About three years ago a funny quip began circulating on social media that the gig economy was now mostly composed of Mommy apps. Business Insider suggested that twenty-something techbros were wasting their talents designing technologies and programs for things they wished their Mommies still did for them: driving, cooking, cleaning, laundering. Newsweek even ran a similar story under the headlines read “Silicon Valley Needs Moms.” The term “post-mom economy” emerged to capture this particular moment in tech(bro) culture when Uber (“Mommy, drive me”), TaskRabbit (“Mommy, clean my room”), GrubHub (“Mommy, I’m hungry”), and LiveBetter (“Mommy, I’m bored”) emerged. But to suggest that these apps are designed to replace Mommy misses a key point. These services do not replicate, reproduce, or replace Mommy. Instead, they extend the maternal mandate to all other care providers and expand the realm of consumption. The labor associated with Mommy merely attaches to new bodies and figures not usually associated with Mommy, while the goods and services associated with Mommy’s care expand. In other words, the issue with Mommy is not just who is doing this labor, but the demands for this sort of labor in society.

Thus they reveal a problem that goes beyond a matter of gender and diversity in the tech world. The classed and heteronormative obsession with work–life balance, efficiency, and time management displayed by Mommy’s-basement apps suggest that one can escape patriarchy or gendered labor in an instant—one just needs the right app! But this propaganda obscures the inescapable realities of care work that so many women, people of color, and precarious workers undertake out of survival. A Mommy’s-basement world forecloses the possibility of a reconfigured technological future that is not based on exploiting the labor of others. And it co-opts the political potential of care as a category of feminist organizing.

Mommy’s-basement apps are telling in that they reveal that misogyny and racism in the tech industry will not be solved by diversity-based hiring and the inclusion of women alone. Scholars such as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, and Marie Hicks have done important work in highlighting how the history of technology and technological designs are deeply implicated in upholding racism and misogyny. We might add Mommy’s basement to this mix. That these apps emerge out of Mommy’s basement can explain why the classed labor of gig work seems to escape recognition. Because it is Mommy’s devalued labor, it can be packaged and sold as labor not worth doing oneself. Because it is Mommy’s otherwise devalued labor, it has been repackaged and sold to prospective gig workers as an enterprising and innovative system of assembling and modulating work rather than old-school care labor.

None of this will be corrected by the current frantic wave of inclusion in the world of tech. That is too often just about showing good face. It is not enough. This is not to say that tech is not full of subversive actors who are organizing and pushing for a more equitable technological future. The industry is not a monolithic enterprise full of only techbros—but the future depends on more than representation, it depends on designing media environments that are aware of the social and how the social is reproduced through care. Accounting for gender and diversity in the tech industry means contending with the normative regimes of care built into our technologies. It is not enough to remedy the fact that women are being sexually harassed at Uber. Something altogether different and better than Uber must also be created. Mommy’s basement has been and will continue to be a coveted venue for misogyny. But those who dwell in Mommy’s basement can also be evicted. The first step is to serve notice that the rent owed Mommy is overdue.