#rC3 - Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures

rc3 preroll music

Herald: All right, so our next talk is
called Hacking Diversity, where we

basically try to treat a really awkward
question about these spaces that we move

in here, which is that we really have
these ideas about inclusion and diversity.

But in the end, most of the people that
come just look like me. And in open

source, most people look like me. And this
is extremely strange, right? Because we

have all these ideas about diversity and
everything. And today we try to answer the

question of why this happens and maybe
what we can do about it. Our speaker for

this is Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester.
She's a professor at the University of

Southern California, I think. And today
she is preparing, uh, she is showing

essentially a condensed version of a book
that she just wrote, called Hacking

Diversity. And I'm really looking forward
to this talk because I also have asked

myself these questions and I don't know
the answers.

So I'm looking forward to this.
Please Christina.

Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester: Thank
you so much. Thank you for the

introduction and thank you for the
invitation and thank you for all of your

labor to get this remote experience off
the ground. So I'm really happy and

excited to be here, whatever that is. And
I will get into the talk. Let's see here,

OK. Let me know, you should be able to see
slides now. If that didn't work, let me

know. OK, thanks. This is not a best
practices talk so much as a first

principles and how did we get here talk?
My examples are mostly from the US, but

they are part of a broader Euro-American
milieu. And so to get started, I think I

want to put up this quote from the Free
Software Foundation from 2012. And the

goal of this talk is really to give some
context. And I think at the almost very

end of 2020 it's safe to say that this is
a fairly mainstream and uncontroversial

topic, but it wasn't always this way. So
the quote says: "The free software

movement needs diverse participation to
achieve its goals. If we want to make

proprietary software extinct, we need to
make everyone on the planet engage with

free software. To get there we need people
of all genders, races, sexual orientations

and abilities leading the way. And as I
said, I think this is a very recognizable

sort of discourse now, but it hasn't
always been. And I'm going to sort of

unpack this for a little while. The
outline of the talk, this is a pretty bare

bones outline, but there's going to be a
lot of sort of history and context and

then a little bit about the value and goal
of diversity and how it relates to profits

and markets and also the goal of diversity
and how it relates to other values,

particularly justice. And I want to note
that there's a couple of content warning

slides on here. One, for people who have
been involved in promulgating genocide and

another for a person who's been ejected
from hacking for abusive behavior. And so

there will be a warning preceding each of
those. OK, so first, talking about

genocide. In the 19th century in the
United States and even into the 20th

century, there was an idea of a sort of
frontiersmen, brawny man who you can see

here. This is a folk hero, but was
important enough to still be being

represented on television in the 1960s.
And the sort of consistent thing

here is going to actually go, this is the
genocide one, to these sort of consistent

representations. You can see these folks
are wearing, well, they're men and they're

being manly and they're wearing animal
hide with the implication that they maybe,

you know, shot the deer themself. They
carry a gun, they're in naturalistic

settings. They're sort of rough and ready
for anything. I'm drawing here on

historian Susan Douglas, who argues that
around the turn of the 20th century,

society started to change. And so even
though there was still this mythos of this

brawny frontiersmen, what society actually
needed was a reconfigured masculinity that

didn't sort of have this rough physical
brawny masculinity. And so masculinity

itself, she says, was reconfigured to what
she calls technical masculinity. And so

the masculinity was sort of refashioned to
be about mastery over machines and

particularly these sort of new cutting
edge electronic machines, which in this

case was radio. So radio experimentation
in the very early 20th century, first

wireless telegraphy and then later
wireless sound transmission, which became

broadcasting, she argues, is a way to sort
of refit masculinity or the way the

society was changing. It was more urban.
There was more specialized division of

labor needing people to work in a
professional white collar fields with

technology as opposed to going out and
settling the West. And so here we see

technical, technical masculinity,
entrainment basically, a father with his

very young son teaching him this is a way
to be in the world. And Douglas argues

that this started with ham radio in the
early 20th century. But perhaps

unsurprisingly, it continued to sort of
persist over time. And so my next few

slides are showing the same technical
masculinity, which is about, you know,

curiosity, solving a problem, you know,
expressing your will with technology only

with different sorts of technical
artifacts. And so here this is the Model

Railroad, made very famous in Steven
Levy's book about hackers. We also have,

and this is probably about the 1950s.
We have phone phreaking in the 1960s

and here this is also a 2600
magazine from the 80s, sort

of continuing to mythologize phone
phreaking. Going into the 70s, we

see this with computers, the Homebrew
Computer Club, a really important hobbyist

formation for both, you know, the history
of Silicon Valley, but also the history of

hacking and free software. It was people
who were sort of building and tinkering

and experimenting. And so what we're
starting to see here is even as the tech

shifts, the technical masculinity stays
consistent. And this is probably the early

80s and the slide is just an ad for a
microcomputer. But we can see not only the

representation of masculinity at the
center, we also see femininity in relation

to the technology, which is to say it's
just the sort of ancillary handmaiden for

the sort of male agent here. And as I
said, this is certainly a really cheesy

ad, but I think, I hope underscores the
sort of consistent promulgation of this

relationship with technology. And so I
want to suggest is that tech here over the

