Politics & Power Quote by Anita Borg

She’s not marveling at “innovation.” She’s warning you that the code is already law, and the builders are quietly becoming legislators. Anita Borg’s line lands with the measured urgency of someone who watched computing shift from a technical specialty into an invisible civic infrastructure. The phrasing “unique point in history” isn’t hype; it’s a timestamp. Borg is situating the reader at an inflection where systems stop being tools and start being environments: networks that mediate work, intimacy, speech, money, and power.

The intent is twofold. First, it expands accountability. By stacking “social, political, economical, and personal,” Borg refuses the convenient fiction that technology is neutral or confined to the marketplace. Second, it recruits agency. “The things that we are building” names the engineers, researchers, and institutions as protagonists, not bystanders. The subtext: if you build it, you own the consequences.

Context matters. Borg helped found Systers and the Grace Hopper Celebration, pushing against an industry culture that treated who gets to build as a side issue. Read through that lens, the quote isn’t just about impact; it’s about whose values get embedded into defaults, whose bodies are “edge cases,” whose labor is invisible, whose safety is optional. Long before “algorithmic bias” became a headline genre, Borg is pointing at the pipeline from design choices to lived reality: what gets optimized, what gets surveilled, what gets excluded, what gets normalized.

It works because it’s broad without being vague. She doesn’t predict a specific gadget; she names the domains that will be reorganized and implies the stakes: technology as governance by other means.