v

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowl edgments ix

1 Introduction 1

2 History, Heresy, Hacking 32

3 To Fork or Not to Fork: Hacking and Infrastructures of Care 49

4 Crafting and Critique: Artifactual and Symbolic Outputs of Diversity Advocacy 96

5 Working Imaginaries: “Freedom from Jobs” or Learning to Love to Labor? 128

6 The Conscience of a (Feminist) Hacker: Po liti cal Stances within Diversity Advocacy 149

7 Putting Lipstick on a GNU? Repre sen ta tion and Its Discontents 183

8 Conclusion: Overcoming Diversity 229

Bibliography 243

Index 263

1

1Introduction

Why did this come up as an issue when it did? Well . . . People started tracking instances of overt sexism and talking about it. The default [had been], sigh, “another one of those [bad] things happened to me.” Then there were the “groping is happening at your events” [discussions], sometimes people were blogging about this . . . Women who had been in the community long enough got to the point [where] they said, it’s ok to have this conversation [now]. It’s critical that at entry- level stuff you— we— don’t fuck this stuff up [ because then we will turn people off and lose them forever].1— InterVIewee, marcH 2012

A reader might reasonably assume that the opening quote refers to recent revelations of sexual harassment (and worse) in Hollywood. Starting in the fall of 2017, a series of accusations were leveled against prominent men in the entertainment industry, starting with film producer Harvey Weinstein. This sparked a wave of “#MeToo” public sphere discussions of harassment, misconduct, and unequal treatment of women that circulated in the media, around water coolers, on social media platforms, and in schools and homes.2

1. Interview, Meg, March 2012, Boston, MA.2. Initially conceived by civil rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006, “#MeToo” drew women’s

individual experiences with sexual harassment into collectivity, creating space for empathy, soli-darity, and activism. In the wake of Trump’s election to the presidency, there was renewed urgency for attention to these issues. See Gibson et al. 2019; Ohlheiser 2017.

2 cHaPter 1

In a very short span of time, multiple power ful, high- profile men in politics, entertainment, and a few other fields were accused of wrongdoing, and in many cases terminated from their jobs. As of 2019, it is clear that this cultural moment is not over, and its final outcomes have yet to be written.

But this quote is from an interview I conducted in 2012 and pertains to a diff er ent cultural field entirely— the realm of open technology, where makers, programmers, and hackers mingle (online and off ) to circulate knowledge and cultural goods, share technical prob lems and solutions, and generally revel in exploring technical puzzles related to coding and to craft. The inter-viewee was describing a dominant trend in these circles: snowballing advo-cacy around diversity and inclusion in voluntaristic technical communities, which had become pronounced as early as 2006. As the #MeToo momentum makes evident, this advocacy in open- technology cultures is an instantiation of a much wider social phenomenon, a collective reckoning with gendered imbalances in social power. This being said, there are features that make open- technology cultures distinct; they are largely convened in places where human resources departments or equal opportunity legislation do not hold sway, as they are voluntaristic, and they are (or have traditionally been) gov-erned relatively informally. This means that participants have historically had little formal recourse to redress instances of either abuse or subtler unequal standing. Moreover, specific cultural barriers to addressing these issues, including the belief that these communities are open to whoever “wants to be there,” have tended to perpetuate the notion that if some people are not there, it is because they do not wish to be. Lastly, though this quote makes reference to ugly be hav ior (“groping”), it would be a mistake to think that advocacy in these communities primarily pertains to ending violent mis-treatment. Much more of it has to do with more mundane yet still laborious efforts to place inclusion at the fore and build up infrastructures for support.

Advocacy around “diversity” in software and hackerspace3 communi-ties, which spans the past de cade and continues today, gathered momentum after the 2006 release of a Eu ro pean Union policy study that indicated that fewer than 2  percent of participants in free/libre and open- source software (FLOSS)4 were women.5 This appeared to set FLOSS apart from propri-etary software development; while still heavi ly masculine, women’s rate of

3. Hackerspaces are community workspaces where people with interest in computers, craft, and other types of fabrication come together to socialize and collaborate.

4. “ Free” and “libre” are interchangeable (though the latter nods to languages that are not En glish), while “open” means something diff er ent (see chapter 2).

5. Nafus et al. 2006.

IntroductIon 3

participation in non- FLOSS development was around 28  percent.6 Partici-pants were galvanized by these findings about FLOSS— what about their communities could account for such a dramatically low rate of participation by women?7 What interventions were appropriate and effective to change this? A subsequent study, administered in 2013, showed that FLOSS partici-pants who identified as nonmale had climbed to approximately 14  percent.8 This shows that something was happening within these communities, result-ing in an increase in participation by women and other people who did not identify as men.

Interventions to change the constitution of and practices within open- technology cultures should be understood as social analy sis. Diversity advo-cacy flows from the same impulse to remake the world that FLOSS does. It is best understood as the practices that result from prac ti tion ers’ shared belief that there is an error in how open- technology communities have been constituted, one that will leave a corresponding negative imprint on their technical output, which is how they intend to shape the world. Thus their impulse is to correct the “error” in the community (and not to reevaluate whether technology is the seat of pro gress). In attending to the pro cesses and practices of diversity advocacy, we can observe how this advocacy flows from the social world of FLOSS itself, and attempts to remake it, and thus the world.

At the heart of this book lies the question: What happens when ordi-nary people try to define and tackle a large social prob lem? Though open- technology communities possess features diff er ent from the culture at large, they nevertheless constitute a laboratory for the voluntaristic address of social in equality. One special feature is, of course, their orientation around technology, which means they are beholden to the cultural legacies of com-puting and engineering in impor tant ways. Another is their level of com-mitment to self- governance and autonomy. The hacker ethic includes a devotion to hands-on prob lem solving, which, this book argues, has led to open- technology enthusiasts trying to hack their communities in real time. In other words, some have addressed their communities with an approach

6. Nafus et al. 2006: 4.7. It is worth pointing out that industry data may overstate the presence of women in technical

fields due to conflation of women employed overall in these industries versus women employed in technical positions. So it is pos si ble that the glaring 2006 statistics about FLOSS overstated how special FLOSS was in this regard. Thanks to Chris Kelty for discussion on this point.

8. Callahan et al. 2016: 575. Note that the framing of “nonmale” gender shifted during this period from “ women” to “ women and other people who did not identify as men.”

4 cHaPter 1

that can be characterized as, Hey, our culture is informal and constituted by shared interest in taking things apart and putting them back together again, so how hard could it be to change?

