 All right, so our next talk is called Hacking Diversity, where we basically try to treat a really awkward question about the 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 of these ideas about diversity and everything. And today we try to answer the question, why this happens and maybe what we can do about it. Our speaker for this is Professor Christina Dambajesta. She's a professor at the University of Southern California, I think. And today she is preparing, 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. 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. Okay. Let me know. You should be able to see slides now. If that didn't work, let me know. Okay. 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 has been ejected from hacking for abusive behavior. And so there will be a warning preceding each of those. Okay, 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 frontiersman, a 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 shot the deer themselves. 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 frontiersman, 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 as a way to sort of refit masculinity for the way the society was changing. It was more urban. There was more specialized division of labor needing people to work in professional white collar fields with technology as opposed to going out and settling the West. And so here we see 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 curiosity, solving a problem, expressing your will with technology only with different sorts of technical artifacts. And so here this is the model railroad made very famous in Stephen Levy's book about hackers. We also have this is probably about the 1950s. We have phone freaking in the 1960s. And here this is also a 2600 magazine from the 80s sort of continuing to mythologize phone freaking going into the 70s. We see this with computers, the homebrew computer club, really important hobbyist formation for both, you know, the history of Silicon Valley, but also the history of hacking and free software 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 this slide is just an ad for a micro computer, but we can see, you know, 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 a sort of, you know, ancillary handmaiden for the sort of male agent here. And as I said, this is all 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 prescriptions, gender roles are a part of this, but it's 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. Okay, 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 again, 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 or of the picture of 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 sort of 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 kind of behind her. And so this control over technology is part of how white settler newly arrived Americans are sort of promoting and maintaining dominance over their new continent, their new continent. And you can actually see that 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 there's sort of, again, a biblical hierarchy of man over the beast. 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 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 II, operating the first electronic computers. This is ENIAC in the US. But 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 women's 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 maybe 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 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 was 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 non-white people, particularly women, particularly in this day and age, Asian have, quote, 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 this sort of overlay of Navajo weaving and microchip. So Nakamura calls this insourcing, sort of outsourcing before outsourcing. And now those laboratories and factories have mostly moved to Asia but this sort of period of experimentation with trying to 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, 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 U.S. will remember this, let alone outside of the U.S., but this is a student, a high school student who is a Sudanese American, I believe, who was 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. Okay, 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 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, you know, they're not only saying, you know, 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. 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, you know, 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 U.S. this summer, there's huge, you know, 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, you know, warehouse work and delivery work. These are some of the lowest paid workers. They are not getting health insurance. They're not getting consistent, you know, hazard pay or protection. And they're dying at disproportionate rates. But, you know, Amazon's very happy to say Black Lives Matter is part of the PR. Similarly, they're still, you know, basically building surveillance equipment. But there's, you know, 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 the work and the sort of meaning for, you know, 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, you know, justice-affirming points that I think are why people are drawn to these topics in the first place. Okay, 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. So that's definitely been at the core pretty consistently. But historically, this has really had to do with, you know, 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, you know, who the individual is who's maximally empowered to, you know, 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, you know, 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 PyStar was initially for sort of women and it was trans-inclusive and, you know, I think pretty quickly this started as a women but then it became often non-binary and trans-inclusive so not a sort of essentialist version of women. Something happened in 2006 that really caused this topic to really spring to the fore and a lot of these communities there was an EU policy report that came out so the research was from, you know, 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 again 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 that's not a truck that you dump something on and everybody was making fun of him for not even, you know, understanding network computing at all but these activists sort of put these together and sort of mashed 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 like a female reproductive system and so they just sort of brought this to the conference and they were, you know, 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 to 40 and so they just wanted to force a conversation about this. This is an artifact from a little bit later, 2014, but the rise of explicitly dedicated feminist hacker spaces and this is from the U.S. 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, you know, zine-making isn't necessarily in bounds with traditional hacking but it is closer to sort of strands of, you know, feminist consciousness raising and, you know, riot girl 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, you know, craft and sewing and find a way into electronics and soft circuits and, you know, 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, you know, why haven't these things gone 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, gyna-punk, DIY, DIWO taking DIY of a sort of heroic individualist to doing it with others making it more self-consciously collective and less, you know, individualist, self-reliant. It also says, gender hacking, anti-capitalism, libre culture, technology is biohacking. 