“Glamorous Factories of Unpredictable Freedom”: Care, Coalition, and Hacking Hacking

7. “Glamorous factories of unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, and Hacking Hacking

CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER

Let’s start to work on this and see what would happen if we change the somehow boring hackerspaces of the present into some glamorous factories of an unpredictable freedom for all of us even those who do not ﬁt in the classical nerd scheme. Change the nerds. … For you and for me and the entire human race. —Grenzfurthner & Schneider (2009)

Hacking is an ideologically charged mode of technical and cultural production. In the first decades of the 21st century, it casts a long shadow. Many undertakings might now be considered variants of hacking, from modding cars to crafting to DIY. An earlier and more bounded meaning centers around computer programming, of course. But hackers were not always coders; their lineage can be traced through phone phreaking and other sorts of tinker-y attempts at technical mastery, including lock-picking, in the latter half of the 20th century. Rather than focusing on material output—lines of computer code, picked locks, or other artifacts—we should consider hacking as a worldview. Its adherents assert that cultural and technical artifacts should be left open to allow endless modification, reinterpretation, and re-fashioning toward purposes beyond those for which they were originally created (Coleman, 2012; Jordan, 2017; Kelty, 2008). This fervent commitment to openness has led to some cultural blind spots, including a central contradiction in hacking and open source software communities. On the one hand, these communities’ norms dictate that these communities be open to whomever wants to be there, which has tended to perpetuate the notion that if some people are not there, it is because they do not wish to be, or because they are unworthy; community members historically have claimed that they are satisfied having 106 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER their ranks constituted by the best and brightest who both self-select and prove their merits (Nafus, 2012; Reagle, 2013). On the other hand, because hackers are evangelists for their mode of technical engagement, they believe that more people hacking will lead to the creation of more, new, and better technologies, so they wish to increase their ranks and thereby the revolution- ary potential of technological production in general and networked computing in particular. Growth potential in hacker communities is thus held to be nearly unlimited: in the breathless words of the Free Software Foundation, “If we want to make proprietary software extinct, we need everyone on the planet to engage with free software. To get there, we need people of all gen- ders, races, sexual orientations, and abilities leading the way. That gives the free software movement a mandate to identify under-represented groups and remove their barriers to access” (2012). These issues matter even outside of hacking because peer production and self-organizing modes of production, key features of digital cultures, are commonly assumed to have implications for how industrial patterns may be organized in the future (Turner, 2009). Especially when notions of peer production become hitched to matters of social organization, there are good reasons to consider carefully the implications for social equality and egalitarian values (Kreiss, Finn, & Turner, 2011). This chapter is not about hacking in hardware or software, but rather about hacking hacking itself. In the early years of the 21st century, as free software communities matured, they began to recognize that their contributor bases were overwhelmingly composed of men. A 2006 European Union policy report revealed that fewer than 2% of free software practitioners were women, which catalyzed attention to these matters (Nafus, Leach, & Krieger, 2006). Many hackers decided that what Grenzfurthner & Schneider (2009) called the “classical nerd scheme”, which has tended to favor men and elites, was insufficient to realize their goals (Dunbar-Hester, 2016; Eglash, 2002). With increasing urgency, groups formed to support individuals defined as “others” in open source and hacking. Significantly, the rough consensus and running code ethos that supported practitioners’ self-organization around technical production was reoriented to hack their communities. These voluntaristic efforts to reconstitute open technology communities are the subject of this chapter. In order to assess them, I draw on discussions in feminist Science & Technology Studies (STS). I argue that focusing on the missing or underrepresented people in hacking is an extension of I-methodology, and that people who wish to hack hacking on more generative grounds should lessen their focus on technological production and instead emphasize care in social relations, coupled with critical analysis. “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 107