Though this book is eminently sympathetic to these impulses, it shows is that there is a prob lem of scale for voluntaristic technologists hoping to reframe power relations. Part of the issue is that DIY interventions are insuf-ficient to take on structural social prob lems (which is not a shortcoming of these communities, or their members’ efforts). But it is also worth zeroing in on the analy sis itself. Though “diversity in tech” discourse is emanating from many quarters in our current historical moment, it is impor tant that the mandate of open- technology cultures is not identical to that of industry or of higher education. Here, the reasons for engagement with technology nominally include experiencing jouissance and a sense of agency. This is experienced through, yet not reducible to, community members’ engage-ment with technology. If we tease apart the emancipatory politics from the technical engagement, we find that the calls for inclusion and for refram-ing power relations are not only about technical domains; rather, they are about agency, equity, and self- determination at individual and collective levels. This book argues that the social analy sis offered by diversity advocates in open- technology cultures is impor tant, but often incomplete. Calls for diversity in technical participation stop short of calls for justice— and are certainly not interchangeable. A consequence of this elision or slippage is that diversity work has the troubling potential to feed back into status quo arrangements of social and economic power that advocates are nominally critiquing. Therefore, a robust appraisal of power, and of technology’s role in reproducing social orders, is required. This has implications that extend beyond open- technology communities. Careful attention to calls for inclu-sion and reconfiguring power in open- technology communities may, ironi-cally, reach their fullest potential if they disentangle technology from agency. These two points— understanding how diversity advocacy does and does not scale, and where bound aries are drawn in technical communities’ critical, reflexive attention to social and technical order— are this book’s contribu-tions to social analy sis that can enhance and multiply diversity advocates’ efforts to generate justice.

This book argues that this diversity advocacy in open- technology cul-tures holds the keys to a broader emancipatory politics, which is not techno-logical emancipation. Precisely because their mandate is not, for example, to capture a wider market share or ready a national workforce, diversity advocates in open- technology communities have the space to articulate not

IntroductIon 5

only the potentials of technological engagement but also the limits. A rigor-ous analy sis of power that emanates from technology- oriented communities is vital as conversations about power and inclusion roil science, technol-ogy, engineering, and math (STEM) industries and sites of education in our technologically advanced but socially and eco nom ically unequal socie ties. Ironically, technical inclusion may be a red herring when elemental equities have not been established.

The prob lem of scale can be addressed only through a more incisive analy sis. It is ironic that the hack, the patch used to fix a bug, which had served prac ti tion ers well for technical prob lems in technical communities of a certain size, is not particularly well suited to the matters that concern diver-sity advocates. Entrenched social prob lems are hard to hack away. A more expansive critique that includes labor, class, and the transnational po liti cal economy of the material conditions that support Global North hacking is needed if these advocates wish to maximize the potentials of their emergent analy sis. This is not a criticism of the individuals who toil at diversity advo-cacy. To the contrary, their activities represent sincere, vital, and caring9 energies directed toward improving their communities and, it is hoped, the wider society. Diversity advocates in voluntaristic hacking settings are in a unique and influential position from which to launch a critique, as they are not beholden to institutions and not formally circumscribed by the power relations of workplaces. In other words, their power to effect structural change is limited, but their power to propagate social analy sis of the stakes of diversity in tech is great. This is why it is impor tant to bring their analy sis into sharper focus.

This book uses the empirical site of advocacy around diversity in software and hackerspace communities to assess engagement with technology as a site of purposive po liti cal action. It explores multiple framings surrounding the overlapping issues of who participates in amateur technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. My proj ect here is distinctly not to ask (or answer) questions such as, “Why aren’t there more women in STEM?” or “How can we bring more African American or Latinx people into STEM?” Rather, I uncover a range of motivations behind amateur interven-tions into diversity questions, in order to evaluate the po liti cal potentials and limitations of such proj ects. The multiple framings of who participates in technology development, and to what end, are taken as objects of inquiry in

9. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes, care “signifies: an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico- political obligation” (2011: 90). See also Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015.

6 cHaPter 1

their own right. The book argues that technology is a fraught concept to place in a central role in a proj ect of emancipation, requiring special attention.

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 re orient power in light of participants’ understandings of the moral and tech-nical 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 social-ize and collaborate. These sites are far from monolithic, but they are more alike— bound together by a shared (if not singular) po liti cal and technical imaginary— than they are diff er ent. 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 implica-tions 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

10. This heading title is an allusion to Latour’s (by way of Archimedes) “give me a laboratory and I will raise the world,” the idea that Pasteur built the strength of the laboratory by inducing and enrolling other ele ments of the world (like microbes and inscribed information) to run through it (1983). But I am not making a Latourian argument; hacking implies emergence (Kelty 2008).

11. Kelty 2008: 2.12. Banks 2015; Coleman 2015. To own, 0wn, or pwn a server is to gain the top level of access

and have free rein to do what you like (Coleman 2015: 160).13. Coleman 2012a; Dunbar- Hester 2014.14. Interview, Jannie, April 27, 2010, Amsterdam. Though many hackers are secular and athe-

ist, their reverence for their activities often approaches religious fervor. Sociologist of hacking Sarah Davies writes that in her early research, she “toyed with the idea, eventually rejected, of using

IntroductIon 7

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has demonstrated that hackers deploy a range of po liti cal stances including agnosticism and denial of formal politics (exceeding software freedom),15 though implications for intellectual prop-erty in par tic u lar 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 proj ects 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 hack-ing and crafting code that unites FLOSS communities has collided with a realization that to believe that these communities are open in an uncom-plicated 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 proj ects 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 re spects 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 indi-vidualism. Users’ autonomy is sometimes, but not always or even mainly experienced or expressed at the individual level; the community, group, or

the lit er a ture of the sociology of religion— conversion narratives, evangelism, the construction of higher purpose and meaning—to analyse involvement in hacker and makerspaces” (2017c: 225). Thanks to Christo Sims for discussion on this point.

15. The Free Software Foundation explains, “To use free software is to make a po liti cal and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy” ( Free Software Foundation n.d.).

16. Coleman 2012a. See also Kelty 2008.17. See Nafus 2012; Rea gle 2013.18. Kelty 2014: 214.19. GNU Operating System, n.d. Emphasis in original.

8 cHaPter 1

proj ect is also a meaningful unit, and its freedom is also impor tant. In North Amer i ca, 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 Amer-i ca, 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 tech-nology.22 The articulations of freedom within the FLOSS community matter because at pre sent 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 rhe toric 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 undesir-able 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 ideo-logically 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 or ga nize their relationship through . . . traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organ ization.”25 He went on, “Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others

20. Raymond 1998.21. See Chan 2013; Takhteyev 2012.22. As a matter of historical and genealogical accuracy, it is worth noting that there are

semantic and ideological distinctions between free software and open source. Yet as they are mobilized by open- technology communities seeking to consider diversity issues, they are more alike than diff er ent, which is why I lump them together in this book without hesitation. The term open technology encompasses both.

23. Thanks to Sarah Myers West and Mike Palm for comments here.24. Email,—to [Feminist Hacking List], November  1, 2018. Thanks to Mike Palm for

discussion.25. Benkler 2006: 8.

IntroductIon 9

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 organ ization could be relevant in FLOSS cul-tures. 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 estab-lishes 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 techni-cal 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 prob ably no coincidence that as cele bration 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

26. Benkler 2006: 9.27. Coleman 2012a: 120.28. Powell 2012.29. Söderberg 2008: 30.30. Here I use tech as a shorthand for development of software, electronics, and comput-

ing hardware, following media, education, and industry usage. I do argue however that an all- encompassing notion of tech—particularly analytical looseness about tech participation and participants— serves to reproduce rather than destabilize existing hierarchies and power arrangements.

