Hacking Meets Feminine Craft

A prominent feature of many of the products created by advocates of diversity in open technology is how they conjoin traditionally feminine craft practices with electronic components. Textiles that incorporate the LilyPad Arduino kit are a prime example.

Developed by MIT designer Leah Buechley and commercially introduced in 2007, LilyPad is an Arduino variant geared toward use in e-textile contexts. Arduinos, as discussed above, are microcontrollers that can be programmed in a variety of ways. They are sold commercially but released as open hardware, meaning the design files are available for people to modify the design and share their modifications. They are usually programmed using open-source software.

Buechley observed that soon after the introduction of LilyPad, sales figures, in the tens of thousands, indicated that approximately 35 percent of the buyers were women, and 57 percent men. This was a striking difference from the purchasing statistics for the standard Arduino (from the same retailer), which indicated that men accounted for 78 percent of sales and women only 9 percent.¹² Over 90 percent of customers were in Europe or North America.¹³ As these numbers show, the LilyPad design was significantly more popular with women, who represented just over one-third of its purchasers, than the regular Arduino, for which women were less than a tenth of the consumer base.

The design of the LilyPad lent it to use in textile projects, as the kit included conductive thread that could be used to configure the circuit and to anchor it to a fabric base. One use suggested by the designer was to use the LilyPad to program LEDs on a jacket for use as bicycle turn signals (figure 4.4).

In a design such as this one, the microcontroller is sewn onto the garment using conductive thread. The LED lights and their switches are also sewn to the garment. Because the thread is conductive, it permits a working circuit to be mounted on the garment, which allows for various possibilities incorporating electronics into wearable items. Notably, these electronics can be programmed and attached to their bases without wires or soldering.

The significance of the LilyPad exceeds the application of this particular circuitboard or any specific project that incorporates it. In combining hobbyist electronics and sewing, it locates hobbyist electronics as being within the purview of feminine craft. This is important because electronics has a long legacy of being a masculine domestic hobby, as we saw in chapter 2. To reimagine hobbyist electronics within the feminine sphere is a way of expanding the identity of hacking and making (and of hackers and makers).

This should not be overstated, however. Computing has been associated with elements of artisanal practice for decades.¹⁴ In spite of their subsequent obscurity in popular imagination, the programmers of the earliest electronic computers were women.¹⁵ And women’s labor has been integral to the global production of electronics. For example, in the context of RCA’s hiring practices for consumer electronics production in Mexican maquiladoras, “Management’s standard explanation for its preference for young female workers typically rested on the idea that women’s mental and physical characteristics made them peculiarly suited to the intricacies of electrical assembly work.”¹⁶ Managers have often drawn parallels between needlework and the dexterity and attention to detail that electronics assembly required, citing “nimble fingers.”¹⁷ Computer historian Paul Ceruzzi gives a more detailed description of these fabrication processes, writing, “On an assembly line (possibly located in Asia and staffed by women to save labor costs), a person (or a machine) would ‘stuff’ chips into holes on one side of the [circuit] board. She would then place the board in a chamber, where a wave of molten solder would slide across the pins protruding through to the other side, attaching them securely to the printed connections.”¹⁸ As these accounts illustrate, this work is often offshore and invisible to consumers, which explains in part how computing could be so long associated with white masculinity in the North American and European markets where consumer electronics flourished. By the 1980s, electronics assembly “was not just women’s work, but women of color’s work.”¹⁹ One person at the Montréal convergence said she had learned to solder as a child, helping her mother assemble circuit boards for her job.²⁰

Nonetheless, in the realm of hobbyist craft, soft circuit designs sparked the imaginations of people interested in “hacking hacking,”²¹ opening up electronics practices and artifacts to nontraditional electronics hobbyists such as women. Soft circuit is another term for circuitry conducive to being integrated with textiles.²² (Needless to say, soft is also a signifier of femininity.²³) At the 2012 unconference for women in open technology held in Washington, DC, one of the unconference tracks was on soft circuits. People discussed possible applications of soft circuit textile designs. One attendee, who was pregnant, kidded that she should make a fetal monitor for the HOPE conference (Hackers on Planet Earth, discussed in chapter 3), in which sensors in her clothing could give her feedback on “what sessions the baby likes.”²⁴ Other people joked about a “proximity sensor dress” that would blink more aggressively as someone got closer to the wearer. This could mean either warning off someone whose approach was unwanted, or heightening the experience in a flirtation or romantic encounter. Another person said it could be combined with an eye-tracking sensor in order to convey the message “quit staring at my boobs.”²⁵ These comments were not sincere attempts at designing material artifacts (though echoes of the sex-toy-hacking workshop can be heard in the idea for a garment sensor that tracks a lover’s approach). Instead, they should be read as in-group signification, celebrating mutual affinity for feminine craft and customizable electronics. They also signified in-group membership through commiseration about common experiences for women in many technical spaces (“quit staring at my boobs”).

