‘Instead of fantasizing about ideal technologies, we must learn to recognize what Menkman calls “the inherent fingerprints of imperfections” in those technologies. Rather than seeking to avoid or suppress glitches, we should learn how to conjure them so we can better understand how to break or bend the rules. Whether its entertainment or politics–and there may no longer be any difference–we need to be awake to how sexism, racism, and violence continues to be part of the design. It’s time to start taking our fiction seriously. It may be the best resource we have to create a world that won’t kill us, and avoid the ones that will. After all, The Apprentice was great reality TV until it became reality.’
[Via]
“Odle was writing at a time when women’s rights were an enormously important issue of the day, and female power loomed as a futuristic threat and promise. Odle lived for many years in the Bloomsbury district of London with his wife Rose, and these issues would have been fused with the dominant literary figures of his generation. Not only was he living in the same neighborhood as writers like Virginia Woolf, but Odle’s older brother was married to the bohemian author Dorothy Richardson. She is often credited with writing the first stream-of-consciousness novel in English (Pointed Roofs), and she dated H.G. Wells for many years before settling down with Alan Odle…Through his family associations, Odle would have been exposed to a world where women dominated the artistic scene.
