There Are No Girls on the Internet - How Women Built the Internet

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Claire Evans is one half of the band Yacht. She’s also a tech historian who archives women’s contributions in tech and computing in her book Broadband. Claire lays out how women were always at the forefront of technology and computing and how our contributions were erased over time. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, everyone. It's Ryder Strong and Will Ferrell from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you.

Again, we are experts. Listen to Pod Meets World on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Okay, so here's the story we get told about technology. Men built computers and then they built the internet, and women, we've been trying to break into this tech voice club ever since. We pretty much always assume the default experience online is male and white.

But women are using technology to build movements, create art, and connect with each other, despite dealing with some pretty vile shit just for daring to be women online. And even before that, women and other marginalized voices have always been at the ground floor of technology and the way it impacts culture. So that story we get told, it's bullshit. Tech has always been our domain. So why isn't it always easy to see it that way? Okay, let's take it back.

Way back. In the beginning, computers were human. They were also women. In the early days of computing, computer science was solidly women's work. Computing was seen as administrative or secretarial type position. It was such a women's job

that after World War II, computing power was even measured in, quote, kill a girls, which was understood to be roughly the calculating ability of a thousand women. If you've seen the film Hidden Figures that chronicles mathematicians, Catherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and engineer Mary Jackson,

then you probably know what I'm talking about. That's John Glenn. What do you ladies do for NASA? Calculate you. Lodge and landing, sir. And even before that, born in the 1800s, Ada Lovelace has widely considered to be one of the world's first computer programmers. But we're more

than just literal computers. Women were involved in every single step on our journey toward computers integration into our everyday lives. And while the names like tech icons like Catherine Johnson and Ada Lovelace might be familiar to you. We still need monuments to the marginalized artists,

organizers, community builders, writers, and thinkers who shaped what it means to be online. So let's build them. If you're looking for women in the history of technology, it really helps to look first where people are cared for. Claire Evans is an artist, tech historian, and writer. Along with her partner, Jonah Bechtult, she's half of the impeccable cool Grammy-nominated electro band Yacht.

Claire wrote the book on how women were a race from technology, computers, and the internet, literally. Her book, Broadband, get it, shines a spotlight on the history of tech, spotlighting the women who often go overlooked. Think of it as a radical act of archival so that no one will ever be able to say that women weren't always on the ground floor of technology.

While the women-led efforts of World War II meant the computing workforce was mostly female, eventually things changed. The shift that you're describing between tech as feminized labor and tech as, you know, a site of, you know, masculine entrepreneurship and innovation. You know, it happened in like the late 60s, early 70s through the 80s, the sort of generational changing of the guard that happened,

where the first wave of early women programmers who came out of, you know, the programming efforts around World War II and entered the early computing industry and essentially defined it because that's when the competing industry began, and they were the only people who knew how to do programming. So, of course, they ran it. At air bases here and overseas, women's soldiers perform over 25 technical jobs. war jobs now, but civilian careers later on. As they kind of aged out and were replaced by the next generation,

and the industry itself exploded and became massively, financially valuable. There was this sort of the baton didn't quite get past. There weren't opportunities for young women to come up and replace and fill the shoes of the women that came before them for all the sort of systemic reasons that you would imagine. And I think part of that comes down to just the fact that computing went from being something that was wild and new and more associated with the war effort to something which was relatively beginning to be established and which was a significant commercial enterprise. Money, of course, is what changes things. And I think, you know, oftentimes people read my book and then they come and talk to me and they say, wow, men really ruined everything. But it's money.

I mean, it's money that ruined everything. It's all of a sudden the stakes were different and the players were different and, you know, it was more cut throat and there were less opportunities for people. And, you know, mistakes were made cumulatively and systemically that made it so that there began to be this unreasonable assumption that tech was for men, which was then, you know, reemphasized and reiterated through marketing and popular culture. And I think the work that like advertisements for computers in the 70s and film and TV in the 80s did for making tech seem like a boys club was, you know, that was really significant. I mean, I grew up in a time when, you know, movies like weird science were really popular, which is a movie about, you know, two nerds making a babe using a computer. You know, that's the sort of sets of, you know, it sets a pretty clear standard for what the culture assumes is the point of interest for this technology. And if you look at basically any computer ad from the 70s and 80s, you know, print paper ads for anything from hardware to suffer services, it's either, you know, a model, you know, a sexy woman sitting on top of a mainframe or it's something explicitly condescending about how this machine is going to replace all the nagging, you know, lady data programmers in the office. You know, there's a lot of like really kind of dark, dark marketing that is part of this. And that's sort of created a generation that feels it. as though it's always been for them.