Sites and Methods

The sites of engagement with technology around which we can witness hacking being hacked can be grouped together under the umbrella of open technology, especially but not limited to free and open source software.1 Free/ Libre and open source software (FLOSS) is a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation of code that is made openly available through a reinterpretation of copyright law; it is also an ideologically inflected mode of production and authorship that seeks to reorient power in light of participants’ understandings of the moral and technical possibilities presented by the Internet (Kelty, 2008). Hackerspaces are a cognate offline phenomenon, community workspaces where people with interest in computers, craft, and other types of fabrication come together to socialize and collaborate. These sites are far from monolithic, but they are more alike—bound together by a shared (if not singular) political and technical imaginary—than they are different. Hacking here is about an expression of agency and not necessarily a desire to trespass or “pwn” (defeat) (although some hacking subcultures pos- sess this feature). Open technology broadens the ethos of FLOSS to encom- pass artifacts beyond software, including craft and hardware (Fox, Ulgado, & Rosner, 2015; Powell, 2012). Hacking and FLOSS participation often take on meaning as communal and shared actions. Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has demonstrated that hackers deploy a range of political stances including agnosticism and denial of formal politics (exceeding software freedom), although implications for intel- lectual property in particular are at least implicit and often explicit in the technical and social practices of hacking (Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2008). Scholars have noted that the denial of formal politics makes FLOSS an unlikely site for gender and diversity activism, at least historically (Nafus, 2012; Reagle, 2013). But FLOSS and hacking projects are not monolithic and have matured over time; arguably, the diversity advocacy that is the subject of this chapter represents a turning point within the collectivities whose focus is on hacking. The shared enthusiasm for hacking and crafting code that unites FLOSS communities has collided with a realization that to consider these communities open in an uncomplicated way is naïve. FLOSS projects and hackerspaces are also in dialogue with the wider culture, which is awash in “women in tech” discourses (including the high profile of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In). The raft of open technology initiatives geared toward changing their communities’ constitutions must be placed within this con- text, while keeping in mind that geek politics exist along a continuum. 108 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER

In this chapter, I examine diversity work in hacking. Elsewhere I have asked, “if ‘diversity’ is the answer, what is the question?” (Dunbar-Hester, 2019). In asking this, I mean to zero in on the complex and sometimes con- tradictory ways in which advocates articulate and operationalize their efforts. Unlike actors, I am not seeking answers for how to get more women or members of other underrepresented groups into hacking or technological production. This is not to denigrate their efforts, but to enunciate that my work as analyst is distinct from theirs. Rather, I am inquiring into the political potentials and limits of emphasizing particular aspects of these matters (and muting others). Diversity advocacy is multi-sited and multi-vocal. My research methods here are informed by an ethnographic sensibility, but lack the deep hanging out component that is a hallmark of traditional single-site ethnographic studies (Geertz, 1998). Instead, I mirror the distributed nature of this advocacy, conducting participation observation at a number of sites (predominantly North American and a few European hackerspaces, fablabs, software conferences, unconferences for women in open technology, corporate events, and software training events/meetups). One thing to note is the relevance of my own subject position and social identity to this research. As a White, middle-class, highly educated and literate person in North America, and native English speaker, these communities and their conversations are relatively accessible to me and hospitable to my presence; my presence usually required little justification, although I did identify myself as a researcher. That said, my training, expertise, and commitments are those of the academy, specifically interpretive social science, not computer coding, geeking or hacking, navigating NGOs or startups, or feminist activism. Of special importance is my position as a person with a feminine gender identity. Many of these sites are closed to people who do not identify as women (although most are explicitly genderqueer and trans*-inclusive, some required that people identify as women “in ways that are significant” to themselves). Fieldwork and data gathering spans approximately 2009–2016, with con- tinuous attention to listservs and online traffic, and punctuated conference attendance and interviewing. This period is meaningful because it saw several feminist hackerspaces appear as well as growing attention to gender in mainstream open source; at the same time, it is a snapshot of an unfolding story with both a prehistory and a future that are outside the scope of the present research. It is significant that several initiatives that became research sites were born during this period; although this indicates that I had my fin- ger on the pulse of a meaningful social phenomenon, it also means that the objects of study were a moving target and hard to identify before the fact, “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 109 which creates a methodological challenge. I interviewed participants in these activities as well as founders of hackerspaces, open source software projects, and initiatives to promote diversity in open technology (16 semi-structured interviews and around 10 informal interviews). And I followed much online activity, lurking on project lists and following social media, which is valuable because many of these efforts are coordinated and distributed across space, even if they also include local, static components in real life such as hacker— and maker-spaces, or project—or programming-language-based meetups. Conferences, of course, are important not only for the ritual elements that occur when a community comes together for a short time, but also for the information that is transmitted within them, so I made a special effort to attend a variety of in-person workshops and conferences. In weaving together these threads of activity, I map the meaningful (and contested) discourses that suffuse diversity advocacy. Names in this account have been changed. Though some informants said they did not mind being identified by either real name or hacker handle, many were concerned about appearing to speak for workplaces (especially) or voluntaristic organizations they did not feel authorized to represent. Thus, I opted to give pseudonyms to everyone, usually selected in consultation with the people to whom they are applied. I do not name FLOSS projects or hackerspaces in this chapter because their communities’ inner workings can be sensitive for participants. My goal is to provide plausible deniability and breathing room for the real people whose activities and utterances I narrate, rather than deep-cover anonymity. I have made the calculus that any quotes I include are of analytical benefit and unlikely to bring harm; I weighed para- phrasing quotes, but decided that doing so would likely distort meaningful elements of actors’ statements.

“I think gender disparity in Free Software is probably a Bad Thing”2

As noted above, much agitation in open technology circles began with recognizing that open technology communities skewed masculine, often heavily. As FLOSS matured, groups were founded to address questions of identity and representation, primarily centering on gender. These include LinuxChix (founded ca. 1998), Debian Women (ca. 2004), Ubuntu Women (2006), the Geek Feminism project (ca. 2008), PyLadies (from the Python computer language community; 2011), and more. One mundane example of this turn toward gender awareness can be seen in the following email exchange. One person (with a masculine username) 110 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER addressed the [Womeninfreesoftware] email list, hoping to recruit women to FLOSS projects in which he was involved:

I had a look at the projects I’m directly professionally involved in—[Project A] and [Project B]. And, well, they’re pretty much your typical FLOSS sausage fests [men-dominated spaces], I’m afraid. We do actually have a few women involved, but they’re all [company] employees [who are paid to be there]; on the volunteer side, it’s all men so far. So I’m hoping to encourage people—women in particular—reading this list to come and get involved with [Project A] and [Project B]. (Email,——to [L—] to [Womeninfreesoftware], 9/28/09; emphasis added)

This quote exempliﬁes a project participant reaching out to women and in so doing, demonstrating that these projects were aware of diversity issues and making an effort to be welcoming. Another list subscriber (with a feminine name) replied, “Thanks, [L], for taking the time to make that bid for participants in your project. It was exactly what the world actually needs[,] much more so than almost any other single action” (Email, [K—] to [Womeninfreesoftware], 9/28/09; emphasis added). These quotes illustrate the typical, mundane framing of diversity as inclusion of women in free software projects (all post-2006 initiatives should be read in part as being sparked by the E.U. report showing a minuscule rate of participation by women). Reaching out to women was seen as a straightforward, and appreciated, way to foster the inclusion diversity advocates prized. At the same time, people immediately recognized that there were potential pitfalls lurking in these efforts to promote diversity in their communities. One major stumbling point, which seemed all but impossible to resolve, was how to challenge normative masculinity as a cultural default without invoking normative femininity as its opposite. This played out in a variety of ways. On the list where the person had lamented the “sausage fests” in his current open source projects, other list members discussed making a logo to represent the list itself. One list subscriber proposed, “If we took the picture of a GNU used by FSF [Free Software Foundation] … added lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara, replace the beard by a string of pearls, and replaced the horns by a feminine hat, with a ﬂower sticking up from the hat, I think that would convey the idea” ([M—] to [Womeninfreesoftware], email, 9/24/09). The GNU she references is the logo of a Unix-like, Linux-related operating sys- tem, a line drawing of the antelope-like gnu, replete with chin tuft and horns. Essentially, the subscriber proposed adorning the gnu with normative mark- ers of femininity. Responses to this suggestion registered immediate discomfort. One person commented, “I … am not a big fan of this idea. Most women in free software do not adhere to traditionally feminine styles of dress/grooming—I “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 111 have seen very few wearing makeup let alone pearls at free software events— and I think this sort of appearance would be alienating to many of us” ([K—] to [Womeninfreesoftware], email, 9/24/09). The original poster agreed with this: “You’re right … Most of us don’t dress over-the-top feminine. I certainly don’t,” and added that her original suggestion was intended to be a humor- ous way of depicting women in FLOSS ([M—] to [Womeninfreesoftware], email, 9/24/09). Posters to the list struggled with how to signal the presence of women without falling back on representations of normative femininity that many found “alienating.” (They also touched on race; as one commenter wrote, “I think the gnu is more appealing than the wasp-y [White Anglo- Saxon Protestant] noses and dainty lips [in some other ideas for a logo]” [R—] to [Womeninfreesoftware], email, 9/24/09].) In these discussions, FLOSS diversity advocates were caught on the horns—pun intended—of how to register feminine presence without invoking normative femininity. Many women in general, and geek women in particular, exhibit discomfort with so-called “pink technology,” or marketing strategies that draw on stereotypes of women and girls to attract women to male-dominated products and activities (Kearney, 2010); diversity advocates were hard pressed to signify women in ways that were recognizable without being cringe-worthy. Another immediate line of critique had to do with gender itself: many in open technology circles were uncomfortable reifying notions of binary gender and gender essentialism. On another list, one person invited list members to a corporate-sponsored women-in-tech event called “IT’s not just for the boys,” at which she would be speaking. Another list member wrote back,

[T] he language of a lot of these events and postings seems very troubling to me. It seems ﬁtting that [the corporate sponsor] would host an event like this, one which simultaneously reinforces gender binaries and makes them look good for “supporting a good cause”. If I had the chance to speak at one of these, I would deﬁnitely talk about how not all the boys are just boys and not all the girls are just girls and IT should be one more way we can challenge binaries of identity that force people into gender boxes. So is this event also for male-to- female students? Or female-to-male students? Or genderqueer students? I would love to see more queer feminist technology events … ([C—] to [Gender Tech list], email, 5/28/12)

This list poster is a trans woman, whose first reaction to the topic was to insist on a trans-inclusive and gender-binary-questioning approach to women in tech discourse. Notably, neither her identity nor her comments were anom- alous in these voluntaristic tech spaces. At events, some of which were women-only (but explicitly allowing people to identify as women, however they wished), people commonly expressed the utility of advocating for women 112 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER even while simultaneously recognizing that woman was an essentialized category, which they reserved the right to question. At an unconference for women in open technology, which I attended in Washington, DC, in 2012, one person who identified as “genderfuck” or gender-fluid also said that they were aware that, “I have more street cred if I say I am a woman fighting the gender gap [in tech] than if I say I’m a gender-fluid person fighting the gender gap [so as a matter of strategy I will say I’m a woman]” (Fieldnotes, 7/11/12). Another person at the event agreed, adding: “Being in tech has changed how I identify. I didn’t really care [about gender before] but now I’m like, ‘I’m a woman! Women matter! We need more women!’ But if I need to throw in the word ‘trans’ because I think the room needs to hear that, I’ll throw in the word ‘trans’ too because I can do that.” Even community members who were cis-identified acknowledged the complexity of the category of feminine gender, while still often using “women” as a shorthand. Doing a debrief after a 2018 workshop, one person emailed the Gender Tech list to say that, “[O] ne of the common feedbacks from this year’s [event] is that people did not understand the [distinction for portions of the event that were mixed-/all-gender, versus ones that were more closed, i.e. reserved for women, queer/non-binary, and trans* people], and [this] needs to be more clearly communicated [in the future]. … We need to be clear that [our event] is special and that it has its roots in a women-only project” ([Charlotte] to [Gender Tech] list, 10/23/18, email). Charlotte’s statements reflected a growing consensus that presenting an event as “women only” was insufficient in an era when gender essentialism was under question, even though the event had been a women-only space since the 1990s. A 2018 compromise allowed cis-men to attend some of the event sessions, but limited other sessions and all leadership and presentation roles to “women, trans, genderqueer, gender-fluid, and intersex people.” However, this understandably confused a few attendees and even some organizers. Charlotte concluded her email by sug- gesting, “As long as the patriarchal gender imbalance persists, there will be a need for those who are ‘other’ than cis-men to carve out a space where our voices and needs are heard and prioritized.” This reflected her group’s up-to- the-minute struggle with accommodating a changing notion of gender (fluid, not fixed) while staying true to the political and practical reasons the group had asserted the need for a women-only space in the first place. Charlotte was also careful to include a thoughtful explication of the values of hacking, saying that any iteration of the event should be “self-organized and autono- mous … & adaptable into the future.” This represents, as argued above, the hacker belief that their activities are recursively world-making, and that the greatest good is to leave artifacts and code open for future modification. In “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 113 this case, group members agreed that, as one poster said, “the actual goal is freedom from the undesirable attitudes which in patriarchy are hitched to gender,” thus leaving open the possibility of further modification down the line ([J] to [Gender Tech] list, 10/23/18, email). In other words, they are hacking hacking, and in true hacker style, assuming it will need to be hacked again, by themselves or by others. As Chris Kelty wrote, “[T]echniques and design principles that are used to create software or to implement networking protocols cannot be distinguished from ideas or principles of social and moral order” (2005, p. 186).