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. It 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 where you're not thinking about the prehistory, the supply chain of this artifact, which actually started with mining and fabrication and assembly and shipping. And we'll 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 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 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 thread or a strand of hacking that's about owning hard or mastery or something. Instead, it's being sort of present with oneself and with others and disclosing insecurities, which could be network insecurities or personal ones. So it's taking what it means to be engaging and hacking in 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 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 spontaneously choreographed dance and then performing it all together. Okay, so these are some of the, again, 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 Hacker Space 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 uncontroversal suggestion, the same as having an Arduino night or I'm making stuff up. But, you know, they sort of put it out there as this like, well, let's do this on this 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 flyer for the event. And so what happened was they were they were really surprised that other people in the space were sort of like, no, no, we don't want to have this year. 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 Hope Conference 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 a sort of father son nostalgia. End quote. So this is really interesting. Because we've got this acknowledgement of hacking being a variety of things, right? And maybe again, for some people in European contexts 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 U.S. 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 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 with this sort of proposal that these people didn't think of as being controversial turned into this, you know, 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 hacker space. Initiatives shouldn't be punished, particularly initiative that stakes 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. And quote. And so this, again, I assume that this is fairly recognizable to folks, right? That's sort of 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, you know, 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, you know, was really surprised that people were sort of raising the prospect that, you know, dildo hacking was this interruption of a nostalgic father son, a tech practice that, you know, was somehow offensive. Certainly it seems like part of the problem might have been the introduction of sexuality and maybe questions about who's sexuality, sexuality that didn't seem to center straight men. What happened was this didn't get resolved. The people who'd proposed the workshop to get 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, you know, stayed how they were and didn't have to, you know, 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, you know, I know these conflicts have been very painful and alienating for people who have experienced them, even though maybe the content of this one seems almost, you know, 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 know, you're just having an argument with your, you know, fellow group members who are a lot like you, but then you're breaking down along some kind of, you know, line that you both, you know, can't cross over to with the other one. But there's a sort of really deep sedimentary layer of, you know, who has been anointed the sort of power of agency over tech and, you know, for whom that has been sort of a taken for granted task that 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, you know, conflicts and flash points, 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 to say impossible, but like there's a reason these conflicts are difficult. Okay, so returning to diversity. And this is the same quote, I won't read it again. But the, you know, sort of idea that women in tech are there to bring forward different experiences and build a better product, you know, 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, you know, sitting alongside market values, which I think are not what people in hacker spaces 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, you know, 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. You know, here we've got Black Lives Matter and Yes We Can and LGBT sort of flags or slogans on a bomber, right? 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, again, very tough conversations that have been happening and hacking and free software groups. And so, you know, 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, volunteeristic communities, you know, that are either your hacker space in the city you live in or the project 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, you know, hacking groups, but keep theorizing and keep experimenting. That is a way, you know, 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 space, 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, right? Not a sort of public conflagration flame more, but you know, if people feel safe, you know, 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, you know, all have our eyes on, because if we solve some of this stuff, then low 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 U.S. examples here, reparations, land back. And obviously the one that's coming for all of us climate is going to be, you know, the biggest problem that 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 know, 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. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right, everyone. Questions on Twitter, Mastodon, RC32 on ISE. We will wait for a little bit and ask the question in the meantime. So this research for this book, when did you actually do it? Like time-wise? 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 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. And maybe it's about 2010 to about 2015 is the period that I was actively going to conferences and meetups and spaces and interviewing people. So it's a sort of snapshot. Yeah, that's the sort of answer. Thanks. All right, that's very interesting because I kept thinking if you had encountered this sort of the 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. I think that's a really interesting point. And I think you're right. 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 a kind of Obama liberal neoliberal framing. And actually something I wrote about I think is in the intro of the book is the Obama White House had women in STEM as part of a women and people of color in STEM as part of a kind of national security and nationalist agenda basically on their page. And the Trump administration took it down. So I think and also in the book, there is 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 or the sort of temporal is really is part of this. Yeah. All right. Now we turn to the ISE. Have you looked into the woman in floss as perhaps being one with predominantly engineers as a mother slash fathers? Sorry, could you repeat women? I think the question is whether you have sort of noticed a pattern that women that get into these spaces are sort of by their parents have encountered engineering. I think as familiar context. Yes, I have not personally done research on that, but it does. Other, you know, sort of historical and more sociological research shows that people with who are exposed, you know, at a young age that that's part of the differential. And even even in households where, say, a computer came home early on talking about a slightly older generation, a computer came home early on because, you know, parents brought it into the house. You know, boys were more likely to sort of claim it is 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, those sort of life narratives directly, but other people have and I draw on that. And that's also something I am hearing now, you know, 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, you know, I want this to get solved so my daughter doesn't have a hard time. But that's that's a little outside of what I've looked at, but it feeds in. Yeah. 