]> Computational Reticence: Why Women Fear the Intimate Machine 1986 I ask Robin to talk to me about her relationship with her piano, a machine, but she insists that it was a completely different thing.  The piano took her away from people, but then it brought her closer to them.  The involvements of her male peers with the computer only shut people out. To take an analogy from the world of the computer’s second cousins, the video games: it is almost impossible to learn to play a video game if you try to understand first and play second.  Girls are often perceived as preferring the ‘easier’ video games.  When I have looked more closely at what they really prefer, it is games where they can understand ‘the rules’ before play begins.  Both Lisa and Robin crave transparent understanding of the computer.  For example, although both apologize for their behavior as ‘silly,’ both like to program the computer to do everything they need to build their larger programs, even when these smaller, ‘building-block’ procedures are in program libraries at their disposal.  It makes their job harder, but both say that it gives them a more satisfying understanding.  They don’t like taking risks at the machine.  What they most want to avoid is error messages. First, insisting that the computer is just a tool is a defense against the experience of the computer as the opposite, as an intimate machine.  It is a way to say that it is not appropriate to have a close relationship with a machine.  Computers with their plasticity and malleability are compelling media.  They have a psychological ‘holding power.’  Women use their rejection of computer holding power to assert something about themselves as women.  Being a woman is opposed to a compelling relationship with a thing that shuts people out. Lisa reacted with irritation when her high school teachers tried to get her interested in mathematics by calling it a language.  ‘People were always yakking at me about how math is a language—it’s got punctuation marks and all that stuff.  I thought they were fools and I told them so.  I told them that if only it were a language, if only it had some nuance, then perhaps I could relate to it.’ We know that pencils, oil paints and brushes are ‘just tools.’  And yet, we appreciate that the artist’s encounter with his or her tools is close and relational.  It may shut people out, temporarily, but the work itself can bring one closer to oneself, and ultimately to others.  In the right settings, people develop relationships with computers that feel artistic and personal.  And yet, for most people, and certainly for the women I studied, this was rare.  When they began to approach the computer in their own style, they got their wrists slapped, and were told that they were not doing things ‘right.’ When this happens, many people drop out. Tendencies 1993 This history makes its mark on what, individually, we are and do.  One set of effects turns up in the irreducible multilayeredness and multiphasedness of what queer survival means—since being a survivor on this scene is a matter of surviving into threat, stigma, the spiraling violence of gay‐ and lesbian‐bashing, and (in the AIDS emergency) the omnipresence of somatic fear and wrenching loss.  It is also to have survived into a moment of unprecedented cultural richness, cohesion, and assertiveness for many lesbian and gay adults.  Survivors’ guilt, survivors’ glee, even survivors’ responsibility: powerfully as these are experienced, they are also more than complicated by how permeable the identity “survivor” must be to the undiminishing currents of risk, illness, mourning, and defiance. I think many adults (and I am among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer‐eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged. I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival.  We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love.  This can’t help coloring the adult relation to cultural texts and objects; in fact, it’s almost hard for me to imagine another way of coming to care enough about literature to give a lifetime to it. For me, this strong formalist investment didn’t imply (as formalism is generally taken to imply) an evacuation of interest from the passional, the imagistic, the ethical dimensions of the texts, but quite the contrary: the need I brought to books and poems was hardly to be circumscribed, and I felt I knew I would have to struggle to wrest from them sustaining news of the world, ideas, myself, and (in various senses) my kind.  The reading practice founded on such basic demands and intuitions had necessarily to run against the grain of the most patent available formulae for young people’s reading and life—against the grain, often, of the most accessible voices even in the texts themselves.  At any rate, becoming a perverse reader was never a matter of my condescension to texts, rather of the surplus charge of my trust in them to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.  And this doesn’t seem an unusual way for ardent reading to function in relation to queer experience. A thousand things make it impossible to mistake the verdict on queer lives and on women’s lives, as on the lives of those who are poor or are not white.  The hecatombs of queer youth; a decade squandered in a killing inaction on AIDS; the rapacious seizure from women of our defense against forced childbirth; tens of millions of adults and children excluded from the health care economy; treatment of homeless people as unsanitary refuse to be dealt with by periodic “sweeps”; refusal of condoms in prisons, persecution of needle exchange programs; denial and trivialization of histories of racism; or merely the pivot of a disavowing pronoun in a newspaper editorial: such things as these are facts, but at the same time they are piercing or murmuring voices in the heads of those of us struggling to marshal “our” resources against illness, dread, and devaluation.  They speak to us. They have an amazing clarity. Rightists today like to invoke the threatening specter of a propaganda‐ridden socialist realism, but both they and the anti‐intellectuals of the left might meditate on why the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate art” (Jewish, gay, modernist) was couched, as their own arguments are, in terms of assuring the instant, unmediated, and universal accessibility of all the sign systems of art (Goebbels even banning all art criticism in 1936, on the grounds that art is self‐explanatory).  