Give Me a Hackerspace and I Will Make the World

Hackers exhibit enthusiastic faith in their ability to effect change.¹⁰ The sites of engagement with technology around which diversity advocacy is occurring can be grouped together under the umbrella of open technology, especially but not limited to free 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 charged 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.¹¹ 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 “own hard” (though some hacking subcultures possess this feature).¹² Open technology broadens the ethos of FLOSS to encompass software, hardware, and other cultural artifacts that proponents believe should be left open for the purposes of modification, reinterpretation, and refashioning toward purposes beyond those for which they were originally created. This worldview has implications beyond the forging of new code and technical artifacts.

Hacking and FLOSS participation often take on meaning as communal and shared actions.¹³ As Jannie, a volunteer in the Netherlands, put it, “A big part of these groups is social. In that way we are like church groups.”¹⁴ Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has demonstrated that hackers deploy a range of political stances including agnosticism and denial of formal politics (exceeding software freedom),¹⁵ though implications for intellectual property in particular are at least implicit and often explicit in the technical and social practices of hacking.¹⁶ Scholars have noted that the denial of formal politics makes FLOSS an unlikely site for gender and diversity activism, at least historically.¹⁷ But FLOSS projects are not monolithic, and have matured over time. Arguably, the diversity advocacy that is the subject of this book represents a turning point within the collectivities whose focus is on FLOSS. As will be elaborated in the following pages, the shared enthusiasm for hacking and crafting code that unites FLOSS communities has collided with a realization that to believe that these communities are open in an uncomplicated way is naive. The communities have initiated debate and hacks of their dynamics, and there is no turning back, but these matters are far from settled internally. FLOSS projects and hackerspaces are also in dialogue with the wider culture, which is awash in “women in tech” discourse (including the high profile of Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In). The raft of open-technology initiatives around diversity must be placed within this context, while keeping in mind that geek politics exist along a continuum.

Computing has become associated with freedoms, particularly notions of autonomy, self-actualization, and higher selfhood.¹⁸ Common notions of what is at stake in open technology can be seen in this statement: “ ‘Free software’ means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.”¹⁹ In other words, free software is here imagined to support users’ autonomy, including expressive individualism. Users’ autonomy is sometimes, but not always or even mainly experienced or expressed at the individual level; the community, group, or project is also a meaningful unit, and its freedom is also important. In North America, this might be the freedom to tinker with a given program in order to modify it to suit one’s own desires or to scratch an itch.²⁰ In Latin America, this might be the freedom to not be subject to intellectual and economic constraints imposed on one’s government or education system by a foreign corporation.²¹ These freedoms are related and exist along a continuum, but they are not identical interpretations of the scope and mandate of open technology.²² The articulations of freedom within the FLOSS community matter because at present community members are challenging their cultures from within: How can commitments to freedoms be reconciled with the unequal treatment experienced by some members of the community? For all the rhetorical attention paid to individual freedoms, hacking is suffused with collectivity; diversity and inclusion work insists on bringing collectivity to the fore, making self-consciously collective worlds.²³ It is significant that the hacking- and FLOSS-inflected rhetoric of freedom is always ready to hand for those attempting to hack their communities; as one person wrote on a feminist hacking list, “[our] actual goal is freedom from the undesirable attitudes which in partriarchy [sic] are hitched to gender.”²⁴

Hacking Emancipation

In 2006, prominent legal studies scholar Yochai Benkler buoyantly claimed that the “networked information environment” that materially and ideologically undergirds FLOSS “enhances individual autonomy” by “improving [individuals’] capacity to do more for and by themselves; [it also] enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through … traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization.”²⁵ He went on, “Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.”²⁶ Benkler exults in FLOSS participants’ “newly expanded practical freedom” and the lack of “constraint” experienced by individuals in FLOSS cultures, and flat out rejects the notion that traditional lines of social organization could be relevant in FLOSS cultures. For him, the improved experience of justice and democracy is without question open to all; FLOSS not only levels social hierarchy but consigns it to irrelevance in all networked modes of collaboration. Coleman uses more tempered language but makes a congruent claim: “The arena of FLOSS establishes all the necessary conditions (code, legal protection, technical tools, and peers) to cultivate the technical self and direct one’s abilities toward the utilitarian improvement of technology.… FLOSS allows for technical sovereignty.”²⁷ This is a worthwhile summary of the scope and aims of FLOSS, and even open technology more generally, where an emphasis on code may be less central (though open-source software often supports open hardware).²⁸ Coleman’s account is one of the richest cultural studies of the FLOSS lifeworld, enlarging our understanding by accentuating hacking in its idealized form. The backdrop of the ideals that animate FLOSS, against which its shortcomings stand out, sets up the contestations that form the subject of this book.

It is probably no coincidence that as celebration of open technology reached a fever pitch in accounts like Benkler’s, diversity advocacy in open-technology cultures also began to heat up. At the heart of the contestations around diversity in hacking and opening up technological participation lies the fact that a substantial appeal of hacking has to do with agency. “The emancipatory potential of hacking exists precisely in that it crosses the line of who can access technology,” writes Johan Söderberg.²⁹ The topic of this book is the relatively new but broadly accepted notion that the promotion of diversity in tech³⁰ is a social good, worthy of attention and advocacy, as well as the exploration of the myriad conceptions of what is at stake for its champions in open-technology cultures. Once again, we should note a disconnect between agency as an abstract individual capacity and diversity advocacy, which is necessarily socially embedded.

