"Good Tech" and Technologies of Elite Capture

This paper examines the utopian fantasies of technologies developed at the height of Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation around social good—or “good tech”—and situates their increasing purchase within the technology industry in the broader context of a global crisis of care. We explore how aspirations towards greater empathy, global connectivity, and diversity were captured by elite tech entrepreneurs in a strategy to bolster their moral power and raise capital in the name of disaffected and exhausted workers. Through an analysis of emergent AI-enabled accent modification technologies, which promise to relieve call center workers from accent-based discrimination by artificially modifying the sound of their voice, we locate the affective lures operating in their futuristic fantasies and marketing strategies. In a peculiar alliance where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire toward making globalization “feel good,” we trace the ideological conditions that allowed the exploitation of offshore workers to be recoded as the employment of diverse workers. Thus understood, good tech rhetorics, we argue, are productive discourses that function both as a mechanism of value accumulation and as a counterinsurgency tactic—they constitute concrete “structures of feeling” that sustain attachments to the social reproduction of structures of racial capitalism and the continuation of postindustrial, colonial dispossession.