20th and into the 21st century is not just
reflecting a legacy of division, of which

gender prescription, gender roles are a
part of this, but is actually actively

been involved in enforcing this. And so
we've got basically a white patriarchal,

Christian, native-born supremacy, and a
global system of racial capitalism. And so

I've shown you who's sort of at the top of
this hierarchy. We've got colonized

subjects, immigrants, women, rural and
lower class people, indigenous people

coming out on the bottom. And both
builders and consumers of tech are

implicated in this tension. OK, so going
back even further in the history to sort

of where some of this comes from. I'm not
sure how many of you thought that in a

discussion of hacking you'd be looking at
a 19th century American oil painting. But

here we are. This is called American
Progress. So I think mythologized American

progress from the late 19th century. And
as you can probably see, there's a real

sort of light to dark element of the
photo, of the picture, the painting. And we

have this maiden who's really not so much
a person, but more like a God, this is

sort of Greek iconography, sort of up
above everyone, up above man. And we do

see technology in the painting. We see
the railroads and some ships on the right

hand side, which is the east. And so you
can tell that she's sort of presiding over

everybody, settling the west. And again,
they're bringing the light, which is

civilization. The maiden herself is
actually carrying a book which symbolizes

knowledge and what may not be obvious, but
she's actually got telegraph wire strung

around her arm. And then you can see the
telegraph pattern behind her. And so this

control over technology is part of how
white settler, you know, newly arrived

Americans are maintaining or sort of
promoting and maintaining dominance over

their new continent, their new continent.
And you can actually see, so we've

got these white settler folks in the
center of the painting. All the way in the

dark are indigenous people. And there's
also actually a bear. So they're sort of,

again, a biblical hierarchy of man over
the beasts. And you can tell that the

indigenous subjects and the bear are
probably either going to get run out of

the frame or sort of forced to become
civilized. So this is very deep in how

American sort of hierarchy and notions of
dominance get promoted and, you know, sort

of renewed over time. And this is
interesting because this ideology is so

strong that it's actually succeeded in
basically erasing some of the historical

record. Like, for instance, we know that
there were women, highly skilled women

operators in World War 2 operating the
first electronic computers. This is ENIAC

in the US. But they were still, they were
sort of written out of the record and

computing, once it became popular and moved
out of a top secret military project, the

womens' roles were basically effaced and
credit for dominance over and sort of

control over the new technology publicly
went to men. And again, so we see this

sort of sorting happening in all these
different ways, even in defiance of the

actual historical record. Another
instance, which may be kind of surprising

is this is a really wonderful article by
Lisa Nakamura that I'm drawing from here.

This is a Fairchild Semiconductor, so
they're based in Silicon Valley, they used

to make microchips and associated
equipment in Silicon Valley, but they had

an intermediate period before outsourcing
that stuff to Asia, where they opened

operations on a Navajo reservation in the
American Southwest. And so there's really

interesting ways in which race and gender
basically become resources for valuing the

labor of some kind of people more and
other kinds of people less. So this

reservation is attractive because regular
American labor laws didn't obtain and they

also, managers in their minds, thought, oh
there's this history of Navajo weaving and

sort of fine fabrication work. And so
there's a sort of stereotype that nonwhite

people, particularly women, particularly
in this day and age, Asian, have "nimble

fingers" and are going to be really good
and diligent at something that we need,

like electronics assembly, to be really
sort of diligently done. And so what we've

got here is the sort of overlay of Navajo
weaving and microchip. So Nakamura calls

this insourcing, sort of outsourcing
before outsourcing. And, you know, now

those laboratories and factories have
mostly moved to Asia. But this sort of

period of experimentation with trying to,
like, alienate the labor from the sort of

managerial home. And so now we would
think, like, you know, your Apple products

as assembled in China, designed in
Cupertino or whatever. But that kind of

thing, this is a sort of early moment of
that. And so, again, I want to sort of

underscore that race and gender are a
resource for global capitalism to assign

worth to some people's bodies and work and
not to others. Another way that this

works, I don't know how much people in the
US will remember this, let alone outside

of the US, but this is a student, a high
school student who is a Sudanese American,

I believe, who was, you know, a geek. And
he was enthusiastic about doing a DIY

electronics assembly at home where he
built a clock and he brought it to school

and the school called police. And so here
we can see that whiteness has been a

resource for avoiding criminalization for
certain kinds of sort of hacky

activities. I'm certainly not saying that
no white people have been criminalized for

hacking because that's not true. But
certain activities get more of a pass

based on who's participating in them. And
I also want to point out that this legacy

of division and this system of social
sorting is flexible. In 2015, it

could easily be turned to islamophobic
purposes, which is what happened here. And

so what I want to point out is there's
a sort of like, you know, history of

division and really sort of policing who's
in bounds and who's out of bounds for the

most celebrated category of technological
agent, but I also want to sort of

introduce the idea that this is not
inconsistent in a way with diversity as a

market value. Capitalism is actually happy
to affirm difference if it can help sell

something, even though here we also see
the sort of, you know, cultural and even

legal system being brought to bear to
punish certain forms of difference. OK, so

at this point, this kind of statement is
really ubiquitous. This is from 2012 from

a TechCrunch post. In my mind, the
women in tech discussion should really be

framed as having different people with
different experiences and different

outlooks helps you build a better product.
So this is a pretty different framing of

difference than the one I just showed you.
But the point is capitalism is

actually able to sort of reconcile these
in these contradictions in a way. And you

can also see this is my name tag from a
Google sponsored event I attended for work

for this book. And they're not only saying
we need women to help us build a better

product, they're also reflecting back this
sort of symbol of femininity, you know, the

pink Venus sign, which, of course, turns a
lot of people off. But it's you know, if

you're thinking about marketing, it's a
way to symbolize this inclusion. Right?

