerful

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(like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk,
Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) 

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because they get something more valuable
than money from us.

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They get to own all the information we produce which they use against us  

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with increasing accuracy for the purposes of advertising, surveillance, 

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perception management and psychological warfare that aims for total domination.

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Shosana Zuboff calls this
system surveillance capitalism

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but it's worse than surveillance
and worse than capitalism.

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Alice Walker, who coined
the term "womanism" says:

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"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."

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Every day we give our information
in return for a service marketed as free,

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without thinking that we
are giving up a power we have.

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The power we give up is used against
us and it works.

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In fact, even Alice Walker is not immune to racist propaganda from artificial intelligence 

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as she unironically explains
in one of her poems,

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how she was persuaded to antisemitic conspiracy theories:

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"Where to start?
You will find
some information,

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"Where to start?
You will find
some information,

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Slanted,
unfortunately,

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By Googling.

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For a more in depth study

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I recommend starting with YouTube.

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Simply follow the trail show of 
“The Talmud” as its poison winds its way

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Into our collective consciousness."

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This way of using Youtube
for reactionary endoctrination

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is called "redpilling"
among altright antifeminists,

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 even the concept itself is a cisheteropatriarchal appropriation of the

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work of trans sisters
who wrote and directed the Matrix.

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If the founder of womanism
can be redpilled by youtube autoplay,

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it must not have been very hard
for companies like Cambridge Analytica

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to use the Artificial Intelligence of Facebook
to hack elections

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and raise neofascism around the world.

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La psicografía.
Es un conocimiento de tu personalidad.

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Porque es la personalidad la que dirige el comportamiento

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y el comportamiento obviamente influye como votas.

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To date, many studies prove that

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the artificial intelligences of big corporations are classist, racist and sexist, 

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there's even documentaries about it on Netflix.

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At the same time they also fuel reactionary trends within feminism, like transphobia

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and whorephobia because social
media algorithms 

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consider inflammatory speech to be
engaging, therefore profitable.

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Our attention spans are colonized and exploited by this new political economy.

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This can’t go without questioning
by feminists 

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or anyone who positions themselves against systems of domination.

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Audre Lorde's powerful essay

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"The master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house"

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about racism within the feminist movement, can also be applied

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to other forms of intersecting oppressions that we have internalized,

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like our relationship with technology.

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Interestingly, Xenofeminist Lucca Fraser had challenged what Lorde said

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by claiming that "the masters tools
can indeed dismantle the master’s house 

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because they can be hacked."

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I disagree with Fraser’s reversal

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because while you may well hack the master’s tools,

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they could still belong to and benefit
the master.

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"Let's acknowledge that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.

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The very technologies that was
reason to dream

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of new forms of political empowerment 

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has turned out to be the means of surveillance and control for everybody."

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Even the first social use of telephone was a hack by housewives 

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as mentioned by Judy Wajcman.

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We have hacked the tools of the master
to near perfection

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but it seems like we are hacking in
the dark without consciousness.

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We are winning battles but losing the war.

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As Audre Lorde said:

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"They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game,

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but they will never enable us
to bring about genuine change."

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To bring about genuine change and realize the revolutionary potential of hacking

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we have to demystify what hacking means.