Women Aren't Invited to the AI Revolution

If you work at an office or a lab or really anywhere with computers then it’s almost certain that you’ve been pressured lately to use AI tools in your work. Your CEO is worried that the company will fall behind the competition if employees are slow at embracing the immense productivity boost that comes with incorporating AI into their daily tasks.

 But there’s a big problem. Working women are considerably more reluctant to embrace AI. As with most major societal discrepancies between the sexes, the favored explanation is that women are feeling too many feelings about the situation. It’s enough to force many businessmen into the ostensibly uncomfortable position of asking whether retaining feeemale employees is in the best interests of the company or whether “tough choices” need to be made.

 This isn’t necessarily against the plan.

 Let’s take a step back, first: There are some pretty weird contradictions inherent to the whole right-libertarian tech-supremacy thing that’s going Hulkamania on us right now. Tech oligarchs despise the unemployed as ungrateful “takers” and think everyone should work for a salary until they’re in the grave, preferably one that they dug themselves. Only those who contribute meaningfully to the machine to their dying breath are worthy of participating in society. Elon Musk made that abundantly clear recently when he came out publicly in favor of taking the right to vote away from “takers,” which we can reasonably assume means anyone who receives any kind of government assistance. 

At the same time, these same men are absolutely fanatic about removing as many people from gainful employment as possible. The oligarchs aren’t job creators so much as job terminators—Musk is especially notorious for workplace reduction to the extent that he fired all the office cleaners upon taking over Twitter, forcing the few remaining staff to bring in their own toilet paper and clean the toilets themselves (presumably in their break time, if they are even allowed a break.) This made him such a folk hero to the right that Trump hired him to do the same thing to the federal government.

 And, of course, the proverbial elephant in the room here is the long-promised AI jobpocalypse.

The excitement on the right about the predicted coming mass layoffs is palpable: What’s that, the world wouldn’t end if your job went away? Then you’re nothing but inefficient capital bloat, a living example of waste, fraud, and abuse. Get ready for your new career as a Starbucks barista for the short time that job remains viable before the Tesla Optimus robot learns how to grind beans.

 So they don’t want unemployed people to exist, because they’re parasites, but they don’t want them being paid to work either, because that’s inefficiency and waste. It would make sense if they wanted you to just die, I guess, but if you’re familiar at all with these guys I’m sure you’re aware that something high on their agenda is to massively increase the population. If you’re not having as many children as possible, you’re a selfish misanthrope.

 So that’s the third contradiction. The three vectors of judgment are: If you’re unemployed, you’re a parasite; if you’re employed at a level beneath CEO you’re likely redundant bloat; in either case, if you’re childless, you’re guilty of not increasing the number of categories A and B, which is also bad somehow.

 So what the fuck are we supposed to do?

 Stop taking orders from unelected tech CEOs, for one thing. But more to the point, the contradictions tend to fade when you consider the specifics of their ideal: They don’t want to remove people from society in broad, random swaths. The goal is a reorganization. We can already see how it’s panning out.

Of the number of people who lost their jobs in America in the first year of Trump’s second term, the vast majority were women. It’s not exactly that scene from The Handmaid’s Tale where the nervous schlub has to fire every woman in the office because “it’s the law now,” but it’s not too far from that either. Outside of Gilead, it’s not “the law” that women be cast out of employment, but in Trump’s America, what is or is not “the law” tends to be spoken in the language of nudges and winks. 

Particularly in the federal government, where the president’s word is the law until (maybe) a judge says otherwise, employment demographics have been affected by Trump’s executive orders banning “DEI.” This is of course one of those nudge-and-wink terms—ostensibly, it refers to people who were hired based on their being a woman or a minority rather than credentials or merit. The motte-and-bailey in MAGA world is that, in a society where people were hired only on merit, you wouldn’t see any women or minorities.

 It’s not subtle that the Trump administration is all about masculinity. Pete Hegseth thinks that expelling women from the military and pumping grunts full of testosterone is going to solve America’s effeminacy problem. They celebrate a beer-guzzling FBI director and UFC fights on the White House lawn. And this is exactly what you would expect from Christian theocrats like Hegseth and 1980s yuppie culture fossils like Donald Trump, but rarely do we speak of how this gung-ho alpha masculinity attitude maps onto the stuttering, insecure, atheistic and eternally beta-coded geek set of Silicon Valley—your Musks, Zucks, Thiels, and Altmans.

Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:

My master theory of the rise of the reactionary—and ultimately fascist—subset of geek culture is that it’s basically a masculinity LARP. For those who can’t let go of the stereotypes of the geek/nerd and the jock, these labels last well beyond the schoolyard and become long-term scars. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, specifically, are both known to have been relentlessly bullied by bigger and meaner boys. A lot of geeks were.

