Sarah Sharma’s recent work extends feminist media theory into a critique of Big Tech, arguing that a politics of refusal must first develop an understanding of media and technological milieux, including the media theory practiced by the architects of contemporary technology. In this interview with Ben Pulver, Sharma discusses her own experience as director of the Centre for Culture and Technology (formerly the McLuhan Centre), from the MsUnderstanding Media banner, the tension of leading the space while staying critical of hagiography, and moves into the central claims in her new book Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (2026): that tech bros already operate with a media theory of their own and are controlling environments in which only certain forms of life and rhythms are permitted, that techno-feminist critique must begin from the media milieu rather than from policy or ethics, and that refusal is more akin to a strategic incompatibility than an exit. In the discussion, Sharma addresses the gendered dichotomy between care and exit, the notion of “Mommy’s basement,” her term for the anti-social, retreat-seeking logic upholding tech-bro workplaces, and the contemporary turn towards a “maternal AI.”
Ben Pulver: The medium is the message—one of the most well-known aphorisms of the 20th century on new media and digital culture. For a long time, Marshall McLuhan was heralded as the prophet of new televised media. How has his status changed and what has become of McLuhan’s legacy?
Sarah Sharma: I would say it’s a very complicated question. I think the legacy runs in all sorts of directions. If you were a student in communications studies or media studies in Canada, you would have had to read McLuhan in your first year. I think he gets picked up in certain places more than others. I think there’s people that are highly invested just in his legacy. There are also people very invested in his theory. He is known as a prophet of the aphorism, so it’s hard to take him seriously and recognize that he offered a transformative media theory. I found “the medium is the message” to be a life changing concept for me. My perspectival lens on technology radically changed when I started to think about what this means. It’s a huge concept, sure it’s also an aphorism, but what he means by this is the message of the media is the change in pace, scale, pattern, and social relations it introduces into our human affairs. And I consider this as one of the most profound ways to think about technology and technological change, partially because it’s a theory of media that makes us have to confront the fact that not everything is possible under every technological environment. I think this is something we often forget, and something that, if it is not acknowledged, can be detrimental to struggles around social justice.
McLuhan was pivoting away from notions of media as content-based, as with, for example, the introduction of the television, everyone’s freaked out about this content in their home or the hours spent in front of the tube. What McLuhan is getting us to think about, however, is how the television’s changing relationships and dynamics in the household. He extrapolates quite a bit about the relationship between the senses and the body, and I kind of leave some of that behind.
I think we can flow with some of this concept but where I differ from many perhaps is that I think of it as a highly political understanding of media and technology. Even if he wasn’t politicized in the ways I would agree with and if we read him, we can see there’s a lot of problematic politics at play in his work. But in terms of the relationship between technology and social and political change, it’s a fundamental idea for me. I would also never read McLuhan apart from Harold Adams Innis when it comes to defining a technology or what does a technology do—and for me it’s always the centrality of the space and time binding of a media form—a media theory that McLuhan also learned directly from Innis.
The medium is the message comes out of Innis’s theory of communication and his understanding of technologies as spatially or temporally biased. Innis was looking at railroads and systems of dependency, papyrus, stones, and the history of civilizations as a history of power and different media forms. There’s no people in Innis’ work. There are not really any people in McLuhan’s work, he has instead this [idea of a] body and Innis talks about populations and civilizations in generalized form. Without real people it can be hard to keep reading. For me, as a feminist interested in technology, I understand we can think about people, identities, subjugated populations, uneven gendered dynamics, sexuality, orientations, etc. We can do the work of understanding where the biopolitcs of life fits within this framework.
BP: Do you feel like these ideas [of McLuhan and Innis] resonate in massively different ways now?
SS: The resonance… I think these seem like universalizing, totalizing theories, right? They’re easy to just dismiss. We could say: “okay, these are two white men with problematic theories which don’t include people in them.” But the overall theory of media is actually helpful to understanding things like race, class, gender, sexuality, and I think we can understand these as theories of power, and we unfold within these environments. To me, it’s necessary to understand our media milieu. I think it’s easy to just not read this stuff because you don’t see yourself in it, which I also don’t think is the best way to go about reading media philosophy. We’re not always going find ourselves in these texts. So, I’ve never turned away from some of these figures in the field. I turn towards them, I guess.