10 cHaPter 1

disconnect between agency as an abstract individual capacity and diversity advocacy, which is necessarily socially embedded.

Access and emancipation are po liti cally charged ideas: they offer liberal subjects inviting opportunities for self- determination as individuals and as collectives.31 Technology, and computing technology in par tic u lar, has a tangled relationship to these po liti cal constructs, but in our pre sent age, talking about the machines is never just talking about artifacts decoupled from these po liti cal valences. What is worth sustained analy sis 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 comput-ing, freedom, and pro gress. In the words of one prominent diversity advo-cate, whose technical background included a high- status programming role in a free software operating system proj ect, “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 prob lem with a computer, it’s because you told it to do something wrong. [Working with code] can bring plea sure, adrenaline, and joy.”32 She neatly articulates many of the core beliefs of open technolo-gists and computing devotees in general. First, the idea that FLOSS has a “transcendent purpose” (in contrast to contract work for industry or govern-ment 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 pleas ur able 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 some-thing wrong. Her quote exemplifies key ele ments 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

31. Kelty 2014.32. Interview, Liane, July 24, 2014, San Francisco, CA.33. See Streeter 2010; Coleman 2012a; Kelty 2008.34. Here I am using hacker in an expansive sense to indicate users who have much closer

relationships with computers than those held by average users, which are usually constituted in part by affective connections to this technology. I am using it in spite of the limitations of hacker identity, discussed in the next chapter, and sidestepping the common sensationalist media repre-sen ta tion of the hacker.

IntroductIon 11

those who experience these relationships with technologies would iden-tify 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 pro gress 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 Par-ticipation in technical cultures and open technology in par tic u lar has been routinely hailed as attractive, even transformative. Indeed, one of the rea-sons open technology has been so celebrated is because (in conceptions like Benkler’s, and countless others) it is held to offer its participants an oppor-tunity to rework social relations, implicitly or explic itly contributing to their empowerment. Fundamentally, expanding this participation is often touted as a shortcut to enhancing po liti cal agency for every one, and in recent years particularly for those groups who have been relatively sidelined vis- à- vis technological and po liti cal 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 par tic u lar, what are the entailments of exporting a progressive belief in the individual and collective power of technical agency to sites of social and economic in equality? Before we begin to answer this question, however, we should spend a moment unpacking how technological pro gress and human or social pro gress 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 pro gress; while it could be in the ser vice of human pro gress, 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. Preced-ing terms (such as machinery, the mechanic arts, and even the word tech-nology itself, which did exist but narrowly referred to branches of learning

35. Kelty 2014: 198.

12 cHaPter 1

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 handi work. 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 impor tant to take technology seriously as an object of analy sis. 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 pre sent society, it cannot help but to stand in for things greater than artifacts, and it is understood to have profound effects on social order. Con-versations about technology are rarely about artifacts in themselves (though this phrasing may mislead us into thinking that a clear demarcation of tech-nology from society, from power, and from social order is even pos si ble, 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 analy sis: 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 develop-ment in order to maximize “ human flourishing through creative and self- actualizing production.”38 Likewise, technology is a unique domain for the discharge of po liti cal 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 po liti cal concerns and seek to build technologies that they believe can shift social power and redress social

36. Marx 2010: 562–64.37. Sturken and Thomas 2004.38. Barton Beebe quoted in Coleman 2012a: 15.39. Marx 2010: 577.

IntroductIon 13

imbalances or inequities. This certainly is true of quite a number of the people in open- technology communities whose efforts are under consider-ation here. Others, however, believe that “pro gress 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 po liti cal chan-nels is widespread among open- technology enthusiasts, though emphasis can be placed on diff er ent aspects of technology development, in par tic u lar developing (or reworking) technology for specific po liti cal reasons versus keeping technology under development for its own sake.41 Lastly, and cru-cially, 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 po liti cal outcomes through technological devel-opment. 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 vari ous forms of civic, po liti cal, 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 prob ably 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 rea-sons having to do with consolidating their own social and technical power, more or less consciously. Lastly, some articulations of freedom and meri-tocracy 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

40. Coleman 2012a: 119.41. Neither of these beliefs is inherently demo cratic, and both can be quite technocratic.42. Thanks to Sarah Myers West for help with this point. Notably, the coiner of the term

meritocracy intended it as a satirical concept, which was lost on many who uncritically adopted it in subsequent de cades (Young 2001; thanks to Peter Sachs Collopy for this reference). At one feminist hackerspace, the wifi password when I visited was “meritocracy is a joke,” pushing back on the meritocratic ideal, but only within the subaltern counterpublic of members and vetted

14 cHaPter 1

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 po liti cal 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 po liti cal implications of diversity advocacy. Even in spite of advocates’ often clearly emancipatory objectives, some of their framings of prob lems 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 prob lems; it can be power ful 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 sig-nificantly diff er ent proj ect from the one that diversity advocates are now challenging their communities to undertake. There is a potential discon-nect 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 worth-less, just that their proponents are up against entrenched, monumental pat-terns. 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

visitors (Fieldnotes, July 2014, San Francisco, CA; see also Skud 2009; Rea gle 2017). Amy Slaton has illustrated that meritocratic framings in engineering education were used to deny the fact that race could function as a determinant of students’ life experiences (2010: 171). Fi nally, meritocracy can also be mobilized to argue for diversity initiatives (see Fowler 2015), though this is much rarer than “colorblind” (and the like) meritocratic framings.

IntroductIon 15

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, techno-crats, and corporations. Chua writes in a 2015 blog post,

As a kid, I wanted to choose the privilege of being oblivious and keep-ing 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 analy sis suggests that mov-ing 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 analy sis is more ambiguous: What effect does “patching the roof ” have

43. Chua 2015. Emphasis in original.44. Slaton 2017.45. Slaton 2017.

16 cHaPter 1

beyond a single building? To extend her meta phor, is the plumbing con-nected to sewer systems and water treatment facilities that taint the tap water?

Scale is an issue here: diversity advocates hope to rectify social prob lems 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 proj ects and cultures—to patch the roof and fix the plumbing. This comes up short as a solution for the prob lem 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 prob lem is conceptual or definitional, having to do with how social prob lems are framed. If the goal is to distribute diversity, to sow more diff er ent 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 proportion-ately represented in proj ect A or proj ect 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 proj ect or institutional setting “gives permission” for people to turn away from institutional or societal in equality.47 Put differ-ently, to frame social in equality 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 vari ous social identities in a given sector are outgrowths of differential social power, not the other way around.48 As po liti cal theorist Joan Tronto writes, “the pro cess by which we make some questions central and others

46. Ahmed 2012: 71. Emphasis in original.47. Ahmed 2012: 71.48. Harding 1995. In her foundational study on early communities in cyberspace, Lori

Kendall writes, “The culture of [her research site] and similar online spaces have been constructed by people from par tic u lar (relatively homogeneous) backgrounds. As such, these cultural contexts continue to appeal to people from those backgrounds and to re- create par tic u lar meanings and understandings. Increases in online diversity will not necessarily change these existing norms” (2002: 216, emphasis added).