In the session devoted to soft circuits, an attendee from Philadelphia had brought some supplies to quickly throw together something that would illustrate the principle of soft circuits. In the approximately hour-long session, attendees decorated a pillowcase with magic markers. They also stitched on a small battery unit and a few LEDs with conductive thread. The end product was a hastily assembled collective work that celebrated women in the workplace, community around computing, and the unconference (figure 4.5).

Though celebratory of soft circuits’ potential, unconferencers also reflected on whether DIY electronics might contribute to reinforcing gender stereotypes in problematic ways. One person said she had long struggled with whether it was patronizing to try to bring women into electronics through sewing, but that she had ultimately concluded it was “not patronizing to meet people where they’re at.”²⁶ She also said that she found how makers often touted Arduinos—“you can do anything with an Arduino”—very abstract. She said, “But what does this really mean? This comment is going to sound gendered, but I think a great intro would be ‘hack your oven.’ Find a device you already use, take out the proprietary crap that controls it, and control it yourself.”²⁷ She said this approach could be taken to many household items, including the freezer, alarm clock, oven, and washing machine, newer models of which are all loaded with electronic controls. In practice, this would require not only a fair amount of expertise but a willingness to open up and break your appliances—not necessarily a welcoming prospect for a beginning hobbyist, but probably an enticing challenge for more experienced hackers and makers. Many people expressed enthusiasm for hacking automated watering systems and their household appliances. But one person said, “I need not beginner Arduino but pre-beginner Arduino,”²⁸ which again underscores an expertise barrier for true novices to electronics.

A young woman from Philadelphia who had recently graduated from college said that DIY craft could be an opportunity for hackerspaces. She said that e-textiles were, for her, more welcoming than computer science classes: “I took computer science classes but only got excited when I made my own biking jacket with turn signals”²⁹ (as shown in figure 4.4). Another person, also from Philadelphia, did not disagree but said that she thought that “a lot of hackerspaces are afraid of becoming craft spaces.”³⁰ Though she did not spell out the gendered dimensions of this, they are clearly there. A woman from Montréal laid this out more plainly, saying, “A lot of the hackerspaces [in Montréal] are less than 20 percent women, and when new women arrive, all the guys tell the women to go talk to the new woman who came in.”³¹ Thus, while unconferencers did not dismiss bringing feminine craft practices into existing hackerspaces, integrating them and giving them equal footing with other practices and artifacts would probably be challenging and require delicate maneuvering—more effort than some of them wanted to make. It is unsurprising that feminist hackerspaces and other separate spaces for women have made traditionally feminine craft practices fairly central activities.

To drive this point home, I turn to a zine-making event held at a women*-only hackerspace in San Francisco in 2014 (figure 4.6). It may seem surprising that a hackerspace would routinely host a low-tech event like zine-making, but we should not view this as incongruous. As Alison Piepmeier has noted, “Zines created by girls and women … are sites where girls and women construct identities, communities, and explanatory narratives from the materials that comprise their cultural moment.… These documents … are [also] a site for the development of late-twentieth-century feminism.”³² Insofar as a central ambition of the hackerspace was providing a site for the cultivation of a feminist-identified subaltern counterpublic, the practice of zine-making there was fully consonant. This became more apparent in the discussion about zine-making that evening. The evening’s activity was to make a zine that reflected “who comes here”³³—in other words, that narrated the hackerspace’s constituency. To accomplish this, people cut up magazines and pasted the images to 8.5 × 11-inch pieces of paper, which they also decorated with drawing and text (some written, some cut-out letters). Each page was to represent the person who made it, and they would be bound together to collectively portray the hackerspace.

