Speculative Autoethnography Through Comics: Reversing Big Tech’s Gaze and Reclaiming the Story

My paper deploys the comic — generated collaboratively with ChatGPT — as a feminist method for resisting corporate censorship and reclaiming authorship under conditions of structural opacity. Throughout my fieldwork, especially in one case study in a Big Tech robotics corporation, conducting participant observation was often impossible, as tools like digital surveillance and nondisclosure agreements in the workplace enforced silence. In response, I creatively reconsider the practice of participant observation in the age of surveillance. I propose the method of speculative autoethnography as tool to resist Big Tech censorship of knowledge production –– following feminists who question the very possibility to meaningfully consent under coercive conditions. As a method of feminist autoethnography and resistance to tech.censorship, my paper proposes the use of a comic storyboard created in collaboration with ChatGPT to deliberately disguise traces, obscure identifiable details, and redirect the extractive gaze of Big Tech. This work performs a political reversal: contrary to Audre Lorde’s famous warning that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” I demonstrate how the “master’s” generative AI tools can be appropriated to dismantle the house from within. Building on anthropologist Joseph Dumit’s recent account of LLMs as “worlding reverberations” and his invitation to treat them as partners in “affirmative speculation”, I situate my approach alongside other anthropological efforts to reappropriate these tools.  I use the comic form as a visual shield or distorted mirror that obfuscates the extractive gaze of Big Tech while enabling feminist storytelling, and opose method of “speculative auto-ethnography through comics.”