 In some cases this gauntlet causes boys to turn away from performative masculinity. In other cases, they lean into it very hard, trying to prove to their bullies that their anime, vidya and D&D does not make them any less masculine than a quarterback or steelworker. These men hold no malice against their oppressors. In fact, impressing their bullies has become the project of their lives. They don’t consider their enemies to be the jocks who shoved them into a locker. Rather, the geek reactionary considers themselves to share a mutual enemy with the jocks: That is, women.

 I have to stress again that I’m not talking about every male geek, here. That would, in fact, be insane. I’m talking about the Musk fanboys, the Gamergaters, the 4chan-poisoned manosphere, and of course the Paypal Mafia. Their whole mission is to show off for the jocks and demonstrate that they are worthy of the club. The sycophancy toward Donald Trump and his frat party administration is the most obvious manifestation of this. With AI, they think that they can finally demonstrate their worth to the chest-beating chauvinists by inventing a machine that drives women out of the workforce and back into the kitchen.

The misogyny that comes part and parcel with AI is demonstrable: According to recent studies, when men are seen working with AI, they are seen as pragmatic and ahead of the curve; when a woman is seen using AI, she is seen as incompetent and in need of a crutch. This is when they are performing the same task and producing the same result.

 It’s called a “competence penalty,” and it’s a stronger explanation for women’s vastly decreased adoption of this technology than the moral queasiness theory. It becomes a kind of sexist ouroboros—the assumption that women are just bad at their jobs creates the misconception that incompetence drives their use of technology, which is then used as evidence to prove the original assumption.

 Then, when they compensate for the competence penalty by in fact working harder than their male colleagues, they are punished for their Luddism.

 This is just an efficient process for achieving what the leaders of this technology want anyway. Many of the tech oligarch class including Peter Thiel are on record suggesting that women shouldn’t have been given the right to vote, let alone work. Thiel’s Palantir co-founder and CEO, Alex Karp, is more explicit about the long-term goals of AI technology—it will decrease the economic and political power of Democrats broadly, and women more specifically.

Elon Musk barely hides his disdain for women, so strong that he doesn’t just hate his own exes, he hates the exes of other billionaires by extension. He is constantly whinging about Mackenzie Scott, who lives in his head particularly, and won’t even bring himself to use her current name, referring to her as “Mackenzie Bezos” as though to affirm that she is still in some way her former husband’s property.

A key belief of the neofascist-masculinist ecosystem to which Musk, Trump, and these other men belong is that women’s participation in human society is the primary driver of its collapse. It is women, they say, who harbor what MAGA guru Gad Saad and others refer to as the disease of empathy. Cutting this disease out is viewed as integral to the restoration of the mythological American golden age. Make no mistake, the oligarchs feel more emboldened every day in communicating their intentions in ominous tweets and sound bites.

For all the ungendered opining about the future of humanity, the discourse about AI and the tech-right’s other fantastical projects rarely show evidence that these tools are anything but toys for men, and in many ways, appear geared towards replacing women, not just in the workforce, but in the lives of men more generally. And not just replacing them—degrading them.

 OpenAI has been trying for some time to figure out how to implement features into ChatGPT that can turn it into a kind of sexbot. Sam Altman is apparently a big fan of the 2013 science fiction drama Her, a fairly prophetic film in which a lonely man played by Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an agentic AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson, though as usual for these guys, he missed the point of the movie and thinks the Torment Nexus is an excellent idea. In 2024, the company approached Johansson to be the voice actor of ChatGPT’s speaking capability, and when she declined, they hired someone who sounds just like her.

 Elon Musk, who has been wrestling for years with his scandal-plagued Grok AI to make it right-wing without praising Hitler in the process, has driven an absurd amount of his company’s energy toward developing anime-themed AI sex companions for men and boys. It’s not difficult to see ominous intent in an openly misogynistic tech mogul’s efforts to develop and mass produce a servile woman-substitute that will never demand or require consent.

This sinister project has been overshadowed in the media by Grok’s other major sexism scandal, in which Musk gleefully promoted his chatbot’s ability to alter photos of women on demand to remove their clothing and portray them engaging in sexual acts. Musk thinks this feature, which he calls “Spicy Mode,” is hilarious boys-will-be-boys mischief. In what passes for his heart, he knows that what he’s developing for himself and a deeply concerning number of radicalized men and boys is the vengeful and ritualistic degradation of women.

 Much is said about the reckless moral and environmental nature of these technologies, but not enough about their clear political intent. Until we can be honest about the fact that this is not politically neutral tech—and its developers are virtually all united in a political project—we can’t possibly claim that this technology is being developed for all of humanity. We’re still just building a robot genie for sad and entitled men.

If you're interested in my theory of reactionary geek culture and its pandering to fascist jock culture, you're in luck because I'm writing a whole book about it. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.

Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: