“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 pur- poses 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 comput- ing 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 contribu- tor 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 volun- taristic 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 partic- ipants’ 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 dif- ferent. 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 confer- ences, 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

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