IntroductIon 17

peripheral or marginal is not simply a benign pro cess of thought.”49 In social analy sis and intervention, where the borders of care are drawn is critical.

The proj ect of this book is to name and elucidate these dynamics in order to help advance a po liti cal proj ect of justice in a technology- oriented world. It is impor tant 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 prob lems 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 vari ous 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 pos si ble.

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 par tic u lar 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 impor tant? 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 mean-ing is part of what makes diversity work as well as it does; it is shifting and nebulous, ripe for appropriation in diff er ent contexts, with a protean (and contested) po liti cal valence.51

The mobility of diversity is easy to grasp, as it is a ubiquitous term and concept. Our con temporary moment is saturated with exhortations for women and members of other underrepresented groups (but particularly

49. Tronto 1993: 4.50. Ahmed 2012: 58.51. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping draw this out.

18 cHaPter 1

women) to take up participation in STEM. “Building up young people of color in tech so that we can fi nally tackle structural inequity and disparity in this critical industry . . . [is] integral to the advancement of social justice in Amer i ca,”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 empow-erment. (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 Amer i ca’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 memoran-dum 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 hir-ing women better served our users.”57 In other words, the corporation’s full

52. Email, Dream Corps mailing list, February 16, 2019. Emphasis in original. Thanks to Chenjerai Kumanyika for discussion.

53. National Center for Women & Technology. I use Hispanic here because NCWIT does. See Margolis 2010.

54. “ Women in STEM,” n.d. The page also quotes President Barack Obama as having said in February 2013, “One of the things that I really strongly believe in is that we need to have more girls interested in math, science, and engineering. We’ve got half the population that is way under-represented in those fields and that means that we’ve got a whole bunch of talent . . . not being encouraged the way they need to.”

55. United States, 2017.56. Prasad 2018. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.57. http:// www . google . com / diversity / women / index . html, accessed February 2, 2015.

Another Google page additionally stated, “Our goal is to build tools that help people change the

IntroductIon 19

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 busi-nesses, 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 vol-untaristic ethos that surrounds FLOSS. We have to explain why fairly grass-roots 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 impor tant 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 impor tant, and why? In the earliest and widest instances of diversity advocacy, the who of diversity usu-ally 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 mem-bership 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? Per-haps people from racial and ethnic backgrounds less likely to be pre sent in

world, and we’re more likely to succeed if Googlers reflect the diversity of our users” (http:// www . google . com / diversity / women / our - work / index . html, accessed February 2, 2015).

58. http:// www . google . com / diversity / women / our - future / index . html, accessed February 2, 2015. Note that while my research sites are mainly in North Amer i ca, Archana is in India; techni-cal work is used to bring people into globalized capitalism, literally and figuratively (Freeman 2000; see also Qiu 2016).

59. Chua n.d.60. Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 1991.

20 cHaPter 1

open- technology communities? Or an understanding of gender that is less binary? People outside of North Amer i ca and Eu rope? Advocates are not wrong to draw attention to the lack of repre sen ta tion of vari ous groups in open- technology communities.

Going further, though, how do these multiple framings of identity within open technology serve to produce a politics of repre sen ta tion? What are the consequences of this act of production? What does a politics of repre sen-ta tion 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 sug-gested by advocates’ engagement with diversity in open technology. An issue in need of recognition is that many advocating for diversity are located in North Amer i ca 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 pos si ble 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 prob lem per se, because women workers of color actually abound. Thus, the diversity prob lem with which advocates mainly strug gle 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

61. Qiu argues that, far from being new, shiny, and digital, these conditions are an outgrowth of old industrial geopolitics (2016).

IntroductIon 21

centered on “open stuff.”62 In my conception, it is precisely the murky out-line 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 advo-cacy 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 vis i ble in campaigns from the life- and- death stakes of the Black Lives Matter movement64 to feuds about repre sen ta tion embodied by, for example, the #OscarsSoWhite campaign about race and inclusion in Hol-lywood. 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 organ ization 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

62. Skud 2011.63. Exceptions exist: when diversity is interpreted as affirmative action or as at odds with

meritocracy, opposition in FLOSS can be intense.64. Rickford 2016; Mislán and Dache- Gerbino 2018.65. Ahmed 2012: 151, emphasis in original. Ahmed writes that “diversity pride” may demand

solidarity with whiteness. On the other hand, Ralina Joseph explores the “strategic ambiguity” of “postracial” terms like “inclusivity” and “humanity,” arguing that they can be a way of naming and resisting racism (2018).

66. Eubanks 2012: 75.

22 cHaPter 1

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 im mense 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 proj ects of social sorting and domination.

How This Book Is Or ga nized

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 interven-tion to already- constituted and bounded technical cultures, with ambivalent results) and how they are continually confronted by prob lems of scale, in that they are seeking wider emancipation but are limited to hacking versus effecting deeper structural transformation. It proceeds as follows. Follow-ing 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 technolo-gists; it illustrates the painstaking local- ness of many infrastructural inter-ventions. Chapter 4 continues to examine what is built on a more literal artifactual level, describing what is being produced in sites of diversity advo-cacy, 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 gener-ally do not fully account for the protean bound aries 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 po liti cal stances that relate to but are broader than diversity advocacy: social justice activism, antimilitarism, and anticolonialism. These

IntroductIon 23

are sites where feminist hackers in par tic u lar 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 relation-ship 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 perspec-tives of diversity advocates. It discusses gender, race, and ethnicity; proposes that repre sen ta tion has its limits as a proj ect 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 advo-cacy in open technology as a site for claiming equal rights, and as a quest for repre sen ta tion; it also evaluates the market logics that accompany this advocacy. Fi nally, it meditates on the challenges inherent in centering a proj ect that insists on a redress of imbalances of power around technology, arguing for a proj ect of justice and equity that ironically decenters technol-ogy 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 analy sis that can set a more expansive, yet more rigorous, agenda.

(CONTINUED...)

263

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures.

