Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Broad Band
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/21/1984
WEBSITE: https://clairelevans.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2008143876 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2008143876 |
| HEADING: | Evans, Claire Lisa |
| 000 | 00463cz a2200133n 450 |
| 001 | 7672845 |
| 005 | 20171114132909.0 |
| 008 | 080923n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2008143876 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca07895252 |
| 040 | __ |a SaPrUSA |b eng |e rda |c SaPrUSA |d DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Evans, Claire Lisa |
| 670 | __ |a “Where is your song?”, 2004: |b t.p. (Claire Lisa Evans) |
| 670 | __ |a Broad band, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Claire L. Evans) pub information (VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer) |
PERSONAL
Born November 21, 1984; partner of Jona Bechtolt.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and musician. Singer and cofounder, Yacht; founding editor, Terraform. Advisor, Art Center College of Design; member, Deep Lab (cyberfeminist collective).
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Aeon, Grantland, Guardian, Rhizome, VICE, WIRED, and Universe (National Geographic blog). Former futures editor, Motherboard.
SIDELIGHTS
Claire L. Evans is perhaps best known for her role as a musician, but she is also a writer about technology and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. The book “is a feminist history of the Internet. That’s what I’ve been telling people,” Evans said in an interview with Addie Wagenknecht in Forbes. “Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a history of the Internet told through women’s stories: boots-on-the-ground accounts of where the women were, how they were feeling and working, at specific, formative moments in Internet history. It emphasizes users and those who design for use, while many popular tech histories tend to zero in on the box. I’ve always been fascinated with what happens after hardware hits the market; it’s what we do with it that counts.”
Broad Band emphasizes the important roles women played in the development of electronic computation following World War II. Before the word became associated with electronic machines, “tech workers were called computers, as in someone who ‘computes, or performs computations,'” wrote Booklist reviewer June Sawyers, “and many of them were women.” “The author consistently demonstrates how often these women were overlooked when it came time to acknowledge who had performed the work,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor; “they were the silent, behind-the-scenes workers … underpaid and ignored.” “One of the great arcs of the book is the shift in computing’s purpose: What began as an intellectual pursuit and then a military necessity became, after World War II, a driver of the global economy,” stated Katherine Boyle in the Wall Street Journal. “Ms. Evans concludes that women became less valued after American men returned from war and as computing grew more commercially viable. ‘The shift from programmer to software engineer was an easy enough signal for female programmers to interpret,’ she writes.” In addition, Boyle pointed out “that women of different eras were tinkering for different reasons—intellectual challenge, wartime opportunity, financial independence, freedom from an oppressive reality.” “If the spirit of the Internet is collaborative,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “Evans’s women embody that spirit entirely–which is no surprise.”
Evans built on her own early interest in technology in composing Broad Band. “When writing about the history of the Internet, she found it helpful to get ‘hands-on,'” explained Agatha French in the Los Angeles Times, “partly because of how much the technologies have evolved. ‘Trying to wrap your head around the fact that there was no such thing as a screen’ in the earliest computers, for example, can be difficult to square with our understanding of the machines we use today. Early computing was considered a woman’s job—a kind of evolution from typists and secretaries—to the extent that one term used to describe a machine’s labor potential was ‘kilo-girl.'” “I never had a feeling when I was a kid that computers were for boys or girls or for anyone in particular,” Evans said in an interview with Shirin Ghaffary in Recode. “I thought they were just magical portals to the world. I always defined myself as an Internet person and a net native. I learned how to write online. I was a blogger in the early blogging days. I wrote so much stuff that’s floating online forever, probably. But I got to a point … where I started to feel like, as a person and more importantly as a woman, I didn’t really know what my place was anymore.” “The women I profile in Broad Band accomplished what they did within the spaces that were open to them, which were often administrative, user-oriented, humanist, or not yet perceived as being technical, as with programming, which was seen as a secretarial-type position in its early days,” Evans told Sophie Lynne Jackson in Dazed. “Had they been given more access, who knows what they could have done? This is people doing the best they could under the circumstances, often elevating a constrained position to an advantage: Jake Feinler, for example, who ran the early Internet’s central information office, the NIC.” “‘Broad Band’ captures—and reclaims—the idealism of not only discovering a new frontier but of creating one,” French stated. “Regarding women in tech, Evans says, ‘This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of stories there are.'”
In fact, critics concluded that Broad Band helps partly to restore women to their rightful place as leaders in the postwar emergence of computers. “Broad Band began as an encyclopedia: I obsessively tracked every woman I could find,” Evans told Jackson. “I felt a burden of responsibility to make sure everyone who had been omitted elsewhere was included here. But for a book to do its job, it has to be a readable narrative, so I narrowed my lists down to those people whose stories I felt to be most representative of the themes at play, of the larger history I wanted to track. … I hope what I chose to include can serve as a signpost for people. This way for more. And there’s plenty more.” “I want everybody to know about these stories because they’re interesting. When you’re only interested in a small part of the story, you’re not getting the whole story,” Evans told Ghaffary. “I want you to know that Ada Lovelace had a drug problem, that Ada Lovelace was a compulsive gambler and she felt really weird about motherhood. There’s a lot of things in those stories that are more relatable, and it’s more interesting to me to learn how people manage to do exceptional things within the context of their lives.” “Broad Band,” concluded Bill Forman in the Colorado Springs Independent, “is a useful history of a past that, unlike the future, couldn’t be cooler.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2018, June Sawyers, review of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, p. 3.
Colorado Springs Independent, March 21, 2018, Bill Forman, review of Broad Band.
Forbes, March 5, 2018, Addie Wagenknecht, “How Claire Evans Is Writing Women Back into the Internet.”
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of Broad Band.
Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2018, Agatha French, “Claire L. Evans Created an App, Leads the Band Yacht and Now Has Written a Book about Female Tech Pioneers.”
Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2018, review of Broad Band, p. 51.
Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2018, Katherine Boyle, review of Broad Band.
ONLINE
Claire L. Evans Website, https://clairelevans.com (June 23, 2018), author profile.
Dazed, http://www.dazeddigital.com/ (March 2, 2018), Sophie Lynne Jackson, review of Broad Band.
