i can't for the life of me find this again but i was doing some reading on the early age of television advertising and was reminded of the term "domestic technology"

the idea, i believe from radical feminists in the mid 1980s, is that advances in technology coupled with a particular american capitalism that creates attention economies, inescapably devalues the labor of marginalized folks

so to use the microwave as an example: if you could theoretically save 3 hours cooking a turkey or whatever in a microwave, that creates the unspoken expectation that those 3 extra hours now produce something separate and distinct

in theory, it's about "aiding" american women, but the effect becomes that a patriarch consumes more and more intricate technology to enhance the continued extraction of labor that is culturally considered a "responsibility" more than respected as actual labor

advertising plays a role in this because technology and especially the advertising of tech specs sets an expectation of eventually-attainable, theoretically-perfect efficiency, the responsibility for which we then shackle marginalized laborers into

this comes up a lot in early studies of television advertising, because people were really wary about what mass comms literally designed to make you feel worthless would do to a country's psyche. 60 or so years on and we've got some answers: it sucks

the two most capital-successful organizations in the history of humankind, alphabet/google and apple, are two of the biggest players in online advertising. social media is the attention economy times a million

the motor of capitalism is making people miserable and then offering them a way to buy themselves out of misery. but that means that capitalist attention-culture societies are, inherently in a theory sense, misery-creating machines. that's what they're best at bc that's the point

sidenote: all of this is why i think it's a moral imperative to support groups like @GigWorkersRise: labor at the bleeding edge of technology need to be protected politically, popularly, and legislatively, as early as possible in the technological lifecycle

imo, what i generally think of as "convenience technology" like gig apps is the new domestic technology, and legislatively we're seeing that the gig apps see themselves that way too, because that's the exploitation model they're following