3D printers, 41, 50, 50n3501(c)3 status, 732600 (hacker publication), 32

access and emancipation, 4–6, 8–11Acker, Kathy, 55Ada Initiative, 28affective connection to technology: among

hackers, 10n34; class- based barriers to, 219; history of, 132; mastery as, 192; and open source communities, 224; and voluntaristic pursuits, 142

affirmative action, 21n63Africa: Google’s involvement in, 177–78;

technical participation in, 48African Americans: and “black nerd” figure,

34n7; blackness and black hackers, 38; and “electrical priesthood,” 38n28, 212; and intellectualism, 34n7; as lower- wage contract workers, 130n5; in open tech-nology, 223, 223n139; and tinkering and inventing, 37, 212–15, 214n105; women’s employment among, 147n50

Afrofuturism, 36–37, 177, 187–88, 215n110Afronet, 38n30Agbogbloshie (electronics dump site,

Ghana), 173agency. see also freedom rhe toric: and

gender identity, production of, 187n17; and hacking, 6, 9, 11; individual vs. social, 10; open technology as site for, 4, 238

Ahmed, Sara: on decentering whiteness, 21; individuals’ diversity, 16; on justice vs. diversity, 179; on meaning of diversity, 17, 129; and “scary” issues, 146, 234; on solidarity with whiteness, 21n65

Allied war time efforts (in Great Britain and United States), 44

“Ally Skills” workshops, 76

alternative living and activist spaces, 41, 42Altman, Mitch, 161, 168, 169Amazon, 40Amrute, Sareeta, 175n81, 236Amsterdam group for women in hacking,

116–17anarchism, 52, 88–89n95, 173, 176Anderson, Chris, 165n51anonymity of participants and sites, 28–31,

29–30nn89–90, 30n92antisocial online be hav ior, 158–59, 224Appropriate Technology movement,

41, 113Arab American and Muslim hackers, 37n26,

215n108archiving discussion lists, 83argument by technology, 50artifactual production, 14, 49, 101–3,

124–25, 127, 231Asian ste reo types and diversity, 66–67,

67n50, 187–88, 216–17, 216n115Assange, Julian, 35, 152, 152n15, 212autonomist po liti cal movements, 113autonomous infrastructures, 113–14,

113n43, 125–26autonomy of users, 7–8

backchannels, 81–86, 84n82Banet- Weiser, Sarah, 78Barlow, John Perry: Declaration of In de pen-

dence of Cyberspace, 67, 151Bay Area counterculture, 210Beard, Mary, 47n74Beaulieu, Anne, 30n92Bell, David, 193Benkler, Yochai, 8–9Benner, Chris, 53n16Berg, Paul, 96nBielefeld, Germany, 61

264 Index

Black Girls Code organ ization, 224n140. see also African Americans

Black Lives Matter movement, 21. see also African Americans

Black Panthers, 120bodily care routines, 207–8Borg, Anita, 45boyd, danah, 223n137Bratich, Jack, 119n57Brazil, FLOSS programmers in, 176“brogrammer” type, 36n19Bryant, Kimberly, 224n140Buechley, Leah, 103–4Burke, Tarana, 1n1Burning Man festival, 209–10Butler, Judith, 187

cabal humor, 225n144capitalism, 142–43, 145, 147, 153, 180care: borders of, 17, 22, 102, 126–27, 182,

241; and care work, 21; defined, 5n9; and feminist hacking, 179; infrastructures of, 88; networks of, 127

Car ne gie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), 44, 44n63

case statements, 197Catalonia anarchist autonomous collective,

173Ceruzzi, Paul, 105–6Chakravartty, Paula, 170n66Chan, Anita, 131, 175Chaos Computer Club (Germany), 41Chua, Mel, 15–16, 19“cockblocked” term, 226, 226n146code and coding, 121, 122n68, 144n38,

150–51, 174–75codes of conduct (CoCs), 62–69, 63n41,

85–86, 93–94, 93n106Cold War, 181Coleman, Gabriella: on cabal humor,

225n144; on decision- making, 51n12, 225; on FLOSS, 9; on intersubjective experi-ences of hackers, 39–40; on po liti cal stances of hackers, 7, 43; on politics of hacking, 153; on proj ect folklore, 113

colonialism and decolonization, 170n66, 171–72, 176, 177, 181, 212

“come as you are” ethos, 65communication rights, 157comparative optics, 25competitive be hav ior, 200, 200n58Compulsive Repurpose (artwork), 111–12,

112, 124computers, popu lar perceptions of, 35

conferences, ritual ele ments at, 26. see also unconferences

“confidence you can carry!” charity handbag campaign, 178n92

consent, 88consumption: and DIY movement, 142, 153,

191; and market- related motivations for diversity, 129, 227; and reclaiming dis-carded machines, 115; and repre sen ta tion, 146, 189, 236

cooperatives, worker- owned, 136–37corporate culture, 237cosplay, 83Coupland, Douglas, 33–34Cox, Alan, 58craft, 119n57. see also feminine craft

practicesCreative Commons, 122Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 155“critical making” concept, 102–3cryptodance event (Montréal, 2016),

96–102, 96n, 97, 100, 124Cuba, coding in, 174–75cultural sorting within STEM, 15, 21cyberfeminism, 45–47, 45n68, 46cyberlibertarianism, 126, 151, 153

Dafermos, George, 132Dame, Avery, 209n91Damore, James, 47, 179Daniels, Jessie, 188Dash, Anil, 177Davies, Sarah, 6–7n14, 152, 153Debian (FLOSS operating system), 50n6,

51n12, 225, 225n144Debian Women, 190decolonization. see colonialism and

decolonization“deep hanging out,” 25Defense Advanced Research Proj ects

Agency (DARPA), 161–65, 167–69, 182de la Peña, Carolyn, 188Delfanti, Alessandro, 48n84democ ratization of technology: and alter-

native perspectives, need for, 129; as continuum, 51n12; Feenberg on, 234n8; limits of, 242; in makerspaces, 41n45; and perceived benefits of hacking, 152; and technical expertise, 51, 92

demystification of technology, 141Diffie- Hellman model of encryption, 98,

98–100digital utopianism, 120, 126distributed denial of ser vice (DDoS), 77

Index 265

diversity: and corporate mandates, 179; framing of, 189–90, 189n25; in hacker-spaces, 73–75; labor- and market- related motivations for, 129, 144–48, 227, 233; meaning of, 17, 19–21, 21n63, 129

diversity advocacy in open- technology cultures: critical stance of, 127; goals of, 240; heterogeneity of, 133; and individual pursuit vs. communitarian ethos, 95; language of, 159–61, 180–81; limits and potential of, 4–5, 13, 16; material and symbolic dimensions of, 101–3; and moral framing of issues, 159–60; as multisited and multivocal, 24; overview of, 2–3; politics of, 154–61

“Diversity in Tech . . .” pre sen ta tion (PyCon, 2011), 194–99

“diversity in tech” discourse, 4, 161diversity statements, 122–23DIY communities and interventions: and

consumption, 142; emergence of, 59, 59n29; and feminine craft, 107–8; and masculinity, 153n17; of people of color, 119–20, 125; and structural social prob-lems, 4, 15, 50n3

DIY Drones (website), 165n51DIY floggers, 72, 72documentation and collation, 83“Does talking about differences . . .” session

proposal (Washington, DC, 2012), 199, 199–201

“Do I Have to Have a Beard?” slide, 58, 221, 222

domestic space, 65, 212Donglegate (2013), 77–79dotcom boom, 40Douglas, Susan, 35–36, 211–12doxxing, 77Dream Corps, 18, 238Dreamwidth (software proj ect), 121–26,

121n64, 123n70drones, 164, 165

eco- camps, 177eco- feminism, 45Edwards, Paul, 181Eglash, Ron: on Afrofuturism, 36–37, 215n110;

on geeks and nerds, 33–34, 207n83; on people of color and geek identity, 187–88, 215; on technical participation, 146

“electrical priesthood,” 38n28, 212electronic bulletin board systems (BBS),

38n30Electronic Frontier Foundation, 176

electronic mass actions, 152n11Eliot, George, 55elitism in hacker culture, 61–62, 65, 125, 242.