Access and emancipation are politically charged ideas: they offer liberal subjects inviting opportunities for self-determination as individuals and as collectives.³¹ Technology, and computing technology in particular, has a tangled relationship to these political constructs, but in our present age, talking about the machines is never just talking about artifacts decoupled from these political valences. What is worth sustained analysis here is the ways in which technologists identify the tools and techniques that they find particularly emancipating themselves—here, computing, electronics, and related skills. Notably, they continually assert the conjoinment of computing, freedom, and progress. In the words of one prominent diversity advocate, whose technical background included a high-status programming role in a free software operating system project, “Open source was attractive because I never wanted my work to be thrown away. My job [ideally] has to have some sort of transcendent purpose. I loved puzzle-solving, making things work. If there’s a problem with a computer, it’s because you told it to do something wrong. [Working with code] can bring pleasure, adrenaline, and joy.”³² She neatly articulates many of the core beliefs of open technologists and computing devotees in general. First, the idea that FLOSS has a “transcendent purpose” (in contrast to contract work for industry or government entities); it lives on in the user base, whose members breathe life into it through use and modification. Second, the idea that the computer is a site where desire may be consummated in a joyous, almost formally aesthetic way, though it is also pleasurable in an embodied way to solve puzzles and “make things work.”³³ Third—and this is a crucial point to note—her belief that if the computer doesn’t work, it’s because the user told it to do something wrong. Her quote exemplifies key elements of the belief system that for hackers³⁴ fuses computing to joy and emancipation.

This belief system animates hackers’ extreme fervor for and commitment to computing technologies. It is not a stretch, therefore, to comprehend why those who experience these relationships with technologies would identify expanding the ranks of this form of participation as a crucial means of expanding agency for others as well. Hackers (including diversity advocates) are commonly extrapolating from their own experiences to articulate the notion that freedom and progress for others must also be related to access and emancipation through computing. As Christopher Kelty writes, “these tools engage our individual capacities to think, create, and manipulate the world, and they transform the collective relationships we have with others.”³⁵ Participation in technical cultures and open technology in particular has been routinely hailed as attractive, even transformative. Indeed, one of the reasons open technology has been so celebrated is because (in conceptions like Benkler’s, and countless others) it is held to offer its participants an opportunity to rework social relations, implicitly or explicitly contributing to their empowerment. Fundamentally, expanding this participation is often touted as a shortcut to enhancing political agency for everyone, and in recent years particularly for those groups who have been relatively sidelined vis-à-vis technological and political agency. Pursuit of technological emancipation is celebrated as an end run around discrimination and other social constraints.

Though these belief systems are persuasive for those who subscribe to them, we might ask what the consequences are when these beliefs are projected elsewhere. In particular, what are the entailments of exporting a progressive belief in the individual and collective power of technical agency to sites of social and economic inequality? Before we begin to answer this question, however, we should spend a moment unpacking how technological progress and human or social progress came to be imbricated.

Technology and Social Order (Or, How Hacking and Emancipation Came to Be Linked)

Historian of technology Leo Marx has persuasively argued that technological development was not initially bound to human progress; while it could be in the service of human progress, it was not interchangeable, at least in the early American republic. Importantly, the term technology was not widespread, either—its emergence as a prominent term with its present-day import did not occur until approximately the turn of the twentieth century. Preceding terms (such as machinery, the mechanic arts, and even the word technology itself, which did exist but narrowly referred to branches of learning surrounding the mechanical arts) did not carry the same moral charge that today’s technology does.³⁶ Indeed, according to Marx, technology acquired its potency in order to fill a semantic void, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural longing to describe a novel form of human power that “the mechanic (or useful) arts” were insufficient to encompass, given their association with artisanal labor and individual-scale handiwork. It is this inflated notion of technology we are encountering when the large-scale technological society is imagined (no matter whether this is invoked as a freeing or frightening specter).

It is important to take technology seriously as an object of analysis. This is not nearly so straightforward as it may seem, as technology is as much an ideologically charged domain as it is a mundane artifactual component of everyday life. According to Marx, technology is a “hazardous concept”: in our present society, it cannot help but to stand in for things greater than artifacts, and it is understood to have profound effects on social order. Conversations about technology are rarely about artifacts in themselves (though this phrasing may mislead us into thinking that a clear demarcation of technology from society, from power, and from social order is even possible, or desirable). Many critics of technology and culture have observed that stories told about technology reveal as much about the tellers as about the artifacts, and this is no less true here.³⁷ For these reasons, technology is a special case for social analysis: it is no less a product of social relations than other domains of culture, but its stature is so great and its shadow so long that it is worth concerted attention.

