Excerpt: On digital craft, sabotage aesthetics, and how women of color engineers are rewriting the infrastructure of the internet from inside the machine.
The Interview
Alexis Chen has spent fifteen years working as a software engineer at some of tech’s biggest companies—and the whole time, she’s been quietly sabotaging them. Not maliciously; artfully. She documents the small acts of glitch, error, and refusal that women engineers embed into code as survival strategies and acts of resistance. Her newsletter, “Source Code Sabotage,” has become required reading for anyone asking what it really looks like to build technology from a feminist position. We talked about craft, complicity, and the revolutionary potential of a well-placed bug.
Q&A
You use the word “sabotage” in a way that seems intentional, not accidental. What’s the difference?
A bug is an accident. Sabotage is a choice made with your hands on the keyboard. When I write code that deliberately creates space for error, or that refuses to optimize in the way it’s supposed to, or that builds in friction where there’s supposed to be frictionless flow—that’s intentional. It’s saying: I will not make this system as efficient at exploitation as they want it to be. Women engineers do this constantly, and we rarely speak about it because it’s dangerous. We could be fired. But the glitch is our language.
Can you give a concrete example without, obviously, getting yourself in trouble?
laughs I can speak generally. Let’s say you’re building an algorithm that’s designed to extract maximum engagement data. You could write it to do that perfectly. Or you could introduce inefficiencies—what looks like a small error that actually prevents it from collecting as much intimate behavioral data. It slows things down slightly. Most people never notice. But that slight resistance, that tiny refusal built into the code—that’s feminist labor.
There’s this assumption that tech is “neutral.” How is that assumption itself gendered?
Neutrality is a men’s story. It’s a way of saying: don’t ask who built this, who profits, who it harms. Women and femmes who code are asked constantly to be neutral, to separate our “personal politics” from our “professional work.” But the neutrality was always male. The men who built the internet with military funding, with no regard for privacy, with exploitation baked in—they claimed neutrality. What I’m arguing is that our interruption, our refusal, our glitch—that could be the real neutrality. That’s care. That’s humanity.
You write about the invisibility of women’s technical labor. Why does that matter?
Because when sabotage is invisible, when refusal is coded into the work but no one knows it’s there, we don’t get to claim it as knowledge. We don’t get to teach it. Other women don’t know it’s possible. If we name what we’re doing—if we make visible the craft of resistance—then it becomes repeatable, teachable, political. Right now, thousands of women in tech are doing this work in isolation, thinking they’re alone. They need to know they’re in community.
What would feminist infrastructure look like?
It would be slower. It would prioritize stability over scale. It would ask “who could this hurt?” before “how much can this grow?” It would have friction built in—places where you have to stop and think. It would be transparent about what data it collects and why. It would assume users are not resources to be extracted from but people to be protected. We can’t build it inside these companies. But we can teach it. We can imagine it. We can start building it in the margins.
Bio
Alexis Chen is a software engineer, artist, and writer based in San Francisco. She has worked at Meta, Google, and Amazon, and currently leads the Infrastructure Justice Lab, a research collective exploring technology from feminist and decolonial perspectives. Her book The Glitch Memoir was a finalist for the National Book Award.