see also technical expertiseembodied relationships between people and

technologies, 102empowerment, discourses of, 144, 144n38,

178En glish as programming language, 176, 218Eno, Brian, 34n7Ensmenger, Nathan, 35, 132Environmental concerns, 125, 172–73Estalella, Adolfo, 30n92Ethernet cables, 111–12, 112Etsy corporation, 117–18, 118Eubanks, Virginia, 21, 130, 143, 238–39Eu rope: EU policy report (2006), 53, 56;

hackerspaces in, 41; Indian coders, 175n81, 236

expertise. see mastery; technical expertise

Facebook, 53n16, 149, 177, 240facial recognition software, 232, 232n3fan culture, 122Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks,

173–74Feenberg, Andrew, 234n8feminine craft practices, 50n4, 103–12, 124,

153n17femininity: defining, 178, 178n92, 202; in

queer spaces, 202–3, 206–7; in radical-ized spaces, 201; and self- presentation, 184, 207–8, 217

feminist hacking and hackerspaces: and care, 178–79; critique of, 154; and feminine craft, 108; and paid labor, 23; redefining hacking, 50n4; as safer spaces, 70; and social relations, focus on, 231

feminist hacking convergence (Montréal, 2016), 142, 171, 176–77, 181

feminist servers, 113, 124, 127flame wars, 52forking, 40, 40n40, 61, 77, 91, 126, 237n20Fouché, Rayvon, 37, 212Fox, Sarah, 50n4, 127n78Fraser, Nancy, 53n18, 101 Free Basics ser vice, 177 free culture movements, 52, 52n15freedom rhe toric, 7–9, 11, 92, 154n21,

158–59n35. see also agencyfree/libre and open- source software

(FLOSS): Benkler on, 8–9; in Brazil, 176; as communal, 6–7; and cyberfeminism, 46; defined, 6; discriminatory be hav ior

266 Index

free/libre and open- source software (FLOSS) (continued) observed within, 56–57, 57; and diversity advocacy, 7, 21n63; emergence of, 40–45; ethos of, 19, 50–51; freedom within, 8, 31; and free labor debate, 132; liberal ideals associated with, 226–27; motivations and ideals of, 3, 9, 24; vs. open source, 40–41; orga nizational structure of, 51; and personal growth, 175; as term, 2n4; “transcendent purpose” of, 10; transparency and privacy within, 31; voluntaristic ethos surrounding, 19, 130, 131; women in, 2–3

Freeman, Jo, 51 free speech, 52, 69, 87, 93, 93n106, 159

Gajjala, Radhika, 38n31, 47Gamergate (2014), 46–47, 86Gates, Bill, 35Geek . com: “Lockheed Martin wants a

fingertip- sized UAV in every soldier’s backpack,” 165n53

Geek Feminism blog and wiki, 28, 83–84, 190

geeks and geekhood. see also nerds and nerd culture: and capitalistic values, 47–48; as computer enthusiasts, 186; and counter-cultural selfhoods, 209; defined, 33–34; exclusivity of, 36, 62; history of, 34–35; vs. nerds, 193n39; status of, 35; and white masculinity, 37–38, 62n36, 187–88, 193, 201

Gelber, Steven, 153n17gender (as identity category), 187, 187nn16–17.

see also femininity; masculinity and technical competence; women

gender essentialism, 194–202gender- fluid (or genderfuck) identity, 207genealogy, 24, 24n75German hackerspaces, 60, 61GitHub, 63–65, 67globalized capitalism, 19global justice movement (or anti- corporate-

globalization movement), 152Global North: cyberfeminism in, 47; diversity

advocates in, 20; hacking in, 5; origins of technologies in, 172; white women in, 220–21

global positioning systems, 170–78Global South: allyship to women in, 221;

cap i tal ist interventions in, 47, 177–78; labor extracted from, 172–73

GNU symbol, 194, 195, 199Golumbia, David, 151, 153–54, 179

Google: corporate agenda on women in technology, 18–19, 18–19n57; and National Security Agency, 149; and Proj ect Maven, 170; and PyCon, 184n2; reception for women in open technology (2013), 79, 81, 177–78; walkout (2018) at, 235, 235n12; work and leisure time at, 131–32

The Grace Hopper Cele bration of Women in Computing (GHC), 45, 45n66

Gray, Herman, 226, 235–36 Great Recession (2007–2008), 130Green, Venus, 147n50Grenzfurthner, Johannes, 59–62Guardian newspaper, 149Gusterson, Hugh, 182

Hacker News, 63–64, 68–69, 77hackers and hacking: defined, 10n34;

emergence of, 39–40; ethic of, 3–4; and hacktivism, 40–43, 41n45; and identity per for mance, 62; and masculinity, 191–92; origins of, 32; politics of, 152–53; religious- like devotion among, 6–7n14; and social relations, 231; and whiteness, 37–38, 191

Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) confer-ences (New York), 54, 106, 161, 168–69, 182. see also individual workshops and panels

hackerspaces: and challenges of finding spaces, 116–19; communicative practices within, 84; defined, 2n3, 6, 41, 41n45; and devotion of hackers, 6–7n14, 10–11; emergence of, 59–60; and exploration of self, 145; feminist, 50n4, 70, 75; freedom vs. collectivity within, 8; funding for, 42–43; and hacking as communal, 6–7; in high schools, 162; job training through, 140–41, 144; orga nizational structure of, 42–43, 42n51; overview, 2–3; separate spaces within, 70–73; versus makerspace, 60, 215

“hacking hacked” dialectic, 48n84“hacking hacking,” 106, 112“Hacking the Gender Gap” exercise (HOPE

conference, 2012), 57–59, 65“Hacking the Spaces” panel (HOPE confer-

ence, 2012), 59–62, 65hacklabs, 41, 41n45, 43n53HackMake (hackerspace), 72–76, 139–40,

165, 168hair color as geek signifier, 208–9, 208n87harassment issues. see antisocial online

be hav ior; sexual harassment and assault

Index 267

Haraway, Donna: “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 127Harding, Sandra, 129, 176n85hardware, 120–21hardware and autonomy of infrastructure,

120–21Haring, Kristen, 212hazing, 65, 192Hidden Figures (film), 39n33Hill, Benjamin Mako, 90n98“hipsterism” (among Asian Americans),

187–88Hispanic. see LatinxHollywood: and #OscarsSoWhite campaign,

21; sexual harassment in, 1hooks, bell, 179Hopper, Grace, 55HotWired, 40Huws, Ursula, 234

identity categories and construction, 185–89, 211, 228, 236–37. see also repre sen ta tion issues; selfhood, exploration of

