*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.
*postroll music*
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