Sarah Sharma – Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech

Toronto-based media critic and educator Sarah Sharma joins us for a discussion about her book Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech, a book that cuts to the core of modern technology’s gendered politics.

In a world seemingly run by the whims and power plays of Musks and Zucks, Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (Duke University, 2026) cuts to the core of modern technology’s gendered politics. Sarah Sharma challenges the idea that the Big Tech broligarchs are neutral utilitarians who view technology as mere tools. She shows instead how these tech giants have turned the internet, and, increasingly, “real life” into a set of environments which they cultivate and manipulate to wield the real tools: us, the users. Sharma critiques a popular system of inclusion she calls “Big Tech Feminism” that attempts to incorporate and make useful people of color, queer people, and others who are seen as broken machines in the current gendered power structures. Deconstructing Big Tech’s patriarchal deployment of media theory to gain and maintain power, Sharma proposes a feminist techno-politics that can forge new futures free from the grip of the truly insufferable tools.

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Sarah Sharma is Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information and Director of theInstitute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching focuses on the relationship between technology, time and labour. She is also the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014) which was awarded a NCA Critical Cultural Book of the Year award in 2014. Her edited volume (with Rianka Singh) Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke UP 2022) highlights her time as director of the McLuhan Centre between 2017-2022.