Science Quote by Anita Borg

The line cuts like a bug report against the whole genre of “solutions” aimed at women: the devices aren’t failing because they’re underpowered, but because they’re built around the wrong user model. Borg is naming an invisible workload that tech culture has long treated as background noise - the cognitive labor of remembering birthdays, medications, school schedules, elder-care logistics, emotional temperatures, and the dozens of small commitments that keep other people’s lives from tipping into chaos.

The phrasing matters. “Keep track” sounds mundane, almost clerical, which is exactly the point: this is labor that gets dismissed because it doesn’t look like ambition. “Many people’s lives” expands the frame beyond individual productivity into relational responsibility. Borg isn’t asking for a prettier interface; she’s indicting the assumption that the primary unit of design is a solitary person optimizing their own time. That assumption smuggles in a politics: if your tools only understand “me,” then “we” stays unpaid and uncounted.

Contextually, Borg’s career sits at the intersection of computing and feminist critique, at a moment when personal tech was marketed as liberation while quietly reinforcing old divisions of labor. Her intent is to force designers to confront the social reality their products land in. The subtext is sharper: when devices ignore the coordination work disproportionately done by women, they don’t just miss a feature request - they encode inequality into the infrastructure of daily life.