Marx’s account offers a useful and sophisticated contextualization for hackers’ and other enthusiasts’ technological zeal as well as for the cultural baggage that accompanies this zeal. Hackers pursue technological development in order to maximize “human flourishing through creative and self-actualizing production.”³⁸ Likewise, technology is a unique domain for the discharge of political energies. In the collective imagination, it has been vested with the power to initiate change (even as this belief obscures the role of social and economic relations).³⁹ Many technologists, especially those in activist geek circles, are motivated by political concerns and seek to build technologies that they believe can shift social power and redress social imbalances or inequities. This certainly is true of quite a number of the people in open-technology communities whose efforts are under consideration here. Others, however, believe that “progress depends on the constant expression and reworking of already-existing technology.”⁴⁰ In other words, the belief that technology is a progressive force outside of political channels is widespread among open-technology enthusiasts, though emphasis can be placed on different aspects of technology development, in particular developing (or reworking) technology for specific political reasons versus keeping technology under development for its own sake.⁴¹ Lastly, and crucially, technologists often feel that dealing with technology offers a more concrete site in which to negotiate power and privilege—that is, it can seem cleaner to work on “technological solutions” than to wade into wider social contestations.

These points all explain why diversity advocacy has taken hold in open-technology cultures. Some community members emphasize the pursuit of both explicit and inchoate political outcomes through technological development. Others view the emancipatory experiences they have experienced working and playing with computers as worthy of export, and a singular and meaningful way to enfranchise people who have been relatively more excluded from various forms of civic, political, and economic citizenship. Often, these views overlap and serve to multiply adherents’ commitments to diversity.

Pushback against diversity advocacy does exist, though it gets relatively little attention in these pages. Some can probably be attributed to naivete, the belief that these cultures and practices are already fully open to those who wish to participate. And it is undoubtedly the case that some opponents of diversity advocacy believe in “agency for me but not for thee,” for reasons having to do with consolidating their own social and technical power, more or less consciously. Lastly, some articulations of freedom and meritocracy are incompatible with diversity work—for some, this work is seen as inherently nonmeritocratic and thus at odds with the cultural values of the FLOSS community.⁴² In any event, the focus in this book is the internal negotiations of diversity proponents and their mediating work within their open-technology communities.

Why does it matter if hackers and open-technology enthusiasts promote expanding the ranks of hacking as a means to wider political emancipation? What is at stake in framing proficiency in computing as a significant path to social inclusion? What is obscured in framing technical cultures as the appropriate site of intervention? And what does calling this diversity work accomplish (or fail to accomplish)? This book does not argue for diversity in technical cultures directly. Rather, it is interested in carefully investigating the political implications of diversity advocacy. Even in spite of advocates’ often clearly emancipatory objectives, some of their framings of problems and solutions contain the potential to crystallize patterns of power that contravene their intentions. Across the chapters of this book, I argue that diversity advocacy has the most potential to change the expressive culture of open-technology communities. Interventions in these sites can serve as stages in miniature where people confront wider social problems; it can be powerful and galvanizing to strive for inclusivity in a social milieu over which one has some control.

At the same time, change in these communities is challenging, and not necessarily a stand-in for the broader change they hope to see. Though hacking is an exercise in world making, hacking has historically been a significantly different project from the one that diversity advocates are now challenging their communities to undertake. There is a potential disconnect between these local interventions in voluntaristic spaces and the wider, loftier effects that are supposed or hoped to flow from them. In other words, it is not enough to act locally while thinking globally—there are structural forces at work that dictate that these hacks will fall short of advocates’ most elevated intentions. This is not to suggest that these interventions are worthless, just that their proponents are up against entrenched, monumental patterns. Partly, this confusion stems from the ways in which technology is hazardous: artifacts and artifactual production can wind up standing in for, or being confused with, social order. But voluntaristic communities, by their nature, are bounded. Open-technology communities are formed around a shared enthusiasm for hacking. Challenges of social structure or systemic inequity are a heavy lift for DIY communities, and communities constituted around technology face unique challenges.

Without referencing these social issues directly, Mel Chua, a self-described “contagiously enthusiastic” hacker, writer, and educator touches on some of them. The social relations and historical patterns that surround computing and hacking are always freighted, and often reflect the priorities and interests of groups with greater social power, including elites, technocrats, and corporations. Chua writes in a 2015 blog post,

As a kid, I wanted to choose the privilege of being oblivious and keeping my head down and immersing myself into the beauty—the sheer beauty!—and joy of STEM for STEM’s sake …

But I couldn’t “just geek out about nerdy stuff.” The environments where I was trying to “learn about nerdy stuff” were sociotechnically broken in a way that made it hard for me (as a disabled minority woman, among other things) to join in. If I wanted to even start being part of the technical community, I had to start by fixing the technical community—patching the roof and fixing the plumbing, so to speak—before I could even walk inside and start to live there …

It was as if I could only enter the makerspace as a janitor.⁴³

To paraphrase Chua, the aesthetic beauty and agentic participation hailed as attractive attributes of technical engagement were less available to her. Even though she showed up excited to partake, there were barriers to her “walking into” the open-technology space, let alone to her “living there.” She experienced, firsthand, some of the historical patterns that historian of technology Amy Slaton has called the relational nature of science and engineering knowledge, and of technological skill and talent: “All of these relations involve the constant making of knowable students and employees by those with influence.”⁴⁴ In other words, science and technology have historically been sites for cultural sorting work, separating STEM-capable people from STEM-incapable people. Slaton’s analysis suggests that moving some people from one category to another does not destabilize the use of STEM as a site for this kind of problematic cultural sorting.⁴⁵ Chua’s analysis is more ambiguous: What effect does “patching the roof” have beyond a single building? To extend her metaphor, is the plumbing connected to sewer systems and water treatment facilities that taint the tap water?