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 FOSSO, that's free open source software, right? And FOS diversity, equity and inclusions, DEI spaces, is intersectionality sufficiently recognized as an issue in FOS feminism or is it actually worse off due to the low number of women in FOS around 2%? Great. Yeah. So I couldn't, a first cell flag that the numbers in FOS have started to change. There's later research that shows that there are 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 discuss 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, you know, 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 fundamentally questions of racial capitalism. And so being positioned within fairly well advantaged, you know, 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. Then, you know, 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 I think there's been a sort of probably shift in attention to that, some of which post post dates the period in the book. But I also think that that is, it's uniquely hard, I think, to solve involuntaristic 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, you know, Google and the firing of Dr. Tim Jibru 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, you know, countries and, you know, that want to build prisons. Again, this is what's coming with climate stuff. And so saying, oh, you need to hire, you know, 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 going to 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, you know, 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 small, a response to the sort of forms of exclusion all the kinds of different people have experienced. And so, again, I think of this as 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 what they can, you know, 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, it's a really great question. I do take it up some. The people I was writing about, I think we're starting to take it up some. It's probably more full-throated now. And it's very complicated. Yes, all of these things. Yeah. All right, we have an interesting question. Would you advise people to try to change communities from within or just start new structures with more intersectional spaces? I don't have a great answer to that. I think it's kind of the pressing question of the day, I think, in 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 separate space chooses to interface with a sort of wider space is going to vary. And I don't think it's necessarily a binary, like you're either totally outside or you're within having 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 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 to 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. Yeah, it seems like these kind of hacker spaces have at least the advantage of being able to accommodate subgroups, right? So you can have these certain events or these certain working groups that can focus on these issues. For example, I think our host today, the Exxon Hacker Space in Berlin, they started this talk series, Gespräch unter Bäumen, which is just talks below the tree. They have an LED tree in their hacker space. And it just sort of naturally happened that it would have 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 when you just have these ability to have these initiatives inside existing spaces somehow. But just a rant from my side. Oh, someone had a question. The title of the book is just Hacking Diversity, right? I think we mentioned this at the beginning. Yeah, I think the whole title. Yeah, if you look for Hacking Diversity, you'll find it. My name, Princeton University Press. Yeah. Nice. Oh, and I'll 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. I think it's H-D-E-V-S. Anyway, it's 40% off through like February. Nice. Yeah. It's very affordable. Can you comment on how structures like GitHub that predominantly value code submissions and other highly formalized tasks over community building and less technical contributions play into this nexus? Yes, absolutely. Historically, the focus on, you know, the artifact, what you get produced, 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, you know, things, documentation or translation, right, with its being global practices, that the sort of authors of the code are getting this sort of, you know, 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, the historical sense that there was underrepresentation of some kinds of folks. And I think there are ways you can, I mean, it sort of starts with raising awareness of this. But again, that sort of signal, the celebration of the technologist is coming in from all these other places in the culture. And so, deprogramming that or something as it were is tough but not impossible. And again, I see that, I see that actually at least here as part of a sort of bigger culture war. And, you know, the idea that that 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, you know, fall away. And 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 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. So do you feel as someone that is actually a science and technology scholar that this feel as like is finally getting recognized as something that exists is real because I always have this impression that people just assume this doesn't exist or no one thinks about this except them. And as an entire academic field about it, do you think this is changing or is it just the same as always? 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, you know, moving a hacker space 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 again, I'll keep coming back to the tension between what I think some of the most interesting, the volunteeristic and politicized sort of goals for these kinds of activities. Them versus what the market wants them to do are our sort of intention. And there was a moment where I was interviewing someone maybe in, 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, we mean opens, like open source one sort of. And I'm not the only person who's written about that at all. But I think the 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, you know, hackathons and coding boot camps 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 like scholarly recognition of these activities. I think people look at me less weird talking about this than a book about radio in the 21st century. But I think the sort of, you know, really sustained work to sort of disarticulate and disentangle some of this from industry where it's getting the sort of most, not just attention, but the sort of most celebration and the ways that that can kind of distort, I think, some of the other intentions that is always going to be tough. All right, wonderful. I think we're out of time. So thank you very much. Everyone buy the book and have a good night. Bye-bye. Good day. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.