And that sense of entitlement is really difficult to undo. But I think part of the work of kind of digging up this history is showing that, you know, if there is a boys club that exists in tech, it's an anachronism. You know, it's a historical anachronism, a wrong that needs to and can be righted, hopefully in less than a generation. Speaking of generations, Claire is a second generation computer nerd. Her dad was a coder at IBM. She grew up online.

And that means she grew up feeling like the inner. at was her hometown. I came of age during an era where there was kind of an efflorescence of girl-centric early web content and girl-centric computer games, but I never really was interested in that. I never thought of the computer as being explicitly for boys or for girls, you know, any more than like the TV or the microwave was for boys or for girls. It was just a thing, you know. And what you did with it was more about expressing your individual interests and your individual personality down to really esoteric subjects that it was about expressing your gender in any way. But I do know that, I mean, I certainly remember the computer lab at school when I was a kid

being pretty dominated by boys and, you know, having to kind of elbow my way in to play my games during lunch break or whatever. There certainly was this idea when I was a kid that that boys liked computer games and girls didn't. But I think I was always more interested in, you know, finding ways to empower myself and learn new things. using this amazing tool that happened to be in my bedroom. So what kind of games with Little Baby Claire playing? My favorite kinds of games were trivia games. Like I love to play.

There was this game that came with Microsoft Incarta, which is an encyclopedia, CD-ROM, that was like a trivia through the ages game. Loved it. Couldn't get enough of that kind of thing. Or there was a game a little bit later called You Don't Know Jack. That was, again, like a trivia, more of a game show-style trivia game. But I loved, yeah, I mean, I honestly, I really loved learning.

And I know that sounds kind of, you know, it sounds like what it sounds like. But I love trivia games. I loved like semi-educational CD-ROMs, like, you know, learning about anatomy. There was a Grey's Anatomy CD-ROM I was really obsessed with when I was a kid. By the way, we bonded a little bit here because nerdy educational games is something that young Claire and young me had in common. Growing up, if I did an hour of Mavis Beacon typing tutor, my parents rewarded me with 30 minutes of math blaster. Remember Math Blaster? Math Blaster was legitimately really fun

and it's funny that you bring up Mavis Beacon because I started a chapter on Mavis Beacon that I ended up scrapping because it wasn't, you know, it was kind of like too tangential to the history of the internet but the story of Mavis Beacon is really interesting. I mean, she was the woman on the box,

you know, like a lot of people believe that she was like a real typing expert that Mavis Beacon was a real person and that she was a champion typeer and there's all this kind of interesting lore around her like there was a survey that was done in the 90s where people were asked whether or not Mavis

Miss Beacon was a real person and people like remembered seeing her on TV. Like everyone thought she was real, but she was just this model that had been cast. Like, I want to say like she was working at the perfume counter at Sacks or something. And the guy who made the game was like, this woman is amazing. I need her. She has beautiful hands. And so she was on the box cover. She was this Trinidadian model.

And she kind of, she, my name was Renee Lesperance. Wow. I think I've pulled that out of my memory. But she didn't get a dime, of course. I mean, because the world is garbage. She ended up, she left the States and there's like, no one's really been able to find her and she didn't get any royalties even though her face, her likeness was really like a huge part of what sold that game or whatever that piece of software.

It was like really, I don't know, there's something really relatable about her, this idea that this woman was this typing genius that could teach you how to type. So Claire was pretty much always fascinated by computers and being online. But after a while, she started to feel like the internet was no longer her hometown. and where being online had once felt like freedom and escape, it started to feel different. It's this realization after many years of spending, you know, the lion's share of my waking life on the computer that I didn't feel good anymore on the computer. And when I was a kid, I remember nothing but joy and discovery and excitement and, you know,

