WEBVTT

00:00:04.680 --> 00:00:11.940
<i>rc3 preroll music</i>

00:00:11.940 --> 00:00:18.859
Herald: All right, so our next talk is
called Hacking Diversity, where we

00:00:18.859 --> 00:00:23.600
basically try to treat a really awkward
question about these spaces that we move

00:00:23.600 --> 00:00:28.640
in here, which is that we really have
these ideas about inclusion and diversity.

00:00:28.640 --> 00:00:32.529
But in the end, most of the people that
come just look like me. And in open

00:00:32.529 --> 00:00:37.690
source, most people look like me. And this
is extremely strange, right? Because we

00:00:37.690 --> 00:00:43.480
have all these ideas about diversity and
everything. And today we try to answer the

00:00:43.480 --> 00:00:47.079
question of why this happens and maybe
what we can do about it. Our speaker for

00:00:47.079 --> 00:00:51.560
this is Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester.
She's a professor at the University of

00:00:51.560 --> 00:00:55.900
Southern California, I think. And today
she is preparing, uh, she is showing

00:00:55.900 --> 00:01:00.610
essentially a condensed version of a book
that she just wrote, called Hacking

00:01:00.610 --> 00:01:05.476
Diversity. And I'm really looking forward
to this talk because I also have asked

00:01:05.476 --> 00:01:08.000
myself these questions and I don't know 
the answers.

00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:10.290
So I'm looking forward to this.
Please Christina.

00:01:10.290 --> 00:01:14.290
Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester: Thank
you so much. Thank you for the

00:01:14.290 --> 00:01:18.720
introduction and thank you for the
invitation and thank you for all of your

00:01:18.720 --> 00:01:24.990
labor to get this remote experience off
the ground. So I'm really happy and

00:01:24.990 --> 00:01:35.990
excited to be here, whatever that is. And
I will get into the talk. Let's see here,

00:01:35.990 --> 00:01:45.740
OK. Let me know, you should be able to see
slides now. If that didn't work, let me

00:01:45.740 --> 00:01:53.450
know. OK, thanks. This is not a best
practices talk so much as a first

00:01:53.450 --> 00:01:59.770
principles and how did we get here talk?
My examples are mostly from the US, but

00:01:59.770 --> 00:02:10.450
they are part of a broader Euro-American
milieu. And so to get started, I think I

00:02:10.450 --> 00:02:19.329
want to put up this quote from the Free
Software Foundation from 2012. And the

00:02:19.329 --> 00:02:25.400
goal of this talk is really to give some
context. And I think at the almost very

00:02:25.400 --> 00:02:31.730
end of 2020 it's safe to say that this is
a fairly mainstream and uncontroversial

00:02:31.730 --> 00:02:35.859
topic, but it wasn't always this way. So
the quote says: "The free software

00:02:35.859 --> 00:02:40.930
movement needs diverse participation to
achieve its goals. If we want to make

00:02:40.930 --> 00:02:45.849
proprietary software extinct, we need to
make everyone on the planet engage with

00:02:45.849 --> 00:02:52.090
free software. To get there we need people
of all genders, races, sexual orientations

00:02:52.090 --> 00:02:58.799
and abilities leading the way. And as I
said, I think this is a very recognizable

00:02:58.799 --> 00:03:03.699
sort of discourse now, but it hasn't
always been. And I'm going to sort of

00:03:03.699 --> 00:03:10.260
unpack this for a little while. The
outline of the talk, this is a pretty bare

00:03:10.260 --> 00:03:15.639
bones outline, but there's going to be a
lot of sort of history and context and

00:03:15.639 --> 00:03:20.859
then a little bit about the value and goal
of diversity and how it relates to profits

00:03:20.859 --> 00:03:27.529
and markets and also the goal of diversity
and how it relates to other values,

00:03:27.529 --> 00:03:33.329
particularly justice. And I want to note
that there's a couple of content warning

00:03:33.329 --> 00:03:40.279
slides on here. One, for people who have
been involved in promulgating genocide and

00:03:40.279 --> 00:03:46.089
another for a person who's been ejected
from hacking for abusive behavior. And so

00:03:46.089 --> 00:03:54.549
there will be a warning preceding each of
those. OK, so first, talking about

00:03:54.549 --> 00:04:03.327
genocide. In the 19th century in the
United States and even into the 20th

00:04:03.327 --> 00:04:12.579
century, there was an idea of a sort of
frontiersmen, brawny man who you can see

00:04:12.579 --> 00:04:16.829
here. This is a folk hero, but was
important enough to still be being

00:04:16.829 --> 00:04:21.500
represented on television in the 1960s. 
And the sort of consistent thing

00:04:21.500 --> 00:04:27.970
here is going to actually go, this is the
genocide one, to these sort of consistent

00:04:27.970 --> 00:04:32.210
representations. You can see these folks
are wearing, well, they're men and they're

00:04:32.210 --> 00:04:37.490
being manly and they're wearing animal
hide with the implication that they maybe,

00:04:37.490 --> 00:04:43.800
you know, shot the deer themself. They
carry a gun, they're in naturalistic

00:04:43.800 --> 00:04:58.159
settings. They're sort of rough and ready
for anything. I'm drawing here on

00:04:58.159 --> 00:05:04.069
historian Susan Douglas, who argues that
around the turn of the 20th century,

00:05:04.069 --> 00:05:09.930
society started to change. And so even
though there was still this mythos of this

00:05:09.930 --> 00:05:15.330
brawny frontiersmen, what society actually
needed was a reconfigured masculinity that

00:05:15.330 --> 00:05:23.360
didn't sort of have this rough physical
brawny masculinity. And so masculinity

00:05:23.360 --> 00:05:30.300
itself, she says, was reconfigured to what
she calls technical masculinity. And so

00:05:30.300 --> 00:05:38.759
the masculinity was sort of refashioned to
be about mastery over machines and

00:05:38.759 --> 00:05:43.199
particularly these sort of new cutting
edge electronic machines, which in this

00:05:43.199 --> 00:05:51.030
case was radio. So radio experimentation
in the very early 20th century, first

00:05:51.030 --> 00:05:57.039
wireless telegraphy and then later
wireless sound transmission, which became

00:05:57.039 --> 00:06:02.919
broadcasting, she argues, is a way to sort
of refit masculinity or the way the

00:06:02.919 --> 00:06:08.810
society was changing. It was more urban.
There was more specialized division of

00:06:08.810 --> 00:06:14.969
labor needing people to work in a
professional white collar fields with

00:06:14.969 --> 00:06:19.940
technology as opposed to going out and
settling the West. And so here we see

00:06:19.940 --> 00:06:26.210
technical, technical masculinity,
entrainment basically, a father with his

00:06:26.210 --> 00:06:35.569
very young son teaching him this is a way
to be in the world. And Douglas argues

00:06:35.569 --> 00:06:41.110
that this started with ham radio in the
early 20th century. But perhaps

00:06:41.110 --> 00:06:46.770
unsurprisingly, it continued to sort of
persist over time. And so my next few

00:06:46.770 --> 00:06:52.200
slides are showing the same technical
masculinity, which is about, you know,

00:06:52.200 --> 00:06:59.819
curiosity, solving a problem, you know,
expressing your will with technology only

00:06:59.819 --> 00:07:05.590
with different sorts of technical
artifacts. And so here this is the Model

00:07:05.590 --> 00:07:11.943
Railroad, made very famous in Steven
Levy's book about hackers. We also have,

00:07:11.943 --> 00:07:16.509
and this is probably about the 1950s. 
We have phone phreaking in the 1960s

00:07:16.509 --> 00:07:22.060
and here this is also a 2600 
magazine from the 80s, sort

00:07:22.060 --> 00:07:29.129
of continuing to mythologize phone
phreaking. Going into the 70s, we

00:07:29.129 --> 00:07:33.419
see this with computers, the Homebrew
Computer Club, a really important hobbyist

00:07:33.419 --> 00:07:40.919
formation for both, you know, the history
of Silicon Valley, but also the history of

00:07:40.919 --> 00:07:44.150
hacking and free software. It was people
who were sort of building and tinkering

00:07:44.150 --> 00:07:49.830
and experimenting. And so what we're
starting to see here is even as the tech

00:07:49.830 --> 00:07:56.289
shifts, the technical masculinity stays
consistent. And this is probably the early

00:07:56.289 --> 00:08:03.800
80s and the slide is just an ad for a
microcomputer. But we can see not only the

00:08:03.800 --> 00:08:09.840
representation of masculinity at the
center, we also see femininity in relation

00:08:09.840 --> 00:08:16.849
to the technology, which is to say it's
just the sort of ancillary handmaiden for

00:08:16.849 --> 00:08:24.240
the sort of male agent here. And as I
said, this is certainly a really cheesy

00:08:24.240 --> 00:08:31.669
ad, but I think, I hope underscores the
sort of consistent promulgation of this

