Latina/o/e technoscience: Labor,race,and gender in cybernetics and computing

Abstract

The history of cybernetics has often displaced non-white actors and women from its accounts. Recentering them offers an opportunity to rearticulate the history of computing through its entanglements with labor and race/gender as network formations. In paying attention to these actors and the silences in the STS literature, this article offers an analysis of networked asymmetries, non-essential knowledge and disposability. In doing so, it redraws the boundaries of STS with race/gender integral to the field. It proposes hemispheric approaches that trouble national bounds and move us beyond the dominant sites of Europe and the United States, and that interrogate US empire. The article follows closely the role of Arturo Rosenblueth in the development of cybernetics and of Mexican women workers in computer semiconductor assembly. These stories of technoscience show the invisible work of Latina/o/es as unacknowledged and unaccounted entities in the infrastructural assemblage of cybernetics and computing.