self-identification and all kinds of positive things. And all of that had kind of fallen by the wayside. Some of that is just growing up, you know, and becoming aware that the world doesn't revolve around you. taking things for granted and getting blasé about things and maybe even getting out of step with what's going on in technology because of course, you know, tech culture evolves so quickly that I'm sure teenagers on TikTok are having the same feelings of self-actualization that maybe I did playing CD-ROM games in the 90s. I hope so. But yeah, I don't know. I think as an adult, all that joy kind of went away. And the life online began to feel more like a burden

or something that had to be accomplished in order to remain part of culture and remain engaged in the larger conversation around me, and not something I did for fun or for joy. There's a lot of, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that too. I think, you know, the overlap between digital life and real life, however you want to define that, has certainly changed a great deal in the last 15 years. When I was a kid, the Internet was something other. It was something separate from the world, as I understood it.

It was an escape. It's not an escape anymore. I think if anything, real life is an escape from the internet. Okay, so if you're under 25, this probably means nothing to you because you've always grown up carrying the internet in a little square in your pocket, but humor me. I still remember my early experiences online. I was still a few years away from being lucky enough to have a computer in my bedroom.

So going online meant logging on from the clunky family computer in what we called the computer room. And if my dad caught you with a soda down there, watch out. Once everyone was asleep, you could sneak downstairs and get online. and do whatever you wanted. I mean, forget just having a Coke in the computer room. You could be anyone. Those days of being anonymous online were a kind of intoxicating freedom.

For me and Claire both. But while being anonymous online back then meant freedom, today it's totally flipped. The real world is where you go to feel anonymous, not the internet. It's something I think about a lot, like the position of anonymity. Because I know that when I was a kid and I was, you know, hanging out in chat rooms and posting on message boards and surfing around the early World Wide Web,

I was free because nobody knew who I was, and I could be anybody I wanted to be. I could, you know, create an avatar for myself or create a new identity for myself. I could pretend I was older than I was. I could pretend I was a different gender than I was. I could pretend all kinds of things. And everyone else was probably also pretending a little bit too. And the excitement of being able to kind of redefine who I was and try on new things was a really big part of the attraction of the early internet, I think, for a lot of people.

Now, of course, it's the opposite. I mean, we have to be who we are. You know, we have to have our legal names on our Facebook profiles. And this kind of the joy of the creative joy of anonymity has been replaced by a form of anonymity that is kind of different. Anonymity is now something that's weaponized to, you know, persecute vulnerable people on the internet. It's not something that comes from a place of delight. I mean, there's very few instances, I think, of people who have anonymous. profiles who are doing, you know, because they just, for the fun of it, it's a different,

it's a different thing. You either are forced to hide who you are because you're, because you want to bother other people or because you are being bothered by other people. So, yeah, so we're only anonymous now in the real world. We're only anonymous when we're, you know, walking down the street or at home doing the things that, you know, we do during our time off from the internet. She's right. The internet can be a not fun place, especially if you're marginalized. And because we've allowed those once foundational marginalized voices to be pushed so far outside of the tent of tech, it only reinforces that it's not our domain, that it's not where we'll go to have experiences that involve protection, care, or freedom. It's a problem that has far-reaching consequences,

not just for women, but for everybody. I think as we sort of as a culture begin to digest the consequences of creating this kind of boys club culture around technology, we will hopefully see that the clearest antidote is to diversify these companies and platforms as quickly as possible. Again, I don't know. I mean, I'm kind of a, I don't know, capitalism is a, is a mighty beast and it'll take a lot of work to kind of get at the heart of this problem in some of these massive, massive tech companies, especially as they, you know, resist union efforts and resist deregulation and resist all kinds of positive benefits. Yeah, it's a long fight.

Yeah, it is a long fight. We'll be right back after this quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between, songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the Eye Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You, me, I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. podcasting can help your business, think iHeart, streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas.

And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without

Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us

on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He run up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball like. You go through a training camp with that Isaiah, you figure it out real quick.

Get your ass up and down the court and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit Thursday. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health.

These are real, honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, we'll have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas.

their practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I was watching this video of you speaking to prepare for this interview,

and something that you said was, if you're looking for the history of women in tech, it helps to look for places where people are cared for. And I guess to that end, what would it look like if care was built into some of these tech platforms from the very beginning?