00:08:31.669 --> 00:08:38.460
relationship with technology. And so I 
want to suggest is that tech here over the

00:08:38.460 --> 00:08:46.420
20th and into the 21st century is not just
reflecting a legacy of division, of which

00:08:46.420 --> 00:08:52.519
gender prescription, gender roles are a
part of this, but is actually actively

00:08:52.519 --> 00:08:59.199
been involved in enforcing this. And so
we've got basically a white patriarchal,

00:08:59.199 --> 00:09:06.880
Christian, native-born supremacy, and a
global system of racial capitalism. And so

00:09:06.880 --> 00:09:11.310
I've shown you who's sort of at the top of
this hierarchy. We've got colonized

00:09:11.310 --> 00:09:18.440
subjects, immigrants, women, rural and
lower class people, indigenous people

00:09:18.440 --> 00:09:22.690
coming out on the bottom. And both
builders and consumers of tech are

00:09:22.690 --> 00:09:30.960
implicated in this tension. OK, so going
back even further in the history to sort

00:09:30.960 --> 00:09:35.679
of where some of this comes from. I'm not
sure how many of you thought that in a

00:09:35.679 --> 00:09:39.660
discussion of hacking you'd be looking at
a 19th century American oil painting. But

00:09:39.660 --> 00:09:45.490
here we are. This is called American
Progress. So I think mythologized American

00:09:45.490 --> 00:09:51.529
progress from the late 19th century. And
as you can probably see, there's a real

00:09:51.529 --> 00:09:57.110
sort of light to dark element of the 
photo, of the picture, the painting. And we

00:09:57.110 --> 00:10:04.720
have this maiden who's really not so much
a person, but more like a God, this is

00:10:04.720 --> 00:10:12.660
sort of Greek iconography, sort of up
above everyone, up above man. And we do

00:10:12.660 --> 00:10:18.950
see technology in the painting. We see
the railroads and some ships on the right

00:10:18.950 --> 00:10:24.779
hand side, which is the east. And so you
can tell that she's sort of presiding over

00:10:24.779 --> 00:10:28.360
everybody, settling the west. And again,
they're bringing the light, which is

00:10:28.360 --> 00:10:32.850
civilization. The maiden herself is
actually carrying a book which symbolizes

00:10:32.850 --> 00:10:38.120
knowledge and what may not be obvious, but
she's actually got telegraph wire strung

00:10:38.120 --> 00:10:44.570
around her arm. And then you can see the
telegraph pattern behind her. And so this

00:10:44.570 --> 00:10:53.089
control over technology is part of how
white settler, you know, newly arrived

00:10:53.089 --> 00:10:59.019
Americans are maintaining or sort of
promoting and maintaining dominance over

00:10:59.019 --> 00:11:03.100
their new continent, their new continent.
And you can actually see, so we've

00:11:03.100 --> 00:11:07.840
got these white settler folks in the
center of the painting. All the way in the

00:11:07.840 --> 00:11:12.110
dark are indigenous people. And there's
also actually a bear. So they're sort of,

00:11:12.110 --> 00:11:19.660
again, a biblical hierarchy of man over
the beasts. And you can tell that the

00:11:19.660 --> 00:11:23.329
indigenous subjects and the bear are
probably either going to get run out of

00:11:23.329 --> 00:11:29.810
the frame or sort of forced to become
civilized. So this is very deep in how

00:11:29.810 --> 00:11:39.430
American sort of hierarchy and notions of
dominance get promoted and, you know, sort

00:11:39.430 --> 00:11:45.740
of renewed over time. And this is
interesting because this ideology is so

00:11:45.740 --> 00:11:51.930
strong that it's actually succeeded in
basically erasing some of the historical

00:11:51.930 --> 00:11:58.180
record. Like, for instance, we know that
there were women, highly skilled women

00:11:58.180 --> 00:12:04.690
operators in World War 2 operating the
first electronic computers. This is ENIAC

00:12:04.690 --> 00:12:11.279
in the US. But they were still, they were
sort of written out of the record and

00:12:11.279 --> 00:12:20.410
computing, once it became popular and moved
out of a top secret military project, the

00:12:20.410 --> 00:12:27.759
womens' roles were basically effaced and
credit for dominance over and sort of

00:12:27.759 --> 00:12:34.180
control over the new technology publicly
went to men. And again, so we see this

00:12:34.180 --> 00:12:38.440
sort of sorting happening in all these
different ways, even in defiance of the

00:12:38.440 --> 00:12:45.910
actual historical record. Another
instance, which may be kind of surprising

00:12:45.910 --> 00:12:52.350
is this is a really wonderful article by
Lisa Nakamura that I'm drawing from here.

00:12:52.350 --> 00:13:02.050
This is a Fairchild Semiconductor, so
they're based in Silicon Valley, they used

00:13:02.050 --> 00:13:08.350
to make microchips and associated
equipment in Silicon Valley, but they had

00:13:08.350 --> 00:13:13.649
an intermediate period before outsourcing
that stuff to Asia, where they opened

00:13:13.649 --> 00:13:20.920
operations on a Navajo reservation in the
American Southwest. And so there's really

00:13:20.920 --> 00:13:28.079
interesting ways in which race and gender
basically become resources for valuing the

00:13:28.079 --> 00:13:33.630
labor of some kind of people more and
other kinds of people less. So this

00:13:33.630 --> 00:13:40.411
reservation is attractive because regular
American labor laws didn't obtain and they

00:13:40.411 --> 00:13:47.600
also, managers in their minds, thought, oh
there's this history of Navajo weaving and

00:13:47.600 --> 00:13:55.480
sort of fine fabrication work. And so
there's a sort of stereotype that nonwhite

00:13:55.480 --> 00:14:02.550
people, particularly women, particularly
in this day and age, Asian, have "nimble

00:14:02.550 --> 00:14:07.740
fingers" and are going to be really good
and diligent at something that we need,

00:14:07.740 --> 00:14:12.610
like electronics assembly, to be really
sort of diligently done. And so what we've

00:14:12.610 --> 00:14:21.730
got here is the sort of overlay of Navajo
weaving and microchip. So Nakamura calls

00:14:21.730 --> 00:14:28.009
this insourcing, sort of outsourcing
before outsourcing. And, you know, now

00:14:28.009 --> 00:14:32.210
those laboratories and factories have
mostly moved to Asia. But this sort of

00:14:32.210 --> 00:14:38.589
period of experimentation with trying to,
like, alienate the labor from the sort of

00:14:38.589 --> 00:14:43.120
managerial home. And so now we would
think, like, you know, your Apple products

00:14:43.120 --> 00:14:47.880
as assembled in China, designed in
Cupertino or whatever. But that kind of

00:14:47.880 --> 00:14:54.511
thing, this is a sort of early moment of
that. And so, again, I want to sort of

00:14:54.511 --> 00:14:58.670
underscore that race and gender are a
resource for global capitalism to assign

00:14:58.670 --> 00:15:04.899
worth to some people's bodies and work and
not to others. Another way that this

00:15:04.899 --> 00:15:10.360
works, I don't know how much people in the
US will remember this, let alone outside

00:15:10.360 --> 00:15:15.329
of the US, but this is a student, a high
school student who is a Sudanese American,

00:15:15.329 --> 00:15:23.050
I believe, who was, you know, a geek. And
he was enthusiastic about doing a DIY

00:15:23.050 --> 00:15:28.540
electronics assembly at home where he
built a clock and he brought it to school

00:15:28.540 --> 00:15:34.921
and the school called police. And so here
we can see that whiteness has been a

00:15:34.921 --> 00:15:40.610
resource for avoiding criminalization for
certain kinds of sort of hacky

00:15:40.610 --> 00:15:46.480
activities. I'm certainly not saying that
no white people have been criminalized for

00:15:46.480 --> 00:15:51.579
hacking because that's not true. But
certain activities get more of a pass

00:15:51.579 --> 00:15:57.199
based on who's participating in them. And
I also want to point out that this legacy

00:15:57.199 --> 00:16:06.160
of division and this system of social
sorting is flexible. In 2015, it

00:16:06.160 --> 00:16:14.670
could easily be turned to islamophobic
purposes, which is what happened here. And

00:16:14.670 --> 00:16:20.129
so what I want to point out is there's
a sort of like, you know, history of

00:16:20.129 --> 00:16:26.410
division and really sort of policing who's
in bounds and who's out of bounds for the

00:16:26.410 --> 00:16:33.730
most celebrated category of technological
agent, but I also want to sort of

00:16:33.730 --> 00:16:40.720
introduce the idea that this is not
inconsistent in a way with diversity as a

00:16:40.720 --> 00:16:48.529
market value. Capitalism is actually happy
to affirm difference if it can help sell

00:16:48.529 --> 00:16:54.319
something, even though here we also see
the sort of, you know, cultural and even

00:16:54.319 --> 00:17:02.649
legal system being brought to bear to
punish certain forms of difference. OK, so

00:17:02.649 --> 00:17:06.160
at this point, this kind of statement is
really ubiquitous. This is from 2012 from

00:17:06.160 --> 00:17:12.810
a TechCrunch post. In my mind, the
women in tech discussion should really be

00:17:12.810 --> 00:17:17.120
framed as having different people with
different experiences and different

00:17:17.120 --> 00:17:22.820
outlooks helps you build a better product.
So this is a pretty different framing of

00:17:22.820 --> 00:17:30.100
difference than the one I just showed you.
But the point is capitalism is

00:17:30.100 --> 00:17:35.760
actually able to sort of reconcile these
in these contradictions in a way. And you

00:17:35.760 --> 00:17:41.370
can also see this is my name tag from a
Google sponsored event I attended for work

00:17:41.370 --> 00:17:46.940
for this book. And they're not only saying
we need women to help us build a better

00:17:46.940 --> 00:17:52.730
product, they're also reflecting back this
sort of symbol of femininity, you know, the

00:17:52.730 --> 00:17:56.810
pink Venus sign, which, of course, turns a
lot of people off. But it's you know, if

00:17:56.810 --> 00:18:02.830
you're thinking about marketing, it's a
way to symbolize this inclusion. Right?