BP: As the former Director of the Center for Culture and Technology [formerly the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology], how did you decide to frame the Centre’s relation to McLuhan and his legacy, how did you turn towards it? In your book, Re-Understanding Media, Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (2022), you write that when you took up the position as Director, one of the first things you did was to hang a hot pink poster riffing on the classic McLuhan phrase, the poster reading, MsUnderstanding Media. Did that gesture shape the direction of your turn towards McLuhan from day one under your tenure?
SS: There’s so much hagiography around the figure [of McLuhan]. And when I first entered the space, just as somebody visiting and looking around, it was a space that was celebrating this figure. But that’s not really doing media philosophy. That’s not media theory. It’s really odd to be in an environment where everyone’s just talking about the figure. So, I was trying to move the centre away from that hagiographic celebration. It was interesting to have to prove that I was a media theorist or prove that what I did was McLuhan-esque because I’m not talking about him, his personality, or what he was up to. I was really interested in his theories of media. And at the same time, my queer, feminist, radicalized colleagues were like groaning ‘why are you interested in this dead white man?’ And, I would have to retort, I think it’s important for our own work.
I was trying to reconcile these two tensions that I was dealing with. I would find resonance—I found so much—in this new book [Insufferable Tools], there’s so much queer and trans media theory that is doing media theory like McLuhan but would never say ‘the medium is the message.’ But to me the most powerful type of media critique is coming out of queer and trans media theory because there is an implicit theory of refusal and deep recognition of machine logics. There is also a sense of justice that never forecloses the world of another, meaning it is never the end of the world.
One of his [McLuhan’s] disciples referred to my work in a sort of slip as ‘feminized media theory’ and I’m like okay you don’t even know the difference between feminist and feminized and so the pink became a way for me to engage the lowest common denominator form of representation and way for me to signal change in the space. MsUnderstanding Media was also play on the accusation that I didn’t understand McLuhan. And I think, you know, ultimately, I never named the book MsUnderstanding because one, it’s not a word. But also, it was too much seeped in a binary notion of gender, and one of the things I’m working on in this new project [Insufferable Tools] is to dismantle the binary construction of gender that is held up in with all of our most popular technological tools for managing the day.
I think the questions around social justice that we have at the university and across all disciplines need a media theory. And that’s what I wanted the Mcluhan Centre to provide: an interdisciplinary conversation about media and technology available to all the disciplines and practices related to social change.
“…before we look at ethics or policy or regulation or the way people have been excluded, we need to understand media. Calls for reform and regulation do not always have a handle on the technological conditions that they operate within.” — Sarah Sharma
BP: It is funny that it’s such a small place, considering it has a massively important role in that [media theory] space. I’m just curious, how did you respond to the McLuhan name being removed from the Centre?
SS: I felt sad when the name was taken away. I vividly remember some were very upset about it in the same way I was and then there were also those who said “oh, who cares now, we can do what we want.” But I think the tension between the legacy and the new way of approaching media McLuhan at the centre during my time as tension that was productive, and I think the name mattered. The McLuhan legacy was fraught by a tension on either side of things. I called it two extensions for the price of one, like, you know, extensions of man. So, it would either be the type that would ride the rocket of McLuhan, like I am the second coming of McLuhan, right? And then the other was the ‘screw McLuhan, he was wrong.’ And that’s also its own extension of man, neither are satisfactory intellectual practices. This isn’t what we should do with these types of figures. But this is a deeper question to do with what we read, how we read, how we work with theory.
BP: Well, there’s a big difference between hagiography and idea-formation, right? That’s completely different.
SS: Right. In Insufferable Tools, I try to argue that our ‘tech bros’ have a media theory, and so our job is to understand our media milieu, which includes understanding media the way they do. This means, I argue, we need to understand their theories.