Scale is an issue here: diversity advocates hope to rectify social problems that are deeply entrenched, which span sites such as higher education and industry, not only their own more intimate voluntaristic spaces. But their own social worlds, closer to home, are composed of people who are led to join by their shared enthusiasm for technology. Their preferred solutions are to hack their projects and cultures—to patch the roof and fix the plumbing. This comes up short as a solution for the problem of unequally distributed social power. In other words, distributing diversity in technical participation is not equivalent to generating justice—and it can never be equivalent. In fact, cultivating diversity without a robust critique of power can wind up placing open technologists’ efforts adjacent to the goals of industry and neoliberal government initiatives.

But another problem is conceptual or definitional, having to do with how social problems are framed. If the goal is to distribute diversity, to sow more different kinds of people in technical production, then diversity advocacy is plainly making some inroads, though advocates and other community members may quibble about whether group X or group Y is proportionately represented in project A or project B, etc. But as feminist theorist Sara Ahmed argues, “diversity” inheres in individuals: “diversity is what individuals have as individuals.”⁴⁶ Moving the needle on the individuals’ diversity in a given project or institutional setting “gives permission” for people to turn away from institutional or societal inequality.⁴⁷ Put differently, to frame social inequality as a question of diversity in technological production, and to expect to change wider inequities by adding “diverse” individuals to technical cultures, is to misunderstand how the distribution of various social identities in a given sector are outgrowths of differential social power, not the other way around.⁴⁸ As political theorist Joan Tronto writes, “the process by which we make some questions central and others peripheral or marginal is not simply a benign process of thought.”⁴⁹ In social analysis and intervention, where the borders of care are drawn is critical.

The project of this book is to name and elucidate these dynamics in order to help advance a political project of justice in a technology-oriented world. It is important to recognize and validate the critiques of power that are emanating from open-technology communities. But what this book suggests is, if technical enthusiasts are experiencing their consciences being stoked vis-à-vis unequal technical participation, they stand to gain from placing their critiques into productive dialogue with conceptions of these problems that can help illuminate the ways in which STEM participation both is and is not contiguous with social and economic power writ large. To have a clearer understanding of what various concerns and interventions around diversity can and cannot accomplish is to set the stage for confrontations that may allow more concerted, less prefigurative changes to become possible.

If Diversity Is the Answer, What Is the Question?

Up front, it should be noted that I do not attempt to define diversity or hold fast to any particular definition in this book. I treat the concept as an “emic” one, emanating from within the communities that form the subject of this study. The questions I ask are: Why is diversity so important? and, What work is diversity doing (or meant to do) in these cultural spaces? As Sara Ahmed writes, the “mobility of the word ‘diversity’ means that it is unclear what ‘diversity’ is doing, even when it is understood as a figure of speech.”⁵⁰ In other words, even though we understand what diversity means, it is not clear what work it is doing, or is meant to do. Her observation rings true here, and thus the book’s agenda is to map and analyze where diversity has traction, and what work it is doing. The mobility and the limits of diversity are of primary significance in this book. Sometimes, its ambiguous meaning is part of what makes diversity work as well as it does; it is shifting and nebulous, ripe for appropriation in different contexts, with a protean (and contested) political valence.⁵¹

The mobility of diversity is easy to grasp, as it is a ubiquitous term and concept. Our contemporary moment is saturated with exhortations for women and members of other underrepresented groups (but particularly women) to take up participation in STEM. “Building up young people of color in tech so that we can finally tackle structural inequity and disparity in this critical industry … [is] integral to the advancement of social justice in America,”⁵² writes Dream Corps, commentator Van Jones’s “social justice accelerator.” At the time of this book going to press, the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) reports that 26 percent of the US computing workforce are women and less than 10 percent are women of color; 5 percent are Asian, 3 percent are African American, and 1 percent are Hispanic.⁵³ Rationales for this push to increase STEM participation vary, but common ones are national competitiveness and women’s economic empowerment. (NCWIT also claims that by 2026, 3.5 million computing-related job openings are expected, and that at the current rate only 17 percent of these jobs could be filled by US computing bachelor’s degree recipients.) Both of these rationales could be found on the Obama White House’s website in 2015: “Supporting women STEM students and researchers is … an essential part of America’s strategy to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world”; and “Women in STEM jobs earn 33 percent more than those in non-STEM occupations and experience a smaller wage gap relative to men.”⁵⁴ The Trump administration removed this page but also touted a memorandum to increase STEM education funding.⁵⁵ In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claims to be building a feminist government, mandating diversity and inclusion frameworks under all government policies and programs.⁵⁶

