take back the tech!

An illustrated journal and love letter to the feminists, hackers, women, gender-diverse, astrology-believers, radical nay-sayers, hikers, sleepers, vegans, beef-eaters, and everyone else who gathered in Nepal for the Take back the Tech and Feminist Tech Exchange camps in August 2018.

This bilingual edition is born of many conversations and moments at the two camps held in parallel in August this year (2018) at Dhulikhel, Nepal - the Take back the Tech! meet and the Feminist Tech Exchange.

In this series, writers from across the Global Majority explore various questions and raise important points around how cyber stalking defines and dictates different aspects of one’s experiences of online and offline interactions.

Digital stalking is a pervasive form of violence that blurs the lines between intimacy, control, and surveillance. In this editorial, Karen Vergara explores how stalking functions as both a personal violation and a tool of cultural and political discipline. Drawing on narratives from across the Global South, the article examines how digital stalking leaves deep emotional and physical imprints…

Through storytelling, humour, and community care, this article emphasises the importance of vulnerability, support networks, and collective healing. It rejects isolation and self-blame, and encourages honouring the pain while building boundaries, resilience, and shared resistance against the structural violence of cyberstalking.

The article explores how systemic gender inequality, precarious employment, and corporate inaction converge to leave women workers vulnerable and unprotected. With testimonies from cashiers and trade unionists in South Africa, it highlights a rarely acknowledged tech-enabled violence, and calls for urgent changes in retail technologies and practices to prioritise women’s safety and privacy at…

Through the chilling account of how her stalker weaponised social media against her, Vickie Wang reveals the insidious nature of cyberstalking and how it erodes women’s public participation.

Through intimate storytelling, Sofia Celi recounts how digital surveillance, censorship, and manipulation became extensions of past trauma, revealing how laws, platforms, and moderation systems replicate historical silencing. Yet, despite this erasure, Re-memory is also a testament to survival, collective resistance, and the power of writing as a form of reclamation - a refusal to…

This investigative piece exposes how Zimbabwe’s ruling regime weaponises digital stalking to silence outspoken women, both within the country and across the diaspora. Through coordinated troll armies known as Varakashi, female activists, lawyers, and dissidents are harassed, surveilled, and threatened with fake leaks, sexualised slurs, and psychological intimidation.

This article explores a growing and troubling trend: trans and detransitionist activists aligning with extreme right-wing groups to cyberstalk, discredit, and divide the trans rights movement. Drawing on examples from Chile and beyond, Michel Riquelme examines how tactics like misinformation, online harassment, and collaboration with anti-gender forces undermine decades of progress.