thought-provoking

patriarchy mystifies technology, casting it as a domain beyond the possibility of comprehension for all but certain experts. Mystification hides the economics of accumulation that technologies serve, turning people’s attention to a marvelous innovation instead of the extraction it enables.

As a political theorist, hooks believed fiercely in the power of naming systems—her recurring phrase, in defining what we are up against, was “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”5 But she was far more ambivalent about the impulse to attach identity signifiers to our beings, to brand ourselves as a this, or a that. In her landmark 1984 book,