Recode, https://www.recode.net/ (March 16, 2018), Shirin Ghaffary, review of Broad Band.
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the pop group YACHT, and the founding editor of Terraform, VICE's science-fiction vertical.
She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, WIRED, and Aeon; previously, she was a contributor to Grantland and wrote National Geographic's popular culture and science blog, Universe.
She is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.
https://clairelevans.com/
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the
Women Who Made the Internet
June Sawyers
Booklist.
114.12 (Feb. 15, 2018): p3. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. By Claire L. Evans. Mar. 2018. 288p. Penguin/Portfolio, $27 (9780735211759): e-book (9780735211766). 004.092.
According to Evans, the first ad in which the word computer appeared was in the classified pages of the New York Times in 1892. In this book, with its clever play-on-words title, Evans tells the stories of the many unsung women who propelled our computer age. As anyone familiar with Hidden Figures (2016) knows, early tech workers were called computers, as in someone who "computes, or performs computations," and many of them were women. Thus, women were on the forefront of technology from the beginning. "We're not ancillary; we're central, often hiding in plain sight," Evans notes. She writes about the best-known of these pioneers, Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter), Maria Mitchell, and many others, including the women the Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering hired to analyze data because he could pay them for "next to nothing." And yet despite the lack of proper payment, Pickering's maid and "computer," Williamina Fleming, was credited with discovering the Horsehead Nebula. From COBOL and ARPANET to Silicon Valley and cyberfeminism, women have always played a major role in developing computer technology. Now their collective stories are finally being shared in Evans' fascinating and inspiring work of women's history.--June Sawyers
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
1 of 5 5/20/18, 10:10 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Sawyers, June. "Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2018, p. 3. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A531171454/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6790790d. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531171454
2 of 5 5/20/18, 10:10 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Evans, Claire L.: BROAD BAND
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Evans, Claire L. BROAD BAND Portfolio (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 3, 6 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1175-9
A history of the major role women played in creating the internet and the computer industry.
Long before there were machines called computers, women worked as "computers," performing complex mathematical computations by hand for the U.S. Naval Observatory and other entities. When male engineers designed the first computing machines, using relays and switches and then vacuum tubes, they hired these same women to become the operators and programmers of the machines. Evans, the former futures editor of VICE's Motherboard and founding editor of its sci- fi imprint, Terraform, tells the fascinating story of how these highly intelligent, mathematically astute women were pioneers in a new field integral to the rise of the computer age. Since there were no training manuals, they had to figure out how the Mark I or the ENIAC computers worked by studying the hardware. Then they invented the software to run them and went back and wrote the training manuals for others to use. They wrote code, created ballistic trajectories for the war effort during World War II, invented the languages used by microprocessors today, designed searchable databases that were used to connect people across the country, and figured out a standard addressing format, which has led to the billions of .com, .org, .gov designations found online today. Throughout, the author consistently demonstrates how often these women were overlooked when it came time to acknowledge who had performed the work; they were the silent, behind-the-scenes workers who were underpaid and ignored when accolades were due. "Again and again," she writes, "women did the jobs nobody thought were important, until they were." Thankfully, Evans provides an informative corrective, giving proper due to these women and their invaluable work.
An edifying and entertaining history of the rise of the computer age and the women who made it possible. A good choice for fans of Hidden Figures.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Evans, Claire L.: BROAD BAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461514/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6e036e73. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461514
3 of 5 5/20/18, 10:10 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
Publishers Weekly.
265.3 (Jan. 15, 2018): p51+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
Claire L. Evans. Portfolio, $27 (270p) ISBN 978-0-7352-1175-9
Journalist Evans's first book is an invigorating history of female coders, engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who helped create and shape the internet, and whose contributions, she argues, are too often overlooked. The book's subjects stretch back to Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter and a collaborator with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine. Evans makes astute connections to draw her subjects into a narrative about the democratization of technology. Grace Hopper, who worked on the Harvard Mark I computer during WWII, "believed that computer programming should be widely known and available to nonexperts," which led her to develop one of the earliest programming languages. Stanford scientist Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler hired and trained other women to help her develop and maintain one of the first servers at the Network Information Center at Stanford in 1970s, and programmer Brenda Laurel brought gaming (and computer skills) to a generation of girls through her Rockett Movado series in the 1990s. If the spirit of the internet is collaborative, Evans's women embody that spirit entirely--which is no surprise, since, as Evans dutifully shows, they had a huge role in inventing it. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet." Publishers Weekly, 15
Jan. 2018, p. 51+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888928 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6f8a2bfe. Accessed 20 May 2018.
4 of 5 5/20/18, 10:10 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523888928
5 of 5 5/20/18, 10:10 PM
Claire L. Evans created an app, leads the band Yacht and now has written a book about female tech pioneers
Agatha French
By Agatha French
Mar 23, 2018 | 8:00 AM
Claire L. Evans created an app, leads the band Yacht and now has written a book about female tech pioneers
Claire L. Evans, author of "Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet" at home in Los Angeles. (Christina House)
Claire L. Evans sang that she "thought the future would be cooler" as frontwoman of the L.A.-based pop band Yacht. In her first book "Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet" the musician, app developer and journalist looks through time the other way, to history — which could be cooler too.
Women have often been left out of the history of technology. "I want them to be recognized for their contributions," she says of female pioneers Ada Lovelace (mathematician), Grace Hopper (computer scientist) Stacy Horn (founder of the early social network Echo) and the many others whose endeavors and accomplishments she traces in her book. Stretching from the early 1800s to the 1990s, "Broad Band" covers major booms and movements in technology focusing on the women in the room.
Evans perches on a red chair in her bright Garvanza home, where a record collection shares shelf space with vintage computers; on a mantle to her right a name plate reads "Claire L. Evans Cyberfeminist."
Reading other tech histories, she says, "I always wondered where the women were." The prevailing image of the advent of the internet, she says wryly, is "long haired men in the streets of San Francisco talking about tomorrow;" Evans describes her early research for "Broad Band" as "zeroing in on the one female name that's in the footnotes and being like, 'who's this?'"