Well, we certainly wouldn't have social media as it exists today, right? I mean, I don't know. It's funny. I think that there's this kind of actual, what's the word? Maybe it's not possible to build things at the scale that the tech industry seems to demand while still emphasizing and prioritizing care. I think, you know, you look at the history of social media and I, you know, I profiled this community in my book called Echo, which was run by a single person in an apartment in New York, which, you know, a person who really deeply cared about her community and who was really invested in the well-being of her community and who kind of had the authority to kick people out who were being hurtful and who could mediate

conversations and, you know, who was really part of the community. And I think that that kind of care is beautiful. And it's possible when your community is 2,000 people to 10,000 people, maybe at most. It's not really as possible when your community is in the billions, when your community is essentially the size of planet Earth. It's just so difficult to have enough and the right kind of emotional investment to take care of all those people. It's impossible to enforce standards or rules across cultures and across subcultures, across languages. It becomes kind of this, yeah, it becomes a folly, which is why we've kind of, which is why social media platforms have outsourced the job of caring to these kind of traumatized content moderators who are

not part of the community, who are not, you know, deputized members of this, of a dynamic community who are helping take care of their own, but who are instead being shown the worst of humanity and who are suffering greatly as a consequence of seeing and working through all that material. You know, they're being paid to care, but we don't care about them, you know, it's, I think scale and care might be mutually exclusive, which means that the future of care in tech platforms might look really different than what we're accustomed to. I think we need to move beyond this idea of constantly growth hacking and trying to build, you know, the biggest, biggest, biggest, communities, platforms, cultures, you know, programs, systems in the world and

instead focus on empowering people to create platforms and communities and services which affect them and their peers in maybe like an interconnected network of smaller communities. which, you know, maybe a world of neighborhoods rather than one giant megacity, I think would be a lot more seen. There are different forms of connecting with others. I mean, there's a time and place for, you know, kind of the speaker's corner where you can go out in the street and like yell your piece and everyone can hear you maybe. Or, you know, you have the capacity to go viral or whatever it is that you want. I mean, the one to many audience thing is valuable in certain instances. But most of the time when we're looking for meaningful engagement, community interaction in real life and all. online, it does happen in smaller groups. It happens, you know, with people that you either know or you share an interest with or you share a geographical location with or you share something with,

something real. And I think, you know, part of the joy of the early internet was that because users were kind of spread all over the world, people came together on, not based on geographic location necessarily, but based on interest. And, you know, most of those early internet communities were interest-based communities, you know, people who were really into Star Trek, people who were really into gardening. And that's something really beautiful about that, because it reminds us what we have in common, even when we're really different. Whereas now we're supposed to kind of relate to the billions with absolutely nothing to hold on to as a shared experience other than like basic civility in being human, which as we can see has eroded completely in the wild wilderness of the feed.

Basic civility. So far, we've sort of danced around the elephant in the room that Claire is hinting at here, which is that being a woman online sometimes means dealing with harassment. So if we're trying to write the history of women's experiences and contributions to the internet. Do we include the reality that a lot of that history is involved having to deal with harassment? And if I'm being honest, I struggled with that when trying to put together this very podcast. Yeah, I can totally relate to that. I mean, I kind of made a choice that I didn't want my book to be about fighting back against the trolls.

I wanted my book to be, you know, a showcase for all the amazing things that people accomplished despite the fact, you know, that they had to fight against the trolls or whatever their circumstances were. I think I was able to cop out from that a little bit because my book ends basically the collapse of the dot-com bubble. And I'm not saying that harassment didn't exist before then. It certainly did. But, you know, things like Gamergate, the MeToo movement, the sort of larger conversations that are happening as like a consequence of systemic sexism in the tech industry and in the world, you know, sort of became much, much uglier more recently. And yeah, but I don't know.

I have this mantra that is like, don't fight the darkness, bring the light and the dark. darkness will disappear. And I think that, I don't know, I think people need to see how much light there really has been and how much, how many fascinating, beautiful, interesting, you know, dynamic contributions had been made in by women, you know, throughout history. And that it's, it's not always about having to, it's not always about being a victim. I don't want to always have that, I don't want that to be like a core part of the identity of the characters that I profile my book. Because they're all, they're not, you know, like they all, they're all tough as nails and super, interesting and hardworking and have done great things in this world. And maybe people didn't