00:18:02.830 --> 00:18:09.690
Now, I'm going to put up the only horribly
academic slide I have for the whole talk.

00:18:09.690 --> 00:18:16.150
This is a quote from Herman Gray who says,
"Abstract notions of rights and freedom

00:18:16.150 --> 00:18:21.580
and their expansion to new subjects elide
the social salience of race and gender as

00:18:21.580 --> 00:18:26.140
a basis of inequality even as it
culturally recognizes and celebrates

00:18:26.140 --> 00:18:32.130
differences." So here we can see the
market is happy to recognize and celebrate

00:18:32.130 --> 00:18:40.130
difference, to sort of take up, you know,
women in tech or whatever, while sort of

00:18:40.130 --> 00:18:46.720
papering over and doing nothing to unseat
the sort of core, which is that race and

00:18:46.720 --> 00:18:53.370
gender are bases of inequality. So you can
sort of have this lip service, abstract

00:18:53.370 --> 00:19:00.220
expansion of, you know, new identities.
But what is sort of always intact is even

00:19:00.220 --> 00:19:04.190
if you're sort of bringing one group over
and saying, oh, you know, you're part of

00:19:04.190 --> 00:19:11.550
the dominant group, now, in some way.
The system of sorting is remaining intact

00:19:11.550 --> 00:19:18.020
and in a less abstract way. Like in the US
this summer, there is huge Black Lives

00:19:18.020 --> 00:19:23.980
Matter protests, uprisings. And pretty
quickly, all these companies started

00:19:23.980 --> 00:19:29.040
saying, oh, yes, Black Lives Matter, we
support this. You know, Amazon was really

00:19:29.040 --> 00:19:34.720
prominent among them. And yet Amazon
doesn't stop to question whether or not

00:19:34.720 --> 00:19:40.450
it's exploiting racialized workforce
during Covid with warehouse work and

00:19:40.450 --> 00:19:44.810
delivery work. These are some of the
lowest paid workers. They are not getting

00:19:44.810 --> 00:19:50.620
health insurance. They're not getting
consistent hazard pay or protection. And

00:19:50.620 --> 00:19:56.570
they're dying at disproportionate rates.
But Amazon is very happy to say black

00:19:56.570 --> 00:20:04.140
lives matter as part of the PR. Similarly,
they're still basically building

00:20:04.140 --> 00:20:10.690
surveillance equipment, but there's no
inconsistency between the sort of

00:20:10.690 --> 00:20:16.070
recognition and celebration of difference
while working to continue to cement that

00:20:16.070 --> 00:20:22.580
difference and exploit that difference.
So all of this is to say is that diversity

00:20:22.580 --> 00:20:32.220
is, in my opinion, a rather toothless 
value to sort of attach to the work and

00:20:32.220 --> 00:20:38.560
the sort of meaning for what's at stake
with working with tech and with inclusion,

00:20:38.560 --> 00:20:44.130
too. Diversity can sort of bring
our attention to these patterns of social

00:20:44.130 --> 00:20:48.300
difference. But if it ends there, it can
actually kind of draw us in the wrong

00:20:48.300 --> 00:20:54.830
directions without the tools we might need
to, you know, actually make some of the

00:20:54.830 --> 00:20:58.770
more justice affirming points that I
think are why people are drawn to these

00:20:58.770 --> 00:21:04.760
topics in the first place. OK, so after
this digression, getting more some into

00:21:04.760 --> 00:21:10.750
how this relates to hacking and free
software. So I've established a sort of

00:21:10.750 --> 00:21:18.190
legacy of division. And I want to sort of
underscore that the hacking and free

00:21:18.190 --> 00:21:23.530
software milieu has had this commitment to
freedom and openness. That's definitely

00:21:23.530 --> 00:21:30.971
been at the core pretty consistently. But
historically, this has really had to do

00:21:30.971 --> 00:21:36.030
with, the freedom and openness has been
about controlling technology, some free

00:21:36.030 --> 00:21:42.970
speech of course. It's definitely about
the individual's exercise of freedom

00:21:42.970 --> 00:21:47.430
without necessarily a lot of thought about
who the individual is, who's maximally

00:21:47.430 --> 00:21:56.340
empowered to be free, or it's been about
individuals in collectives, but that are

00:21:56.340 --> 00:22:01.770
relatively small and relatively
homogenous. And so what I want to suggest

00:22:01.770 --> 00:22:08.150
is this sat within the bigger context of
tech and division, but without really

00:22:08.150 --> 00:22:13.840
acknowledging this, because the freedom of
the individual was presented as a sort of

00:22:13.840 --> 00:22:19.770
universal value. Even though in practice
it really, really wasn't. And I think

00:22:19.770 --> 00:22:26.460
around 15 to 20 years ago that really
started to change. When I started working

00:22:26.460 --> 00:22:31.620
on this project, there was already a good
deal of agitation forming some of these

00:22:31.620 --> 00:22:38.800
groups in free software and related
projects to especially draw attention to

00:22:38.800 --> 00:22:46.300
the sort of disparities around women and
Py Star was initially for sort of women,

00:22:46.300 --> 00:22:51.230
and it was was trans-inclusive and I think
pretty quickly this started as a women,

00:22:51.230 --> 00:22:57.640
but then it became often non-binary and
trans-inclusive, so not the sort of

00:22:57.640 --> 00:23:03.400
essentialist version of women. Something
happened in 2006 that really caused this

00:23:03.400 --> 00:23:10.670
topic to really spring to the fore in a
lot of these communities. There was an EU

00:23:10.670 --> 00:23:18.110
policy report that came out. So the
research was from 2004/2005 that showed

00:23:18.110 --> 00:23:26.230
that the rate of participation by women
and FLOSS was less than 2% and that was

00:23:26.230 --> 00:23:31.180
significantly less even than academic and
proprietary computer science. And so that,

00:23:31.180 --> 00:23:37.210
I think, really shocked people who had
maybe sort of intuitively known, oh, yeah,

00:23:37.210 --> 00:23:44.460
this isn't very representative, but that
number really galvanized a lot of

00:23:44.460 --> 00:23:50.550
conversations and got people started
talking and organizing basically in new

00:23:50.550 --> 00:23:56.390
ways. And so I'm now going to show just a
handful of sort of what this report

00:23:56.390 --> 00:24:04.980
caused, which is a bunch of conversations.
This is from the hackers on planet Earth

00:24:04.980 --> 00:24:11.650
Hope Conference in New York in 2006. And
it may not totally be clear what's going

00:24:11.650 --> 00:24:20.090
on here, but some folks had responded to
this statistic on the one hand and this

00:24:20.090 --> 00:24:28.210
quote from this United States senator who
had said something like, sort of gibberish

00:24:28.210 --> 00:24:32.900
about he was supposed to be considering
net neutrality and internet regulation,

00:24:32.900 --> 00:24:36.670
and he said something like, the internet
is a series of tubes. It's not a truck

00:24:36.670 --> 00:24:41.951
that you dump something on. And everybody
was making fun of him for not even, you

00:24:41.951 --> 00:24:48.210
know, understanding networked computing at
all. But these activists sort of put these

00:24:48.210 --> 00:24:52.930
together in a sort of mash-up. And they
were selling t-shirts, actually, that said

00:24:52.930 --> 00:24:58.180
"The Internet: A Series of Tubes". And as
you can see, that's a sort of textbook

00:24:58.180 --> 00:25:03.420
representation of a female reproductive
system. And so they just sort of brought

00:25:03.420 --> 00:25:08.382
this to the conference and they were
trying to force a conversation about it

00:25:08.382 --> 00:25:12.080
because they estimated, this is not an
official count, but they estimated that

00:25:12.080 --> 00:25:18.940
there were maybe, the ratio of women to 
men at Hope was like 1:40. And so they

00:25:18.940 --> 00:25:25.400
just wanted to force a conversation about
this. This is an artifact from a little bit

00:25:25.400 --> 00:25:32.700
later, 2014, about the rise of explicitly
dedicated feminist hacker spaces, and this

00:25:32.700 --> 00:25:39.710
is from the US and it's just a flyer for a
Zine-making workshop, which is again, a

00:25:39.710 --> 00:25:46.651
pretty mundane thing, but just the sort of
difference between the 2006 sort of flag

00:25:46.651 --> 00:25:51.340
planting and something a bit later where
there's actually a separate space here.