The history of science has long been relevant to Evans' work; she was a science and tech columnist for the now-defunct Los Angeles Alternative and futures editor of Vice's tech-website Motherboard.
Claire L. Evans will present on female tech pioneers at the Voyager Institute on April 7 at 4 p.m. »
Her interest in computing began at a young age. Evans' father studied programming at Manchester in the 1970s and worked for Intel his entire career.
"I don't know if it was him intentionally trying to get his young daughter into technology because he wanted to arm her for the future," she says. "He also took me skiing. I hated that, but I loved the computer."
Booting up her vintage Mac Classic, Evans runs the early digital drawing program Kid Pix, sighing, "This really takes me back." She also owns a Next Cube, the model which on Tim Burners Lee created the web.
The impetus for "Broad Band" arose from a sense of wanting to reconnect more meaningfully with history, but also with the internet, which she credits as being her "introduction not just to the world but to being a writer and thinking about text." Evans "cut her teeth blogging" and writes the content for 5 Every Day, which recommends 5 interesting things to do in Los Angeles daily. She's also the lyricist for Yacht, and crafts the band's conceptual persona.
Claire L. Evans at home in Los Angeles
Claire L. Evans at home in Los Angeles (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Evans herself possesses a sense of limitlessness, of determined exploration: literature, tech, and music all capture her efforts and attention. "For a long time I thought there was no connection whatsoever and that I was just a person with many side hustles," she says. "But at the same time, I think it's a right-brain, left-brain thing too. I really enjoy the catharsis of being able to be in a rock band every once in a while."
When writing about the history of the internet, she found it helpful to get "hands-on," partly because of how much the technologies have evolved. "Trying to wrap your head around the fact that there was no such thing as a screen" in the earliest computers, for example, can be difficult to square with our understanding of the machines we use today.
Early computing was considered a woman's job — a kind of evolution from typists and secretaries — to the extent that one term used to describe a machine's labor potential was "kilo-girl."As Evans writes, "women were the first computers; together, they formed the first information networks."
"The idea that women themselves were the computers … to me that was the kernel," she says as her calico cat Issey stalks past. In "Broad Band," Evans illustrates that women have always been at the vanguard of embracing the connectivity of the internet, but she bristles at notion that community building is inherently feminine.
Issey the cat and a vintage computer
Issey the cat and a vintage computer (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
"I never want to make any kind of essentialist argument about what women are good at online or what attracts women to certain parts of computing in this history," she says. "There are these sort of tendencies that come up in the book again and again, in terms of women being connected to the software or humanist or use-oriented side. That's much more about the circumstances of the industry and academia than it is about any kind of natural tendency."
The writing of a book — a true solo project — is another new experience. "I know that if I take a hit, I take a hit alone, but if I succeed I get to have the feeling of triumph and I don't have to share with anybody."
“Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet” by Claire L. Evans
“Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet” by Claire L. Evans (Portfolio)
Evans' relationship with the web is complicated. Her surfing habits, "they're toxic," she admits; she wastes time on social media. But "when I go on a research k-hole, a deep-dive, if you will, that's when I feel like the internet is really doing its thing for me, and I feel like it's worth my time. But you know, everything else is rough.
"I'd always taken pride in being a net native who understood the internet, who had fun on the internet, who thought the internet was ostensibly a place of connection.… I was starting to feel like I didn't know if it was that anymore for me, so I started reinvestigating these earlier histories, trying to find where we lost the thread."
She was also "compensating for the way it felt to be a woman online," where antagonism, doxing and trolls come part and parcel with having a screen presence. "I think people have nostalgia for the early internet because it was still small enough that it could be conceived of as something discrete from us," she says ruefully. "Like any utopia, once enough people join it just becomes a mirror of the world."
"My big fantasy is Internet-2," says Evans. "Maybe if the internet falls we can all reclaim some of these older technologies that have been sitting there waiting for us." In "Broad Band," Evans writes of these technologies with admiration: Resource One used its mainframe to operate a Social Services Referral Directory, Women's Wire hosted domestic abuse resources, and computer scientist Wendy Hall's Microcosm predated the semantic web.
Claire L. Evans in her backyard; the CD is a prop from a Yacht show.
Claire L. Evans in her backyard; the CD is a prop from a Yacht show. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
For a design school in Spain, Evans prepared a lecture on subversion, approaches that, as she describes them, sound refreshingly simple — humane, even — without being ignorant of the pull of hyperrealities. "For example," she says, "If you're playing a first person shooter, maybe instead of shooting the bad guy you could try a different strategy, like a horticultural strategy, so you go around the map of the game and you look at all the plants and you catalog them," she says excitedly.
The internet, after all, is human-made and therefore full of human complexity. "Broad Band" captures — and reclaims — the idealism of not only discovering a new frontier but of creating one. Regarding women in tech, Evans says, "This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of stories there are."
agatha.french@latimes.com
@agathafrenchy
Author Claire Evans wants you to know about the women who helped found the internet
Her new book follows the stories of women in tech from Ada Lovelace in the 1800s to cyber feminists of the ‘90s.
By Shirin Ghaffary Mar 16, 2018, 10:39am EDT
Claire Evans, author of the new book “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet” Jaclyn Campanaro
Claire Evans grew up as the daughter of a coder for Intel, and she never thought computers were strictly for boys. But as an adult, she became disappointed to find the story of Silicon Valley thoroughly dominated by male characters.
That’s why Evans set out to highlight the women who helped make the internet in her new book, “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet,” a series of biographical essays about important women in tech history the Wall Street Journal called “engaging,” while also “too-often fannish,” in its review.
Evans followed the stories of women in computing that span from Ada Lovelace, who published the first computer program in 1843, to cyberfeminism matriarch Sadie Plant, who inspired a generation of politically engaged women online in the early ‘90s.
Evans, who writes about technology for Vice’s Motherboard, spent two years digging up archives and tracking down subjects to add to the canon of internet pioneers.
Her writing was a welcome retreat from Evans’s other life as lead singer in an arty rock band with her partner, Jona Bechtolt. The couple made headlines in 2016 when they faked a sex tape leak for a video that never really existed. Evans called it a “failed experiment” at commenting on celebrity online culture. There was a backlash and the band later apologized.