believe in them at the right time. Maybe people have forgotten some of their contributions, but that doesn't make them any less incredible. Definitely. You know, that's one of the things I love about your book. You know, as we speak, I have an Ada lovely sticker on my computer at this very moment. But I feel like your book really allows for these figures to be full, complex, 360 degrees of who they were, not just boiled down to some sticker or poster or platitude. Yes, I love that you clock that because that's a really big thing for me. I think, you know, and I've been, I've been interacting with this a lot since the book came out, this kind of, you know, inspirational poster version of, you know, the history of women in tech or like the sticker,

the sticker on the laptop version of women in tech. And I totally get it. I mean, we have such a hunger for representation in this history that we want to trot out these women as perfect, you know, idolizable heroes. And they are heroes, but they're heroes because of the complexity of their lives, not just because, you know, Ada Lovelace wrote the quote-unquote first computer program. I think she's interesting for so many more reasons than that. And I don't think that, you know, the opposite of a great man history is necessarily a great woman history, because that's just reiterating the same thing. That's just, you know, laying all of the power and clout and influence at the feet of exceptional individuals, rather than acknowledging, A, the collective

nature of innovation and the complicated collective nature of history in general. And without acknowledging the complexity of individual people and all the things that they do. I mean, I don't want to develop a superficial relationship with a character from history. I want to know them. I want to really know them. And I'm not necessarily super inspired and empowered by knowing that someone who came before me was really, really good at what they did and they were perfect. That doesn't help me. That doesn't make me feel like I can do things. I mean, I come from a world of music and punk rock, and there's nothing more empowered. and then seeing someone just like you do something kind of badly,

and you think to yourself, hey, I could do that too, you know? Like, that's punk. So I kind of wanted to do that. I wanted to show that, yeah, Ada Lovelace was a genius, no doubt about it. But she was also a drug addict and she was also, you know, like prone to illness and really conflicted about being a mother and, you know, had a really weird relationship with her own mother and never knew her father and all this stuff that really humanizes her and makes her accomplishments, you know,

more relatable in a weird way because greatness emerges out of conflict and out of people's individual, you know, the complex combination of strife and an inspiration that makes people who they are. Yeah, their sorrows and their bad habits are just as important as their aptitude and, you know, their inspirational brilliance. It is punk rock. It's like, yeah, and like it's also really interesting. I mean, for me doing this, this survey of women throughout history because my book spans about 200-ish years. And, you know, what it means to be a feminist or to be a sort of a feminist icon is, it changes a lot from generation to generation. And, you know, look at Grace Hopper, for example. I mean, she's sort of this

classic feminist icon, but she didn't think of herself as a feminist. She was actually kind of contemptuous of the idea of women's lid, like didn't, you know, thought it was kind of, you know, I don't know, she thought it was like whiny. And she really, like, actively resisted the characterization that she might have faced any challenges whatsoever in an all-male environment. Like she just wouldn't acknowledge that that was a possibility. And I think, you know, does that make her less of a feminist icon? I don't think so. I mean, I think we have to reach people within their time and understand, you know,

why they might be seeing the world in the way that they see the world and why and understand like what, yeah, understand them within their own context. And that's hard sometimes, you know, history's messy. And sometimes doing it means like holding multiple contradictory positions. in your mind at the same time. That's the joy of it anyway. More, there are no girls on the internet after this quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide.

Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get. Get your podcast. Human me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only I-Heart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think I-Hart. streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast, Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before.

And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective. on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall.

And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball, like,

after you go through a training camp with that ice, Ed, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space,

Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30, you shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. from navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real, honest conversations we don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right?

Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas, their practices. and this mental health awareness month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. History is important. It's also tenuous. The fact that there could be entire movement spearheaded by women online that go forgotten today is just an example of why we need to fight to make sure that we're including nuanced depictions of women and their contributions to history in our archives

because they could disappear a lot quicker than you might think. Even Claire's favorite woman-fueled online movement, the cyberfeminist arts movement of the 90s, was almost a thing that went totally forgotten. I'm really into the sort of mid-90s cyberfeminist art movement because it sort of feels, you know, just to give a broad strokes for your listenership, I mean, it was this sort of arts, culture, literary movement in, you know, pretty much coinciding with the development of the World Wide Web.