“I think you can only figure out how to be incompatible if you understand the media environment. And, with this requires a new cultural understanding of technologies beyond utility. Ours is a culture where the utility of people and utility of technologies is aligned in such a way to maintain the worst kinds of power.” — Sarah Sharma
BP: Can you elaborate on the media theory that you’re saying that these ‘tech bros’ are invested in?
SS: I think it’s not that complicated and you won’t be surprised by now, but I think it’s the medium is the message.. But I’m asking: what is the theory of media that runs the world? Because I do think media theory can operate this powerfully. And it’s an idea of media as an environment in which social relations unfold. And when you think about what our tech firms are doing with the things that they’re invested in and creating, “innovating,” are certain technologies that extend space and time in particular ways that make only certain types of life possible. And that’s the medium is the message. That is an understanding of media as an environment. They’re controlling environments, creating environments in which only certain forms of life, social action, rhythms of relations can unfold. And it’s not a neutral space of ‘here is a technology, if we better regulate it or if we do this or that, that it can do all those things,’ in and of itself by existing sets the parameters of possibility for the rise of, for instance, white ethno-nationalism, for the rise of certain misogynistic forms of content. I just think this is the crux, and I think this is understood [by them].
BP: Yes, they’re setting the rules of the game. Turning to your new book Insufferable Tools, you theorize the need for a unified techno-feminist media theory that can take on this patriarchal techno-logic and act as a guide for multiple techno-feminist projects and new orientations. I’m interested in how you orient this techno-feminist media theory towards ‘refusal’. It feels as though there is a rise in media theory right now about refusal and the negative, as in Thomas Dekeyser’s new book Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine (2026).
SS: We actually just did a podcast together! I think we both feel like our books are an interesting combination together because he’s not doing a feminist theory of refusal and I am certainly not doing a good history of anything, but I feel like the books are oriented towards a similar politics of refusal. I also find that certain calls for refusal are brave, and I must admit too, I find it hard — I feel like we’re at an impasse. We’re doing things that reproduce the patriarchal techno-logic. We’re responding to our context or situation in a way that is reproducing this, and we’re not saying ‘no’. We’re almost asking to become compatible with the techno-logic, and instead we have to think about becoming incompatible. So, I found Thomas’ book brave because he makes a distinction with reformist approaches to technologies. And that’s precisely what I mean when I’m saying, before we look at ethics or policy or regulation or the way people have been excluded, we need to understand media. Calls for reform and regulation do not always have a handle on the technological conditions that they operate within.
BP: Does that step of understanding the technological conditions necessarily precede an orientation towards (in)compatibility and refusal, or is that just part of building that framework?
SS: I think you can only figure out how to be incompatible if you understand the media environment. And, with this requires a new cultural understanding of technologies beyond utility. Ours is a culture where the utility of people and utility of technologies is aligned in such a way to maintain the worst kinds of power. Interpersonally, politically, institutionally, within our normative [frameworks] ... If there is one thing I wish I said more about it the book philosophically, it would be directly on utilitarianism but I had to get to the techno-feminist project faster so as not to lose my readers! I did point out how we have a conception of technology and utility that are both always-already extractive. The whole book is about refusing utility as a one’s assigned subject position.
BP: It feels like the tech-bros’ orientation of media theory that you mentioned runs in a much longer history of extraction that underpins all of this.
SS: Yes, it operates in eugenics and colonialism. I think that’s why I gather it under the notion of patriarchal techno-logic—it’s more that to me, the notion of the utility of others is deeply rooted in patriarchy which requires it to be also about race, class, gender, sexuality. It’s a far worse system of power than we could even imagine.
BP: I am thinking back to one chapter “Broken Machines” in your new book, where you pair Barbie with the Titan submersible as being the same gender event. You note that the ‘refusal Barbie’ is actively inhabiting the patriarchal techno-logic, but actively inhabiting is still somehow about refusing.