Now, I'm going to put up the only horribly
academic slide I have for the whole talk.

This is a quote from Herman Gray who says,
"Abstract notions of rights and freedom

and their expansion to new subjects elide
the social salience of race and gender as

a basis of inequality even as it
culturally recognizes and celebrates

differences." So here we can see the
market is happy to recognize and celebrate

difference, to sort of take up, you know,
women in tech or whatever, while sort of

papering over and doing nothing to unseat
the sort of core, which is that race and

gender are bases of inequality. So you can
sort of have this lip service, abstract

expansion of, you know, new identities.
But what is sort of always intact is even

if you're sort of bringing one group over
and saying, oh, you know, you're part of

the dominant group, now, in some way.
The system of sorting is remaining intact

and in a less abstract way. Like in the US
this summer, there is huge Black Lives

Matter protests, uprisings. And pretty
quickly, all these companies started

saying, oh, yes, Black Lives Matter, we
support this. You know, Amazon was really

prominent among them. And yet Amazon
doesn't stop to question whether or not

it's exploiting racialized workforce
during Covid with warehouse work and

delivery work. These are some of the
lowest paid workers. They are not getting

health insurance. They're not getting
consistent hazard pay or protection. And

they're dying at disproportionate rates.
But Amazon is very happy to say black

lives matter as part of the PR. Similarly,
they're still basically building

surveillance equipment, but there's no
inconsistency between the sort of

recognition and celebration of difference
while working to continue to cement that

difference and exploit that difference.
So all of this is to say is that diversity

is, in my opinion, a rather toothless
value to sort of attach to the work and

the sort of meaning for what's at stake
with working with tech and with inclusion,

too. Diversity can sort of bring
our attention to these patterns of social

difference. But if it ends there, it can
actually kind of draw us in the wrong

directions without the tools we might need
to, you know, actually make some of the

more justice affirming points that I
think are why people are drawn to these

topics in the first place. OK, so after
this digression, getting more some into

how this relates to hacking and free
software. So I've established a sort of

legacy of division. And I want to sort of
underscore that the hacking and free

software milieu has had this commitment to
freedom and openness. That's definitely

been at the core pretty consistently. But
historically, this has really had to do

with, the freedom and openness has been
about controlling technology, some free

speech of course. It's definitely about
the individual's exercise of freedom

without necessarily a lot of thought about
who the individual is, who's maximally

empowered to be free, or it's been about
individuals in collectives, but that are

relatively small and relatively
homogenous. And so what I want to suggest

is this sat within the bigger context of
tech and division, but without really

acknowledging this, because the freedom of
the individual was presented as a sort of

universal value. Even though in practice
it really, really wasn't. And I think

around 15 to 20 years ago that really
started to change. When I started working

on this project, there was already a good
deal of agitation forming some of these

groups in free software and related
projects to especially draw attention to

the sort of disparities around women and
Py Star was initially for sort of women,

and it was was trans-inclusive and I think
pretty quickly this started as a women,

but then it became often non-binary and
trans-inclusive, so not the sort of

essentialist version of women. Something
happened in 2006 that really caused this

topic to really spring to the fore in a
lot of these communities. There was an EU

policy report that came out. So the
research was from 2004/2005 that showed

that the rate of participation by women
and FLOSS was less than 2% and that was

significantly less even than academic and
proprietary computer science. And so that,

I think, really shocked people who had
maybe sort of intuitively known, oh, yeah,

this isn't very representative, but that
number really galvanized a lot of

conversations and got people started
talking and organizing basically in new

ways. And so I'm now going to show just a
handful of sort of what this report

caused, which is a bunch of conversations.
This is from the hackers on planet Earth

Hope Conference in New York in 2006. And
it may not totally be clear what's going

on here, but some folks had responded to
this statistic on the one hand and this

quote from this United States senator who
had said something like, sort of gibberish

about he was supposed to be considering
net neutrality and internet regulation,

and he said something like, the internet
is a series of tubes. It's not a truck

that you dump something on. And everybody
was making fun of him for not even, you

know, understanding networked computing at
all. But these activists sort of put these

together in a sort of mash-up. And they
were selling t-shirts, actually, that said

"The Internet: A Series of Tubes". And as
you can see, that's a sort of textbook

representation of a female reproductive
system. And so they just sort of brought

this to the conference and they were
trying to force a conversation about it

because they estimated, this is not an
official count, but they estimated that

there were maybe, the ratio of women to
men at Hope was like 1:40. And so they

just wanted to force a conversation about
this. This is an artifact from a little bit

later, 2014, about the rise of explicitly
dedicated feminist hacker spaces, and this

is from the US and it's just a flyer for a
Zine-making workshop, which is again, a

pretty mundane thing, but just the sort of
difference between the 2006 sort of flag

planting and something a bit later where
there's actually a separate space here.

