UCLA

This dissertation traces a critical genealogy of queer activist, corporate, and consumer engagements with digital computers and networks in the United States between 1992 and 2010. Special attention is paid to what I call “cyberutopian desires” for digital computation to automatically produce better living. I argue that cyberutopian desires tend to reify capitalist exploitation, even when paired with ostensibly oppositional queerness. This argument is made via a queer materialist methodology that historically, philosophically, and politically situates two linked examples of queer computation: Digital Queers, a non-profit activist group co-founded by gay tech executive Tom Rielly in 1992, and PlanetOut, a social media platform also founded by Rielly which launched in 1995 and operated until 2010. I first elaborate a historically materialist theorization of utopian desire, drawing especially upon the work of Ernst Bloch, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, and José Esteban Muñoz, and recount the anticipation and actual development of networked computation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via industrial capitalism, cybernetics, and the rise of Silicon Valley. I then use primary historical sources to show how Digital Queers’ provision of computer equipment and training to queer non-profits invested queer activism with capitalist logics and processes, and how PlanetOut subsumed the queer public sphere by pursuing multimedia conglomeration and technologically transforming queer experiences for the maximum extraction of surplus-value. Both Digital Queers and PlanetOut integrated queer desires for better living to circuits of capital accumulation that ideologically limited the utopian potential of queer activism and publicity. These case studies thus show how utopian desires motivate a range of actions and cannot be taken to be inherently progressive as well as how the medium of digital computation is materially inseparable from its capitalist origins.