Critical Affects: Tech Work Emotions Amidst the Techlash

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Techlash encapsulates a breaking point reached with the critique of technology companies. To investigate how this whirlwind of rage, inquiry, and accountability affects the lives of tech workers, we conducted interviews with 19 tech workers. Our methodological approach adopts a style of writing and analysis associated with anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, where we focus on the affective textures of critique in an attempt to redirect the temptation to representational thinking to a slowed ethnographic practice. Through this approach, we find that emotional habitus, a social group's emotional dispositions honed by tech culture's rationality and optimism, conditions the possibilities of personal and political action and inaction in response to critique. We suggest this habitus must shift if people are to access new ways of emoting and thereby adopt more fruitful attitudes and exercise towards critique.