The weekday evening workshop was attended by around fifteen people, many of whom had come straight from work. Most everyone appeared to be in their twenties or thirties, and while people did not uniformly present as white, a majority did. Nearly half sported a shock of vividly dyed hair, a common feature of people in hacker and tech scenes, alternative culture, and fan culture, as well as at intersections of those cultures. The event’s hosts asked people to introduce themselves to one another. Introductions were to include one’s name, one’s preferred pronoun (several people said they preferred “she/they”³⁴), and to tell the group “how you’re feeling, if you saw something weird today, and your favorite animal.”³⁵ Though this was in some ways a fairly generic introduction and icebreaker, and it was certainly meant light-heartedly, it struck me that no one had asked me to disclose to a group of people my favorite animal since I accidentally accompanied a friend to a church youth group’s after-school meeting, at around age eleven. Between the favorite animal and the confession of how one was feeling, the zine-making activity was marked as one where a sort of atavistic girlhood or adolescence was on display and welcomed. Zines can be understood as public-facing diaries, also a feminine, confessional genre. This introductory exercise also exhibited hints of a more direct feminist sensibility: in the disclosures of weird events of the day, people not only gravitated toward random mishaps and amusing urban juxtapositions, but one or two instances of unwelcome masculine attentions (firsthand or observed), in keeping with feminist cultural practices of witnessing.³⁶ (This event occurred a couple of years before the cascading #MeToo moment began.)

The evening’s participants also swapped ideas and attempted to recruit one another to create content for other zines they were working on outside of the evening’s workshop. One person said she was seeking submissions for a zine about occult, “witchy,” or magical things.³⁷ Another said she was taking submissions for “awful stuff said about your body,” inspired by a recent date who had told her she was “very sturdy.”³⁸ A number of zines were passed around and on display for perusal or inspiration. Members of the hackerspace had previously worked together, producing a zine about health told through the stories of vaginas in a family and one about menstrual periods. This latter zine included a “hipster period tracking app” that was a paper chart; it was meant to wink at the Quantified Self movement so popular in the Bay Area tech circles.³⁹ Notably, all of these proposed and extant examples show the circulation of knowledge about women’s bodies, including less-credentialed forms of knowledge such as witchcraft. Whether or not the occult zine-writer’s interest in magic should be taken at literal face value, witchcraft symbolizes a mode of resistance to patriarchy and the subjugation of women’s bodies.⁴⁰ According to cultural historian Janice Radway, zines “function as a critique of the marking and individuation of girls’ bodies as visible—that is, as bounded objects that can be controlled through others’ surveillance. At the same time, they constitute an alternative strategy for making girls present to and with each other.”⁴¹ In feminist zine making, forms of knowledge like folk medicine can be filtered through the riot grrrl practice of zine-making, which is itself connected to long traditions of feminine papercraft and journaling. They are identity practices in addition to circulations of knowledge.

My final example of feminine craft cum hacking is a 2012 piece of artwork—Compulsive Repurpose—produced by a hackerspace founder and artist in Philadelphia (figure 4.7). The piece features a knit textile, rather resembling a homemade scarf, rendered mainly in Ethernet cables. The first cable is connected to a computer keyboard, and the artist leaves visible the craft and production process by including the chunky knitting needles in the piece.

Explaining her rationale for producing the piece, the artist wrote,

I think I had recently learned about a project that aimed to get more women into hardware hacking, specifically the Lilypad Arduino and the work of Leah [Buechley]. She developed the Lilypad because many women are familiar with sewing and the materials involved, and figured it could get more women using the Arduino.… I thought for myself, as I struggled to find an entry point into hardware that was interesting, what if I combined a craft that I already like (knitting) with hardware. The Etherknit piece was the result. I think it did open up a lot of avenues I was interested in exploring, like how to use the inner wires of the ethernet cable to add circuits with LEDs.… Other people responded well to the piece, and I would be interested in pushing it further sometime in the future.⁴²

This quote shows the conscious fabrication of a link between electronics and craft practices such as sewing and knitting likely to be already in women’s skill set; in the artist’s own words, she used knitting to find an entry point into hardware. It also emphasizes that to produce speculative objects like Compulsive Repurpose is to communicate, “other people responded well to this piece.” Sometimes the objects themselves can forge connections, create juxtapositions, and spark ideas in ways that augment or exceed other forms of communication about the same concepts. These objects not only introduce new materials and practices into hacking, they “hack hacking” by challenging its boundaries. That said, what is effected by these practices is far from clear.

Autonomy of Infrastructures

Another category of product that is worth scrutiny is autonomous infrastructures.⁴³ Once again, this can range from speculative to concrete things. Autonomy is a key component of both hacker and cyberfeminist beliefs about technology, which are complex but have roots in the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s and 80s, and in the older American notion of self-reliance.⁴⁴ It also echoes the small producer ethos of indie and punk music scenes, and DIY, as practiced—particularly in Europe—within squatter movements and autonomist political movements.