00:25:51.340 --> 00:25:57.660
And crucially, Zine-making isn't
necessarily in bounds with traditional

00:25:57.660 --> 00:26:06.000
hacking, but it is closer to sort of
strands of feminist consciousness raising

00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:11.910
and riot grrrl. And so there's a sort of
intermingling of these different kind of

00:26:11.910 --> 00:26:19.140
threads of DIY, basically. This is another
artifact from someone in Philadelphia who

00:26:19.140 --> 00:26:25.840
was an artist and a designer and was
trying to find a way from the stuff that

00:26:25.840 --> 00:26:34.370
she knew how to do with craft and sewing
and find a way into electronics and soft

00:26:34.370 --> 00:26:42.860
circuits and doing new things. And so she,
kind of for her own exploration, knitted a

00:26:42.860 --> 00:26:50.310
scarf using Ethernet cables. And for
her this was a kind of speculative object

00:26:50.310 --> 00:26:54.540
that was meant to help her find her way
into electronics, but also to kind of

00:26:54.540 --> 00:27:02.200
start conversations about why haven't
these things gotten together. Also seeing

00:27:02.200 --> 00:27:12.060
gatherings like this one, a more sort of
explicitly radicalized feminist hacking

00:27:12.060 --> 00:27:15.980
convergence. And I don't know if everybody
can read all the text, but it says

00:27:15.980 --> 00:27:20.930
"Trans Futuristic Cyborgs, anti-racist,
anti-sexist, gynepunk, DIY-DiWO - so taking

00:27:20.930 --> 00:27:32.750
DIY of a sort of heroic individualist to
doing it with others, making it more

00:27:32.750 --> 00:27:38.670
self-consciously collective and less
individualist self-reliant. It also says

00:27:38.670 --> 00:27:44.310
gender-hacking, anti-capitalism, libre
culture, technologies, bio-hacking. So

00:27:44.310 --> 00:27:53.000
again a sort of spectrum of politics and
interventions around hacking and feminist

00:27:53.000 --> 00:28:00.950
hacking. And I'm going to dwell for a
moment on feminist servers. Haven't spent

00:28:00.950 --> 00:28:07.000
too much, haven't had too much text on
slides. But this one is. So these are

00:28:07.000 --> 00:28:11.960
artifacts that were on the one hand,
basically, like an independently

00:28:11.960 --> 00:28:18.340
maintained server run primarily by women-
identifying folks or non-masculine

00:28:18.340 --> 00:28:25.200
identifying folks running free software,
but they're also a sort of list of

00:28:25.200 --> 00:28:31.050
networking principles that gets out of
that more kind of literal artifactual mode

00:28:31.050 --> 00:28:42.090
into a more sort of speculative and
aspirational sort of politics of what it

00:28:42.090 --> 00:28:46.540
means to be doing this. And so the first
couple- it's actually a very long list and

00:28:46.540 --> 00:28:51.190
I only have a handful up here - the first
couple, I think, are very consonant with

00:28:51.190 --> 00:28:58.590
kind of mainstream hacking, wants networks
to be mutable and read-write accessible,

00:28:58.590 --> 00:29:02.370
and radically questions the conditions for
serving and service experiments with

00:29:02.370 --> 00:29:08.070
changing client-server relations. Those,
again, seem kind of axiomatic for

00:29:08.070 --> 00:29:14.150
mainstream hacking. But then the feminist
server starts to go in some other

00:29:14.150 --> 00:29:19.321
directions; is autonomous in the sense
that she decides her own dependencies. I

00:29:19.321 --> 00:29:23.090
think this one's really interesting and
important. It's again, it's getting away

00:29:23.090 --> 00:29:31.310
from this kind of heroic, individualistic
or almost sort of libertarian sense of

00:29:31.310 --> 00:29:36.450
autonomy. It's just the autonomy is about
deciding where you're dependent and being

00:29:36.450 --> 00:29:42.970
sort of transparent and open about that.
It's not about bootstrapping or being

00:29:42.970 --> 00:29:48.930
individually self-sufficient; does not
strive for seamlessness, division of

00:29:48.930 --> 00:29:53.740
labor; the not so fun stuff is made by
people. That's a feminist issue. That one,

00:29:53.740 --> 00:29:59.240
I think is really important. A lot of
hacking that goes on in, say, a Global

00:29:59.240 --> 00:30:07.750
North context is about the artifacts and
the practices in that moment. But here

00:30:07.750 --> 00:30:13.190
this is, if it's not clear, drawing
attention to where did that come from, it

00:30:13.190 --> 00:30:18.510
shouldn't be a seamless experience for you
not thinking about the pre-history, the

00:30:18.510 --> 00:30:24.060
supply chain of this artifact, which
actually started with mining and

00:30:24.060 --> 00:30:32.740
fabrication and assembly and shipping. And
will also have a post-use life, which

00:30:32.740 --> 00:30:40.770
might be recycling, might be very
hazardous reclaiming of precious metals

00:30:40.770 --> 00:30:47.110
by people without good labor protections,
or might not. But sort of instead of

00:30:47.110 --> 00:30:52.550
having this all be invisible, sort of
drawing it forward treats technology as

00:30:52.550 --> 00:30:56.357
part of a social reality. This is a big
one, but it's really just sort of opening

00:30:56.357 --> 00:31:02.120
up the space to acknowledge that legacy of
division that I was talking about earlier.

00:31:02.120 --> 00:31:07.580
And takes the risk of exposing her
insecurity. I like this one so much. It's

00:31:07.580 --> 00:31:13.461
it's really evocative on a few levels. But
at the most sort of basic level, what I

00:31:13.461 --> 00:31:18.220
want to point out is that it's very
different than, again, a sort of threat or

00:31:18.220 --> 00:31:24.220
a strand of hacking that's about owning
hard, or mastery or something. Instead,

00:31:24.220 --> 00:31:33.760
it's being, you know, sort of present with
oneself and with others and disclosing

00:31:33.760 --> 00:31:40.850
insecurities, which could be network
insecurities or personal ones. Right. So

00:31:40.850 --> 00:31:45.720
it's taking what it means to be engaging
in hacking and all these new and sort of

00:31:45.720 --> 00:31:51.710
mutated directions. One more example from
the sort of feminist hacking that I want

00:31:51.710 --> 00:31:58.600
to just tell you about for a second was
this exercise. I was at a feminist hacking

00:31:58.600 --> 00:32:05.970
convergence in Montreal in 2016 and people
did a exercise in understanding public key

00:32:05.970 --> 00:32:14.440
cryptography as a dance where, you know,
instead of learning about this theory,

00:32:14.440 --> 00:32:18.910
people actually tried to embody it. So
placing your body in the relationship with

00:32:18.910 --> 00:32:24.961
tech and often some of these things happen
in kind of explicitly separate spaces, but

00:32:24.961 --> 00:32:30.850
going through the principles of
cryptography in a spontaneously

00:32:30.850 --> 00:32:36.600
choreographed dance and then performing it
all together. OK, so these are some of the

00:32:36.600 --> 00:32:42.370
ways, the mutant strains of feminist
hacking. I don't want to suggest that this

00:32:42.370 --> 00:32:47.770
has been just a very linear and conflict-
free progression. And so I do want to

00:32:47.770 --> 00:32:54.700
dwell for a moment on just a single
instance of conflict, which probably

00:32:54.700 --> 00:32:58.367
the details will be unfamiliar, but there
might be a sort of wider recognition

00:32:58.367 --> 00:33:07.040
I think. So this is from a hackerspace in
Philadelphia in 2011 and a handful of

00:33:07.040 --> 00:33:15.910
members of the space proposed holding an
event to hack sex toys, and they thought

00:33:15.910 --> 00:33:24.278
it was a pretty uncontroversial suggestion,
the same as having an Arduino night or a

00:33:24.278 --> 00:33:29.330
... you know, I'm making stuff up. But
they sort of put it out there as this:

00:33:29.330 --> 00:33:34.380
well, let's do this on the Saturday. And
they were really surprised when a bunch of

00:33:34.380 --> 00:33:39.250
other members of the space were very
opposed to it. And this is in the book.