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 170

impostor syndrome, 137, 147incarcerated people, 142, 157, 160–61inclusive environments, creating, 202–3India: coders from, 175n81, 236; education

in, 218; Free Basics ser vice in, 177indigenous people and knowledge, 38n28,

125, 181, 212individualism, 51, 95International Women’s Day virtual march

(2007), 54–56“The Internet: A Series of Tubes” T- shirt,

54, 55“The Internet of Things, So Mom Can

Understand” blog post, 198n55intersectionality, 19, 155, 219“Intersectionality: feminism and other social

justice work in technology circles” (work-shop at unconference, 2012), 155, 156

“Invisible Queers” meeting (PyCon, 2011), 210, 210–11

Irani, Lilly, 53n16IT work, 130, 130n5, 132, 143, 143, 146–47, 239

Jackson, Steve, 53n16Jobs, Steve, 35Jones, Van, 18Jordan, Tim, 39, 150–51Joseph, Ralina, 21n65justice and diversity advocacy, 4, 147, 161,

179–80

Kearny, Mary Celeste, 202Kelty, Christopher: on collective experience,

11, 145; on “domesticated” forms of open source, 127; on free software, 40, 121; on perspective of free- software proponents, 24; on “recursive public,” 101; on termi-nology, 41

Kendall, Lori, 16n48, 29–30n89Khatchadourian, Raffi, 152n15“Kill your boss” workshop (unconference for

women, 2012), 134–35, 135, 145Klinenberg, Eric: Palaces for the People,

53n16Kranzberg, Melvin, 153

“laboratories of oligarchy,” 90n98 labor issues, 20, 22, 34, 172–73land acknowl edgments, 172lanyards indicating photography prefer-

ences, 79, 80Latin Amer i ca, servers in, 114–15Latinx, 130n5, 223n139Latour, Bruno, 6n10leadership in open- technology culture, 90leaking and whistle- blowing, 149–50, 152,

152n15“lean in” feminism, 240leisure time and activities, 37, 41n45, 126,

131–32, 139, 152. see also tinkering and inventing

LGBT. see queer, trans, and nonbinary people

libertarianism, 52, 68n55, 151n8, 154, 176. see also cyberlibertarianism

libraries, funding for, 163“likeability paradox,” 200–201, 208LilyPad Arduino kit, 103–5, 105, 108, 111LinuxChix, 190Linux operating system, 121LiveJournal (online platform), 121, 126Lockheed Martin, 165n53, 167Lovelace, Ada, 54low- income people. see rural and low- income

people

Make magazine, 161, 168, 191Maker Faire, 161, 165making and makerspaces, 41n45, 42n51,

102–3, 152–53maple seed UAV prototype, 165–67, 165n53,

166Marcus, George, 24n74market logics, 232–35Marvin, 212

268 Index

Marx, Leo, 11–12, 154masculinity and technical competence: and

competitive displays, 66, 193, 200–201, 200n58; and geekiness, 36–37, 36n19, 62n36; and mastery, 192, 193; tinkering and leisure shaping, 35–36, 132; during World War II, 44

Mas sa chu setts Institute of Technology (MIT), 32, 167, 207

mastery, 192, 192n33Maxigas, 43n53McGee, Art, 38n30McRobbie, Angela, 142–43Meetup (software com pany), 118meritocracy, 13, 13–14n42, 21n63, 225#MeToo movement, 1–2, 1n1, 230Mexican American low- rider car culture, 37Mexican maquiladoras, 104–5microlending, 178Microsoft, 170, 175, 204militarism, 181–82. see also Defense

Advanced Research Proj ects AgencyMills, Mara, 170n66Miltner, Kate, 78Mohamed, Ahmed, 37n26, 215n108Mohanty, Chandra, 176n86 mothers, 21, 26n82Mujeres en Red (cyberfeminist web portal,

Spain), 46multi- sited ethnography, 24n74Mutu, Wangechi: Uterine Catarrh, 173–74,

174mutualism, 51, 126Myerhoff, Barbara, 103

Nafus, Dawn, 190Nakamura, Lisa, 67n50, 216–17“nannying” expression, 68, 68n55National Center for Women & Information

Technology (NCWIT), 18National Science Foundation, 28n86National Security Agency (NSA), 149–50Nazism, 93–94, 93n106nerds and nerd culture, 33–34, 34n7, 62n36,

65–66, 68, 193n39. see also geeks and geekhood

net neutrality, 54, 177networked computing, rise of, 39networked misogyny, 78“neutral tool” argument, 169New Communalism, 120New Hacker’s Dictionary, 33New Left movement, 51New York City, sponsored spaces in, 118–19

Nguyen, Lilly, 38, 53n16Noble, David, 241n30No Code of Conduct (NCoC), 67–68Noisebridge (San Francisco), 42–43, 161“No More Rock Stars” blog post, 88–90nonbinary identities. see queer, trans, and

nonbinary peoplenonmale gender, 3, 3n8. see also queer, trans,

and nonbinary peoplenonnormative femininities, 206–7nonprofit organ izations, 158–59n35North Amer i ca: hackerspaces in, 41; weap-

ons scientists in, 182Northrop Grumman (defense contractor),

42n51, 165NSA (National Security Agency), 149–50

Oakland makerspace (California), 119–20, 142, 168, 211, 215

Obama, Barack, 18, 18n54, 149objectivist philosophy, 151offensive speech, 93n106open source, 40–41, 47, 51–53, 122open technology and open- technology

communities. see also diversity advocacy in open- technology cultures; free/libre and open- source software: core beliefs within, 10; defined, 2, 6; governance within, 94; leadership in, 90; po liti cal engagement within, 155–56; as refuge, 65

#OscarsSoWhite campaign, 21, 230otherness, 178, 221–22“own hard” concept, 6, 6n12Oxford En glish Dictionary (OED), 33, 34n7

Paulitz, Tanja, 190n26Peaches (performer), 55peer production orga nizational modes,

90n98Penning, Henk, 58 people of color: allies to, 220, 221; Dream

Corps on social justice and, 18; and femi-nist hacking convergence (2016), 181; geek identity limiting, 215; initiatives by, 125; lack of support for, 216; and Oak-land makerspace, 119–20, 125, 142, 168, 211, 215; online spaces for, 27; as term, 119n58; tokenization of, 220n127; vulner-ability of, 224

Perl (programming language), 123, 126Peru, computing education in, 175–76phone phreaking, 32photography policies, 78–79, 80Piepmeier, Alison, 109

Index 269

pillowcase proj ect, 107, 107pink collar work, 146–47, 239pink technology (marketing strategy), 202Poland: Python community in, 84–86, 93–94police, distrust of, 88–89n95“politics of communicability,” 82polymorphous engagement, 25Popu lar Electronics magazine, 212, 213“positive” and “negative liberty,” 154n21power dynamics: and activism, 177; and

FLOSS, 176; and high- status coding, 175n81; and market logics, 234–35; and technological participation, 231–32; and technological solutions, 13

privacy and safety issues, 78, 149–50, 152. see also photography policies

Proj ect Maven, 170“Protein Synthesis: An Epic on a Cellular

Level” (Stanford University, 1971), 96npublics perspective, 23–24n70Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 5n9PyCon (Atlanta, 2011), 183–84, 184n2, 189,

194–97, 208PyCon (Santa Clara, 2012), 184n2PyCon (Santa Clara, 2013), 77–79, 184PyLadies and PyStar groups, 185, 190Python programming language community.