I-methodology and the Challenges of/to Hacking Communities

The above efforts of diversity advocates are thoughtful and sincere. Nonetheless, there is an irony to much of their advocacy. Some of the most nuanced ways of addressing social difference are at odds with realistic goals for voluntaristic groups brought together by the shared social imaginary of open technology. For example, Glen, a North American White man in his thirties who had founded a Python language–based FLOSS project renowned by diversity advocates for being hospitable and welcoming, said in an interview, “African Americans are underrepresented [in open technology], but more than half of Americans are women. If we do [outreach] efforts focused on women, a lot of the women we’ve been attracting aren’t White, [this is] increasing the spectrum already. [Racial diversity] won’t completely take care of itself but [outreach to women] will address most levels” (Interview, 7/3/12). Glen is correct that African Americans are underrepresented in open source. (In fact, Callahan, Hathaway, and Krishnamoorthy [2016] broke representation down into FLOSS project member versus contributor and found that just looking at members overcounted the African Americans and Hispanics3 in the FLOSS project they studied; when looking at the ethnicities of contributors to the project, the presence of African Americans and Hispanics was even more limited.) And he is also obviously correct that not all women are White, and that outreach to women may signal to members of various groups that there is attention being paid to inclusion. At the same time, as Glen acknowledged, to lump racial inclusion in with gender inclusion is to paper over some of the unique features of cultural and personal histories that members of different racial and ethnic groups have vis-à-vis technological cultures and online cultures (Daniels, 2016; Nakamura, 2013; Noble & Tynes, 2016). In particular, the experience of vulnerability is one that stands out in the accounts of some women of color in open technology. In describing an ugly instance of online harassment to which she was subjected in an open source 114 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER community, Helena, a North American mixed-race woman in her thirties, said that she felt her experience was intensified as a woman of color. She said, “I was way more scared than women not of color [would be]”, indicating that misogynistic attacks online can also be racialized—and often are (Interview, 8/14/16) (see Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016, p. 171; Nakamura, 2013). In addition, Helena’s mundane experiences in open technology communities— as opposed to the one where she was viciously attacked—left her unsure who to trust. She did not always feel that White women were her allies. (Similar dynamics have arisen with women of color in the global south vis-à-vis White feminist FLOSS collectivities whose members are largely based in the global north; see Dunbar-Hester, 2020.) This points to a double bind for advocates collapsing “diversity” into “gender/women,” leaving these advocates unpre- pared to attend to how differential social statuses and vulnerabilities play out. Although these issues are important, so far, they are not specific to open tech communities, and largely mirror the general social experience of racial and ethnic minorities in cultures where Whiteness is hegemonic (Daniels, 2016; De la Peña, 2010). One issue that stands out for further consider- ation is that open technology communities are voluntaristic. Unlike insti- tutions of higher education or workplace relations between employers and workers, whose terms of association are formally overseen by regulation and the courts, these sites are predicated on elective associations between members. As cultural historian Thomas Streeter wrote, in “creat[ing] social and organizational structures that by their design could motivate individuals to collaborate,” engineers whose practices laid the groundwork for open source predicated the existence of these communities on affective commitments and the motivation to collaborate (2010, p. 105). Expressions of good will toward others and inclusivity are laudable as values and practices, but the terms of association in these communities are much less enforceable than in more formal institutional relationships. And as Francesca Polletta (2002) noted when considering friendship as a basis for political organizing in the women’s liber- ation movement, these elective associations are especially vulnerable to strain and even dissolution when personal relationships are strained. What is occurring here exposes a tension between the sincere efforts of diversity advocates to be inclusive, to hack hacking, and to “change the nerds” by issuing a challenge to open technology communities as they are currently constituted. On the one hand, these efforts represent a sincere, iterative, and always-incomplete effort at inclusive world-making that aims to hitch a hacking ethos to diversity and inclusion work. On the other, voluntaristic efforts within hacking communities begin, naturally, with who is already there, and the calls for collectivity formation that began in 2006 centered mainly on “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 115 women. These calls both represented and constituted the communities who were clamoring to change the nerds. These dynamics could rightly be called I-methodology, in which technology designers implicitly or explicitly consider themselves as representative of the user base (Akrich, 1995; Oudshoorn, Rommes, & Stienstra, 2004). Feminist scholars in particular have critiqued the I-methodology for its implicit, covert, and often unconscious bias. As Oudshoorn et al. wrote, “user-representation techniques more often function as tools to legitimate the design process so that designers can claim that they have taken the needs of users into account as tools to guide technological decisions” (2004, p. 43, emphasis added). The danger is two-fold; both the biases I-methodology introduces and the claims to legitimation designers make on behalf of others are problematic if the goal is to produce maximally democratic technological designs. But in the case of voluntaristic communities, I want to suggest that it is useful to parse these dangers carefully. In open technology communities attuned to diversity and inclusion, there is indeed great danger in claiming to take the needs of others into account when one is primarily speaking for oneself. Yet insisting on meeting the needs of oneself or others with whom one is aligned in agitational coalition is potentially the most realistic way to change communities formed around affinity for hacking and technology. In the above cases, where community members (including men) respectfully supported one another in calling out for more women to volunteer, and in redefining who women are, while leaving open the possible need to revisit these issues and redefine membership categories in the future, a reflexive I-methodology advanced the cause of inclusive hacking, at least somewhat. But it is important to get the analysis right. As Glen, the Python project leader, indicated, it would not do to conflate measures that might be specifically welcoming to women in general, with those of African American women in particular (for example); the mixed-race woman commenting on her fear invoked her own differential burden in the matrix of domination (Collins, 2000). At the same time, voluntaristic technological collectivities are not, in and of themselves, responsible for overcoming the burden of ingrained structural problems including racial and economic segregation and inequity. Their impulse to broaden participation in their ranks in reflexive and flexible ways is laudable, but likely to be limited in scope.

