‘Genius’ Entrepreneurs, Technofacists & Phobic Misogynists with BECCA LEWIS

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“I think I've always been interested in the far-right end of technology, or I should say for several years that’s what I’ve been studying. However, I kept feeling that gender was understudied in these elements. When I was studying the alt-right online, the focus more than anything else was frequently on white nationalism and the racial dynamic. The scholars whose work really inspired me, like sociologist Jesse Daniels, showed how the racial dynamic was always interconnected with the gender dynamic. As I started following breadcrumbs and looking at certain figures, it became clear that gender was at the heart of their worldview, and there was no getting around it. There were absolutely elements around race and immigration and all sorts of different topics, but in many ways, gender was the core of the worldview, and everything else emanated from there.”

Worries about the so-called “pussification of Silicon Valley” are not at all new. In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with Becca Lewis. Her work reaches far back in American history to trace the nexus of gender, technology, and entrepreneurship, such that what we find today seems a foregone conclusion. In today’s wide-ranging discussion we talk about the central figure in this history—George Gilder, whose first book, Sexual Suicide, and subsequent forays into technology, conservative politics, and capitalism included much of what we see today in things like the echo chambers of misinformation of Fox News and the alienated “freedom” of Elon Musk’s SpaceX City. Who are these men, who Becca says, “leave behind the messy physical flows of women’s bodies in favor of the streamlined capitalism of male genius”?

Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University Department of Communication and an incoming assistant professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her work examines the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online. In September 2024, she received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published flagship reports on far-right online broadcasting, media manipulation, and disinformation. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as The Guardian and Business Insider. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.

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