And crucially, Zine-making isn't
necessarily in bounds with traditional

hacking, but it is closer to sort of
strands of feminist consciousness raising

and riot grrrl. And so there's a sort of
intermingling of these different kind of

threads of DIY, basically. This is another
artifact from someone in Philadelphia who

was an artist and a designer and was
trying to find a way from the stuff that

she knew how to do with craft and sewing
and find a way into electronics and soft

circuits and doing new things. And so she,
kind of for her own exploration, knitted a

scarf using Ethernet cables. And for
her this was a kind of speculative object

that was meant to help her find her way
into electronics, but also to kind of

start conversations about why haven't
these things gotten together. Also seeing

gatherings like this one, a more sort of
explicitly radicalized feminist hacking

convergence. And I don't know if everybody
can read all the text, but it says

"Trans Futuristic Cyborgs, anti-racist,
anti-sexist, gynepunk, DIY-DiWO - so taking

DIY of a sort of heroic individualist to
doing it with others, making it more

self-consciously collective and less
individualist self-reliant. It also says

gender-hacking, anti-capitalism, libre
culture, technologies, bio-hacking. So

again a sort of spectrum of politics and
interventions around hacking and feminist

hacking. And I'm going to dwell for a
moment on feminist servers. Haven't spent

too much, haven't had too much text on
slides. But this one is. So these are

artifacts that were on the one hand,
basically, like an independently

maintained server run primarily by women-
identifying folks or non-masculine

identifying folks running free software,
but they're also a sort of list of

networking principles that gets out of
that more kind of literal artifactual mode

into a more sort of speculative and
aspirational sort of politics of what it

means to be doing this. And so the first
couple- it's actually a very long list and

I only have a handful up here - the first
couple, I think, are very consonant with

kind of mainstream hacking, wants networks
to be mutable and read-write accessible,

and radically questions the conditions for
serving and service experiments with

changing client-server relations. Those,
again, seem kind of axiomatic for

mainstream hacking. But then the feminist
server starts to go in some other

directions; is autonomous in the sense
that she decides her own dependencies. I

think this one's really interesting and
important. It's again, it's getting away

from this kind of heroic, individualistic
or almost sort of libertarian sense of

autonomy. It's just the autonomy is about
deciding where you're dependent and being

sort of transparent and open about that.
It's not about bootstrapping or being

individually self-sufficient; does not
strive for seamlessness, division of

labor; the not so fun stuff is made by
people. That's a feminist issue. That one,

I think is really important. A lot of
hacking that goes on in, say, a Global

North context is about the artifacts and
the practices in that moment. But here

this is, if it's not clear, drawing
attention to where did that come from, it

shouldn't be a seamless experience for you
not thinking about the pre-history, the

supply chain of this artifact, which
actually started with mining and

fabrication and assembly and shipping. And
will also have a post-use life, which

might be recycling, might be very
hazardous reclaiming of precious metals

by people without good labor protections,
or might not. But sort of instead of

having this all be invisible, sort of
drawing it forward treats technology as

part of a social reality. This is a big
one, but it's really just sort of opening

up the space to acknowledge that legacy of
division that I was talking about earlier.

And takes the risk of exposing her
insecurity. I like this one so much. It's

it's really evocative on a few levels. But
at the most sort of basic level, what I

want to point out is that it's very
different than, again, a sort of threat or

a strand of hacking that's about owning
hard, or mastery or something. Instead,

it's being, you know, sort of present with
oneself and with others and disclosing

insecurities, which could be network
insecurities or personal ones. Right. So

it's taking what it means to be engaging
in hacking and all these new and sort of

mutated directions. One more example from
the sort of feminist hacking that I want

to just tell you about for a second was
this exercise. I was at a feminist hacking

convergence in Montreal in 2016 and people
did a exercise in understanding public key

cryptography as a dance where, you know,
instead of learning about this theory,

people actually tried to embody it. So
placing your body in the relationship with

tech and often some of these things happen
in kind of explicitly separate spaces, but

going through the principles of
cryptography in a spontaneously

choreographed dance and then performing it
all together. OK, so these are some of the

ways, the mutant strains of feminist
hacking. I don't want to suggest that this

has been just a very linear and conflict-
free progression. And so I do want to

dwell for a moment on just a single
instance of conflict, which probably

the details will be unfamiliar, but there
might be a sort of wider recognition

I think. So this is from a hackerspace in
Philadelphia in 2011 and a handful of

members of the space proposed holding an
event to hack sex toys, and they thought

it was a pretty uncontroversial suggestion,
the same as having an Arduino night or a

... you know, I'm making stuff up. But
they sort of put it out there as this:

well, let's do this on the Saturday. And
they were really surprised when a bunch of

other members of the space were very
opposed to it. And this is in the book.