00:33:39.250 --> 00:33:46.510
It's a design for a DIY flogger made from
a bicycle tube. And this was on the

00:33:46.510 --> 00:33:52.950
proposed sort of flier for the event. And
so what happened was they were really

00:33:52.950 --> 00:33:57.090
surprised that other people in the space
were sort of like, no, no, we don't want

00:33:57.090 --> 00:34:01.380
to have this here. We don't think it's
appropriate. And so here's a quote from

00:34:01.380 --> 00:34:09.230
one of the people who was opposing the
event. And he says: "A lot of the hackers

00:34:09.230 --> 00:34:14.260
here at the space are the Make Magazine/
Instructables type, not the Julian

00:34:14.260 --> 00:34:19.099
Assange HOPEconference attending type or
even the kind that cares much about a

00:34:19.099 --> 00:34:26.299
global movement of hacker spaces. I'm not
sure what category dildo-hacking falls in.

00:34:26.299 --> 00:34:33.570
For a lot of people, DIY has to do with
the sort of father-son nostalgia", end

00:34:33.570 --> 00:34:44.809
quote. So this is really interesting,
because we've got this acknowledgment of

00:34:44.809 --> 00:34:51.840
hacking being a variety of things, and
maybe again, for some people in a European

00:34:51.840 --> 00:34:56.759
context where hacker spaces are often
more political, maybe this Make Magazine

00:34:56.759 --> 00:35:06.780
sort of home-project, personal fabrication
will be a little bit unrecognizable or

00:35:06.780 --> 00:35:13.280
even disappointing, but it is part of
hacking and making in the US. And then, of

00:35:13.280 --> 00:35:19.619
course, there's the "information wants to
be free" HOPE-conference, lock-picking all

00:35:19.619 --> 00:35:25.880
these kinds of things, hacking that he
acknowledges. But he he says, I'm not sure

00:35:25.880 --> 00:35:33.450
what dildo-hacking is, maybe suggesting
it's not even hacking at all. And then he

00:35:33.450 --> 00:35:37.359
says, for a lot of people, DIY has to do
with this father-son nostalgia, which I

00:35:37.359 --> 00:35:41.839
hope might make you think of the picture
I had up at the very beginning of the

00:35:41.839 --> 00:35:50.569
father-son with the radio apparatus. And
so it's really interesting that this sort

00:35:50.569 --> 00:35:55.309
of proposal that these people didn't think
of as being controversial turned into

00:35:55.309 --> 00:36:02.460
this, pretty full on argument about what
even hacking is in the sort of essential

00:36:02.460 --> 00:36:10.140
way. And so here's a reply from one of the
people who had proposed the workshop, and

00:36:10.140 --> 00:36:16.059
she says: "So my concern here is that it's
a hackerspace. Initiative shouldn't be

00:36:16.059 --> 00:36:21.289
punished, particularly initiative that
shakes up old patterns. Our space is

00:36:21.289 --> 00:36:26.109
really stratifying into hardware-tinkering
as the core interest , and white males as

00:36:26.109 --> 00:36:32.849
the demographic. I'm really frustrated.", 
end quote. And so this again, I assume

00:36:32.849 --> 00:36:41.849
that this is fairly recognizable to folks.
Right? If the core of what hacking is, is

00:36:41.849 --> 00:36:48.319
taking it upon yourself to take artifacts
and practices that you already know how to

00:36:48.319 --> 00:36:54.510
do in a new direction; like that's what
hacking is, according to a lot of people.

00:36:54.510 --> 00:36:58.299
And so she's really surprised and really
dismayed and really, I think felt very

00:36:58.299 --> 00:37:09.119
hurt and rejected that this was flaring as
controversy, and was really surprised that

00:37:09.119 --> 00:37:15.509
people were sort of raising the prospect
that dildo-hacking was interruption of

00:37:15.509 --> 00:37:24.769
a nostalgic father-son tech practice, that
was somehow offensive. Certainly, it seems

00:37:24.769 --> 00:37:30.810
like part of the problem might have been
the introduction of sexuality and maybe

00:37:30.810 --> 00:37:34.140
questions about whose sexuality;
sexuality that didn't seem to center

00:37:34.140 --> 00:37:40.539
straight men. What happened was this
didn't get resolved. The people who had

00:37:40.539 --> 00:37:48.170
proposed the workshop - included women,
men and non-binary people - actually left.

00:37:48.170 --> 00:37:55.750
They decamped to a new space that was
forming, that was forming with more kind

00:37:55.750 --> 00:38:01.420
of feminist hacking principles and
welcomed them there. And the first space

00:38:01.420 --> 00:38:08.100
stayed how they were and didn't have to
keep having conflicts and grapple with

00:38:08.100 --> 00:38:12.460
this kind of controversy anymore because
the people - and they weren't kicked out -

00:38:12.460 --> 00:38:22.559
but they decided to leave. And so, I know
these conflicts have been very painful and

00:38:22.559 --> 00:38:27.270
and alienating for people who have
experienced them, even though maybe the

00:38:27.270 --> 00:38:32.160
content of this one seems almost funny or
something in hindsight. But what I want to

00:38:32.160 --> 00:38:40.450
propose is that part of why this has been
so difficult for people in these spaces is

00:38:40.450 --> 00:38:45.550
that people are actually wrestling with
this whole legacy of division that I laid

00:38:45.550 --> 00:38:50.890
out in the first part of the talk. So it
may feel like you're just having an

00:38:50.890 --> 00:38:56.690
argument with your fellow group members
who are a lot like you, but then you're

00:38:56.690 --> 00:39:02.819
breaking down along some kind of line that
you both can't cross over to with the

00:39:02.819 --> 00:39:12.920
other one. But there's a sort of really
deep sedimentary layer of who has been

00:39:12.920 --> 00:39:22.289
anointed the sort of power of agency over
tech and for whom that has been sort of

00:39:22.289 --> 00:39:26.240
a taken for granted tacit assumption and
who's had to sort of assert their presence

00:39:26.240 --> 00:39:30.380
or their right to be there in different
ways. And so when there are these

00:39:30.380 --> 00:39:34.440
conflicts and flashpoints, all of that
stuff is there. And that's actually really

00:39:34.440 --> 00:39:42.140
hard to solve anywhere. But it's very,
very hard to solve in elective

00:39:42.140 --> 00:39:47.140
volunteeristic associations, I think, also
so not not to say impossible, but there's

00:39:47.140 --> 00:39:56.520
a reason these conflicts are difficult.
OK, so returning to diversity and this is

00:39:56.520 --> 00:40:03.599
the same quote, I won't read it again, but
the sort of idea that women in tech are

00:40:03.599 --> 00:40:10.430
there to bring forward different
experiences and build a better product.

00:40:10.430 --> 00:40:14.150
Diversity is maybe necessary to start
these conversations, or the idea of

00:40:14.150 --> 00:40:20.170
diversity, but I don't think it's
sufficient for the purposes here. It's too

00:40:20.170 --> 00:40:26.440
easily sitting alongside market values,
which I think are not what people in

00:40:26.440 --> 00:40:30.630
hackerspaces are primarily most
interested in. And that's not really why

00:40:30.630 --> 00:40:36.690
they're there. And it's also very easily
steered away from the important political

00:40:36.690 --> 00:40:42.799
work that I think people in hacking
communities often want to do. It can sort

00:40:42.799 --> 00:40:49.150
of mutate into this contradictory thing
where you've got sort of market values on

00:40:49.150 --> 00:40:54.170
the one hand, and something that isn't
what you set out to do on the other hand,

00:40:54.170 --> 00:40:57.940
and I'm going to illustrate that with this
somewhat more provocative example. This is

00:40:57.940 --> 00:41:04.730
a meme I stole from the internet. But the
point here is that you can make these

00:41:04.730 --> 00:41:10.520
diversity affirming slogans. And here
we've got "Black Lives Matter" and "Yes,

00:41:10.520 --> 00:41:19.010
we can" and LGBT sort of flags or slogans
on a bomber. You can make these diversity

00:41:19.010 --> 00:41:24.739
affirming slogans fit within a system that
is fundamentally violent, carceral,

00:41:24.739 --> 00:41:30.410
militarized. It doesn't necessarily
challenge the system itself to bring

00:41:30.410 --> 00:41:36.479
forward individuals' identities as members
of marginalized groups. In fact,

00:41:36.479 --> 00:41:40.690
capitalism is actually quite happy to
resolve what might seem like contradiction

00:41:40.690 --> 00:41:46.300
here, by commodifying identity, selling
it as a brand without resolving the

00:41:46.300 --> 00:41:51.710
fundamental tensions that we know that are
here, that have to do with social power

00:41:51.710 --> 00:41:58.220
and dominance and exploitation. So coming
back to the free software quote from the

00:41:58.220 --> 00:42:04.990
beginning, as I said, this sort of hit
consensus, but I'm actually going to argue

00:42:04.990 --> 00:42:09.980
it's not really going far enough. Diverse
participation and making proprietary

00:42:09.980 --> 00:42:16.240
software extinct are fine, but I think
they actually do not fully capture what's

00:42:16.240 --> 00:42:21.640
at stake in these very tough conversations
that have been happening in hacking and

00:42:21.640 --> 00:42:31.259
free software groups. And so, we might
think of this as, again, a point of entry,

00:42:31.259 --> 00:42:34.759
but we might want to take it a bit
farther. And this is as far as I'll go

00:42:34.759 --> 00:42:44.190
with prescriptions or how-to. So specific
in local voluntaristic communities that

00:42:44.190 --> 00:42:49.920
are either your hackerspace in the city
you live in or the the project that you...

