Deja Foxx

Every headline says, influencer runs for Congress.

Though I've been an activist for a decade, I was one of the youngest presidential staffers in history, a digital strategist for Kamala Harris.

I'm not a teen girl anymore, but still I see my accomplishments flattened, diminished.

Yeah, and I think women of every generation can relate to that.

ja selkeämmät suojelemukset haittasta ja harrastuksesta, jotka ovat tiettyjä meidän kokemuksistamme. Olemme olleet itsellemme ja ystävillemme. Olen nähnyt monia kokemuksia, kuten tämän minun aikani digitaalisen yhteiskunnallisuuden tekemisessä. Pandemian tuotantokysymyksissä naiset, joita en ole koskaan tutustunut, olivat työskennellä heidän stimulanssiinsa, jotta he voisivat auttaa pitkäaikaisen työnantajan tarpeeksi.

Unfortunately, I don't think we grow out of it.

They've shared thousands of internships, job opportunities, fellowships that have become career-making moments, first jobs for women they may never meet.

Big tech wasn't coming to save us, but girls like my friends just might. In my experience, it is teenage girls that are the digital strategists of our time. In an internet not built for us, we have built narrative and political power one viral video at a time.

Yeah, I mean, the world we build online...

translates into the lives we get to live offline, not just in politics, but in everything from culture to economics.

We've developed survival strategies like Maya to protect ourselves and our friends, and we're not stopping there. We're building a new, better way of being online, no matter your generation or your gender. So let me be the first to welcome you to the girl internet.

And so when we think about the digital architecture we live in, right, something like Facebook that was originally designed as a way for these men to rate their female classmates, it really should be no surprise that this digital architecture was not built

with the goal of democratizing who gets to be a storyteller, right?

Archive of Her Own was founded in 2008. If you ask almost any girl my age about it, she'll respond with a story of her introduction to the internet via its sometimes salacious fan works. But even more subversive is its structure.

Like Mark Zuckerberg did not design Facebook for me to go viral and be on even footing in the public discourse with the United States senator when I was a teenage girl working at a gas station.

That was not the design.

And so when we think about what is possible as we build a new world, right, and I think even this resonates maybe for people who are feeling –

non-commercial, non-profit archive run by an elected board, completely volunteer-powered, supporting a user base of over eight million, and its legacy brings us new, younger builders like Sarah Naqvi, whose experience running One Direction Stan accounts as a teenager has transformed into an AI-powered, VC-backed search engine for the fangirls called Lore.

hopeless or dejected about politics is there are so many ways to be a world builder.

And one of the ways folks are doing that, girls, women, are doing that is online.