It's a design for a DIY flogger made from
a bicycle tube. And this was on the

proposed sort of flier for the event. And
so what happened was they were really

surprised that other people in the space
were sort of like, no, no, we don't want

to have this here. We don't think it's
appropriate. And so here's a quote from

one of the people who was opposing the
event. And he says: "A lot of the hackers

here at the space are the Make Magazine/
Instructables type, not the Julian

Assange HOPEconference attending type or
even the kind that cares much about a

global movement of hacker spaces. I'm not
sure what category dildo-hacking falls in.

For a lot of people, DIY has to do with
the sort of father-son nostalgia", end

quote. So this is really interesting,
because we've got this acknowledgment of

hacking being a variety of things, and
maybe again, for some people in a European

context where hacker spaces are often
more political, maybe this Make Magazine

sort of home-project, personal fabrication
will be a little bit unrecognizable or

even disappointing, but it is part of
hacking and making in the US. And then, of

course, there's the "information wants to
be free" HOPE-conference, lock-picking all

these kinds of things, hacking that he
acknowledges. But he he says, I'm not sure

what dildo-hacking is, maybe suggesting
it's not even hacking at all. And then he

says, for a lot of people, DIY has to do
with this father-son nostalgia, which I

hope might make you think of the picture
I had up at the very beginning of the

father-son with the radio apparatus. And
so it's really interesting that this sort

of proposal that these people didn't think
of as being controversial turned into

this, pretty full on argument about what
even hacking is in the sort of essential

way. And so here's a reply from one of the
people who had proposed the workshop, and

she says: "So my concern here is that it's
a hackerspace. Initiative shouldn't be

punished, particularly initiative that
shakes up old patterns. Our space is

really stratifying into hardware-tinkering
as the core interest , and white males as

the demographic. I'm really frustrated.",
end quote. And so this again, I assume

that this is fairly recognizable to folks.
Right? If the core of what hacking is, is

taking it upon yourself to take artifacts
and practices that you already know how to

do in a new direction; like that's what
hacking is, according to a lot of people.

And so she's really surprised and really
dismayed and really, I think felt very

hurt and rejected that this was flaring as
controversy, and was really surprised that

people were sort of raising the prospect
that dildo-hacking was interruption of

a nostalgic father-son tech practice, that
was somehow offensive. Certainly, it seems

like part of the problem might have been
the introduction of sexuality and maybe

questions about whose sexuality;
sexuality that didn't seem to center

straight men. What happened was this
didn't get resolved. The people who had

proposed the workshop - included women,
men and non-binary people - actually left.

They decamped to a new space that was
forming, that was forming with more kind

of feminist hacking principles and
welcomed them there. And the first space

stayed how they were and didn't have to
keep having conflicts and grapple with

this kind of controversy anymore because
the people - and they weren't kicked out -

but they decided to leave. And so, I know
these conflicts have been very painful and

and alienating for people who have
experienced them, even though maybe the

content of this one seems almost funny or
something in hindsight. But what I want to

propose is that part of why this has been
so difficult for people in these spaces is

that people are actually wrestling with
this whole legacy of division that I laid

out in the first part of the talk. So it
may feel like you're just having an

argument with your fellow group members
who are a lot like you, but then you're

breaking down along some kind of line that
you both can't cross over to with the

other one. But there's a sort of really
deep sedimentary layer of who has been

anointed the sort of power of agency over
tech and for whom that has been sort of

a taken for granted tacit assumption and
who's had to sort of assert their presence

or their right to be there in different
ways. And so when there are these

conflicts and flashpoints, all of that
stuff is there. And that's actually really

hard to solve anywhere. But it's very,
very hard to solve in elective

volunteeristic associations, I think, also
so not not to say impossible, but there's

a reason these conflicts are difficult.
OK, so returning to diversity and this is

the same quote, I won't read it again, but
the sort of idea that women in tech are

there to bring forward different
experiences and build a better product.

Diversity is maybe necessary to start
these conversations, or the idea of

diversity, but I don't think it's
sufficient for the purposes here. It's too

easily sitting alongside market values,
which I think are not what people in

hackerspaces are primarily most
interested in. And that's not really why

they're there. And it's also very easily
steered away from the important political

work that I think people in hacking
communities often want to do. It can sort

of mutate into this contradictory thing
where you've got sort of market values on

the one hand, and something that isn't
what you set out to do on the other hand,

and I'm going to illustrate that with this
somewhat more provocative example. This is

a meme I stole from the internet. But the
point here is that you can make these

diversity affirming slogans. And here
we've got "Black Lives Matter" and "Yes,

we can" and LGBT sort of flags or slogans
on a bomber. You can make these diversity

affirming slogans fit within a system that
is fundamentally violent, carceral,

militarized. It doesn't necessarily
challenge the system itself to bring

forward individuals' identities as members
of marginalized groups. In fact,

capitalism is actually quite happy to
resolve what might seem like contradiction

here, by commodifying identity, selling
it as a brand without resolving the

fundamental tensions that we know that are
here, that have to do with social power

and dominance and exploitation. So coming
back to the free software quote from the

beginning, as I said, this sort of hit
consensus, but I'm actually going to argue

it's not really going far enough. Diverse
participation and making proprietary

software extinct are fine, but I think
they actually do not fully capture what's

at stake in these very tough conversations
that have been happening in hacking and

free software groups. And so, we might
think of this as, again, a point of entry,

but we might want to take it a bit
farther. And this is as far as I'll go

with prescriptions or how-to. So specific
in local voluntaristic communities that

are either your hackerspace in the city
you live in or the the project that you...

that's distributed, but that you work on.
So articulate values and politics.

