Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Hacking Diversity by Christina Dunbar-Hester
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures by Christina Dunbar-Hester (on OpenLibrary)
As someone deeply involved in the maker/hacker scene who’d also like it to be more diverse and welcoming, this was obviously of interest to me. There’s a fair bit that I had some knowledge/understanding of beforehand, but it gave me lots to think about around the layers of overlapping issues and challenges that we face.
It reaffirmed and hardened my thoughts that the FLOSS and hacker communities need a clearer understanding of how we can build and wield power.
Here are the sections I “dog-eared” while reading:
Page 11
Historian of technology Leo Marx has persuasively argued that technological development was not initially bound to human progress; while it could be in the service of human progress, it was not interchangeable, at least in the early American republic.
Page 40
As [the preceding] passage illustrates, free software and open source both do and do not refer to the same thing. The practices that define and unify the mode of production to which these labels refer are sharing source code, conceiving of openness, writing licenses, and coordinating collaborations.
Page 41
A cognate offline phenomenom, with some of the same political ambiguities, is the hackerspace, or hacklab. Hackerspaces port the open-source software ethos to the domain of hardware. Their emblem is the 3D printer, which produces tangible objects whose design is endlessly modifiable. In these spaces, like-minded people come together to hack, learn, socialize and experiment.
[…]
Hackerspaces appeared around the turn of the millennium in Europe, picking up steam after 2005, and reaching North America in approximately 2006, via Germany’s Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest association of hackers.
Page 47
Arguably, to be a geek is to assume a subject position in a technologically advanced society where an abundance of gear and surfeit of time (whether one’s own leisure time, volunteer labor, time stolen from an emmployer, of something in between) can be presumed.
[…]
It is not a coincidence that some of the values of geek communities, including self-organization and peer production, can be easily ported onto discourses of entrepreneurship and bootstrapping.
Page 48
At present, exhortations to “learn to code” are all but deafening. This book shows why the reply, “learn history and social theory!” is not a snarky rejoinder, but an absolutely essential pointer to the means to effectively grasp the economic, technological, and cultural stakes in contestations over diversity in tech fields, and inequality and pluralism more broadly. Everyone becoming a technologist is not a way out; universalist longings cannot unseat sticky dilemmas of inclusion, belonging, and differential social and economic power.
Page 51
It is assumed that individuals will choose to participate [in FLOSS projects] on their own terms and largely define those terms.
This has often resulted in naturally emerging hierarchies based on technical skill and reputational capital. Technical expertise is notoriously undemocratic and prone to hierarchy even when participants are committed to democratization, which they often are not, in part due to a historical legacy of engineering as an elite body of knowledge and practice. Technical projects may be especially difficult to run in a radically egalitarian manner, as some people are bound to be more expert than others: egalitarian politics may sit uneasily along unequally distributed expertise.
Page 60
Continuing to dissect the failed promise of hackerspaces, Grenzfurthner raised issues of social inclusion. He claimed that in spite of their self-promotion as being some of the most open spaces, hackerspaces were “usually white, male, heterosexist.” He commented that, “Even in Germany, where there is a longer tradition of hackerspaces than in the US, it’s hard to find Turkish members in German hackerspaces.” Speaking of a neighborhood of Montréal, Canada where a hackerspace was located, he said you might find an area “where predominantly black people live, you might find a hackerspace that doesn’t have a single black member. . . . We’re the gentrifying nerds, but we’re not trying to talk to the people who live near to us. That’s kind of bad. […]”
[…]
While not blaming hackers for the existence of these stratifications, he argued that the present practices of hackerspace communities were not up to undertaking dialogue with or being truly welcoming to neighbors or community members different from themselves, and he saw substantial room for improvement.
Page 89
She advocated for having an accountable, transparent hierarchy, which was as horizontal and distributed as possible, instead of having unofficial leaders who governed projects through charisma, reputational capital, or technical prowess.
Page 95
The underarticulated politics of open source, useful in some circumstances, leave its practitioners ill-equipped to best manage current calls for diversity. If their political ethos is one of classical liberalism, it should not matter if some people want to depart to hack on a new project or space: there is ample room for the pursuit of many ideas. On the other hand, there is a communitarian umpulse that indicates that a greater good—and stronger movement—will emerge from everyone hacking together. In other words, to fork is not a solution if the goal is to make the community work better for all participants. There is a striking tension between hacking as meritocratic undertaking and the need to think about seemingly extraneous topics such as who’s in our group? or who is winning our arguments?
