Code, Body, Power
Most books about women and technology are written to make you feel one of two things: excitement at what we are building, or alarm at what is being built on top of us. Code, Body, Power is written in a different register.
J.J. Ramos's earlier books named the patterns of the algorithmic patriarchy and asked what feminism's next wave will require. This is the method-book that follows. It hands the reader three lenses - code, body, power - and walks her through what each reveals when held up to the present decade.
Across thirteen essays, Ramos traces the architecture women now live inside: the recommendation feed as a kind of upbringing, the generative model as a synthetic mirror, the beauty filter as the first step in a chain that ends at the operating table, the cycle-tracking app as biology under surveillance, the dating profile and the AI boyfriend, the gig contractor whose body is also her thumbnail, the post that did not go through, the resume scored before it was read, the comment section as a court. By the final chapter, the lenses fit together. Code reaches the body. The body is the site of power. Power decides which code gets written next.
The book is not a manifesto. It is essayistic, scene-driven, sometimes first-person, and built to be portable. The reader closes it with three lenses she can use on her own morning, her own work, her own daughter, her own group chat. It risks the harder conversations - the comment-section pile-on, the synthetic intimacy economy, the politics of refusal - without flattening them into a single team to root for.
For readers of Trick Mirror (Jia Tolentino), So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Jon Ronson), Men Explain Things to Me (Rebecca Solnit), Unspeakable Things (Laurie Penny), Race After Technology (Ruha Benjamin), and We Should All Be Feminists (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) - and for anyone who has been quietly composing a frame for what this decade is actually doing to women's lives.
Code, Body, Power is J.J. Ramos's fourth book, following The Next Wave, After Patriarchy, and What We Owe Our Daughters.
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