Diversity is a good one. But I'm going to
say it's necessary and not sufficient. And

some of the things that I talk about in
the book include like other forms of

political beliefs, like decolonization or
attention to militarism that can actually

sort of force you to have sometimes harder
conversations, but ones that can clarify

values and goals. Obviously, I don't need
to tell hacking groups, but keep

theorizing and keep experimenting. That is
a way, whether it's crypto dancing or not,

it's a way to sort of like walk yourself
through what you're trying to sort of

build and iterate. And within spaces - I
think at this point this is fairly

uncontroversial, but I do chronicle in the
book how people got here - making and

enforcing rules, having conversations
sometimes one on one, not a sort of public

conflagration, flame war. But if people
feel safe, respect each other enough

to actually talk through what is the sort
of point of contention or difference and

see if you can understand one another. The
other thing I want to point out though, is

that there's a whole lot of stuff going on
here that is much, much bigger than the

spaces and communities that you're in. And
so it is kind of a mistake and no one's

fault that you can't solve all of this in
the groups that you're in. And so there

also has to be much bigger society-wide
goals that we all have our eyes on,

because if we solve some of this stuff,
then, lo and behold, quote, "diversity in

tech" would be a lot easier and probably
less fraught and contentious. But things

like demilitarization, supply chain
justice, basic social equity, workplace

fairness, public reconciliation - I'm
giving US examples here - reparations,

land back. And obviously the one that's
coming for all of us, climate, is going to

be the biggest problem. It already is the
biggest problem in terms of, you know,

racial and economic and environmental
justice worldwide. So in conclusion, my

little take home slogan is that there's no
hack or tech audit for justice, but there

are these different levels and you can work
on one and work on another, but you can't

solve the really big stuff in the sort of
tech domain. And that's not a shortcoming,

and it's not for lack of trying. That is
all. I'm very happy to quit talking so

much and move to Q&A. Thank you so much
for your attention. Thanks.

Herald: All right. Thank you.
Dunbar-Hester: Thank you.

Herald: All right, everyone, questions on
Twitter, Mastodon, #rc3-two on IRC. We

wait for a little bit and ask the
questions in the meantime. So this

research for this book, when
did you actually do it, like timewise?

Dunbar-Hester: Yeah, it started, it
actually, we were talking before we had an

audience a little bit about radio. And my
earlier project was about people building

radio stations and - try to be brief - but
they had a very emancipatory set of ideas

about what it meant to teach people how to
build electronics or solder a transmitter

board or something. But they kept running
into some of these patterns of exclusion

that I mentioned. And so it was actually
through them that I heard about these

conversations that were starting to happen
in and hacking and open source communities

where people were trying to directly head-
on confront some of this stuff. So I think

I heard about it in around the 2006 era,
started working on it, maybe... It's about

2010 to about 2015, is the period
that I was actively, you know, going to

conferences and meet-ups and spaces and
interviewing people. So it's this sort of

snapshot. Yeah, that's the shortest
answer. Thanks.

Herald: All right. That's very interesting
because I kept thinking if you had

encountered this sort of rise of the alt-
right or something like this, because I

feel like in the last couple of years,
these discussions have just become so much

more radicalized and not from the left,
but from the right, like where you can

basically no longer talk about this
without just all hell breaking loose.

Right?
Dunbar-Hester: I think that's a really

interesting point. And I think you're
right. This does, I mean, I was finishing

the book during the Trump era over here,
and I know you've got your own counterparts

in Europe, but this is all very much within
that kind of Obama liberal, neo liberal

framing. And actually something I wrote
about, I think it's in the intro of the

book, is the Obama White House had a women
in STEM, as part of a women and people of

color in STEM, as part of a kind of
national security and a nationalist agenda

basically on their page. And the Trump
administration took it down. So I think,

and also in the book, there's a discussion
of a channel for Polish Python users where

they were like fretting about how to ban
Nazis from the channel and whether Nazis

were just people showing up and throwing
swastikas all over the IRC channel,

whether that was "trolling" or whether it
was real Nazis. And, yes, I think the sort

of stakes of some of this has gotten a lot
more stark. And so in certain ways,

the sort of "which side are you on?"-
questions are easier, but the sort of

depth of what's at stake and what's being
defended is maybe harder. So, yeah, the

political context is sort of
temporal is really is part of this, yeah.

Herald: All right. Now we turn to the IRC.
Have you looked into the woman in FLOSS as

perhaps being one with predominantly
engineers as mothers/fathers?

Dunbar-Hester: Sorry, could you repeat
women in FLOSS ...?