Page 104
The significance of the LilyPad exceeds the application of this particular circuitboard or any specific project that incorporates it. In combining hobbyist electronics and sewing, it locates hobbyist electronics as being within the purview of feminine craft.
Page 106
This comment is going to sound gendered, but I think a great intro would be “hack your oven.” Find a device you already use, take out the proprietary crap that controls it, and control it yourself.
Page 113
Autonomy is a key component of both hacker and cyberfeminist beliefs about technology, which are complex but have roots in the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s and 80s, and in the older American notion of self-reliance. It also echoes the small producer ethos of indie and punk music scenes, and DIY, as practiced—particularly in Europe—within squatter movements and autonomist political movements.
Page 115
The servers are autonomous, but not along the lines of a notion of autonomy that foregrounds heroic self-reliance (“She decides for her own dependencies”). Their technology is recentered around social relationships (“Treats technology as part of a social reality”; “Builds on the materiality of software, hardware, and the bodies gathered around it”; are run by a caring community)
Page 119
I include this discussion of spaces because products are affected by their producers’ access to work spaces. In spaces where one cannot solder or leave behind a project in progress, material products are less likely than less tangible ones. Of course, New York City in the early twenty-first century is an especially daunting place to carve out an autonomous space. Nonetheless, pursuit of autonomy of infrastructure often means carving out impermanent spaces that are highly contingent—often borrowed from corporations or other sorts of organizations—and being prepared to move. These enterprises are thus fragile, and the difficulty of scaling up projects that revolve around tools and artifacts that are challenging to move is clear.
Page 121
[Dreamwidth, a fork of LiveJournal] is for-profit, but not especially growth-oriented; its leaders are content to cover costs, ensure reliability, and turn a small profit instead of focusing on ever-growing expansion. Two-thirds of the company’s profits were earmarked for developments, with half of that amount put toward developments chosen by the Dreamwidth user and developer community.
Page 126
But like other free software projects, in relying on enthusiastic volunteer developers, the [Dreamwidth] software project chose a relationship to remunerated acts of production in which it is indeed dependent on paid labor, but paid labor that provides leisure or volunteer time on the side. In all cases, projects stake their autonomous existences in relation to paid work, more and less self-consciously (and sometimes including employer or corporate munificence in the form of surplus or waste).
Page 131
The relationship between paid work and open-technology projects contains many somewhat paradoxical elements. As STS scholar Anita Chan writes, “Few practices seemed to be so effective at generating the intense enthusiasm and heightened investments of global free labor that free software participants—as highly skilled information classes, no less—so extravagantly displayed.
Page 136
Liane said in an interview that the social critique she believed in ran deeper than changing the gender balance in IT industry employment. She spoke of her personal history that had led her out of high-status programming work and into full-time diversity advocacy. She said that hackers and coders have
faith in progress, science and technology ... People want to do something with a purpose, that has a point. I think people want to believe that they're doing a good thing [But now I see it as,] if you're defining [progress] as building a better product that concentrating wealth a few, [the status quo] is working great, [but this assumption is wrong]. When I started [as a programmer] I was doing capitalism [and I was fine with that, but] I no longer make the argument about [building] a better product. There is a collision between science kids with a nerdy mindset who want to do good, who work for an industry that is corrupt.
Page 142
In both of these examples, advocates for diversity articulate an alternative value system they hope to implement around technology and technical practice, wherein not only who participates in technological production is changes, but why and how people engage with technology is altered.
Page 145
A founder of a Seattle hackerspace that emphasized inclusion remarked, “Hacker spaces are a sort of gateway into exploring everything. By encouraging the taking apart of ‘closed’ objects … we can begin to form mindsets which make exploration and understanding necessary joys in life.” “Exploration” and “taking apart closed objects” are politically inchoate, but they potentially point to realignment of power relations, especially when experienced collectively.