The feminist server is an artifact that exemplifies autonomous communications infrastructure. Owning and running their own servers has long been a priority for geeks of various stripes, including those whose political beliefs cause them to fear censorship or interference.⁴⁵ Control and access to online content is affected by what server is used, which becomes an important consideration for groups doing political organizing. For example, on the radical left, the group Riseup devotes server space to mirroring content for social justice organizations on at least three continents. It is also a badge of geek pride to keep servers running under challenging conditions, or in unusual environments; anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes that it was “delectable and engaging” for Debian neophytes to learn project folklore such as a key server once being housed “under x’s desk in his Michigan dorm room.”⁴⁶

But feminist servers take this geek pride and interest in political autonomy in a new direction, infusing feminist critique. My first introduction to feminist servers was in a conversation with Pala, a Belgian designer I met in New York City in 2014. Wanting to learn more afterwards, I looked them up online. I found a website discussing the topic, which contained an intriguing list of principles for design and operation of a feminist server:

Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself part of an ecology of practice

Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist

Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it

Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns

Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible (Division of labour—the not so fun stuff is made by people—that’s a feminis[t] issue)

Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scaleability and immediacy because they can be traps

Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice

Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies

Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can

Treats technology as part of a social reality

Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible

Does not confuse safety with security

Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity

Tries hard not to apologise when she sometimes is not available

This is not a closed ‘definition’. Other principles can be added to this list of principles.⁴⁷

It was not clear to me whether this list of principles described a real object.

In point of fact, multiple feminist server projects launched in the mid-2010s, in Europe and Latin America. One that began in Amsterdam and later migrated to Graz, Austria, was described more prosaically: “[This] server is run by women, using free software only. It acts as a place to learn system administration skills, host services and inspire others to do the same.”⁴⁸ Feminist hardware hosts feminist content: for example, feminist servers in Europe host backup content for groups in Latin America that includes information on reproductive health—particularly abortion—as Latin American activists are fearful for the security of their content on domestic servers due to the perceived sensitivity of the information.⁴⁹

That said, the principles listed above gesture toward a function for these servers that is also more speculative and highly symbolic, and that borrows heavily from feminist theory. They acknowledge frailty (risk exposing insecurity; try not to apologize when unavailable). The servers are autonomous, but not along the lines of a notion of autonomy that foregrounds heroic self-reliance (“She decides for her own dependencies”). Their technology is recentered around social relationships (“Treats technology as part of a social reality”; “Builds on the materiality of software, hardware, and the bodies gathered around it”; are run by a caring community). And the servers are understood as situated, located in a place, a community, and a context; this is a challenge to universalist narratives about technology.

Autonomous infrastructure is imagined in numerous ways. During the feminist hacking convergence in Montréal, two local activists presented to attendees their plans to launch a new collective oriented around computer training, with an emphasis on salvaging discarded machines, getting them running, and recirculating them within the local community. They related this to autonomy in multiple ways. Most importantly, by reclaiming discarded machines, the collective hoped to establish meaningful independence from the computer production chain, which brought with it dependence on a global supply chain including offshore labor and environmental practices they did not wish to support. Though they celebrated computers as essential tools, they did not want to uncritically adopt the associated practices of consumption. They were also opposed to sending computers out into a refuse stream that used labor and environmental practices they found troubling. In addition, they hoped to “disrupt the cycle of planned obsolescence.”⁵⁰

The activists said they were modeling their collective on other groups that existed in a few cities across North America. The (quite ambitious) scope for the project included taking in donated machines from the local community, refurbishing them, installing free software, allowing people who volunteered a set amount of time to take home a machine, and donating working machines to social justice groups. They hoped to create a “support system for people to know and use free software,” holding open community events where “anyone can get their computer fixed and help running it as long as it’s running Linux.”⁵¹ They had spoken to people at recycling centers that took in donated electronics about getting their hands on unwanted machines, which were plentiful. They hoped for feedback from the feminist hacking convergence about refining their goals and taking next steps.

A couple of issues stand out here. One is the scale of activist ambition versus the reality on the ground. Though it was the case that Montréal, like other cities in the Global North, could supply activists with a steady stream of discarded consumer electronics like PCs, there were other resources that were harder to come by. One would be a stable space to host a repair shop and workshops. Astras (who was around forty, and thus had more years of hacking and activism under their belt than the Montréal activists, who appeared to be in their twenties) immediately suggested that the activists “factor in mobility [of the equipment]” and suggested that they assemble all the work stations on wheels, under the assumption that a grassroots technology project just getting off the ground might change venues multiple times before finding a stable home, if it ever did. Astras also suggested proactively splitting up the available spaces to suit needs, perhaps using one site for storage and another for teaching or workshops; they said this would make the collective “not so reliant on current infrastructural possibilities.”⁵²