Voluntarism and Always-Incomplete, Coalitional Politics

Before concluding this chapter, I will draw out some of the issues at stake in these contestations that are often underarticulated in open technology circles. 116 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER

In particular, market logics deserve scrutiny. This chapter has elevated the voices and social world of those agitating within open technology communities, but of course their social world shades (and fragments) into other worlds. Industry and higher education are also pushing for diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), including but not limited to women (Margolis, 2010; Poster, 2008). These sectors are primarily invested in national competitiveness, economic growth, women’s economic empowerment, and producing (diverse) products for a (diverse) consuming market (and of course, these mandates cannot be cleanly separated). As of this writ- ing, the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) reported that 26% of the U.S. computing workforce is women (and less than 10% is women of color: 5% Asian, 3% African American, and 1% Hispanic). Diversity advocates often find that their messages can proceed with great ease when the rationale for their efforts dovetails with calls for diversity in industry spaces. In fact, the very idea of diversity holds great institutional appeal (Ahmed, 2012). Of course, one reason for this resonance has to do with open technology diversity advocates’ own adjacency to interpretive frameworks that are devoted to the profit-oriented pursuit of technological development and growth; many advocates are employed as tech workers. Yet voluntaristic open technologists’ motivations are not identical to those of industry players’, and they do themselves a disservice to allow their own calls for diversity to converge with those of industry. When extolling the virtues of diversity in tech, Christen, a 31-year-old German, said, “I cannot buy a bigger smartphone because it won’t fit in my pockets [as a woman]. Apple didn’t include period tracking in their health app, [and] face recognition software regularly fails people of color” (personal correspondence with author, 7/2/15). This is a perfect encapsulation of a market logic being articulated by a volunteer diversity advocate: she touches on race, gender, and consumption, but steers clear of the controversy that surrounds, e.g., face recognition software, such as its relationship to surveil- lance and algorithmic incursions into citizens’ compacts with states.4 And yet, she also disclosed a more expansive notion of what is at stake for her: “I wish, more diversity would mean for everyone, who is not a white heterosexual able-bodied male, to finally feel normal and not like a freak … Even if it meant just this bit of respect and humanity it would change the world” (emphasis added). Although she invoked respect for difference and humanity at the core of her vision for diversity in tech, product-centered explanations of the value of diversity are always rhetorically within reach and always an easy shorthand. But this shorthand shortchanges diversity advocates who desire to pursue social justice (Ahmed, 2012). “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 117