And, you know, the arrival of the World Wide Web is, brought women online really in a major way for the first time. The internet as a military and scientific piece of frame structure was pretty male-dominated, but as soon as the web and the personal computer combined, women took over men in terms of the population of online of the internet. And so there was this beautiful efflorescence of feminist, radical feminist thinking and art that coincided with that because I think a lot of these, especially second-wave feminists

who were coming out of the late 1970s world of consciousness raising and quote-unquote, brawurning, were really excited by the possibility of this new medium that would allow them to kind of do consciousness raising on a global scale and reach women and feminists all around the world and kind of create new spaces, define their own spaces, and do all kinds of fluid and exciting experimentation about identity and gender and all the things that are really fun and interesting. So they made a lot of radical art. There are some wild CD-ROM games and wild early websites. Great manifestos, the Cyber Feminist Manifesto is one of my favorite texts of all time.

It is truly wonderful. And it definitely comes from a time before comment sections because the language is just so bold and raw and radical and kind of gross and just wild. And that kind of free, free, exciting experimentation in a new medium is just really beautiful to look at. at in the rear view. It had its own problems, of course, like everything. And it kind of disappeared pretty quickly after the World Wide Web became kind of normalized in culture. And the artists who contributed to that movement all went off and did their own things. But it's an interesting moment, I think, when feminists sort of saw the World Wide Web as an opportunity and not necessarily as, you know, I don't know, a place that is sort of a social system which would replicate the social

dynamics of the culture that they existed in already. Okay. So I learned about the cyber feminist movement from reading your book. I had never heard of it before, and I'm someone who's looking for these kinds of things. You know, I'm actively on the lookout for women doing cool shit online. And yet it went totally overlooked by me. So it's wild to me that this huge movement began and ended and had all of these cool women making this radical art in the 90s online,

and I had never even heard of it. It's oddly what motivated me to write the book because I had the same exact experience. I was looking for something. This is a classic Wikipedia moment that I had. I was looking for something else. I found myself, I don't know how, on the Wikipedia page for this art collective, the VNS Matrix, who wrote the cyberfeminist

manifesto that I mentioned earlier. And I was like, what? How do I not know about this? You know, it's one of those like late night Wikipedia deep dives where I like, I'd followed some long chain and I was there and I was like, what is this? How was there this crazy like cyberpunk feminist art movement that I didn't know about because I felt the same way. I'd always felt really invested in these histories. I've been writing about these histories for a long time. I thought I knew kind of everything about this, about the early internet, or not everything, but I thought I knew like the broad strokes, the most interesting stuff that had happened. I'd completely missed it. And I think it's a combination of the fact that as a movement, it was, you know,

relatively short-lived. It happened at the very beginning of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web has a remarkable tendency to erase and rewrite itself. By definition, that's what it does. And it just like, blipped, you know, right under my radar. And I was like, how many more of these stories are there? How many more of these moments in history have I completely missed by virtue of just being in the wrong, looking at the wrong part of the internet or looking at the wrong time period? And I think there's something really kind of fascinating and maddening about writing histories of technology and specifically histories that involve cultural movements and human beings doing stuff on the web because the web is so fluid and so amorphous and so impermanent.

like there's you know like outside of the way back machine there aren't that many tools for seeking out what was on the web 10 years ago and it's not that long ago you know it's it's really not that long ago but yet it's it's slipping out from between our fingers and it's wild to me that we have you know Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets that we can still read but I can't tell you what was on you know women.com in 1991 that seems wild to me so I think this idea that I want to to capture as much of this history as I could before it all disappeared and try to identify as many of these moments, movements, you know, people, contributions before they lived out from under all our radars, it gave this entire project a sense of urgency for me. It made me feel like

I had to move quickly before the internet exploded, basically. Yeah, and I think a big part of why your work is so important is that aspect of archival, so that no one will ever be able to say that women weren't there because they weren't included in the archive. you know, we can say, oh, no, no, no, women were always here since the very beginning. Here's the record of it. You know, I'm always hesitant to draw this line between like men and hardware and women and software, but I do think that hardware is much easier to historicize. You know, it's way easier to put an old computer in a glass case in a museum and say, like,

you know, this computer is really important and these guys made it and here it is. It has a material presence, you know, that is permanent, that is going to, you know, continue to pollute the world until the end of time. but software and culture work and games and communities and all these things which are so much more difficult to hold on to, oftentimes they're associated with women's work and oftentimes they're forgotten because they're just, they're not, you know, they're hard to hold on to. They're not things. And we fetishize things and tech culture really revolves around this kind of object fetishism. You know, we get the new device every six months or, you know, we, and we imagine

by getting the new device, everything that ever came before, it disappears. But it doesn't, you know, it keeps existing. And it's really important to remember that tech is not just about objects. And it's not just about platforms. It's about what we do with those objects and platforms. It's about the ways that we bring those things to life. It's about the ways that we make meaning out of those things and build community using those things.