Recode spoke with Evans about her book and the overlooked figures in tech’s past. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you write this book?
I saw a need for it. A more personal reason is, I grew up on the computer — my dad worked for Intel and I had computers in my home from a very young age.
I never had a feeling when I was a kid that computers were for boys or girls or for anyone in particular. I thought they were just magical portals to the world. I always defined myself as an internet person and a net native. I learned how to write online. I was a blogger in the early blogging days. I wrote so much stuff that’s floating online forever, probably.
But I got to a point, I don’t know, maybe three or four years ago, where I started to feel like, as a person and more importantly as a woman, I didn’t really know what my place was anymore. I didn’t feel as free to express myself on the internet as I had when I was younger.
Who’s the internet even for, what is the internet, what does it become? That was kind of where my head was, and so because I’m into history and I’m into old-school computing, my immediate impulse was to go to the past and to try to trace it.
Whether or not I figured it out is up to the reader to determine, but it made me feel a little bit better about my place online.
Your book focuses on women who were foundational to computing and the early internet. Did you know about these women growing up?
No, I didn’t know them. And part of the catalyst of writing the book was I was writing a series of articles about feminism in the ‘90s online, cyber feminism, which was something I discovered just because that was literally a footnote on a Wikipedia page about something else.
It blew my mind, the fact that there had been this fully formed, really interesting, colorful feminist movement on the internet the exact same time that I was coming of age online, and I just couldn’t believe that I’d missed it. Then I started to think, “What else could I have missed?”
You found plenty of subjects.
It’s insane how many more stories there are. And it makes me excited on one level because we get to start to uncover these now, but it also makes me really frustrated that there have been so many books about history of tech that just parrot the same ten stories about Steve Jobs going to hire the guy from Pepsi — stories that we all know.
I enjoy those stories too, but it’s just so frustrating that there are other ones that are just as interesting and just as dynamic with just as funny and interesting characters as any of the things that we see in movies and TV now, so I wanted to make sure that we really start going there.
I want to have something that a young girl today can read and see herself in. I really believe that it’s much easier to see yourself in the future of something when you can see yourself in the past and you’re rooted in it.
Was it hard to write a book about women in tech that focuses on the past when there’s so much happening in the present?
There were so many points in the process of making the manuscript when some story would come out, like the Google internal memo or some of many stories of harassment, like the entire #MeToo movement happened while I was writing this book.
And every time that happened I would think, “Oh no, I’ve got to make make sure to include that, I’ve got to put #MeToo in the book, I’ve got to put Gamergate in the book. I’ve got to put all these contemporary things in the book, but ultimately, I wanted the book to be a sacred space where you don’t have any of that shit in it.
It’s just true stories of people doing amazing stuff against extenuating circumstances and succeeding. As much as that’s kind of a “rah rah” thing, I just wanted there to be that document, and I didn’t want to have to be in a position of retreat or reaction or defensiveness.
What are some of the stories you wanted to include but didn’t have space for in this book?
User interface design is a really huge space. A lot of really amazing women in UX design. I really wish I had the chance to talk to Susan Kare [an artist and graphic designer who created many of the interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s], for example.
Who else did you wish you could have included?
I wanted to do a chapter on the women of Xerox PARC. That’s one of those super mythologized spaces in early tech literature — all the the coders and anthropologists and computer scientists all hobnobbing it together in bean bag chairs. Xerox PARC is really famous for having these bean bag chairs that everyone sat in.
But there’s this woman, Adele Goldberg, who’s a really famous computer scientist, who tells this story in a video at the Computer History Museum about how the beanbag chairs were great except for if you were pregnant, It was impossible to sit down and get up. So the people that designed this collaborative, exciting neutral egalitarian environment did not at all think about how the women would actually be dealing with using it. It was very emblematic, I wanted to write about that.
You dedicated the book to the users, can you explain why?
There’s a woman in the book, Stacy Horn, who founded BBS [an early system for messaging and chatting online] in the late ‘80s, and in its heyday was a very popular social platform on the early net. But she still runs it.
And there’s maybe like a few hundred people that still use it, but this kind of dedication towards long-term care and really owning the responsibility of the platform you create, I think it’s something that is so powerful and I value that. I really want to see it reviewed and just the network as a whole and in the culture of tech as a whole.
I mean, it’s very difficult to do that, I know, because the entire industry is built on obsolescence and constant reinvention, but with [the women in the book], there’s a certain level of mindfulness for the long-term and for care.
Many of the women in your book had rich lives outside their work in technology, and you’re the same way. You are also in a rock band, Yacht.
We have to remember that people with well-rounded lives often have a great deal to contribute because they’re thinking about the larger systems of which they are a part.
One of the people in the book, Radia Perlman, she’s put this in my head, that we have this fantasy about engineers being people that took apart radios when they were a kid, and are obsessive about details and only think about the code. That’s cool and great and those people are necessary to build things, but we also need people that can think about the impact of that and can also think about the whole thing at a higher level, how it’s all going to work, where it’s going to fit in the marketplace, where it’s going to fit in the world in which it will become a part.
In May of 2016, you and your partner made headlines for orchestrating a fake sex tape leak to promote your music video. What was your thinking around that?
It was a failed experiment. We’ve been a band for a really long time and done these experimental projects that play with online culture. We were trying to speak to the disillusionment of clickbait and celebrity culture and the conviction with which people spread stories on the internet — the way that the algorithms and systems in place inflate and exacerbate those stories, but it was a very misguided approach.
We executed it poorly and used poor language. It was a disaster from the beginning and we regretted everything about it. It was something that brought us into a two-year period of creative hibernation, and part of the reason I threw myself into this project is because I had the time, and I had the desire to go deeper into issues of online life and understand a lot more about it and the best way to elevate the voices of women.
How do you regain trust with your audience?
As much as these things often seem entangled in my work, there’s a difference between art and journalism. I have always taken my writing seriously, and I hope that shows. This book isn’t about me, or Yacht, and it’s not fiction. It’s about highlighting the contributions of women who really deserve to be seen.
Why do you think we don’t hear more stories about women in tech?