Herald: I think the question is whether
you have sort of noticed a pattern that

women that get into these spaces, sort of,
by their parents, have encountered

engineering, I think it's a familiar
context.

Dunbar-Hester: Yes, I have not personally
done research on that, but it does,

y'know, sort of other historical and
sociological research shows that people

who are exposed at a young age,
that's part of the differential. And even,

even in households where, say, a computer
came home early on, we're talking about a

slightly older generation. A computer came
home early on because parents brought it

into the house. You know, boys were more
likely to sort of claim it as theirs or

take time on it or start playing with it
even a couple or a few years earlier than

girls. And so, yeah, I haven't looked at
that, the sort of life narratives

directly, but other people have. And I
draw on that. And that's also something I

am hearing now from people who are adults
and are thinking about these problems and

how they want to not have their own kids
encounter the same problems or sort of

legacy of division. You definitely hear
people saying, "I want this to get solved

so my daughter doesn't have a hard time."
But that's a little outside of what

I've looked at, but it feeds in, yeah.
Herald: All right. All right. This is a

slightly longer question. I'll try to do
my best: I've witnessed a lot of white

feminism in FOSS, that's free open source
software, right? And FOSS diversity, equity

and inclusions. DEI Spaces. Is
intersectionality sufficiently recognized

as an issue in FOSS feminism, or is it
actually worse off due to the low number

of women in FOSS, around 2%.

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

FOSS have started to change. There's later
research that shows that they're up some.

The question about white feminism is a
really good one. And I do write in the

book about people sort of grappling with
that. And so the sort of trajectory was

the first category that people started to
notice of exclusion was women, and I think

I discussed how women opened up pretty
quickly to being non essentialist and

again, inclusive of trans and non binary
sorts of identities. But I think that the

race and the what I sometimes talk about
is sort of global positioning, the Global

North hackers in Europe and North America.
It is harder, I think, for them to sort of

deal as head on with, you know, race. And
I mean, these are fundamental questions of

racial capitalism. And so being positioned
within fairly well advantaged Global North

communities, it is harder to confront some
of those issues. I think there's a

consciousness of it, but I would say it's
a lot. What I observed was a lot greater

awareness and sort of development of
potential solutions for being inclusive of

women than a sort of really broadly
intersectional notion of women, including

people in Global South positions and in
racialized categories in the Global North.

And again, I think there's been a
sort of probably a shift in attention to

that, some of which postdates the
period in the book. But I also think that

that it's uniquely hard, I think, to
solve in volunturistic groups because the

forces, at least in the US and I would
speculate in Europe as well, like the

forces that cause inequality and
segregation. And, you know, like the tech

industry is a really good place to see
these contradictions, like what's going on

now with, like Google and the firing of Dr
Timnit Gebru is. You know, places where

there's a sort of capitalistic incentive
are not going to be able to solve these

problems of inequality because the profit
motive is always going to be there to

build surveillance tech, to assist
countries and that want to

build prisons. Again, this is what's
coming with climate stuff. And so saying,

oh, you need to hire more black women or
something is like running smack into these

contradictions. And this is part of why I
say this really can't be solved within

tech. And these are very big, thorny
issues. Another thing the final thing I'll

point out this is sort of rambling is for
a voluntaristic group, it's gonna be

easier to make fairly small interventions.
And so I think that that's. I actually

have somebody talking about this, like if
we make the space more inclusive to

anybody and say bad behavior isn't here or
isn't welcome here, you know, that can hit

a note where it might cause there to be a
sort of more inclusive community that

would be welcoming to a bunch of different
kinds of folks. But it's not necessarily

realistic to tailor in a voluntaristic group
that's more a response to the sort of forms

of exclusion all the kinds of
different people have experienced. And so,

again, I think this is kind of a question
of scale, but I really do think that the

sort of way that voluntaristic groups,
i.e. not the market, not workplaces,

articulate, you know, what they think the
problems are and how

they can sort of begin to talk about
solutions are really important precisely

because they're not hamstrung by the same
contradictions that for profit spaces are.

That was a long ... That's a really great
question. I do take it up. Some are the

people I was writing about. I think we're
starting to take it up. It's probably

more full throated now. And it's very
complicated.

Herald: Yes, all of these things.
Dunbar-Hester: Yeah.

Herald: Alright, we do have an interesting
question: "Would you advise people to try

to change communities from within or just
start new structures with more intersexual

spaces?"
Dunbar-Hester: I don't have a great answer

to that. I think it is kind of the
pressing question of the day, I think in a

lot of a lot of spaces, and I see good
answers on both sides, and I think it

depends perhaps. I do see a virtue in
some space being set aside, but how that a

separate space chooses to interface with a
sort of wider space is going to vary. And

I don't think, I don't think it's
necessarily a binary like you're either

totally outside or you're within having a,
you know, a big discussion about how to be

maximally inclusive. I think those things
are always kind of dialogically happening.