SS: I think being incompatible is a way of actively inhabiting. Because we are not ‘outside.’ One of the things I like about my white male canon of McLuhan and Innis, Mumford, there’s far more, Kittler, all their media theories, is that there’s no ‘outside.’ And it’s not just for digital technology, right? It’s pen and paper. It’s all sorts of communication, oral communication. There’s no ‘outside’ to a techno-logic. And so if you have to think about what is a techno-feminist is supposed to do, you can’t just be like, ‘well, I’m not going to use this stuff.’ Or, ‘I’m not going to participate.’ It’s that you have to operate within the techno-field still and be strategic.
BP: It’s strategic. And that doesn’t always need to be in the form of sabotage and neo-Luddism, necessarily?
SS: No, I mean…I wish, I aspire, and I dream of this. I think we should read this if not at least to more adequately account for the compulsory element to our technical worlds, right? I find it shocking. In our relations with others, I find it a shocking thing. The compulsory relationship to technology is so normative and restricting.
BP: Thinking about ‘exit’ as being central to the techno-patriarchal logic you discuss, I feel like there’s another version of ‘exit’ that we try to find, not symmetrically, but one we want to make on the side of refusal. But it’s not an exit, instead it’s something like inhabiting incompatibility?
SS: Yes, that concept took a long time. Because when I first started thinking about exit and masculinity or exit and tech patriarchy, people were hearing me say ‘women care, men exit.’ And I was running with this for a little while and I said ‘no, there’s a binary emerging where women are resigned—first of all, it’s very binarized—and then it’s like: women are being resigned to care and men are exiting, and feminist power is supposed to be rallying around a solidarity of care, to which I thought ‘no it’s actually a space of resignation. You’re either being left out, or you’re resigned to care.’ And I don’t think a feminist politics should be rooted in a form of resignation tied to a caring subject.’ When this happens then the concept of ‘care’ expands and expands and expands and now we’re just the ‘caring class’? There’s a weird dichotomy emerging in social theory and in our daily lives where this gender dynamic between care and exit was emerging, and I thought: ‘it can’t be this either.’ I thought of writing the whole book on exit.
BP: With all this talk of ‘exit and ‘care,’ can you say more about ‘Mommy’s basement’? You talk about it in Insufferable Tools. Why is ‘Mommy’s basement’ a thing?
SS: I think ultimately my concept of Mommy’s basement is supposed to capture this feeling of having to descend or leave the social in order to devise new technologies.
It operates on this idea that technologies are social. And yet this anti-social figure is at the helm of everything, that type of anti-sociality which also revolves around being cared for. I think that this dynamic between inoculation and retreat, safety and abundance, are central to the technologies we have. When I think about the way the smart phone, for example, it offers both retreat but also the ability to call up the world or have one sandwich delivered to your face on demand or be remotely controlled by the abundant life of another. I mean it when I say, ‘what kind of world do we devise from this realm of abundant safety?’ And it could be exiting out of the social. It relies on the expulsion of others. The book goes further into Mommy’s basement being replicated in the tech workplace with all its snacks and ping pong tables and then to the very design of the technologies. The patriarchal technologic requires a world of care too in order for it to reproduce itself. In the world of tech my book locates this anti-social innovation and a world of care in Mommy’s basement.
And now we are seeing a new call for ‘the maternal’ coming up with AI, where people are saying, ‘oh no, AI is threatening to humanity, and we need it to love us more than it loves itself.’ So, we’re turning to the maternal again. Joseph Weizenbaum has called it ‘uterus envy.’ Geoffrey Hinton’s call for a maternal AI is an interesting logic. They’re picking up on something, but what’s not being further thought about is the very problematic concept of gender that this relies on. I think a techno-feminist understands that you don’t just think one without the other; they’re completely intertwined categories, and if we’re going to rethink our technologies, we have to rethink gender. We should be rethinking this sort of centralized maternal impulse that runs through our technological worlds. If you think of everything we have around us, I get why Joseph and Geoffrey would turn to the maternal, one saying it is envy implicit in all tech and the other is calling for it as the antidote.
BP: The ‘Mommy’s basement’ idea is such a good example of that ‘exit’ and ‘care’ false dichotomy.