00:42:49.920 --> 00:42:55.749
that's distributed, but that you work on.
So articulate values and politics.

00:42:55.749 --> 00:43:01.839
Diversity is a good one. But I'm going to
say it's necessary and not sufficient. And

00:43:01.839 --> 00:43:06.369
some of the things that I talk about in
the book include like other forms of

00:43:06.369 --> 00:43:13.720
political beliefs, like decolonization or
attention to militarism that can actually

00:43:13.720 --> 00:43:18.640
sort of force you to have sometimes harder
conversations, but ones that can clarify

00:43:18.640 --> 00:43:26.490
values and goals. Obviously, I don't need
to tell hacking groups, but keep

00:43:26.490 --> 00:43:32.740
theorizing and keep experimenting. That is
a way, whether it's crypto dancing or not,

00:43:32.740 --> 00:43:38.589
it's a way to sort of like walk yourself
through what you're trying to sort of

00:43:38.589 --> 00:43:43.460
build and iterate. And within spaces - I
think at this point this is fairly

00:43:43.460 --> 00:43:47.259
uncontroversial, but I do chronicle in the
book how people got here - making and

00:43:47.259 --> 00:43:53.609
enforcing rules, having conversations
sometimes one on one, not a sort of public

00:43:53.609 --> 00:44:01.299
conflagration, flame war. But if people
feel safe, respect each other enough

00:44:01.299 --> 00:44:07.900
to actually talk through what is the sort
of point of contention or difference and

00:44:07.900 --> 00:44:13.349
see if you can understand one another. The
other thing I want to point out though, is

00:44:13.349 --> 00:44:18.560
that there's a whole lot of stuff going on
here that is much, much bigger than the

00:44:18.560 --> 00:44:24.930
spaces and communities that you're in. And
so it is kind of a mistake and no one's

00:44:24.930 --> 00:44:31.339
fault that you can't solve all of this in
the groups that you're in. And so there

00:44:31.339 --> 00:44:38.450
also has to be much bigger society-wide
goals that we all have our eyes on,

00:44:38.450 --> 00:44:43.720
because if we solve some of this stuff,
then, lo and behold, quote, "diversity in

00:44:43.720 --> 00:44:48.420
tech" would be a lot easier and probably
less fraught and contentious. But things

00:44:48.420 --> 00:44:54.529
like demilitarization, supply chain
justice, basic social equity, workplace

00:44:54.529 --> 00:45:00.519
fairness, public reconciliation - I'm
giving US examples here - reparations,

00:45:00.519 --> 00:45:07.830
land back. And obviously the one that's
coming for all of us, climate, is going to

00:45:07.830 --> 00:45:12.609
be the biggest problem. It already is the
biggest problem in terms of, you know,

00:45:12.609 --> 00:45:20.319
racial and economic and environmental
justice worldwide. So in conclusion, my

00:45:20.319 --> 00:45:25.409
little take home slogan is that there's no
hack or tech audit for justice, but there

00:45:25.409 --> 00:45:31.269
are these different levels and you can work
on one and work on another, but you can't

00:45:31.269 --> 00:45:37.069
solve the really big stuff in the sort of
tech domain. And that's not a shortcoming,

00:45:37.069 --> 00:45:42.640
and it's not for lack of trying. That is
all. I'm very happy to quit talking so

00:45:42.640 --> 00:45:48.099
much and move to Q&amp;A. Thank you so much
for your attention. Thanks.

00:45:48.099 --> 00:45:52.099
Herald: All right. Thank you.
Dunbar-Hester: Thank you.

00:45:52.099 --> 00:46:02.289
Herald: All right, everyone, questions on
Twitter, Mastodon, #rc3-two on IRC. We

00:46:02.289 --> 00:46:06.350
wait for a little bit and ask the
questions in the meantime. So this

00:46:06.350 --> 00:46:12.209
research for this book, when
did you actually do it, like timewise?

00:46:12.209 --> 00:46:18.359
Dunbar-Hester: Yeah, it started, it
actually, we were talking before we had an

00:46:18.359 --> 00:46:23.450
audience a little bit about radio. And my
earlier project was about people building

00:46:23.450 --> 00:46:30.430
radio stations and - try to be brief - but
they had a very emancipatory set of ideas

00:46:30.430 --> 00:46:35.000
about what it meant to teach people how to
build electronics or solder a transmitter

00:46:35.000 --> 00:46:39.880
board or something. But they kept running
into some of these patterns of exclusion

00:46:39.880 --> 00:46:46.890
that I mentioned. And so it was actually
through them that I heard about these

00:46:46.890 --> 00:46:51.490
conversations that were starting to happen
in and hacking and open source communities

00:46:51.490 --> 00:46:56.809
where people were trying to directly head-
on confront some of this stuff. So I think

00:46:56.809 --> 00:47:03.190
I heard about it in around the 2006 era,
started working on it, maybe... It's about

00:47:03.190 --> 00:47:09.259
2010 to about 2015, is the period
that I was actively, you know, going to

00:47:09.259 --> 00:47:14.039
conferences and meet-ups and spaces and
interviewing people. So it's this sort of

00:47:14.039 --> 00:47:17.900
snapshot. Yeah, that's the shortest
answer. Thanks.

00:47:17.900 --> 00:47:22.710
Herald: All right. That's very interesting
because I kept thinking if you had

00:47:22.710 --> 00:47:26.859
encountered this sort of rise of the alt-
right or something like this, because I

00:47:26.859 --> 00:47:31.489
feel like in the last couple of years,
these discussions have just become so much

00:47:31.489 --> 00:47:35.470
more radicalized and not from the left,
but from the right, like where you can

00:47:35.470 --> 00:47:39.839
basically no longer talk about this
without just all hell breaking loose.

00:47:39.839 --> 00:47:41.980
Right?
Dunbar-Hester: I think that's a really

00:47:41.980 --> 00:47:46.829
interesting point. And I think you're
right. This does, I mean, I was finishing

00:47:46.829 --> 00:47:51.460
the book during the Trump era over here,
and I know you've got your own counterparts

00:47:51.460 --> 00:47:58.099
in Europe, but this is all very much within
that kind of Obama liberal, neo liberal

00:47:58.099 --> 00:48:03.395
framing. And actually something I wrote
about, I think it's in the intro of the

00:48:03.395 --> 00:48:10.589
book, is the Obama White House had a women
in STEM, as part of a women and people of

00:48:10.589 --> 00:48:17.029
color in STEM, as part of a kind of
national security and a nationalist agenda

00:48:17.029 --> 00:48:23.109
basically on their page. And the Trump
administration took it down. So I think,

00:48:23.109 --> 00:48:33.130
and also in the book, there's a discussion
of a channel for Polish Python users where

00:48:33.130 --> 00:48:38.630
they were like fretting about how to ban
Nazis from the channel and whether Nazis

00:48:38.630 --> 00:48:44.859
were just people showing up and throwing
swastikas all over the IRC channel,

00:48:44.859 --> 00:48:49.950
whether that was "trolling" or whether it
was real Nazis. And, yes, I think the sort

00:48:49.950 --> 00:48:59.609
of stakes of some of this has gotten a lot
more stark. And so in certain ways,

00:48:59.609 --> 00:49:04.180
the sort of "which side are you on?"-
questions are easier, but the sort of

00:49:04.180 --> 00:49:10.890
depth of what's at stake and what's being
defended is maybe harder. So, yeah, the

00:49:10.890 --> 00:49:16.650
political context is sort of
temporal is really is part of this, yeah.

00:49:16.650 --> 00:49:22.819
Herald: All right. Now we turn to the IRC.
Have you looked into the woman in FLOSS as

00:49:22.819 --> 00:49:28.460
perhaps being one with predominantly
engineers as mothers/fathers?

00:49:28.460 --> 00:49:33.081
Dunbar-Hester: Sorry, could you repeat
women in FLOSS ...?

00:49:33.081 --> 00:49:37.039
Herald: I think the question is whether
you have sort of noticed a pattern that

00:49:37.039 --> 00:49:41.970
women that get into these spaces, sort of,
by their parents, have encountered

00:49:41.970 --> 00:49:46.450
engineering, I think it's a familiar
context.

