Professor Caroline Bassett MAE reflects on the promises and perils of digital technologies, and why critical feminist perspectives remain vital in shaping our technological futures.
About Caroline Bassett MAE
Caroline Bassett is a Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, where she also serves as Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). Her research critically examines how digital technologies shape cultural forms and social practices, focusing on the intersections of technology, culture, and society- particularly within computational media, artificial intelligence, feminist theory, and critical digital studies.
Professor Bassett is the author of several influential works, including The Arc and the Machine (2007), Anti-Computing: Dissent and the Machine (2022), and co-author of Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures (2019), which critiques the masculinist politics of digital media and advocates for feminist approaches to digital futures.
She and has held fellowships at prestigious institutions, including the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and McGill University and was a co-founder of the Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL) at the University of Sussex. She was elected to Academia Europaea in 2020.
Read the interview
What motivated you and your co-authors to write Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures and what core issues does the book address regarding gender and digital culture?
“The cheap response to why we wrote Furious is that we were – separately and together – furious! What we were furious about was the way computational technology was being hailed as the future, and as a better future for all, when in fact many developments created problems for many, did little to improve lives, and often exacerbated inequalities. The claims made for technology endlessly revert to the universal; tech, we are told, is ‘for good’ – but the urgent question is always: good for whom, in what way, and where? These questions need to be continually revived in response to new waves of technological innovation, both in relation to industry hype and boosterish academic discourse.
We all recognise that computational technology is powerful, and that it brings genuinely new developments. But we don’t believe it resets the world or pushes old issues – such as centuries of gendered discrimination, intersecting with other inequalities – to the sidelines. The core issue of the book, then, concerns what we might term, following Berlant, the cruel optimism of promises made about digital developments, particularly as these promises pertain to gender and sexuality.
We are also furious about waste – the waste of work and opportunity. We’re not anti-computing in a global sense; we are against the waste, the misdirection, and the failure to weigh the costs and possibilities of computational technology against real measures: costs to specific groups, to particular regions, to the environment. We explored this especially in relation to future forms of life, visions of the future, and developments in biotech and health.
All of this could have produced a very dark book. But we also wanted, through writing, to suggest forms of disruption, possibility, engagement, and solidarity.”
In Furious, you highlight concerns about the problematic nature of much of the existing discourse on digital culture. Could you elaborate on what makes this writing problematic, and how it influences our understanding of the digital world?
“One real issue – already clear from the above perhaps – is the fake universalism that pervades much existing discourse on digital culture. Even when the dial shifts from ‘this stuff is good’ to ‘this stuff is evil,’ the assumption is still that it applies equally to everyone. Of course, that’s not the case: what is good for one group often exacerbates suffering and discrimination for another.
A second issue is the failure on digital culture to historicise. Somebody once said that every generation believes its own technology is exceptional – that it breaks through old barriers and rules, even disrupting earlier possibilities for resistance. In short, that it changes the order of things and determines the future. If you believe this, then history, context, previous injustices and inequalities all become irrelevant in the face of the so-called new. The only thing that matters is the present moment and the possibilities it generates for the future. This kind of short-termism produces a demand to develop technologies to safeguard “future people,” while overlooking the threats, possibilities, and discriminations of contemporary computational culture as a mode of informational capitalism. And because it refuses to recognise the past, it ends up entirely trapped in the present.”
How do digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, both reinforce and challenge existing gender biases? Are there examples where AI has either perpetuated stereotypes or been utilised to promote gender equity?
“Of course, there are many – and often notorious – examples of how big data has perpetuated existing gender and racial biases; AI bots that became Nazis, or image systems that consistently made doctors male and nurses female. The rise of large language models (today’s AI, if we accept the term) has amplified some of these issues, producing new problems and at larger scales.
It’s obvious why and how language models are gender biased: they learn from us. Moreover, they have no bodies to ground their assumptions – they are pure discourse. This is partly why they are also highly normative. Homogenisation, the tendency of LLMs to narrow discourse and reproduce the canonical, means dominant ideas are likely to become more powerful and ubiquitous, and oppositional ones less so. I don’t think this is inevitable, but the direction of funding is certainly pushing us that way.
On the other hand, there are many ways to use AI tools, and artists, teachers, activists, and students are already doing so. Still, the environmental cost of these technologies is urgent and must be addressed.”
Your career transitioned from technology journalism to academia. How has this journey shaped your approach to studying digital cultures and gender?
“My time as a tech journalist had a big influence on how I understand and study digital cultures, and questions of gender and intersectional discrimination. When I first started, I worked on a tech business magazine and saw how far vapourware and industry hype – what we might call “industrial imaginaries” – often diverged from the reality of what was actually made or what tech could do. I was also acutely aware of how male this world was, and watched digital technologies being “gendered masculine,” (to quote Judy Wajcman) – from how they were designed to how they were marketed.
So, from the beginning of my academic life, I was sceptical about promises that technology would deliver universal benefits. Later, working for magazines focusing on Apple technologies, I became very aware of Silicon Valley myth-making. Beautiful design that looked – and in some ways was – radical could also be socially as conservative as ever: designed for the West, with Western culture in mind, and with the ideal user imagined as a white, Western male.
At the same time, I also had a blast – and met many brilliant women who were hackers, designers, digital media artists, writers, journalists, and campaigners. Some identified as cyber-feminists, and I learned a lot alongside them. Being immersed in industrial tech culture also showed me what could be done with computational technology. Another – better, more equal, freer – world is possible. The fact that technologies that could support building that world are instead so often made for profit takes me back to Furious…”
How has the intersection of gender studies and digital humanities evolved since you began your career, and what changes do you anticipate in the coming years?
“I didn’t begin my career in Digital Humanities, at least not in the emerging discipline that later took that name. I was in digital media studies. But I would argue that digital media studies, software studies, and feminist technoscience are all key tributaries of what now constitutes DH. One positive development in DH is that this is increasingly recognised by more people who align themselves, in whole or in part, with the field.
DH has also begun to move beyond the highly gendered and crudely binary distinction between “hacking” and “yacking” – where one term signalled valued work and the other dismissed as “just talking,” often a cover for the accusation of “uselessly theorizing.” These days, the argument that practice without critical thinking makes no sense has more traction. Feminists – and particularly intersectional feminists – within DH have been central to this shift, and that work needs recognition.
For me, DH is a cultural study, or it is nothing. It is easier to argue that now than it used to be, and that places DH, amidst all the chaos and violence around us, in a good position to advocate for critical, intersectional feminist perspectives on emerging computational cultures and technologies – and the worlds they don’t determine, but can be used both to secure and to disrupt. I guess in the end, I am hopeful.”
Posted 30th September 2025. For more information contact aecardiffhub@cardiff.ac.uk