see also PyCon: defined, 28n85; diver-sity advocacy in, 93, 128, 129; and labor markets, 240; Polish, 84–86, 93–94; as research site, 28; workshops for women in, 59, 133–34, 134, 138–39, 160, 229, 230

Python Software Foundation (PSF), 43, 85

Qiu, Jack, 20n61Quantified Self movement, 111queer, trans, and nonbinary people: cor-

porate recognition of, 157; and freedom in hacker culture, 92; and gender diver-sity, redefining, 202–11; online spaces as archives for, 209n91; and separation between activism and open- technology fields, 157–58; and “women- only” hacker-space, 49n2

Rabinbach, Anson, 34race and racism, 14n, 37, 78, 188, 212–13racial and ethnic groups and identities,

142–43, 147, 187–88. see also repre sen ta-tion issues; specific racial identities

radical politics and activism, 155–61, 180–81radical techies, 152n11radio amateurs (hams), 35–37, 186,

212–13, 213

Radway, Janice, 111Rand, Ayn, 151, 151n8Ratto, Matt, 102–3Raymond, Eric, 40; “The Cathedral and the

Bazaar,” 192–93“read the fucking manual” (RTFM) norm,

192Rea gle, Joseph, 52, 192“recursive public” concept, 101Red Pill forum, 66n49reflexivity (of researcher), 190n26Rentschler, Carrie, 82repre sen ta tion issues, 146, 226–28, 227n152,

235–39research methods and considerations,

23–31reuse and repair of discarded machines,

115–16, 125, 173riot grrrl practice of zine making, 111Riseup group, 113ritual communication, 124Rosner, Daniela, 127n78“rough consensus and running code” ethos, 50rural and low- income people, 38n28,

142–43, 212

safer spaces, 70–71, 91Said, Edward, 171–72, 181, 181n101Sandberg, Sheryl, 240; Lean In, 7San Francisco unconference for women

(2013), 138, 149“scary” issues, 234, 236, 240schools, military recruitment in, 162–64, 164science, technology, engineering, and math

(STEM), 5, 15, 21, 47, 162–65, 238“second wave” of programmers’ attitudes, 93segregation, 223n137, 228selfhood, exploration of, 145, 203–4, 229servers, 113n45. see also feminist serverssex toy hacking workshop, 72–76, 165, 191,

192n32sexual harassment and assault, 76–78,

88–89, 88–89n95sharing economy, 235Shaw, Aaron, 90n98Silicon Valley, 167, 210, 233, 239Slaton, Amy, 14n, 15, 21, 238small producer ethos, 113Snowden, Edward, 35, 149–50, 152, 179, 212social imaginary perspective, 23–24n70social infrastructure, 53n16social world perspective, 23–24Söderberg, Johan, 9, 48n84, 132, 180soft cir cuit designs, 106, 107, 169

270 Index

software and autonomy of infrastructure, 120–21

software communities, 2–3, 2n3, 5–6Spertus, Ellen, 44squatter movements, 113Stallman, Richard, 40, 58Stein, Arlene, 30STEM. see science, technology, engineering,

and mathSterne, Jonathan, 173Stevens, Ted, 54, 54nn20–21Strathern, Marilyn, 227n152Strauss, Anselm, 23–24, 24n75Streeter, Thomas, 224, 232structurelessness, 51, 52, 89subaltern counterpublics, 53n18, 101, 101n7,

103survivalist tropes, 168systemic inequity, 15, 21–22, 48Systers list, 44–45

Takhteyev, Yuri, 176Tal, Kali, 38Tech Crunch: “40 Diverse People Who Made

Big Moves in 2015,” 233tech industry, 24, 24n72technical cultures, homogeneity of, 16,

16n48technical expertise, 51, 89, 92, 125, 225–26.

see also elitism in hacker culture; masterytechnical sovereignty, 9technological emancipation, 4, 11technology: and artifactual production vs.

social order, 14; control over, 38n28; degendering of, 45–46; and identity con-struction, 186; limits of, 239–40; Marx (Leo) on, 154, 237; overview of, 5–6; as progressive force, 12–13; stature of, 237; as term, 11–12

Tech Workers Co ali tion, 235tension as productive force, 237tent (at feminist hacker event, Montréal),

70, 71The Mentor: “The Conscience of a Hacker,”

151tinkering and inventing, 36, 37, 186, 212,

242Tom Tomorrow, 164Tor Proj ect, 86–89, 93Toupin, Sophie, 70transhumanism, 204trolling. see antisocial online be hav iorTronto, Joan, 16–17truck, 54

Trudeau, Justin, 18Trump, Donald, 1n2, 18trust and inclusivity, 91, 221Turing, Alan, 97Turkle, Sherry, 192, 192n33Turner, Fred, 132, 210“TV- B- Gone” remote control device, 161“tyranny of structurelessness” critique, 89

Uber, 240Ubuntu Women, 190unconferences, 28, 76, 79, 137. see also

specific unconferences by location unions, 147, 235US Department of Education statistics, 44US Department of Labor statistics, 143user- content platform, 137–38, 137–38n25

“value- free” science, 129, 176n85Verizon com pany, 149Viet nam ese hackers, 38voluntarism and voluntaristic communities,

19, 50, 146, 219, 224, 241

Wajcman, Judy, 242n36Wales, Jimmy, 151, 151n8Wall, Larry, 58Wall Street, 36n19Washington, DC, unconference for women

(2012), 106–7, 133–34, 137–38, 155–58, 199, 199–201

weapons work, 182Weinstein, Harvey, 1weirdos, 210, 210–11, 211n95whisper networks, 89whistle- blowing. see leaking and

whistle- blowingwhite feminism, 91, 176, 176n86, 219–20,

220n127White House policies on diversity, 18, 19white men and masculinity, 36–37, 67,

74–75, 159–60, 186whiteness, 27, 37–38, 67, 188, 211–15white race, study of, 67n51white savior narratives, 177–78Wikipedia, 41, 193Winner, Langdon, 53n16Wolfson, Todd, 113n45 women. see also nonmale gender: and

care work, 21; and coding club house culture, 65–66, 196; as early computer operators, 35n14, 104–6; and “electrical priesthood,” 38n28; expectations affect-ing per for mance of, 195–96; in FLOSS

Index 271

development, 2–3, 3n7, 51; in hacking and computing, 43–48, 104–5, 127n78; as lower- wage contract workers, 130n5; in open source, 51, 53, 64; as pink col-lar workers, 146–47; in public sphere, 47n74; self- presentation choices of, 207–9, 216, 217; in STEM professions, 17–19; ste reo types of, 197–99; support-ive workshops for, 137–38; visibility of, 184, 207–9; and “ women in tech” dis-course, 7; and workplace advancement, 135–36; in World War II, 44

Womeninfreesoftware (electronic mailing list), 190, 194

“women- only” spaces, 49n1 Women’s Liberation Movement, 51World War II, 181Wynne, Brian, 228

Yahoo!, 40

zine- making event (San Francisco, 2014), 109, 109–11

Zuckerberg, Mark, 35, 53n16, 177