Industry, too, often regards increased women’s participation as desirable. Google neatly summarizes a 2015 corporate agenda surrounding women in technology fields on a webpage: “Technology is changing the world. Women and girls are changing technology … We always believed that hiring women better served our users.”⁵⁷ In other words, the corporation’s full market potential is not being realized without a developer base that can cater to diverse users. On another page, entitled “Empowering Entrepreneurs: Our Future,” Google explicates the global reach of its vision and reiterates that technology is a route to empowerment: “Archana, an entrepreneur from Bangalore, shows how women are using technology to better their businesses, improve their lives and make their voices heard around the world.”⁵⁸

In many ways, the diversity advocacy that I examine in this book bears similarities to government and industry agendas. But unlike White House policy or Google programs, the initiatives I examine are driven by the voluntaristic ethos that surrounds FLOSS. We have to explain why fairly grassroots civil society groups also are pouring their energies into this diversity advocacy, often as volunteers. Diversity advocacy here is not necessarily identical to corporate, higher education, or government agendas, though there is certainly overlap. To tease out these similarities and differences requires careful parsing of the values and import vested in open technology.

It is also important to note that the who of diversity is flickering, not holding fast to a single definition or category of people. We might ask, whose diversity is most symbolically or strategically important, and why? In the earliest and widest instances of diversity advocacy, the who of diversity usually means women, as above examples illustrate.

This is not, of course, the extent of diversity that mattered and matters to advocates. Revisiting the comments by Mel Chua, above, we see a departure from gender as a primary identity category, as she invokes not only being a woman but also her status as a disabled person and her membership in a minoritized ethnic category (she is deaf and self-identifies as Chinese–Filipino American).⁵⁹ This represents a deepening understanding of “diversity,” including a perceived need to be more intersectional.⁶⁰ By that same token, it represents the fact that many advocates found that agitating for “more women” was inadequate as a diversity goal. In other words, if diversity meant more women, for example, what did that leave out? Perhaps people from racial and ethnic backgrounds less likely to be present in open-technology communities? Or an understanding of gender that is less binary? People outside of North America and Europe? Advocates are not wrong to draw attention to the lack of representation of various groups in open-technology communities.

Going further, though, how do these multiple framings of identity within open technology serve to produce a politics of representation? What are the consequences of this act of production? What does a politics of representation fail to capture? This book argues that the current advocacy around diversity in open technology, with its emphasis on identity categories, largely circumscribes core questions about social and economic power that are suggested by advocates’ engagement with diversity in open technology. An issue in need of recognition is that many advocating for diversity are located in North America and Europe—that is, in the Global North. In advocating for more women, a more expansive notion of gender, or more members of minoritized racial and ethnic groups in open-technology communities, advocates overlook the fact that there is a global underclass whose work materially supports the productive power of open technology.⁶¹ In other words, the material and discursive output of FLOSS is quite literally made possible by labor that extracts raw material and manufactures hardware, which allows FLOSS and hacker communities’ technical engagement. If we zoom out from the Global North and take an expansive notion of tech work—including the labor that undergirds hacking and open technology—it can hardly be said to have a diversity problem per se, because women workers of color actually abound. Thus, the diversity problem with which advocates mainly struggle must be seen in context as an attempt to expand the ranks of an elite position within global capitalism—high-status, well-paid tech workers. The diversity advocacy that forms the subject of this book attempts to change the constitution of open-technology communities while struggling with its ability to realign the social and economic power relations in which open-technology work is implicated.

As stated above, I do not attempt to define diversity or claim that one single definition of this concept suits the work I am doing here. Instead I regard it as a keyword that emanates from open-technology communities (though it does not originate with them, of course). I am interested in the work that it does in the social imagination of amateur technology cultures centered on “open stuff.”⁶² In my conception, it is precisely the murky outline of diversity that allows it to attain power, especially as it is not a value to which many people are easily opposed.⁶³ In some ways, diversity advocacy in these sites simply mirrors wider roil about less-than-equal standing and mistreatment of minoritized people in a variety of settings, which has become visible in campaigns from the life-and-death stakes of the Black Lives Matter movement⁶⁴ to feuds about representation embodied by, for example, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign about race and inclusion in Hollywood. But this centering of effort around a technical domain is significant and singular because of how technology is understood as a special and potent site within our culture.

It is essential to keep in mind the history of science and technology being touted as universally accessible and meritocratic while in practice serving as sites of social sorting, as indicated by Slaton. As Ahmed argues, “adding color to the white face of the organization confirms the whiteness of that face”⁶⁵; decentering the dominance of certain groups requires more than simply adding members of minoritized groups. This seeming paradox may partially account for the ambivalence that some people of color feel with regard to the overtures of would-be white allies around diversity in tech (discussed in chapter 7). It also underscores that while attention to diversity is necessary, it is far from sufficient for an antiracist social justice agenda. In her research on low-income women’s experiences with the “high-tech future” promised by digital technology, Virginia Eubanks describes a woman with a computer science degree who worked as a bus driver, because her son was disabled. Her responsibilities for care meant that she was unable to retain a position in the high-tech field for which she had been trained.⁶⁶ This kind of care work falls disproportionately to women and mothers. In drawing together these observations, I do not mean to suggest that diversity advocacy in open-technology communities is hopeless or without merit—only to illustrate that the terrain upon which advocates stage their interventions is a top layer resting upon sedimented strata that, not unlike geological formations, have formed over time through immense force. Rather than assuming that diverse people cultivating diverse technologies will lead to a more egalitarian and empowering technological future, it is essential to keep at least one eye squarely trained on the social and economic conditions that group people and endow them with differential opportunities, and how technology itself is implicated in projects of social sorting and domination.

