1. Introduction

The technology industry names its products in ways that fool us into thinking they fit naturally, easily, and inconsequentially into our lives. They do not. Technologies often bring about social and political harms, but these harms are concealed by language that obscures and obfuscates. In this collection’s introductory chapter, we elaborate on our collective aim: to subvert Big Tech’s careful branding and to rechristen popular technologies in ways that point explicitly to their problems. We pursue this goal by drawing on a performative-material framework, which holds that what something is has to be understood as what it does; that is, we insist that digital technologies be understood and named as that which they enact, not just as the shiny material objects they appear to be. We argue that the need to rename tech is particularly urgent in our political moment, in which the rise of mis/disinformation, a resurgence in far-right ideologies, and human rights violations are increasingly visible in our digital communication ecosystems. We call for symbolic renaming, a commitment in our own communities to adopting new language that breaks with the values currently encoded by the technology industry: ableism, racism, extractivism, capitalism, and colonialism.