Questions about space and sustainability recurred for diversity advocates seeking to carve out a hackerspace or repair shop of their own. Discussing an Amsterdam group devoted to women in hacking, begun in the early 2000s, a primary member recalled in 2009 how they borrowed spaces to meet, one in a kitchen of a squat, and another in the office of an open-source firm. She said, “Those spaces were free, so that gave us the opportunity to be somewhere. And for the rest we did all this on our own time as volunteers, so that’s free, but obviously people need to have that free time to be able to do it.”⁵³ She also discussed the first server the group used to host its content: “The one server was donated by the company that one of the [our collective members] was working at, and then when [we] had problems with that … we managed to find space [on another server, gratis], so the only thing we pay for is the DNS [domain name system registration].”⁵⁴ Both the face-to-face meeting space and the server space were borrowed or donated resources that were available because participants were situated at the intersection of paid IT work and hackerspace social worlds.

One of the most extreme examples was in New York City in 2015, where a few people were trying to get a feminist hackerspace off the ground. This effort ran for over a year as a monthly after-work meeting for people interested in becoming members of the aspiring space. That summer, meetings were held in the warehouse space leased by the Etsy corporation, the e-commerce site marketing handcrafted goods, which was located in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, just across the river from lower Manhattan. Upon arriving, in the dwindling heat of a brutally hot day in late August, I realized I recognized the building from having attended artists’ open studios events there in years past; the area had largely transitioned from a marginal arts neighborhood taking advantage of fallow warehouse space to one of luxury condominiums and corporate offices.

The Etsy space was provided under the aegis of an employee. At this meeting, a handful of women worked quietly on coding projects on their laptops, breaking to eat dinner when food they had ordered was delivered. They all appeared to be in their twenties and white. A couple of them apologetically announced to the group that they had forgotten to bring their laptop power cables, so they could only stay as long as their batteries held charge. One said she had meant to bring a knitted cowl to which she was affixing programmable LEDs, but had forgotten it when she ran out the door early that morning for a doctor appointment and then headed straight to work. I had never attended a less hands-on hacking or tinkering meetup, but the reason for this became clear in considering the space in which they were convening (figure 4.8). They couldn’t leave their projects there, as there was no storage space allocated for them. There were some tools and workbenches belonging to Etsy, but the effort required to bring material objects from home or another workspace, then to one’s paid work, and back again, limited projects to highly portable ones. The founder of the hackerspace, who was not the Etsy employee, said she could offer a conference room at her workplace, a software company, “but we can’t hold soldering projects there—or we could, but we’d have to be quiet about it, and we can’t burn the table, I’d be responsible.”⁵⁵ Etsy’s space, where one could solder and sew, was better, but only marginally. Use of Etsy’s space was contingent on the employee’s presence; if she had another obligation, or was ill, the rest of the group could not use the workspace after hours. She commented, “I can’t let you in here without an Etsy employee present, so your exposure to risk is high since you have to go through me, even though Etsy is supportive of fostering marginalized people in tech.”⁵⁶

Months later, the Etsy employee’s words had proved prescient, and the connection had proved too tenuous to continue. The meeting moved to the corporate offices of Meetup—a software company whose online social networking platform facilitates in-person meetups for people in shared communities of interest—located in the trendy SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. Again, after-hours access was contingent on the presence and commitment of a Meetup employee who was trying to launch the hackerspace. Not a year later, the nascent hackerspace’s monthly gathering had relocated once again to another space, back in DUMBO—this time to the offices of a software company whose mission was to support independent and leftist media companies. As before, the spaces were fragile in their contingency and left little room for leaving tools or projects on site until the next meetup. In New York City, the high cost of real estate meant that the hackers were wholly reliant on sponsored spaces, and corporations were the entities by far most likely to control desirable warehouse or office space. At the time of this writing, while more than sixty people have expressed interest in joining the hackerspace and the in-person meetings have continued, the hackerspace does not have a permanent home. Members might have found more permanent quarters had they reached into outer boroughs instead of meeting in lower Manhattan and adjacent waterfront Brooklyn, but this would have presented logistical challenges to meeting after work; the aspiring hackerspace members could easily stop off in these neighborhoods on their commutes.

I include this discussion of spaces because products are affected by their producers’ access to work spaces. In spaces where one cannot solder or leave behind a project in progress, material products are less likely than less tangible ones.⁵⁷ Of course, New York City in the early twenty-first century is an especially daunting place to carve out an autonomous space. Nonetheless, pursuit of autonomy of infrastructure often means carving out impermanent spaces that are highly contingent—often borrowed from corporations or other sorts of organizations—and being prepared to move. These enterprises are thus fragile, and the difficulty of scaling up projects that revolve around tools and artifacts that are challenging to move is clear. In multiple ways, such enterprises must situate themselves in regard to employment relations, and they are often far from autonomous.

