Is this still capitalism, or something worse? Haraway was already grappling with a new language for it in her “Cyborg” text. Whatever it is, it produces a new worldwide proletariat, new distributions of ethnicity and sexuality, and new forms of the family. Haraway was writing about an earlier moment in Silicon Valley, when it was still a major center for chip fabrication, using mostly women of color as an industrial workforce. Much of that production has moved on, leaving toxic Superfund sites behind, but the global, distributed labor of making these digital means of production still exists, on an expanded and globalized scale.18

The word precarity had not yet been coined, but Haraway was already describing it. Work has in a paradoxical way been feminized.19 On the one hand, women get to work; on the other, the work is precarious, powerless and toxic. The vector has the ability to route around any stoppage or strike that workers might deploy as leverage.20 “The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communication technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization” (39).