How This Book Is Organized

Across the chapters, the central themes in this book have to do with how diversity advocates define their borders of care (principally: they care about promoting justice and equality broadly construed, but tend to limit intervention to already-constituted and bounded technical cultures, with ambivalent results) and how they are continually confronted by problems of scale, in that they are seeking wider emancipation but are limited to hacking versus effecting deeper structural transformation. It proceeds as follows. Following this introductory chapter, chapter 2 provides a historical background of the cultural strands that intertwine to produce diversity advocacy in open technology. It gives an overview of the history of women in computing, cyberfeminism, and hacking and FLOSS, while challenging conventional accounts of hacking. Chapter 3 explores what diversity advocacy builds in terms of techniques of governance and sociality to support a subaltern counterpublic and to speak back to a wider collectivity of open technologists; it illustrates the painstaking local-ness of many infrastructural interventions. Chapter 4 continues to examine what is built on a more literal artifactual level, describing what is being produced in sites of diversity advocacy, including code and craft. It argues that the significance of much of this material production is symbolic identity work; care is manufactured as much as things. Chapter 5 examines diversity advocates’ imaginaries of work and labor, many of which are contradictory, both aligning with and critiquing market values. This topic matters because, especially as advocates envision their practices as potentially promoting worker power, their analyses generally do not fully account for the protean boundaries of so-called tech work and actual, material labor conditions, including the lower-status labor that supports Global North hacking. Chapter 6 follows diversity advocacy as it intersects with political stances that relate to but are broader than diversity advocacy: social justice activism, antimilitarism, and anticolonialism. These are sites where feminist hackers in particular often articulate connections to broader values that can inform hacking (and vice versa), but often stop short of full-throated critique, in part because of the ambiguous relationship of their activities to paid labor (some of which is laid out in chapter 5). Chapter 7 explores social identity and multiple conceptions of who might embody the missing diversity in open-technology cultures, from the perspectives of diversity advocates. It discusses gender, race, and ethnicity; proposes that representation has its limits as a project of empowerment; and suggests, again, that workplace relations to some degree constrain the criticism that advocates express. Chapter 8, the conclusion, pulls together threads in the previous chapters to assess the potentials and limitations of diversity advocacy in open technology as a site for claiming equal rights, and as a quest for representation; it also evaluates the market logics that accompany this advocacy. Finally, it meditates on the challenges inherent in centering a project that insists on a redress of imbalances of power around technology, arguing for a project of justice and equity that ironically decenters technology as a primary axis of intervention. It argues that while voluntaristic tech communities cannot singlehandedly attain the scale of the endeavors they hope their interventions will address, they are well-positioned to offer care and analysis that can set a more expansive, yet more rigorous, agenda.

Research Methods

The focus in this book may appear somewhat difficult to define. Diversity advocacy in open technology is not a social movement in any traditional sense; neither is open technology itself. What this study attempts to track is the constitution of belief within a geographically dispersed and heterogeneous community, and in particular an impulse to intervene in that community. For many technologists, a “theory of change”⁶⁷ centers around technology itself: the belief that tools are drivers of social progress.⁶⁸ I situate diversity advocacy within what sociologist Anselm Strauss called a “social world perspective.”⁶⁹ For Strauss, a shared social world is first and foremost discursive, bound together by communication, but also includes “palpable matters” like activities, memberships, sites, and organizations.⁷⁰ It is challenging for the analyst to bound social worlds, because they both intersect with other worlds and segment into smaller subworlds.⁷¹ The construct of a shared social world maps quite well to the field of diversity advocacy, which overlaps and intersects with wider open-technology cultures (e.g., mainstream FLOSS) and even with the imaginary of the tech industry,⁷² or Silicon Valley, but is distinct from each of them, or not wholly of either of them. In addition, diversity advocacy segments into smaller worlds: different political, technical, and affective strains coexist within it, sometimes working toward contradictory goals. Although they are more similar than dissimilar, it is important to remember that the sites and groups whose activities comprise diversity advocacy within open-technology cultures are not monolithic.

As Christopher Kelty writes, “What advocates, adherents and proponents of free software see in it is something more than software—they see a style of remaking the world, and they immediately want to apply it to every aspect of life.”⁷³ As noted above, diversity advocacy derives from the same impulse to remake the world that FLOSS does. The practitioners in these pages hold a shared belief that there is a “bug” in how open-technology communities have been constituted, which will leave a corresponding negative imprint on their technical output. They thus believe that in fixing bugs in the community, they will attain better technological outputs, and thus a better social world; the technical and the social are imbricated and co-constitutive.