That's what actually matters. You know, that's what actually has an impact on human culture, not just human, you know, market economics. So, and I think that, you know, oftentimes, that's forgotten. And at the same time, you know, that's also the site where a lot of women's contributions are made. And so that those things kind of get brushed aside. But they're just as important, if not more important, them making iPhones. Okay, so I have this theory that by gatekeeping who is and isn't, quote, someone in tech, that's really just this way of keeping out all of these marginalized figures who maybe weren't coders, right? People who were artists or thinkers or organizers

or activists who were using the internet in really cool ways. It's a way to keep those folks out of the tent of tech. And I think it's important that we understand that just because you maybe aren't a coder doesn't mean you haven't had an influential or important impact on how we understand tech and culture. You know, the tent is huge. Yeah, of course. And like, what good is code if no one's using it? You know, what good is the technology if no one uses it? I think, you know, yeah, I think you're totally right. I think people sort of try to define what tech means in a way that allows them to remain at the top of, you know, the totem pole. But really, I don't know. I mean, making things is just the beginning.

And I think, I mean, I think people in tech know that because users are the most powerful force for innovation that there is. I mean, the Twitter at reply and the hashtag those came from, you know, user suggestions. The World Wide Web itself, you know, was never meant to be a communications platform or a cultural platform. It's users made that what it is. So, you know, I think we often, often underestimate the role that users and that users have in the system. And, you know, you put something out into the world, people decide what they're going to do with it. They give it context. They give it meaning. And then that sort of cycles back. And the people who are designing those tools then have to take that and move forward with it. It's part of the

process of developing a technology. And it's not often considered to be, you know, part of it. But it really is that that labor is invisible, but very real. Being a woman online can be tough. But it's not without hope. Claire's work as a musician grounds her in a very specific kind of hope around technology, where tech sometimes presents an adversarial foil to humans, time and time again, we humans find a way to turn that conflict into something beautiful that reaffirms our existence. There have been many instances in the history of music when a new technology has come along that ostensibly is there to displace the musician. For example, the drum machine or the synthesizer,

you know, these are tools that were designed to replace session musicians with an easier, cheaper version, kind of automation of their labor. In fact, even in the 80s, like the British Musicians Union tried to ban synthesizers. But what artists and musicians did was, instead of allowing those tools to replace them, they took control of them, and, you know, they took drum machines, and they took synthesizers, and they invented Detroit Techno, and they invented New Wave, and they invented hip-hop, and they invented, you know, electronic music as it exists today and as many manifestations.

They kind of took the thing that was threatening them with displacement, and incorporated it into what they were doing and made it essential to who they were and used it to invent something new that they were integrally as human beings involved with. And I think that that act of kind of like, I don't know, like jumping on the grenade or something is like a really beautiful thing

that artists always do willingly or unwillingly when they are faced with new technology. And I think when new technology comes along, you always have that choice. Are you going to let it displace you? Are you going to let it intimidate you? Or are you going to take it you know, jump on it, find some new use for it, and make it part of who you are, and give it back to the world in a new form.

That is all, that choice is always present. And I think that's what I try to do in my work across the board. And I think it's the only way that we're going to kind of keep on top of all of this technology. And I think it's also very human. I think it's what people always do. We are always trying to create systems of meaning and beauty out of what is coming up. ahead and I think that will never change. When you think about it, isn't that what it means to be a woman online?

We're given the worst, but somehow we keep making art, keep connecting, keep building those little monuments to who we were and who we are. We keep saying hello, I was here. You won't erase me. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer.

I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more podcasts from IHeart, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was harmed. You just understood.

That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis keep coming to you. He's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal. and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course.

Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Wilfredel from PodMeets World. And now the PodMeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. Again, we are experts.

Listen to PodMeets Twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.