The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet
Rogers Chapel
The Inattention Economy challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing—the microchip era of the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s—Lisa Nakamura illuminates these women’s instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture and the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of several books on race, gender and digital media including The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (U. Minnesota Press, 2026), and several others.