I think various industries only recently awoke to the fact that womens’ stories are interesting to more than just 50 percent of the population, but in fact they’re interesting to 100 percent of the population.
It’s not that there haven’t been great books about women in tech — there have been. I have many heroes, Ellen Ullman, for example has been writing about this stuff for a long time. Sadie Plant wrote an amazing book in the ‘90s. We could always use a lot more, and there’s space for it.
I feel like already a big part of my reader base is very earnest men who want to learn, which touches me more almost, frankly, than the women excited about the book. I want everybody to know about these stories because they’re interesting. When you’re only interested in a small part of the story, you’re not getting the whole story.
I’m not super interested in countering great man history with great woman history, and I love pointing out heroes like Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, but I am more interested in them as full people than I am as stickers that you put on your binder.
I want you to know that Ada Lovelace had a drug problem, that Ada Lovelace was a compulsive gambler and she felt really weird about motherhood. There’s a lot of things in those stories that are more relatable, and it’s more interesting to me to learn how people manage to do exceptional things within the context of their lives.
Books Bookshelf
‘Broad Band’ Review: Mothers of Invention
The secret history of women’s role in the computing revolution, from the Victorian era’s Ada Lovelace to the ‘cybergrrls’ of the 1990s. Katherine Boyle reviews ‘Broad Band’ by Claire L. Evans.
ENIAC, a computer developed at the University of Pennsylvania.
ENIAC, a computer developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Rue des Archives/GRANGER
By Katherine Boyle
March 6, 2018 7:02 p.m. ET
14 COMMENTS
It is a misfortune for the writer of history to learn that one’s subject has become suddenly fashionable. It’s even worse when popular interest comes with controversies bearing hashtags. While it’s true that the newfound currency of the subject may broaden the audience for one’s work, a larger conversation is already lighting up the Twitterverse, framing one’s thoughts (and readers’ eventual response to them) even as they’re being committed to paper.
Such seems the fate of Claire Evans, whose book “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet” is a spirited collection of portraits of women who contributed to the infrastructure of the digital economy. Beginning in the mid-19th century with Ada Lovelace and her Analytical Engine and ending with the matriarchs of 1990s cyberfeminism, “Broad Band” is a celebration of the women whose minds gave birth to the motherboard and its brethren.
But what starts as an engaging series of biographical essays on lesser known mathematicians, innovators and cyberpunks is forced, either by circumstance or opportunity, to take on the heavy burden of explaining the sexist ills of today’s technology industry. The droning question that dampens this party is why these extraordinary women were erased from computing history and why there weren’t more of them to begin with. While “Broad Band” excels as a collection of brief lives, it struggles as a work of social history and criticism, often resorting to trite asides and girl-power platitudes that diminish its female subjects and their merits.
Ms. Evans, a former technology writer at Vice magazine, warns readers that she is not really a historian, but her portrait of Grace Hopper proves otherwise. Ms. Evans vividly describes how Hopper, a teacher of mathematics at Vassar, joined the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor, expecting to become a code-breaker but instead ending up as one of the three programmers of Mark I, the Harvard-based, IBM-funded electromechanical computer used to design atomic bombs during the Manhattan Project. Despite knowing little about either computers or bombs, the autodidact rose to the occasion and to the rank of rear admiral, ultimately becoming the mother of the Cobol programming language.
‘Broad Band’ Review: Mothers of Invention
Photo: WSJ
Broad Band
By Claire L. Evans
Portfolio, 278 pages, $27
Similarly, the six women who wired and programmed the Eniac, the Army’s first all-electronic general-use computer, were thrown into some of the most complex computational puzzles of World War II. Working without a programming language, they perfected the process of manipulating the hundreds of cables and switches within the room-size super-calculator with hand-punched tape loops. The Eniac would make the work of what were then called “human computers”—mathematicians tasked with problems like calculating firing tables for ballistic weapons—faster and more accurate. The human computers working with Eniac, like the Eniac Six themselves, were drawn from the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering—and all of them, numbering around a hundred, were women.
One of the great arcs of the book is the shift in computing’s purpose: What began as an intellectual pursuit and then a military necessity became, after World War II, a driver of the global economy. Ms. Evans concludes that women became less valued after American men returned from war and as computing grew more commercially viable. “The shift from programmer to software engineer was an easy enough signal for female programmers to interpret,” she writes. But other books, such as Emily Chang’s recent “Brotopia,” note that women made up 40% of computer-science classes at universities until the mid-1980s. Today that number is about 18%. The question of when and how women left the field deserves further scrutiny, but the 150-year span of “Broad Band” raises more questions than answers as to why.
Ms. Evans is sensitive to her subjects’ motivations, noting that women of different eras were tinkering for different reasons—intellectual challenge, wartime opportunity, financial independence, freedom from an oppressive reality. And Ms. Evans is careful to remind us that technology is not built in a vacuum. She describes Jaime Levy, an “early true believer” in new media who, in a few years during the mid-’90s, went from celebrity cyberslacker to pioneer e-zine editor to casualty of the dot-com bubble burst. Ms. Levy attributes the demise of New York’s early tech ecosystem not to a financial crash but to the more devastating impact of 9/11, a reminder of how one random, large-scale tragedy can derail the dreams of innovators for decades.
When writing of the ’90s, Ms. Evans fluctuates between restraint and defensiveness, particularly on subjects whose stories are not as triumphant as Hopper’s. She equates the unknown workings of forgotten early online communities (remember Women’s Wire? ChickClick? iVillage?) with the military’s lack of acknowledgment of the Eniac Six until 1997, a half-century too late. But it’s clear why some of these web pioneers are relatively unknown: Their startups failed. The market collapsed. Their companies were among the first drops in what is now a sea of social networks. To their credit, these women’s stories make “Broad Band” more intriguing—Silicon Valley desperately needs a counterfactual to the unicorn myth. But this too-often fannish, cheerleading and apologetic book doesn’t make room for assessing merit or debating legacy—a feature we can only hope will come when women innovators proliferate and step off this tricky pedestal.