Diversity advocacy is quite evidently multisited and multivocal.⁷⁴ Methodologically, tracking and making sense of this social world is challenging, but I have attempted to conduct what might be called a situated genealogy of the present.⁷⁵ My research methods here are informed by an ethnographic sensibility, but lack the “deep hanging out”⁷⁶ component that is a hallmark of traditional single-site ethnographies. Instead, I have sought to mirror the distributed nature of this advocacy, conducting participation observation at a number of sites (North American hackerspaces, digital fabrication labs, software conferences, “unconferences,” corporate events, and software training events and meetups). An alternative approach would have been to embed myself and closely attend to a single FLOSS project or hackerspace, but the networked nature of this phenomenon means that to follow the actors I had to traverse multiple sites.⁷⁷ This might be called polymorphous engagement, in which I interact with actors across a number of dispersed sites, some in virtual form; this approach preserves the pragmatic amateurism that has characterized anthropological research (even as it moves away from a singular emphasis on participant-observation).⁷⁸ It also allows me to trace multiple simultaneous emphases and orientations within diversity advocacy; employing “comparative optics”⁷⁹ allows for a meaningful analysis of both common features that cohere diversity advocacy and different orientations within it.

Fieldwork and data gathering spanned 2011 to 2016, with continuous attention to electronic mailing lists and online traffic, and punctuated conference attendance and interviewing. This period is meaningful because it has seen several feminist hackerspaces appear as well as growing attention to diversity 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; while this indicates that I have had my finger on the pulse of a meaningful social phenomenon, it also means that the objects of study were a moving target and hard to identify, which creates a methodological challenge.

I have interviewed participants in these activities as well as founders of hackerspaces, open-source software projects, and initiatives to promote women’s participation in technology (around twenty-five semistructured and informal interviews), mainly in North America and a few in Europe. Pursuing “eclectic data collection from a disparate array of sources in many different ways,”⁸⁰ I followed much online activity, lurking on project lists and following social media, which again mirrors the fact that many of these efforts are coordinated and distributed across space, even when they also include local, static components such as hacker and maker spaces, or meetups based on a project or a programming language. Conferences, of course, are important for participants—and the researcher—for the ritual elements that occur when a community comes together, not only for the information that is transmitted within them.⁸¹ Software and hacker conferences can also be occasions for confrontation, including controversy and the policing of behavior and boundaries within a community, which are of interest to those seeking to interpret the values and meaning-making systems of a community. In tracing these threads of activity, I gain the ability to map the meaningful (and contested) discourses that surround diversity advocacy, situating them within varying social contexts. It is not an exhaustive perspective on these endeavors, but it is not wholly idiosyncratic either; I trace multiple skeins of distinct and interwoven activity in order to draw out meaningful contrasts, and interpret the implications of these varying positions for the groups staking positions within the space of this advocacy.

Researcher’s Position

My own subject position and social identity is implicated in this research. As a white, middle-class, highly educated, and literate person in North America I experienced relatively open access to and hospitable treatment in these communities and their conversations. Being a professor, my interest in these sites required little justification in most cases. That being said, my training, expertise, and commitments are those of the academy, specifically interpretive social science at the intersection of science and technology studies and communication research, not computer coding, geeking, crafting, hacking, NGOs or startups, or feminist activism. This meant I was an outsider in meaningful ways, and participants did not generally mistake me for one of their own.

Approaching middle age during this research, I was roughly a peer with or older than many of the practitioners I talked to, but not old enough to seem out of place (yet).⁸² As a mostly able-bodied person, I was able to take for granted access to physical spaces. As a native speaker of English, which is a globally dominant language generally and for technical cultures, I was not excluded from or in need of accommodation in order to follow spoken or written conversations. Hailing from the United States gave me greatest access to groups and conversations located in North America. While the book follows some conversations involving Europe—and a very few traces from Asia and Latin America—it is largely bound in space to North America and the United States in particular, though it attempts to be critically reflexive about how it is situated.

Some of these sites are literally closed to people who do not identify as women, or who are men-identified. Most were explicitly genderqueer and trans-inclusive; some required that people identify as women “in ways that are significant to them.”⁸³ This means that as a person who identifies as a cis woman, my gender is implicated in my ability to conduct this research; such strictures draw out quite plainly the fact that the conclusions I make here are situated. Whiteness marks me as a member of a dominant social group, which matters in both women-centered and mainstream spaces. My whiteness confers many advantages, but it also means that there were a number of spaces and conversations where I was not particularly welcome to visit with the intent of representing the people there in print. Many people of color have felt burned by white women and white feminists and need their own spaces for regrouping. I sought out some conversations about these topics, but especially as this research design lacked the single-site depth required to build comfort and trust, I consciously avoided pushing for my own inclusion. I sought to strike a balance that was not indifference yet offered considered respect for the dynamics of these attitudes.⁸⁴ This being said, gender is the primary axis of diversity advocacy, so the primacy of gender in this work is a faithful rendering of advocates’ priorities, not a distortion.