One notable expression of autonomy as a value can be found in an Oakland, CA, makerspace led by people of color.⁵⁸ The makerspace itself was located in a largely African American, Chicanx, and Latinx neighborhood, in an old storefront space, a couple of doors down from a nonprofit bike collective, also run by people of color, with a particular emphasis on youth empowerment. The makerspace organizers said that in the (famously stratospheric) real estate environment of the San Francisco Bay area, the landlord gave them a break on rent in order to support their mission, which afforded them more stability than the NYC group. When I visited the space, I observed a vestige of an earlier meeting, in the form of a list on a whiteboard. Titled “To Learn for Apocalypse,” the list read:

Running

Plant identification

First aid

Fighting

Herbal medicine

Starlight navigation

DIY clothes

Surgery with everyday objects

Archery

Hunting

Compost

Finding shelter

Water⁵⁹

Whether or not this list should be taken at face value as an expression of the most prominent goals of the makerspace, it is nonetheless illuminating. It reflects the countercultural or New Communalist heritage of digital utopianism, especially prominent in the Bay Area.⁶⁰ Given the list’s setting, it also echoes community self-sufficiency measures taken by the Black Panthers, whose impulse toward survival had a different cast than that of many relatively socially and economically privileged people who moved “back to the land” in the 1970s.⁶¹ Autonomous infrastructure here dispenses with computing entirely, imagining survival in a postelectronic, broken, and forbidding landscape.

At the Montréal convergence, one person observed, “Autonomy of infrastructure in terms of software is not so bad—[but] in hardware we are far from it.”⁶² It is worth unpacking this quote. As discussed above, activists envisioned repairing and rebuilding hardware in line with their vision for autonomy from production and postuse chains to which they objected. They also struggled to find stable spaces in which they could conduct this work. Software, however, is worth considering as its own distinct case. As Christopher Kelty has argued, free software “allows values and principles to be turned into material objects, things that can be manipulated, reconfigured, tested and torqued.… [It] seems (or perhaps seemed) to have a peculiar power to leave this materialism radically open to change.”⁶³ Kelty rightly points to the fact that software, especially software with its code left open, is always potentially ripe for reconfiguration toward different material or political ends. This property is a singular reason why code has been understood as a unique object for intervention, especially for those insistent on software freedom (which should, of course, not be confused with a wider political agenda of emancipation, let alone a progressive or radical politics).

The Montréal activist who made the comment was referring to FLOSS in general, including the famous Linux operating system. But we can see how her comment could apply in the case of Dreamwidth, a software project that reflects both an open-source ethos and a commitment by its founders to changing open source in terms of whose contributions were valued and allowed to constitute the project. Founded in 2008, Dreamwidth forked the code of LiveJournal, an online platform created in 1999, which is something of a hybrid between a blogging platform and social media: users blog, journal, and post other forms of content, and form communities of interest in which they follow one another’s content.

Dreamwidth retains many of LiveJournal’s features, especially the basic foundation of the site: users publishing and sharing content. The founders of Dreamwidth (both had been LiveJournal employees) were interested in having a site with more privacy and author control over content. They removed the advertising features that LiveJournal relied on for support and instead used subscriber revenue to fund the site; since its inception, Dreamwidth has been supported financially by users, not by advertisers.⁶⁴ It is maintained by a small paid staff as well as a much larger pool of volunteer developers. It is for-profit, but not especially growth-oriented; its leaders are content to cover costs, ensure reliability, and turn a small profit instead of focusing on ever-growing expansion. Two-thirds of the company’s profits were earmarked for developments, with half of that amount put toward developments chosen by the Dreamwidth user and developer community.⁶⁵

Dreamwidth is an exemplar of open technology in multiple ways. First, and most obviously, it runs on open-source software. The code it was built upon was open source, and the changes and innovations its developers have introduced are also open source: “We strongly believe in Open Source and the Creative Commons. By freely releasing all of our code and documentation, we hope to create a vibrant and thriving community that will constantly improve the product we offer.”⁶⁶ The founders’ commitment to Creative Commons (a proposed alternative to copyright law, which allows people to license their creations in ways that explicitly permit derivative works) in addition to open source reflects the values of the project and its user and developer community. Dreamwidth describes itself as “not fandom-specific, but fandom-friendly.”⁶⁷ Its founders and users are emphatically committed to supporting fan fiction and fan artwork. The connection between open source and fan culture is well established; it is not uncommon for people to learn programming in order to support their fan enthusiasms.⁶⁸ And as noted above, the Dreamwidth user and developer community is given an explicit stake in determining how the project will proceed in terms of building new features and making changes.