A number of women’s histories were surely green-lighted in the past year, and I hope that more than a few of them will prove themselves timeless. For a historian to focus squarely on her subjects’ works would be a radical act in support of women’s achievement. Until we have such books, it’s hard not to empathize with Ms. Evans’s challenge, as it’s the challenge that many women in technology face daily: How does one celebrate merit, innovation, the elegance of superior code, while also paying homage to the contemporary women’s movement? We are all Ada Lovelace today. Here’s hoping that in future histories we no longer are.
Ms. Boyle, a former reporter for the Washington Post, is a venture capitalist at General Catalyst Partners in San Francisco.
Broad Band shows history of women in tech couldn't be cooler
By Bill Forman
click to enlarge
Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Penguin Random House)
Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Penguin Random House)
If music fans find the author’s name familiar, it’s most likely because Evans is the lead singer of Yacht, the Portland dance-pop band whose most recent full-length album was called I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler. Evans obviously would think that, having written extensively about technology and served as Futures Editor for Vice’s tech site Motherboard. Here, over the course of a few hundred well-researched pages, she uncovers a hidden history of female tech pioneers that dates back to 1842, when Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace created the first program for a mechanical computer. Other standout pioneers include Jaime Levy, the author, professor and self-proclaimed “biggest bitch in Silicon Valley” who created the floppy-disc magazine Word and earned an online following with her posts under the pseudonym “Kurt’s Brain” (a nihilist reference to the suicide of her rock idol and fellow latchkey kid Kurt Cobain). For fans of technology, feminism and/or good writing, Broad Band is a useful history of a past that, unlike the future, couldn’t be cooler.
More Literature »
Untold stories of the visionary women who made the internet
Science & TechFeature
Broad Band, Claire L Evans’ new book, is a deep dive into a dynamic tech history crafted by women programmers, artists, scientists, and cyber punks
2May 2018
TextSophie Lynne JacksonIllustrationMarianne Wilson
A science writer and feminist activist (also known as lead singer of pop band YACHT…), it was almost inevitable that Claire L Evans found herself writing a book about women and the internet. With an ocean-deep knowledge on the importance of internet communities and a determination to protect the memories of key women in internet history, Evans put together Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.
These are women who have been key to the development of technologies that brought us the computer, and later, the internet as we know it: women whose stories have gone largely ignored, and online enclaves that have been all but forgotten. If you liked Hidden Figures, this book will take you beyond NASA, and show you how that story was repeated in every tech industry, in every decade, all over the world.
Broad Band seems to have arrived during the perfect political storm. Living amid Facebook’s extraordinary privacy scandal and the aftershocks of #MeToo and Time’s Up, the internet can feel like a very fraught space to exist as a woman. Evans spoke to Dazed about growing up online, what drove women out of tech, and what the future might hold for women on the internet.
cyber rag mag
Jaime Levy created and distributed electronic magazines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood on floppy disksvia apprize.info
In Broad Band you talk about people and the internet having a symbiotic relationship – what was your online experience growing up and how has it changed over time?
Claire L Evans: There have been so many kinds of “online” along the way, and each phase has had its own flavour. For my temperament, the early blog era was probably the peak; I had friends who built a blog network with a commons in the form of a messageboard, and that’s when I was happiest online, learning to write for a public, having proper conversations, occasionally meeting my Internet friends in real life; “no virtual community is strictly virtual,” to quote Stacy Horn. I think of my life online as a gradient from outward to inward. Like many people, I began by exploring; I largely used the technology to find new people and ideas. As I grew older, I became more content with tending my own little patch of cyberspace, at best making myself available to be found. Now it’s so much more about protection, defense—that constant negotiation between connection and privacy. I used to think: what can I see? Now I think: is it worth looking?
That definitely speaks to my experience of the internet now, it’s become much more about protecting yourself within a community of friends. I think we’re more suspicious of strangers online than we used to be. How did you decide that this book was going to be your next project?
Claire L Evans: I became a writer because of my relationship to the computer. It made text approachable to me: as a kid, to see my own words on a screen made me feel powerful, and I cut my teeth as a journalist in the golden age of blogging, when me and all my friends wrote volumes and volumes, for free, for fun, for the pleasure of it. I think I always knew that if I wrote a book it would be about the internet in some way.
Broad Band itself emerged from a series of articles I wrote for Motherboard a few years ago about female computer histories – Theresa Duncan’s CD-ROM games, for one, and cyberfeminism, this concentrated wave of feminist art that broke in the years immediately following the popularisation of the World Wide Web. I became fascinated by cyberfeminism because although it had coincided with my own early years on the Web, I’d completely missed it – I was too young, I wasn’t looking in the right places. But it twigged something: if there had been this colourful, super-interesting feminist movement online in the 90s that it took me decades to discover, and only then as a footnote in some Wikipedia deep-dive, then what else had I missed?
As a cultural object, the internet has a tendency to be erased and rewritten, erased and rewritten, even as it expands; if we don’t hold on fearsomely to the things that matter to us, we will lose even their memories. I wanted to do a book because I wanted us to remember before we forgot.
collosal cave adventure
Patricia Crowther’s detailed notes on a caving expedition helped create Colossal Cave Adventure, a prototype for modern adventure gamesvia abime.net
Absolutely. Polyvore closed down recently without warning and made me think of how inpermanent our online spaces really are. You can’t trust that you can return to those memories or friends you made years ago. You met up with a lot of the women you wrote about, what was that like?
Claire L Evans: It takes a lot to invite a stranger into your home, let alone one taking notes. It was a privilege to be allowed a glimpse into these women's lives. I only wish I could have met them all in the flesh. I’m able to meet more of them now; it’s been important to me to invite as many of the book’s real-life characters as possible to participate in Broad Band events. I’m still learning from them.
I was interested by this idea you raised that women were the only people who could have done a lot of the work they did because women are better at multitasking, used to having to prove ourselves. How much do you think this is still true? Do you think ‘side hustle’ culture feeds this?
Claire L Evans: I hesitate to say that women are ‘better’ at anything in particular; the women I profile in Broad Band accomplished what they did within the spaces that were open to them, which were often administrative, user-oriented, humanist, or not yet perceived as being technical, as with programming, which was seen as a secretarial-type position in its early days. Had they been given more access, who knows what they could have done? This is people doing the best they could under the circumstances, often elevating a constrained position to an advantage: Jake Feinler, for example, who ran the early internet’s central information office, the NIC. She was so overwhelmed by the day-to-day logistics of her job, which was largely seen as administrative despite being so much more, that she pushed for protocols we still use today, like WHOIS and the separation of the network into “domains” individuated by extensions like .gov, .edu, and .com.