00:49:46.450 --> 00:49:53.230
Dunbar-Hester: Yes, I have not personally
done research on that, but it does,

00:49:53.230 --> 00:50:03.230
y'know, sort of other historical and
sociological research shows that people

00:50:03.230 --> 00:50:11.710
who are exposed at a young age,
that's part of the differential. And even,

00:50:11.710 --> 00:50:18.250
even in households where, say, a computer
came home early on, we're talking about a

00:50:18.250 --> 00:50:23.950
slightly older generation. A computer came
home early on because parents brought it

00:50:23.950 --> 00:50:30.520
into the house. You know, boys were more
likely to sort of claim it as theirs or

00:50:30.520 --> 00:50:35.039
take time on it or start playing with it
even a couple or a few years earlier than

00:50:35.039 --> 00:50:39.760
girls. And so, yeah, I haven't looked at
that, the sort of life narratives

00:50:39.760 --> 00:50:44.359
directly, but other people have. And I
draw on that. And that's also something I

00:50:44.359 --> 00:50:50.440
am hearing now from people who are adults
and are thinking about these problems and

00:50:50.440 --> 00:50:58.690
how they want to not have their own kids
encounter the same problems or sort of

00:50:58.690 --> 00:51:02.309
legacy of division. You definitely hear
people saying, "I want this to get solved

00:51:02.309 --> 00:51:07.240
so my daughter doesn't have a hard time."
But that's a little outside of what

00:51:07.240 --> 00:51:12.660
I've looked at, but it feeds in, yeah.
Herald: All right. All right. This is a

00:51:12.660 --> 00:51:16.470
slightly longer question. I'll try to do
my best: I've witnessed a lot of white

00:51:16.470 --> 00:51:24.150
feminism in FOSS, that's free open source
software, right? And FOSS diversity, equity

00:51:24.150 --> 00:51:30.290
and inclusions. DEI Spaces. Is
intersectionality sufficiently recognized

00:51:30.290 --> 00:51:35.570
as an issue in FOSS feminism, or is it
actually worse off due to the low number

00:51:35.570 --> 00:51:39.150
of women in FOSS, around 2%.

00:51:39.150 --> 00:51:45.769
Dunbar-Hester: Great. Yeah. So I couldn't.
At first I would flag that the numbers in

00:51:45.769 --> 00:51:52.009
FOSS have started to change. There's later
research that shows that they're up some.

00:51:52.009 --> 00:51:56.920
The question about white feminism is a
really good one. And I do write in the

00:51:56.920 --> 00:52:08.309
book about people sort of grappling with
that. And so the sort of trajectory was

00:52:08.309 --> 00:52:18.099
the first category that people started to
notice of exclusion was women, and I think

00:52:18.099 --> 00:52:27.180
I discussed how women opened up pretty
quickly to being non essentialist and

00:52:27.180 --> 00:52:32.489
again, inclusive of trans and non binary
sorts of identities. But I think that the

00:52:32.489 --> 00:52:39.539
race and the what I sometimes talk about
is sort of global positioning, the Global

00:52:39.539 --> 00:52:46.799
North hackers in Europe and North America.
It is harder, I think, for them to sort of

00:52:46.799 --> 00:52:55.520
deal as head on with, you know, race. And
I mean, these are fundamental questions of

00:52:55.520 --> 00:53:04.460
racial capitalism. And so being positioned
within fairly well advantaged Global North

00:53:04.460 --> 00:53:10.080
communities, it is harder to confront some
of those issues. I think there's a

00:53:10.080 --> 00:53:15.359
consciousness of it, but I would say it's
a lot. What I observed was a lot greater

00:53:15.359 --> 00:53:22.829
awareness and sort of development of
potential solutions for being inclusive of

00:53:22.829 --> 00:53:31.650
women than a sort of really broadly
intersectional notion of women, including

00:53:31.650 --> 00:53:37.980
people in Global South positions and in
racialized categories in the Global North.

00:53:37.980 --> 00:53:43.049
And again, I think there's been a
sort of probably a shift in attention to

00:53:43.049 --> 00:53:49.789
that, some of which postdates the
period in the book. But I also think that

00:53:49.789 --> 00:53:54.930
that it's uniquely hard, I think, to
solve in volunturistic groups because the

00:53:54.930 --> 00:54:00.180
forces, at least in the US and I would
speculate in Europe as well, like the

00:54:00.180 --> 00:54:10.100
forces that cause inequality and
segregation. And, you know, like the tech

00:54:10.100 --> 00:54:13.079
industry is a really good place to see
these contradictions, like what's going on

00:54:13.079 --> 00:54:22.440
now with, like Google and the firing of Dr
Timnit Gebru is. You know, places where

00:54:22.440 --> 00:54:30.339
there's a sort of capitalistic incentive
are not going to be able to solve these

00:54:30.339 --> 00:54:34.730
problems of inequality because the profit
motive is always going to be there to

00:54:34.730 --> 00:54:43.269
build surveillance tech, to assist
countries and that want to

00:54:43.269 --> 00:54:49.200
build prisons. Again, this is what's
coming with climate stuff. And so saying,

00:54:49.200 --> 00:54:55.420
oh, you need to hire more black women or
something is like running smack into these

00:54:55.420 --> 00:54:59.319
contradictions. And this is part of why I
say this really can't be solved within

00:54:59.319 --> 00:55:03.010
tech. And these are very big, thorny
issues. Another thing the final thing I'll

00:55:03.010 --> 00:55:10.099
point out this is sort of rambling is for
a voluntaristic group, it's gonna be

00:55:10.099 --> 00:55:15.960
easier to make fairly small interventions.
And so I think that that's. I actually

00:55:15.960 --> 00:55:20.140
have somebody talking about this, like if
we make the space more inclusive to

00:55:20.140 --> 00:55:28.200
anybody and say bad behavior isn't here or
isn't welcome here, you know, that can hit

00:55:28.200 --> 00:55:32.680
a note where it might cause there to be a
sort of more inclusive community that

00:55:32.680 --> 00:55:36.319
would be welcoming to a bunch of different
kinds of folks. But it's not necessarily

00:55:36.319 --> 00:55:44.380
realistic to tailor in a voluntaristic group
that's more a response to the sort of forms

00:55:44.380 --> 00:55:50.239
of exclusion all the kinds of
different people have experienced. And so,

00:55:50.239 --> 00:55:54.839
again, I think this is kind of a question
of scale, but I really do think that the

00:55:54.839 --> 00:56:00.220
sort of way that voluntaristic groups,
i.e. not the market, not workplaces,

00:56:00.220 --> 00:56:06.160
articulate, you know, what they think the
problems are and how

00:56:06.160 --> 00:56:09.619
they can sort of begin to talk about
solutions are really important precisely

00:56:09.619 --> 00:56:18.729
because they're not hamstrung by the same
contradictions that for profit spaces are.

00:56:18.729 --> 00:56:23.770
That was a long ... That's a really great
question. I do take it up. Some are the

00:56:23.770 --> 00:56:26.950
people I was writing about. I think we're
starting to take it up. It's probably

00:56:26.950 --> 00:56:31.030
more full throated now. And it's very
complicated.

00:56:31.030 --> 00:56:34.049
Herald: Yes, all of these things.
Dunbar-Hester: Yeah.

00:56:34.049 --> 00:56:39.191
Herald: Alright, we do have an interesting
question: "Would you advise people to try

00:56:39.191 --> 00:56:45.569
to change communities from within or just
start new structures with more intersexual

00:56:45.569 --> 00:56:47.759
spaces?"
Dunbar-Hester: I don't have a great answer

00:56:47.759 --> 00:56:57.869
to that. I think it is kind of the
pressing question of the day, I think in a

00:56:57.869 --> 00:57:10.819
lot of a lot of spaces, and I see good
answers on both sides, and I think it

00:57:10.819 --> 00:57:23.029
depends perhaps. I do see a virtue in
some space being set aside, but how that a

00:57:23.029 --> 00:57:30.569
separate space chooses to interface with a
sort of wider space is going to vary. And

00:57:30.569 --> 00:57:33.709
I don't think, I don't think it's
necessarily a binary like you're either

00:57:33.709 --> 00:57:39.530
totally outside or you're within having a,
you know, a big discussion about how to be

00:57:39.530 --> 00:57:44.660
maximally inclusive. I think those things
are always kind of dialogically happening.

