Lisa Nakamura, "The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)

Mar 18, 2026

Lisa Nakamura, scholar of race, gender, and digital media, traces how women of color quietly built key moments of computing. She discusses Navajo chip workers, early influencer culture on MySpace, and Black creators shaping VR and AI. The conversation exposes erasure, exploitation, and calls for recognition and material repair.

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INSIGHT

Who Actually Built The Internet

The internet's dominant origin story erases the essential labor of women of color across computing eras.
Lisa Nakamura traces this from Navajo semiconductor workers in the 1960s to social media and contemporary AI/VR creators to reframe who built core technologies.

ANECDOTE

Navajo Women As Semiconductor Labor

Fairchild Corporation publicly showcased Navajo women as ideal circuit assemblers while exploiting tax breaks and weak labor protections.
The plant boasted <3% defect rates and no union, making Navajo labor economically attractive until the plant closed after protests.

INSIGHT

Racialization Hid Indigenous Tech Work

Racialized narratives turned Navajo women's skilled, modern labor into a stereotype of primitive otherness once the plant closed.
Fairchild paired a chip image beside a Navajo rug to racialize craftsmanship and later shifted outsourcing to Asian women.

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The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Lisa Nakamura challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing—the microchip era of the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s—Dr. Nakamura illuminates these women’s instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.

From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Dr. Nakamura highlights how women’s gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism’s benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives.

Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women’s labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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