Research Sites: Names and Anonymity

This is not an exhaustive account of diversity advocacy in open-technology communities, but it draws from a heterogeneous cross section of diversity advocacy. This heterogeneity is what drove site selection. Sites include the Python programming language community, where advocacy around diversity was particularly salient during the period of this research;⁸⁵ the Ada Initiative (2011–15), which ran electronic mailing lists and a series of unconferences to support women in open technology; and a handful of feminist hackerspaces and hacking groups. In addition, various FLOSS projects, some named, make appearances. The community that built and maintains the Geek Feminism blog and wiki (circa 2008 to present) runs through many of these sites like a ribbon, so even though that community is not one I directly explore, its imprint appears on many of these sites. What the sites I visited have in common is that they are not especially institutionalized and are suffused by a voluntaristic ethos; I am interested in how self-organized initiatives address and challenge tech cultures with regard to the issue of diversity.

In research encounters, I disclosed my presence as a researcher. I sought written consent for formal interviews, per Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidance and best ethical practice.⁸⁶ I generally audio recorded interviews and took longhand notes, except in one instance where an interviewee did not wish to be recorded. An introduction when one joins an email list is standard, but because introductions are conducted once, it is possible that list members may have forgetten over time that a researcher was present, and it is also possible that newer list members were unaware that someone on the list was a researcher. Similarly, in group introductions in larger settings, it is possible that my presence as a researcher flew past quickly enough that people did not fully absorb it. I was more careful to alert people that I was conducting research in small group and especially one-on-one interactions.

Whether and how to identify research sites is a complex matter. In traditional ethnographies, the researcher might assign pseudonyms to the sites, and sometimes cloud locale as well (e.g. City Hospital in Large Midwestern City). Norms are changing such that it is more common to identify sites and informants by real names.⁸⁷ I have chosen to name sites named above for multiple reasons. This is ethically justified on the grounds that these sites are already positioned as public entities, conducting debate and advocacy which is by its nature public-facing as it shades into journalism and events in the public sphere. These communities of open-technology enthusiasts are not particularly vulnerable (though individuals within them may be) and are of relatively equal standing when compared to the researcher, in terms of social capital. They do not stand to lose by my disclosing that their activities form the basis for this analysis. Moreover, to change characteristics of these groups beyond recognition to those familiar with this terrain would likely impede my ability to represent them in their particularity and heterogeneity, which creates a dilemma.⁸⁸

That said, the particular events I narrate and interpret are not usually occurring in full public view; thus I do not usually associate events with a named group in the text. Even when I do, or when the group or project can be inferred, I never relate individuals’ actual names, or give identifying details about individuals beyond basic demographic information that is analytically relevant. This was negotiated with informants, many of whom were fairly willing to go on the record but were concerned about their words or opinions being misconstrued as representing the official policies or opinions of their employers or the groups in which they were active. While some consented to being named, giving everyone a pseudonym provides greater cover for those who were ambivalent or wished to remain more hidden. Interview subjects were offered the opportunity to generate their own pseudonyms, sparing me the dilemma of whether or how to disclose gender and ethnicity or nationality in pseudonyms. In not a few cases, people were concerned that identifying details like age bracket, ethnicity, gender, and geography would link them as individuals to their words, in which case we agreed upon broader categories to use that were still accurate but less identifying. Some with handles in hacking circles indicated that I should use these as their pseudonyms, but because these link them to their online identities as much as their given names would—sometimes even more—I elected to change everyone’s names.⁸⁹

I have also not identified hackerspaces, because they are smaller communities whose internal workings can be sensitive for members, and their real names are not analytically relevant.⁹⁰ Nonetheless, in all cases, this terrain is specific enough that a person knowledgeable of these sites might have a strong hunch. Plausible deniability is more realistic and more analytically faithful than absolute anonymity.⁹¹ The greater priority for me was to provide a layer of artifice that protects individual people from having their true identities associated with the utterances and actions that I narrate. One consequence of these choices may be that the sites get flattened a bit; a different approach might bring to bear significant features in order to draw out contrast between sites. A single- or two-site study would provide more intimate portraiture. As I am interested in diversity advocacy at a more zoomed-out level, as a social-world phenomenon, this trade-off is acceptable.

With interview subjects, the researcher has a greater ability to control privacy. But the reality of online research is that archives and traces of online communication may persist online, and a diligent person who wished to look up conversations I quote and link them to real email addresses or social media profiles probably could accomplish that with some.⁹² Another option would be to paraphrase all communication that leaves a trace, which I considered, but concluded undesirable, because as sociologist Arlene Stein notes, I might inadvertently blunt the power and essential features of the narrative.⁹³ I have thus erred on the side of allowing real people’s voices to stand in the text, out of respect for them and in the belief that their actual words can best represent their thoughts and opinions, which are analytically relevant. One of the sites had an explicit policy about quoting being permissible as long as individuals were not named (à la the Chatham House Rule). While this is not a blanket permission for all the sites I traversed, it speaks to the ethos of FLOSS, where both transparency and privacy are cherished values (with the right to choose whether or not to disclose being paramount). I have used it as a rule of thumb for sites that did not have published policies. In all cases, I have attempted to respect individuals’ privacy while leaving analytically relevant features of groups and people intact enough for a coherent analysis and respecting stated preferences. These choices were made in good faith, weighing considerations toward both informants and the scholarly and ethical traditions that inform this work.