“I don’t think the internet is a woman-friendly place. Is it even a people-friendly place?” – Claire L Evans
I feel like a lot of the issues these women faced are so universal, but maybe exemplified because of the industry they were in. You talked about pay gap in the tech industry, as well as other overt barriers like required qualifications and the literal distance of women’s facilities – something that came up in the film Hidden Figures. What steps do you think tech industries need to take to welcome women now?
Claire L Evans: It’s important for women in tech – and women who use technology – to understand that computing is our domain. During the second World War, women hired to ‘operate’ computing machines were the first programmers, and after the War, women led the development of what was then called ‘automatic programming’, the notion that programmers should be able to step above the machine level, with the help of mechanisms like interpreters, assemblers, compilers, and generators, to code at a higher level of abstraction. This led to nothing less than the development of programming languages.
In the 60s women were half the workforce in the computing industry, and women earned 40 per cent of computer-science degrees at American universities until about 1984. What edged women out of the picture was wage disparity, lack of mentorship as the first generation of female programmers aged out of the workplace, a structural unwillingness to make space for childcare, and a shift in the professional credentials and educational requirements necessary to get a job as a programmer. Several historians, like Nathan Ensmenger and Janet Abbate, have suggested that the professionalisation of the field led to its implicit masculinisation – that it had to be masculinised. This seems to have set a male-dominant precedent that has only reinforced itself over the years, through marketing as much as anything else, as being somehow natural to computing. It’s not. It took a few generations to create these conditions, and it may take a few to fully undo them, but we can start by addressing the basics: equal pay, mentorship, equal access to resources, and as much representation as is humanly possible.
community memory
Community Memory, regarded as the first social network, was influenced by the work of women in San Francisco commune Project Onevia wikimedia commons
Thinking of women as internet users – how welcoming a space do you think the internet is for women now? A lot of these women in history were working to make online spaces more accessible, even making concerted efforts to bring in women specifically, like Women’s Wire. Do you think their efforts have succeeded in making the internet a more women-friendly place in the long run?
Claire L Evans: No, but I think their efforts made the Internet a more woman-friendly place at the time. When the entire networked world was only about 10 per cent female, Stacy Horn’s online service, Echo, had near-complete parity. It’s because she was the only person trying. Because of that effort, a number of women were able to experience the internet for the first time. Same with Women’s Wire, an early commercial online service targeted to women. They got a few good years.
I wrote a fan letter to Hakim Bey and asked him whether he thought utopia was possible, and he responded that ‘everything you once imagined is true. But at a cost. One way to lower that cost is to face the fact that utopia will be temporary, and to plan for that. Two years is a very long run. And one night of realisation is better than a hundred years of dull servitude to the technopathocracy.’ I think about it all the time, especially when I’m browsing. I don’t think the internet is a woman-friendly place. Is it even a people-friendly place?
How did you curate the stories you wanted to tell?
Claire L Evans: I’ll admit Broad Band began as an encyclopedia: I obsessively tracked every woman I could find. I felt a burden of responsibility to make sure everyone who had been omitted elsewhere was included here. But for a book to do its job, it has to be a readable narrative, so I narrowed my lists down to those people whose stories I felt to be most representative of the themes at play, of the larger history I wanted to track. There are female hypertext pioneers other than Dame Wendy Hall and Cathy Marshall, for example, and I interviewed many of them – Judy Malloy, Karen Catlin, Nicole Yankelovich – but I hope what I chose to include can serve as a signpost for people. This way for more. And there’s plenty more.
“I wanted women to see themselves in these stories – and not just technical women, but artists, community-builders, spatial thinkers, entrepreneurs, idealists, and punks” – Claire L Evans
I’ll admit that when I started reading this book, Ada Lovelace and Katherine Johnson were probably the only women whose names I recognised. I’ve learnt an incredible amount about the ways that women were involved every single step of our journey toward integrating computers into our everyday lives. If there’s one particular story in this book that you hope people take away and remember, whose is it?
Claire L Evans: Oh, I think different people will gravitate to different stories. I’ve already heard such a wide range of feedback from readers about the characters they identify with most. I wanted women to see themselves in these stories – and not just technical women, but artists, community-builders, spatial thinkers, entrepreneurs, idealists, and punks. The cultural work is just as important to me as the infrastructural and programmatic work. It’s when we isolate those things from each other that we get into trouble.
I’m sure you’ve been following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Knowing how social networks got started, how do you feel about the way we use them today? Do you think we even should be worried about the way our data is being used? Are we using the internet for community or as consumers?
Claire L Evans: I think the utopian idealism of the first generation online – the late John Perry Barlow wrote of a ‘civilisation of the mind in cyberspace’, bless his heart—influenced a popular conception of the internet as a community technology, and our beleaguered social media platforms have grafted themselves onto this assumption, blinding us to their true natures as consumption engines, which hybridise community and commerce by selling communities to advertisers (to say nothing of regimes). But a social network is not a community. In a real community – virtual or otherwise – people have a stake in their own environment. They contribute. They constantly negotiate to determine how things will be, what the rules are. There is a sense of public life, of collective identity through language and the specific social conventions that develop over time in any group. All the early virtual communities struggled with self-governance, but that’s part of placemaking. It’s what makes it real.
Science & TechFeatureBooksinternetFeminism
How Claire Evans Is Writing Women Back Into The Internet
Addie Wagenknecht , Contributor
I am all about culture.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Claire L. Evans is the author of the new book: Broad Band The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. Claire recently caught up with me to discuss Broad Band using email, Skype dates and various document sharing platforms while across the world from each other, with five time zones in between. Her book comes out at a time when #metoo and net neutrality are major topics in the internet conscious and women's roles are being redefined and rewritten.
