Sunshine Machines: Towards a Feminist Future of Digital Care

An expansive and inclusive care economy is one possible expression of an ethic of insecurity, and one that would require dismantling systems that produce and exploit vulnerability. Instead of profit-hungry recklessness, a care economy would proceed cautiously, taking care of people and the planet by doing less harm, and by seeking to repair the dam

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Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish.96 Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today

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Most essentially, it’s about treating child and elder care as infrastructure: absolutely essential to the health of society, and deserving of holistic reforms that treat it as such.

If the future really does belong to those who think about it (and we believe it does), then we believe that should include more, and we mean way more of the population than it does today. We’re not talking about individual daydreaming or even about creating new pathways into the same old industries. Rather, we’re talking about engaging the collecti... See more

None of this is possible inside the industrial mindset that treats humans as controllable inputs in a predictable machine. The factory cosmology—time-and-motion, Taylor, Ford—cannot run a complex, entangled planet.

We are multitudes in becoming, not single-function nodes. The future economy must prize reciprocal care, emancipatory technology, and th... See more