SS: Yes, and there is fascination of men’s subterranean tinkering with technology. We are fascinated with McLuhan Center, its why people were going to see where he did his thinking and sadly found me instead. You can go and visit Steve Jobs’ garage and thankfully I won’t be there. I just think it’s interesting we don’t really talk about the way other figures ‘tinker.’
BP: Regarding Mommy’s basement, if the techno-patriarchal logic extends into both space and time, if it is not limited to the spatial, how does the basement do that, or how else does this logic extend temporally?
SS: This is getting to my first book, In the Meantime (2014), which is about Innis and chrononormativity. But that’s an interesting way of putting it because one of the things I outline in the book is that we have, as part of the Empire of patriarchy, these mini empires, is a balancing with space and time. On the one hand, you see all these things like sea steading, going to Mars, luxury apocalypse bunkers, retreating from the social, ‘Mommy’s basement,’ which is spatial. And then there’s the temporal counterparts, which can include things like Peter Thiel and cryogenics. For example, why does Musk have so many children? Why was Epstein trying to seed a population with his DNA? To me, if you want to look at spatial-temporal strategy of domination, there it is. Wouldn’t it be awful if the ‘tech bro’ will live forever? It might happen. To me, you can look at this through the space-time bias of our tech titans.
BP: The eternal tech bro in Mommy’s basement sounds horrible. Returning to what you were saying earlier about these tech bros and their media theory—to me it’s almost as if the arena has two sides: there’s the media theorists ideating refusal and a techno-feminist critique of power mediated by technology, and on the other sides we have the tech bros who are somehow also now media theorists, as you were saying. Do you think there’s a future in which they become more conscious of their media theories and what would that mean?
SS: I think we should be more conscious of their media theory and that we shouldn’t reproduce work that they benefit from. This is kind of an odd thing to say, but I’ve always thought that media studies can fall so easily into that realm of upholding these [techno-] logics. For example, if you just take as given that a platform should exist. If your work explains that something could work better, like organizing for Uber etc., but as part of that critique, you also need to think about dismantling the technology. I do think we have to be careful that media theory doesn’t get into the wrong hands and I think we should not produce work that reproduces the logic. In the book, I say ‘think about surveillance technologies, we can all agree that black and brown lives are surveilled.’ We all seem a little upset that our hands don’t work under the faucets. So is it ‘faces bad, hands good?’ It’s the same technology. But I’m saying, what do we want? Do we want better representation at a missile company? It matters. At some point, some of these arguments lead there and we should be doing a techno-logic check in our work as media theorists or students of media.
I think it’s interesting. I’ll get asked, and I think it’s a very gendered question to ask a feminist: “So what are we supposed to do? Where’s your chapter on what I’m supposed to do?” And I’m like, “Sorry, I did not write a self-help book about how to manage your tools.”
Somebody else will do that and it’ll probably sell at Indigo, and you can buy it there…
BP: What to do With Your Insufferable Tools…
SS: Yes! And I played it out at the end as a joke where I listed the technologies I don’t like. It’s like, ‘see how annoying this is?’
I did not write a self-help book, but I do think that Chapter 4: “Broken Machine” of Insufferable Tools can be like a ‘what to do.’ I think it’s interesting that I know I’ll get asked ‘well, what are we supposed to do,’ and when you start talking about refusal, I think it’s interesting to think that it’s more about, ‘well, why can you not imagine another way, why are you asking me this question, why can’t you imagine another way?’
Sarah Sharma is currently acting Vice Dean, Research and Program Innovation at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto where she is Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information. She is the author of Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (Duke 2026) and In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014). She is the co-editor of Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke UP 2022), a volume which highlights her time as director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto between 2017-2022. She is (with Cait McKinney) the Sign, Storage, Transmission Book series editor for Duke University Press. In 2024, she was awarded a Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award.
Ben Pulver is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto and was a Graduate Research Fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology (formerly McLuhan Centre) from 2025-2026. He is also a Graduate Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a Junior Fellow at Massey College.
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