Jaclyn Campanaro
Author Claire L Evans, Photo by Jaclyn Campanaro. 2017
Can you tell me about your new book Broad Band? How did it change your point of view on how history is documented and how we should approach the narrative of the future differently?
The easy thing is to say that Broad Band is a feminist history of the Internet. That’s what I’ve been telling people. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a history of the Internet told through women’s stories: boots-on-the-ground accounts of where the women were, how they were feeling and working, at specific, formative moments in Internet history. It emphasizes users and those who design for use, while many popular tech histories tend to zero in on the box. I’ve always been fascinated with what happens after hardware hits the market; it’s what we do with it that counts.
What inspired you to write this book specifically?
I see it as the confluence of a few factors. I cut my teeth as a writer on message boards on the early Web, and published volumes online in the height of the blog era; for me, writing has rarely if ever been separate from online writing, but I had reached a point, having grown up online, of disconnect with the medium. I think we’re all grappling with the ways in which the Internet is changing faster than we can register. As a kind of balm, I started writing “secret history” pieces for Motherboard about female-identified Internet arcana: cyberfeminist artists, lost CD-ROM games. At a certain point it just felt like an inevitability to take the full plunge.
Jaclyn Campanaro
Broad Band, Photo by Jaclyn Campanaro
You met many of these women in person, was there a commonality among the early pioneers of the internet in terms of how they got into the tech sector, their personalities or upbringing that manifested their trajectories?
My process for identifying subjects for this book was to first identify the major sea changes—the birth of programming, the earliest attempts to network computers—and then to play detective, poking around, looking for women’s names. What I found, again and again, was that the women tended to concentrate at the beginnings of things, in those moments where the lack of precedent a new technology affords allowed them to carve their own place, rather than be beholden to institutional requirements or the existing standards of a field. Another way of saying this is that many of the women profiled in the book did some of their best work while nobody was looking—for their own reasons, to serve their own communities, or for the sheer love of the technology.
What does your creative process look like, do you have any rituals or favorite things to do before you start?
Like a lot of writers, I imagine, there’s a lot of hand-wringing and procrastinating and staring hopelessly at an empty text document. I try to read something before I start working, just to remind myself what’s possible. I write best in the morning; I write better if I’ve meditated. A moderate amount of sativa can help in a pinch. When I get burned out, I switch my working method; I’ll go on a long drive and dictate my thoughts into my phone, or pivot to writing longhand.
How as the shift in cultural and social climate since the election affected your work?
I started writing Broad Band before the election. There are some subjects in the book that I spoke to before, during, and afterwards, and although the tone of our conversations definitely evolved over that time, I tried to stay the course. Ultimately what I tried to create with this book is a sacred place: it centers women’s experiences, it highlights the more subtle, beautiful contributions made by people at the margins and at the protean beginnings of these important technologies. I didn’t want to let in the scrum. I wanted us to have something nice that wasn’t necessarily in a position of retreat, resistance, or reaction to external factors. That’s not to say I don’t get into the darkness at all—just that my priority was to hold up the light.
Do you have any key collaborators and people who have shaped your personal aesthetic?
My partner, Jona Bechtolt, is a huge part of my ability to get anything done. He and I have been collaborating for over ten years; we play together in a band, YACHT, and we founded an app together, 5 Every Day. He’s very fastidious and design-oriented, I lean towards big-picture concepts and culture; he can work in intense bursts, and I’m better on the longer-term follow through. He’s rhythm and I’m lyrics. I wasn’t even done with the book before he was obsessing about all kinds of minutiae on my behalf. I’m the type of person to easily spiral inwards, so I need a counterweight.
What is your relationship with beauty and fashion like?
The beauty industry I have a hard time with—my favorite comedian, Kate Berlant, used to do this great bit in her stand-up about how it’s okay to shoplift from Sephora because makeup is a tool of patriarchal oppression, and although I’m so terrified of shoplifting, that sentiment resonates with me. Maybe it’s just because my face resists makeup. I can’t even put on mascara without somehow getting it all over my cheeks.
That being said, I love skincare. I travel a lot so I’m always trying to retain moisture. I always have a tube of Embryolisse Lait Creme, which is the best moisturizer, a bottle of Mixa Bébé, a French cleansing milk my mom always used when I was growing up—it’s so hypoallergenic you can literally squirt an entire pump into your eyes without anything untoward happening—Shiseido Urban Environment sunscreen and Milk Makeup Sunshine Skin Tint, which as close as I get to foundation. Sometimes I do Korean sheet masks on the plane, much to the horror of people traveling with me. The older I get the more minimal my palette is, fashion-wise. I’m obsessed with buying vintage suits on eBay, because I love a uniform, and I like to dress how I imagine a lady tech millionaire might have dressed in the dotcom era: a sharp ‘90s Armani suit or some Pleats Please, a white t-shirt, Nikes.
How do you deal with failure in your work?
Honestly? Badly. I’m an only child and a Scorpio. I lope around silently wounded. I know that highly successful people—according to the jargon of business types and motivational speakers, anyway—crave failure, because it helps bring them closer to the truth, but I’ll take indifference over failure any day. I like to do my own thing, in the hopes that eventually someday it will all make sense in the rear view, as a body of work.
I noticed in many of your Instagram videos and stories, as well in your music, you speak French. How did you learn the language and how has it impacted your ability to live in a global community?
French is my first language! I grew up in Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, a village north of Paris, and emigrated to the United States when I was nine. In my family, we move between English and French when it’s convenient, and I really believe it’s allowed me to appreciate the nuances between worlds: no language has a full grasp on reality, and part of the fun of being bilingual is having access to an extra set of idioms and words for concepts that might be lacking in another language.
I know you spend a lot of time on planes en route to various different cities and countries. Do you have any places you always go whenever you’re in Portland, LA or say the South of France?
I like familiarity when I’m traveling—being a “regular” somewhere, even if it’s only in my mind. Small shops and galleries run by friends give me that feeling: Tusk in Chicago, Stand up Comedy and IAMTHAT in Portland, Otherwild and Virgil Normal in Los Angeles, Freda in New Orleans, the Marfa Book Company in Marfa. From touring in a band for such a long time, I’ve also been to, like, nearly every vegetarian restaurant in the continental United States.