But I've seen people argue both sides of
it, and I've seen, I think, compelling

answers on both sides of it. But, yeah, it
is kind of the place where the idea that

we're sort of all taking up this project
together can start to, you know, break

down. And some people think you're really
losing. A lot of people go off and stop,

you know, working together as some sort of
unified group. And so, yeah, I don't

have a great answer that. I do write
about it in the book. And I would say it

depends on what the goals are. I think
having some separate space is probably

important in any event.
Herald: Yeah, it seems like it is like

these kind of hackerspace have at least
the advantage of being able to accommodate

sort of subgroups, right. So you can have
these certain events, certain working

groups that can focus on these issues. For
example, I think our host today, the xHain

hackerspace in Berlin, just started this
talk series "Gespräch unter Bäumen", which

is just "Talks below the trees", they have
a LED tree in their hackerspace, and it

just sort of naturally happened that it
had only women as speakers and it was just

this lovely natural evolution of just
having much more interesting topics and

not just, you know, the traditional male
hacker kind of topics. So I think it's

really cool. And you just have this
ability to have these initiatives inside

existing spaces somehow, but - just a rant
from my side. Someone had a question, the

title of the book is just "Hacking
Diversity", right? I think we mentioned

this at the beginning.
Dunbar-Hester: Yeah, I think the whole

title, if you look for hacking diversity,
you'll find it. My name, Princeton

University Press. Yeah. I'll not be
shameless and say it's on very deep sale

right now. If you were to buy it from
Princeton directly, there's a discount

code and it's on my Twitter. It's I think
it's "H - D - E - V - S" anyway - it's

40% percent off through like February.
Herald: Nice.

Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. It's very affordable.
Herald: Alright, can you comment on how

structures like GitHub that predominantly
value codes and missions and other highly

formalized tasks over community building
and less technical contributions play into

this nexus?
Dunbar-Hester: Yes, absolutely. I mean,

historically, the focus on the
artifact, what you could produce, the

code, even hardware, has taken on this
sort of exalted, symbolic meaning, and it

has definitely contributed to both the
denigration and the invisibility of people

who weren't doing that kind of work and
who might be doing community building or

even things documentation or translation,
right? With it's being global practices

that the sort of authors of the code are
getting the sort of priesthood

status and everyone else is sort of lower.
I think, again, awareness of that is

starting to change, but it's definitely
contributed to again historical sense that

there was underrepresentation of some
kinds of folks. And I think there are ways

you can, it sort of starts with raising
awareness of this. But again, that sort of

signal, the celebration of the the
technologist is coming in from all these

other places in the culture. And so
deprogramming that or something, as it

were, is is tough, but not impossible. And
again, I see that, I see that actually, at

least here as part of the sort of bigger
cultural war. And, you know, the idea that

the sort of tech is the, you know, godly
apparatus and everything else is, you

know, humanities and squishy soft stuff we
don't need that's going to fall away.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be as big of
a topic as that, but that's again, it's

all kind of in there. I don't know if
that answered a question, but, yes, that's

there. And I think that's something that
the first step in addressing it can be

acknowledging it and and building forms of
collaboration and that are not just sort

of like nominally non hierarchical, but
specifically raising visibility and

sort of credit giving to other kinds of
contributions.

Herald: So do you feel as someone that is
actually a science and technology scholar

that this feels as like is finally getting
recognized as something that exists and is

real? Because I always have this impression
that people just assume this doesn't exist

and no one thinks about this except them
and there is an entire academic field

about it. Do you think this is changing or
is it just to say?

Dunbar-Hester: I don't know. I mean, I
think that there's a there's a lot of

visibility on the one hand and even, you
know, something in the US with and who

knows what will be happening after COVID,
but, you know, public school systems were

having their budgets cut after the first
financial crisis in 2008. And one of the

things that was being proposed was moving
a hackerspace into a high school and sort

of having that, you know, come forward and
do things that institutions had maybe once

been doing. I think that that again, I'll
keep coming back to the tension between

what I think some of the most interesting
voluntaristic and politicized sort of

goals for these kinds of activities, them,
versus what the market wants them to do,

are, are sort of in tension. And there was
a moment where I was interviewing someone,

maybe and I want to say 2012, and I was
asking him questions about free software

and he was very kind but he said something
like, "Why are you asking me about free

software? Like that's dead.", you know,
like Open Source 1.0 - sort of. And I'm

not the only person who's written about
that at all, but I think this sort of idea

that there's something here that can't
just be, you know, co-opted by a market

like that's the hard part and, I mean. I
think there is a lot of there's continuing

to be a lot of attention to hackathons and
coding bootcamps and these kinds of

things. But I don't know, I guess I'm sort
of too inside and outside at the same time

to have a good answer. I think that
there's a well-established body of

scholarly recognition of these activities.
People look at me less weird talking about

this than a book about radio in the twenty
first century. But I think the sort of,

you know, really sustained work to sort of
disarticulate, disentangle some of this

from industry where it's getting the sort
of most not just attention, but the sort

of celebration and the ways that that can
kind of distort, I think, some of the

other intentions that is is always going
to be tough.

Herald: Allright. Wonderful. I think we're
out of time. So thank you very much.

Everyone, buy the book. And have a good
night. Bye, bye.

Dunbar-Hester: Good day.
Thank you so much. Thank you.

Herald: Thank you.

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