Diversity advocates who seek to advance a notion for hacking hacking that exceeds the boundaries of industry’s concern may wish to include a critical, reflexive notion to the social problems that technological participation can and cannot solve. Social power and technical participation are imbricated to such a degree that they may at first glance seem interchangeable, but increasing participation in technological domains is no guarantee of movement into a more empowered social position. In fact, science and technology have historically been sites for cultural sorting work, separating so-called “STEM capable” people from “STEM incapable” people, according to historian of technology Amy Slaton (2017) and others (Fouché, 2003; Harding 1995, 2016). Simply moving people from one category to another reinforces the use of STEM as a site for this kind of problematic cultural sorting. To place technology at the center of a project of social empowerment is uniquely challenging for these reasons. If diversity advocates hope to see change in how power relations in technological communities are constituted, it is imperative that they not only attend to who is there (although this is certainly important). They must ana- lyze the role of technology in maintaining the social order of the wider society. Paradoxical and challenging though this may be for collectivities called into being by a shared affinity for technology, it is essential to recognize that neither diversity nor technology can stand in for social or economic justice, antiracism, or feminism, materially or conceptually. Further, returning to the use of identity and the measure of one’s own experiences to articulate what must change in open technology communities, the above vignettes illustrate that, by its nature, I-methodology can be reflexively brought to bear to offer partial prescriptions for changing communities. In voluntaristic communities, which are tending their own gardens even as they hope to effect more sweeping change, it is probably better to ambivalently embrace these partial, reflexive, and self-referential interventions as though they are features, not bugs. It is unrealistic for DIY collectivities to do much of the heavy lifting of structural change, and this is not their shortcoming. Diversity advocacy reflects a desire to care for neglected things: “Caring is connected with awareness of oppression, and with commitments to neglected experiences that create oppositional standpoints” (Martin, Myers, & Viseu, 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 96). Diversity advocates are right to explicate differential burdens of vulnerability within technical cultures, as this analysis is essential for a project of justice (Dunbar-Hester, 2020; Harding, 2016). Even if they cannot fully ameliorate or redistribute these burdens, to care and to cultivate seem to be the most important goals of diversity advocates (which are most 118 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER generative when not overly muddled with market logics). To maximize the potential for generative justice (Eglash, 2016), diversity advocates can be on the lookout for connections between their inspired homegrown efforts and wider social movements and policy changes, which can maximize their DIY yearnings in productive concert with structural change. We should also recognize the imperfect yet infinite potential of coalition and care across difference.

Notes

1. I do not mean to conflate different hacking/FLOSS projects and subcultures, but for the purposes of this analysis, they are grouped and considered more similar than distinct. A different analysis might bring to bear significant features in order to draw out contrast between sites. A one- or two-site study would provide more intimate portraiture. Because I am interested in a larger perspective, this trade-off is acceptable. 2. Online discussion, Debian community, 2009 (https://debian-administration.org/ users/dkg/weblog/54). 3. I use the label “Hispanic” when referencing reports which have used that label. 4. Benjamin (2016) underscores that technoscientific innovation is a site for making and remaking race and racism. Facial recognition software is inherently subject to racialized abuses, even if it can be made more adept at recognizing a wider range of faces.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Akrich, M. (1995). User representations: Practices, methods and sociology. In A. Rip, T. J. Misa, & J. Schot (Eds.), Managing technology in society: The approach of constructive technology assessment (pp. 167–184). London, UK: Pinter Publishers. Banet-Weiser, S., & Miltner, K. M. (2016). MasculinitySoFragile: Culture, structure, and networked misogyny. Feminist Media Studies, 16 , 171–174. Benjamin, R. (2016). Innovating inequity: If race is a technology, postracialism is the Genius Bar. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 , 2227–2234. Callahan, B., Hathaway, C., & Krishnamoorthy, M. (2016). Quantitative metrics for generative justice: Graphing the value of diversity. Teknokultura, 13, 567–586. Coleman, E. G. (2012). Coding freedom: The ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge. Daniels, J. (2016). The trouble with white feminism: Whiteness, digital feminism and the intersectional internet. In S. Noble & B. M. Tynes (Eds.), The intersectional internet: Race, sex, class, and culture online (pp. 41–60). New York, NY: Peter Lang. De la Peña, C. (2010). The history of technology, the resistance of archives, and the whiteness of race. Technology and Culture, 51, 919–937. “Unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, Hacking 119