Lastly, Dreamwidth is “open” in its explicit and catholic commitment to diversity, which founders embraced from the outset. In 2009, it adopted a diversity statement, which underscored its commitment to serving users (and rejecting advertising, as it plainly stated it would not privilege certain demographics over others). It read, in part:

We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level,⁶⁹ neurotype, religion, elder status, family structure, culture, subculture, political opinion, identity, and self-identification. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break after work. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. (We welcome Internet beginners who aren’t sure what any of those terms refer to.) We welcome you no matter if the Internet was a household word by the time you started secondary school or whether you were already retired by the time the World Wide Web was invented.…

Conservative or liberal, libertarian or socialist—we believe it’s possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to come together and learn from each other.…

To us, you’re not eyeballs. You’re not pageviews. You’re not demographic groups. You’re people.⁷⁰

According to founders (one of whom is a woman), their effort to prioritize “people” had some curious effects on who joined the Dreamwidth volunteer base. Dreamwidth stands out as an open-source project welcoming to newcomers. As of 2012, 70 percent of people contibuting had never programmed or never programmed in Perl (the programming language in which the project is written) before coming to work on Dreamwidth, and most contributors were women.⁷¹ (Needless to say, this was in stark contrast to many open-source projects, where 5 percent might be a high rate for women contributors.) To give a sense of scale, there were around 60 to 70 volunteers, and the project had around 40 to 50 commits [saves of changes to code] per week.⁷² One person commented, “My favorite aspect of Dreamwidth is that every contribution is welcomed, even if it’s incomplete or flawed. There is a sense that we want to help developers improve instead of rejecting them for not meeting some sort of quality standard.”⁷³ According to founders and volunteers, it provides participants with a sense of pride in their contributions to the project (even if they are small or relatively novice level), affective attachment to the project and to other volunteers, and opportunity for learning and growth in coding.

Dreamwidth is far from an enormous project, and it is barely a decade old. But it reflects many of the values of both open source and the diversity advocates within open technology. Running on open-source software, with its ambitions of limited growth and its profit structure designed to cover costs and feed revenues back into the project, Dreamwidth is a tangible example of what the Montréal activist was talking about when she commented that “we have more autonomy in software than in hardware or infrastructure.”

Conclusions: Crafting Capacity?

This chapter has surveyed a variety of products that flowed from open-technology communities that explicitly prized and strove for diversity. Some of them, like the cryptodance and Compulsive Repurpose, were essentially speculative. Others, like feminist servers, represented functional objects that also played with and reimagined the underpinnings of technologies like networked computing. Still others, like Dreamwidth and the Lilypad Arduino, were not only concrete but sufficiently developed to be monetized and circulating in markets, albeit niche ones. All are of great importance for their symbolic or ritual dimensions. As these objects and ideas about them circulated within open technology and maker communities, they signified creators’ beliefs about whose participation should count or be valued. In particular, elevating “feminine” craft products and practices and inserting them into spaces of electronics and computing enthusiasm should be understood as ritual communication, expressions of in-group solidarity and flag-planting.

Rather than focusing on the material effects of any of these products in particular, this chapter argues that collectively, they function as engines of sociality. In other words, they drive the formation of collectivities in open technology, offline and online. They form rallying points that exalt communal action, uniting an imaginary of hacking with diversity advocates’ critiques of mainstream open technology. Participants make and remake such tangible artifacts as textiles embedded with soft circuits, open-source platforms for creative expression, and zines. These artifacts provide symbolic support for the evolution of nonhegemonic forms of hacking, around which communities and identities may be formed. This is true even when the material outcomes are far from working.

These products and artifacts also signified these communities’ values. Indeed, they cannot be separated from the political orientations and emphasis on criticality formulated by diversity advocates. One prominent axis of critique, elaborated in a variety of ways, had to do with autonomy of infrastructure. One might reasonably ask, autonomy from what? And toward what end?

The hopeful Montréal hardware activist group quite ambitiously aspired to create a local supply chain for electronics hardware that relied upon reuse and repair. This represented autonomy from global supply and waste chains. Hardware was donated by local organizations and individuals, sometimes activists’ employers (like the early feminist server). Dreamwidth, the software project, had carved out a niche using paid membership and mostly donated developers’ time, so it was able to sustain itself economically without dependence on advertisers. In its commitment to free expression, it also supported the development of free culture products including fan fiction and artworks. The aspiring feminist hackerspace and the makerspace led by people of color also invoked autonomy. The former hoped to carve out permanent meeting spaces, sometimes borrowing space from employers or from other hacker groups. The latter articulated a skill set for surviving in uncertain times—a fusion of DIY, local and indigenous knowledge, and expert practices with everyday tools.