00:57:44.660 --> 00:57:49.770
But I've seen people argue both sides of
it, and I've seen, I think, compelling

00:57:49.770 --> 00:57:58.740
answers on both sides of it. But, yeah, it
is kind of the place where the idea that

00:57:58.740 --> 00:58:06.119
we're sort of all taking up this project
together can start to, you know, break

00:58:06.119 --> 00:58:10.349
down. And some people think you're really
losing. A lot of people go off and stop,

00:58:10.349 --> 00:58:19.240
you know, working together as some sort of
unified group. And so, yeah, I don't

00:58:19.240 --> 00:58:22.930
have a great answer that. I do write
about it in the book. And I would say it

00:58:22.930 --> 00:58:25.940
depends on what the goals are. I think
having some separate space is probably

00:58:25.940 --> 00:58:30.031
important in any event.
Herald: Yeah, it seems like it is like

00:58:30.031 --> 00:58:34.700
these kind of hackerspace have at least
the advantage of being able to accommodate

00:58:34.700 --> 00:58:39.680
sort of subgroups, right. So you can have
these certain events, certain working

00:58:39.680 --> 00:58:44.670
groups that can focus on these issues. For
example, I think our host today, the xHain

00:58:44.670 --> 00:58:49.990
hackerspace in Berlin, just started this
talk series "Gespräch unter Bäumen", which

00:58:49.990 --> 00:58:54.820
is just "Talks below the trees", they have
a LED tree in their hackerspace, and it

00:58:54.820 --> 00:58:58.109
just sort of naturally happened that it
had only women as speakers and it was just

00:58:58.109 --> 00:59:02.369
this lovely natural evolution of just
having much more interesting topics and

00:59:02.369 --> 00:59:07.539
not just, you know, the traditional male
hacker kind of topics. So I think it's

00:59:07.539 --> 00:59:11.069
really cool. And you just have this
ability to have these initiatives inside

00:59:11.069 --> 00:59:20.890
existing spaces somehow, but - just a rant
from my side. Someone had a question, the

00:59:20.890 --> 00:59:24.020
title of the book is just "Hacking
Diversity", right? I think we mentioned

00:59:24.020 --> 00:59:26.770
this at the beginning.
Dunbar-Hester: Yeah, I think the whole

00:59:26.770 --> 00:59:31.160
title, if you look for hacking diversity,
you'll find it. My name, Princeton

00:59:31.160 --> 00:59:38.970
University Press. Yeah. I'll not be
shameless and say it's on very deep sale

00:59:38.970 --> 00:59:44.319
right now. If you were to buy it from
Princeton directly, there's a discount

00:59:44.319 --> 00:59:52.660
code and it's on my Twitter. It's I think
it's "H - D - E - V - S" anyway - it's

00:59:52.660 --> 00:59:55.579
40% percent off through like February.
Herald: Nice.

00:59:55.579 --> 00:59:59.680
Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. It's very affordable.
Herald: Alright, can you comment on how

00:59:59.680 --> 01:00:03.950
structures like GitHub that predominantly
value codes and missions and other highly

01:00:03.950 --> 01:00:08.880
formalized tasks over community building
and less technical contributions play into

01:00:08.880 --> 01:00:15.549
this nexus?
Dunbar-Hester: Yes, absolutely. I mean,

01:00:15.549 --> 01:00:21.569
historically, the focus on the
artifact, what you could produce, the

01:00:21.569 --> 01:00:30.530
code, even hardware, has taken on this
sort of exalted, symbolic meaning, and it

01:00:30.530 --> 01:00:36.079
has definitely contributed to both the
denigration and the invisibility of people

01:00:36.079 --> 01:00:43.089
who weren't doing that kind of work and
who might be doing community building or

01:00:43.089 --> 01:00:50.259
even things documentation or translation,
right? With it's being global practices

01:00:50.259 --> 01:00:56.150
that the sort of authors of the code are
getting the sort of priesthood

01:00:56.150 --> 01:01:00.781
status and everyone else is sort of lower.
I think, again, awareness of that is

01:01:00.781 --> 01:01:08.650
starting to change, but it's definitely
contributed to again historical sense that

01:01:08.650 --> 01:01:14.940
there was underrepresentation of some
kinds of folks. And I think there are ways

01:01:14.940 --> 01:01:22.490
you can, it sort of starts with raising
awareness of this. But again, that sort of

01:01:22.490 --> 01:01:28.849
signal, the celebration of the the
technologist is coming in from all these

01:01:28.849 --> 01:01:35.069
other places in the culture. And so
deprogramming that or something, as it

01:01:35.069 --> 01:01:41.670
were, is is tough, but not impossible. And
again, I see that, I see that actually, at

01:01:41.670 --> 01:01:48.470
least here as part of the sort of bigger
cultural war. And, you know, the idea that

01:01:48.470 --> 01:01:55.269
the sort of tech is the, you know, godly
apparatus and everything else is, you

01:01:55.269 --> 01:02:02.099
know, humanities and squishy soft stuff we
don't need that's going to fall away.

01:02:02.099 --> 01:02:08.190
Yeah, it doesn't have to be as big of
a topic as that, but that's again, it's

01:02:08.190 --> 01:02:12.630
all kind of in there. I don't know if
that answered a question, but, yes, that's

01:02:12.630 --> 01:02:18.219
there. And I think that's something that
the first step in addressing it can be

01:02:18.219 --> 01:02:24.349
acknowledging it and and building forms of
collaboration and that are not just sort

01:02:24.349 --> 01:02:30.039
of like nominally non hierarchical, but
specifically raising visibility and

01:02:30.039 --> 01:02:33.130
sort of credit giving to other kinds of
contributions.

01:02:33.130 --> 01:02:38.109
Herald: So do you feel as someone that is
actually a science and technology scholar

01:02:38.109 --> 01:02:43.150
that this feels as like is finally getting
recognized as something that exists and is

01:02:43.150 --> 01:02:47.190
real? Because I always have this impression
that people just assume this doesn't exist

01:02:47.190 --> 01:02:51.560
and no one thinks about this except them
and there is an entire academic field

01:02:51.560 --> 01:02:56.270
about it. Do you think this is changing or
is it just to say?

01:02:56.270 --> 01:03:01.469
Dunbar-Hester: I don't know. I mean, I
think that there's a there's a lot of

01:03:01.469 --> 01:03:11.540
visibility on the one hand and even, you
know, something in the US with and who

01:03:11.540 --> 01:03:17.150
knows what will be happening after COVID,
but, you know, public school systems were

01:03:17.150 --> 01:03:23.260
having their budgets cut after the first
financial crisis in 2008. And one of the

01:03:23.260 --> 01:03:27.450
things that was being proposed was moving
a hackerspace into a high school and sort

01:03:27.450 --> 01:03:35.210
of having that, you know, come forward and
do things that institutions had maybe once

01:03:35.210 --> 01:03:45.559
been doing. I think that that again, I'll
keep coming back to the tension between

01:03:45.559 --> 01:03:52.130
what I think some of the most interesting
voluntaristic and politicized sort of

01:03:52.130 --> 01:03:58.869
goals for these kinds of activities, them,
versus what the market wants them to do,

01:03:58.869 --> 01:04:06.219
are, are sort of in tension. And there was
a moment where I was interviewing someone,

01:04:06.219 --> 01:04:12.269
maybe and I want to say 2012, and I was
asking him questions about free software

01:04:12.269 --> 01:04:16.799
and he was very kind but he said something
like, "Why are you asking me about free

01:04:16.799 --> 01:04:24.010
software? Like that's dead.", you know,
like Open Source 1.0 - sort of. And I'm

01:04:24.010 --> 01:04:31.460
not the only person who's written about
that at all, but I think this sort of idea

01:04:31.460 --> 01:04:38.160
that there's something here that can't
just be, you know, co-opted by a market

01:04:38.160 --> 01:04:45.170
like that's the hard part and, I mean. I
think there is a lot of there's continuing

01:04:45.170 --> 01:04:50.480
to be a lot of attention to hackathons and
coding bootcamps and these kinds of

01:04:50.480 --> 01:04:58.819
things. But I don't know, I guess I'm sort
of too inside and outside at the same time

01:04:58.819 --> 01:05:02.420
to have a good answer. I think that
there's a well-established body of

01:05:02.420 --> 01:05:09.829
scholarly recognition of these activities.
People look at me less weird talking about

01:05:09.829 --> 01:05:17.650
this than a book about radio in the twenty
first century. But I think the sort of,

01:05:17.650 --> 01:05:25.650
you know, really sustained work to sort of
disarticulate, disentangle some of this

01:05:25.650 --> 01:05:30.369
from industry where it's getting the sort
of most not just attention, but the sort

01:05:30.369 --> 01:05:36.650
of celebration and the ways that that can
kind of distort, I think, some of the

01:05:36.650 --> 01:05:39.839
other intentions that is is always going
to be tough.

01:05:39.839 --> 01:05:44.549
Herald: Allright. Wonderful. I think we're
out of time. So thank you very much.

01:05:44.549 --> 01:05:50.519
Everyone, buy the book. And have a good
night. Bye, bye.

01:05:50.519 --> 01:05:53.549
Dunbar-Hester: Good day.
Thank you so much. Thank you.

01:05:53.549 --> 01:05:55.619
Herald: Thank you.

01:05:55.619 --> 01:05:57.959
<i>postroll music</i>

01:05:58.539 --> 01:06:03.069
Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de
in the year 2021. Join, and help us!