Page 146
Diversity advocacy appears to bring together people whose politics and agendas might not otherwise align. This diversity work could be viewed as building capacity and social infrastructure for sustained political challenge to prevailing technical cultures and industries. Another possibility, though, is that diversity is part of the problem: as Ahmed writes, diversity can easily “detach from scary issues, such as power and inequality. […]”
Page 153
This is an important point—for all the ink that has been spilled trying to nail down what the politics of hacking might be, it is definitely important to note that a significant proportion of contemporary hacking is essentially in line with the original iteration of DIY in the US, a project of suburban postwar homeowners’ infusing a bit of “autonomous production” into their consumption practices.
Page 154
technology is politics by other means, whether or not this is explicitly acknowledged.
Page 156
Sam, a genderqueer developer from the San Francisco Bay Area reflected:
There is a gulf between tech and [my background in] queer activism. "Tech for the common good" [as a framing] is missing an edge. [I think about] bringing a different or more radical kind of activism to open source or to tech. [If my workplace supports a cause like,] Let's make sure kids are web-literate, [I am thinking,] What about prison? There are people who really don't have access to communication.
Page 170
For Clara, there was a difference between being a techno-enthusiast and someone who had thought deeply about power relations and ethics in relation to technology—in other words, a “disciplined” technologist.
Page 181
But she also points to one difficulty for hackers agaginst colonialism: they are always already implicated in relationships of dominance and dependence. This is true for any person on earth, but it is uniquely true for technologists, who are so often called upon to execute political mandates under the guise of neutral technocratic intervention.
Page 191
This comment is quite illuminating. The hackerspace member allows for a range of hacking practices, first invoking an independent producer ideal, exemplified in Make magazine (though Maker Faire and much of DIY actually reproduces consumer culture). He next refers to a more politicized, Wikileaks-esque, information-wants-to-be-free sort of hacker. Then, he correctly signals the heritage of DIY as a way to impart technical affinity to boys. Notably, while he allows for different motivations for hacking, they are all tied to masculinity, which is marked, and whiteness, which is not. In other words, part of what diversity advocates struggled to address was that even as hacking itself might be malleable enough to encompass a range of politics and practices, the default hacker was under all of these scenarios a man or a boy.
Page 192
Joseph Reagle writes that the RTFM norm can provide a positive incentive toward self-cultivation: one will be valued if one strives “to learn [to code], to write a useful utility, and [then] to share [one’s] learning and its fruits with others.” Less positively, of course, this directive to independently cultivate and exhibit mastery can also be used to intimidate, to shame, and to turn off newcomers who are for whatever reason unwilling or unable to flourish under these conditions.
Page 208
To this, another woman replied, “I get a comment if I wear a skirt or pants. It underscores that I’m being watched.” All these comments make evident that there is no neutral or default way for women* to present in tech workplaces or hobbyist spaces (which clarifies the appeal of separate spaces, as discussed in chapter 4). As I found entering the 2011 PyCon, eyes will be on you if you present in a way that deviates from the expected masculine presentation; even though this may not feel like hostile attention, it can be palpable.
Page 209
“hair color is not a solution, but it’s mitigating. It can draw attention, but in a way that’s respectful.”
[…]
And geek identity has long been bound up with certain kinds of outsider-ness, as described in chapter 2. In FLOSS hackerspaces, geekhood carries echoes of countercultural selfhoods as well: hippies, back-to-the-landers, squatters.
Page 215
Because of this legacy, the people-of-color-led makerspace in Oakland self-consciously called itself a makerspace, not a hackerspace. June, a founder who is East Asian-American, said in an interview, “‘Makerspace’ is more welcoming than ‘hackerspace.’ We do a variety of activities here, and we want people to be attracted to us, not to put on [events] where we tell them what to do—we want there to be cross-pollination [between what they are already doing and our mission].”
Page 228
Recognition within a segment of culture affectively devoted to technological production is not equivalent to just conditions within the wider society, and while the former may be ameliorative, it is no substitute for the latter.
Page 230
At stake for members of this social formation are large, important, and often quite abstract social goods, including democratic participation, agency over technology, and often social justice; all of these concerns are imbricated for them. The preceding chapters explored a variety of diversity advocates’ interventions, which include changing rules and norms in open-technology communities, creating separate spaces for feminist hacking, bringing to the surface other political concerns like militarism and colonialism, and questioning the makeup of open-technology communitites.
Page 239
In other words, not only should we push back on the notion that all must learn to code, we should also push for geeks and technocrats to learn more social theory and history.