17. Conclusion

This book has aimed to reframe technologies—and the prevailing myths around them—by displacing hegemonic language. Our motivation for doing so has been twofold: to better understand the incursions of technologies into our lives and, importantly, to make visible the ways in which technologies subjugate minoritised groups. We propose that renaming technologies is one way for people in dominant groups to do the work of allyship: to prompt reflection on our own complicity with harm-marking symbols and, ultimately, to participate in discursive practices that can bring emancipatory relations into being. Rather than continue to think of ourselves as technology ‘users’, we invoke the term ‘operative’, signalling resistance to the language and practices of Big Tech while thinking towards a reclaiming of agency.