While these groups’ aspirations to autonomy can be taken at face value, it is worth interrogating some of the evident paradoxes in these stances. First, technical expertise presents a difficulty for those simultaneously promoting rarified technical practices and a challenge to elitism in hacking. Quite simply, there is a barrier to entry with hacking hardware and software (as well as with sewing and crafting—but many people, especially women, are likely to have overcome that barrier early in their lives). As one activist at the Montréal feminist hacker convergence responded to the aspiring hardware repair collective, “It’s not empowering to ask people to use Linux, or open source [more generally] if you don’t have the support [in learning to use it].”⁷⁴ She herself was an enthusiast of free software. But she acknowledged that hardware and software autonomy might remain the province—and wish fulfilment—of geeks, not everyday users, unless the hardware collective gave close and considered attention to the politics of expertise, social position, and difference. (The aspiring hardware collective members agreed. One of their goals was a form of mutualism; they pledged to help fix anyone’s computer as long as it ran on Linux.) Dreamwidth’s founders also recognized that expertise was an issue for a group building a technical product that claimed to welcome newcomers to Perl and to programming more generally; they emphasized that they chose to privilege newbies’ contributions over an already-expert developer base: “Every contribution is welcomed, even if it’s incomplete or flawed.”

Another main paradox of the notion of autonomy of infrastructure is that diversity advocates are often required to eke out their communities’ existences in impermanent, contingent spaces. At first glance, Dreamwidth’s autonomy appears more secure. Colocation and temporal synchrony are not required for software collaboration; volunteer developers can be anywhere. The ethos of free and open-source software has allowed for the forking of even mature code bases, which allowed Dreamwidth creators to build upon and modify LiveJournal’s code to suit their own purposes. But like other free software projects, in relying on enthusiastic volunteer developers, the software project chose a relationship to remunerated acts of production in which it is indeed dependent on paid labor, but paid labor that provides leisure or volunteer time on the side. In all cases, projects stake their autonomous existences in relation to paid work, more and less self-consciously (and sometimes including employer or corporate munificence in the form of surplus or waste).

In any event, as the feminist server authors remind us, autonomy as taken up here is generally more about deciding one’s own dependencies than about a claim to total autonomy, or a fantasy of total control. Though many open-technology diversity advocates share with digital utopianists a belief in the emancipatory potential of computers, they position themselves differently than arch-cyberlibertarians.⁷⁵ These are not sites where it is universally believed that “code will save the world.”⁷⁶ The universalism of that belief is belied in part by the fact that the communities invested in saving the world through code fall far short of representing the actual range of people in the world, a shortcoming that is emphatically certified by diversity advocates. In these sites, it is acknowledged that other forms of care and sociality can be as needed, or more needed, than code. Their border of care exceeds objects. This belief is expressed in part through the creation of products that are not code, many of which have little obvious utility, and which refute and challenge universalist projects. A page for a zine or a handsewn LED on a sweatshirt (in 2016 in North America) signifies craft, the particular, imperfect, and nonscalable production. The feminist server is a particularly delectable refutation of universalism: it is situated, and it builds on the materiality of the bodies, hardware, and software gathered around it. Its creators have probably not only read Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” but also gone to sleep with it under their pillows for many nights in a row.

In the end, the products of diversity advocacy reveal a cultural project to intervene into hacking culture, which, like hacking culture itself, is rife with contradictions and an often underspecified, prefigurative politics. A critical stance is detectable, but not a full-throated political intention or intervention. This is perhaps unsurprising. As Christopher Kelty has argued, open source has become dominated by “domesticated” forms—its dominant impact has been one of “techno-infrastructural reform,” less than a “public-oriented, critical and politicized” result.⁷⁷ The social and political milieu from which the diversity advocates’ interventions and products emerge is not politicized in any clear way, nor is it monolithic (see chapter 6).

The above products are engines for sociality. They tell stories about belonging, which challenge the hegemony of hacking as an equivalent to coding and computer hardware. They also publicly critique the constitution of open-technology cultures.⁷⁸ This sociality may aid in the cultivation of networks of care that support people in their jobs or in other less-welcoming hobbyist technical spaces. Further political potential remains underdeveloped. Inarguably, this is in part because technologists convene around artifactual production. They 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 explicit social contestations. Feminist hackers in particular acknowledge that technological hacks cannot route around social problems, because they are products of social relations—though material artifacts are also produced. We are left wondering, is the production of alternate stuff that represents their values (or merely their presence) a sufficient outcome? Alternately, where else might the production of shared sociality and identity lead?