Dunbar-Hester, C. (2016). Geek. In B. Peters (Ed.), Digital keywords (pp. 149–157). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dunbar-Hester, C. (2019). If ‘diversity’ is the answer, what is the question? Understanding diversity advocacy in open technology projects. In J. Vertesi & D. Ribes (Eds.), digitalSTS: A field guide for science & technology studies (pp. 81–98). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dunbar-Hester, C. (2020). Hacking diversity: Open technology cultures and the politics of inclusion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eglash, R. (2002). Race, sex, and nerds: From Black geeks to Asian American hipsters. Social Text, 71(2), 49–64. Eglash, R. (2016). An introduction to generative justice. Teknokultura, 13, 369–404. Fouché, R. (2003). Black inventors in the age of segregation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fox, S., Ulgado, R., & Rosner, D. (2015). Hacking culture, not devices: Access and recognition in feminist hackerspaces. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 56–68). Vancouver, BC: ACM. Free Software Foundation. (2012, October 16). Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Retrieved from https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/happy-ada-lovelace-day Geertz, C. (1998, October 22). Deep hanging out. New York Review of Books. Retrieved from https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/22/deep-hanging-out/ Grenzfurthner, J., & Schneider, F. A. (2009). Hacking the spaces. Retrieved from http:// www.monochrom.at/hacking-the-spaces/ Harding, S. (1995). Just add women and stir? In Missing links: Gender equity in science and technology for development, [compiled by] Gender Working Group, United Nations. Commission on Science and Technology for Development (pp. 295–307). Ottawa, Canada; International Development Research Centre. Harding, S. (2016). Objectivity and diversity: Another logic of scientific research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jordan, T. (2017). A genealogy of hacking. Convergence, 23, 528–544. Kearney, M. C. (2010). Pink technology: Mediamaking gear for girls. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 25, 2 (74), 1–39. Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics. Cultural Anthropology, 20 , 185–214. Kelty, C. (2008). Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kreiss, D., Finn, M., & Turner, F. (2011). The limits of peer production: Some reminders from Max Weber for the network society. New Media & Society, 13, 243–259. Margolis, J. (2010). Stuck in the shallow end: Education, race, and computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martin, A., Myers, N., & Viseu, A. (2015). The politics of care in technoscience. Social Studies of Science, 45, 625–641. 120 CHRISTINA DUNBAR-HESTER

Nafus, D. (2012). ‘Patches don’t have gender’: What is not open in open source software. New Media & Society, 14, 669–683. Nafus, D., Leach, J., & Krieger, B. (2006). Free/libre and open source software: Policy support (FLOSSPOLS), Gender: Integrated Report of Findings. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge. http://flosspols.merit.unu.edu/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16- Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf Nakamura, L. (2013, December 10). Glitch racism. Culture Digitally (blog). Retrieved from http://culturedigitally.org/2013/12/glitch-racism-networks-as-actors-within- vernacular-internet-theory/ National Center for Women & Information Technology. (n.d.). https://www.ncwit.org. Noble, S., & Tynes, B. (2016). The intersectional internet: Race, sex, class, and culture online. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Oudshoorn, N., Rommes, E., & Stienstra, M. (2004). Configuring the user as every- body: Gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies. Science, Technology & Human Values, 29 , 30–63. Polletta, F. (2002). Freedom is an endless meeting: Democracy in American social movements. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Poster, W. (2008). Filtering diversity: A global corporation struggles with race, class, and gender in employment policy. American Behavioral Scientist, 52, 307–341. Powell, A. (2012). Democratizing production through open source knowledge: From open software to open hardware. Media, Culture & Society, 34, 691–708. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41, 85–106. Reagle, J. (2013, January 7). ‘Free as in sexist?’: Free culture and the gender gap. First Monday, 18(1). https://firstmonday.org/article/view/4291/3381 Slaton, A. (2017, November 28). Exit, stage left: Towards transformative critiques of diversity. November 28. Retrieved from https://amyeslaton.com/ exit-stage-left-towards-transformative-critiques-of-diversity/ Streeter, T. (2010). The net effect: Technology, romanticism, capitalism. New York: New York University Press. Turner, F. (2009). Burning Man at Google: A cultural infrastructure for new media production. New Media & Society, 11, 73–94.