It’s hard to tell which assumption is more insultingly wrong: that the People (always considered, of course, as a monolithic unit) have no need and no faculty for engaging with work that is untransparent; or that the work most genuinely expressive of the People would be so univocal and so limpidly vacant as quite to obviate the labors and pleasures of interpretation. Selected Writings 1994 The state abolishes distinctions of birth, rank, education, and occupation in its fashion when it declares them to be non‐political distinctions, when it proclaims that every member of the community equally participates in popular sovereignty without regard to these distinctions, and when it deals with all elements of the actual life of the nation from the standpoint of the state.  Nevertheless the state permits private property, education, and occupation to act and manifest their particular nature as private property, education, and occupation in their own ways.  Far from overcoming these factual distinctions, the state exists only by presupposing them; it is aware of itself as a political state and makes its universality effective only in opposition to these elements. The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen.  Who is this man distinguished from the citizen?  None other than the member of civil society.  Why is the member of civil society called “man”, man without qualification, and why are his rights called the rights of man? […] none of the so‐called rights of men goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society.  Far from viewing man here in his species‐being, his species‐life itself—society—rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons. It is somewhat curious that a nation just beginning to free itself, tearing down all the barriers between different sections of the people and founding a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1971) the justification of the egoistic man, man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should even repeat this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic sacrifice can save the nation and hence is urgently required, when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is highly imperative and egoism must be punished as a crime (Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1973).  This becomes even more curious when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so‐called rights of man and that the citizen thus is proclaimed to be a servant to the egoistic man, the sphere in which man acts as a member of the community is degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being, and finally man as bourgeois rather than man as citizen is considered to be the proper and authentic man. The most radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793, may be quoted: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Art. 2.  “These rights (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.” What is this liberty? Art. 6.  “Liberty is the power belonging to each man to do anything which does not impair the rights of others”, or according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791:  “Liberty is the power to do anything which does not harm others.” Liberty is thus the right to do and perform anything that does not harm others.  The limits within which each can act without harming others is determined by law just as the boundary between two fields is marked by a stake.  This is the liberty of man viewed as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.  […] liberty as a right of man is not based on the association of man with man but rather on the separation of man from man.  It is the right of this separation, the right of the limited individual limited to himself. The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property. In its struggle against these conditions criticism is not a passion of the head but the head of passion.  It is not a lancet, it is a weapon.  Its object is an enemy it wants not to refute but to destroy.  For the spirit of these conditions has already been refuted.  In and for themselves they are objects not worthy of thought but existences as despicable as they are despised.  Criticism itself does not even need to be concerned with this matter, for it is already clear about it.  Criticism is no longer an end in itself but simply a means. […] The criticism dealing with this matter is criticism in hand‐to‐hand combat, and in such combat the point is not whether the opponent is noble, equal, or interesting, the point is to strike him. But gods alone were never workmasters.  The same is true of nature. It is easy indeed to tell a particular individual what Aristotle said:  You were begotten by your father and mother, so in you the mating of two human beings, a generic act of mankind, produced another.  You see therefore that man owes even his physical existence to another.  Here you must not keep in view only one of the two aspects, the infinite progression, and ask further,  Who begot my father?  Who is his grandfather?  etc.  You must also keep in mind the circular movement sensibly apparent in that process whereby man reproduces himself in procreation; thus man always remains the subject. Chihayafuru 2011-10-04 2012-03-27 駒野 勉 Tsutomu Komano When you find yourself wishing that a certain person was also here, that person is like family to you.  Regardless of how long or how well you know them. “Free as in sexist?” Free culture and the gender gap 2012-12-30 While FLOSS is often likened to a gift culture through which exchange creates ties and obligations, in reality code is readily given away without concern of what people do with it; it is a way of cutting ties.  Other communication with users of the code, such as in producing manuals, is seen as women’s work. Gendered Language: Feature or Bug in Software Documentation? 2014-02-24 Surely, though, the claim that gender isn’t relevant to the project is an aspirational one.  If gender was not relevant to the project, then 227 comments wouldn’t have been posted on the Github pull request that Gaynor submitted.  In fact, race, gender, religion, and politics are relevant to open‐source projects.  Community issues are not off‐topic; they are central to any project that is bound together by voluntary ties rather than (as in projects that are part of traditional companies) economic coercion. We need fewer well‐intentioned essays addressed to bros with good intentions about why sexist language might seem good but is bad.  In the tech feminism community, we’ve been writing these essays for most of a decade.  The systematic use of abuser tactics to control conversations and shut down criticism continues.  These conversations go on and on, and happen over and over, each one seemingly unencumbered by the lessons of the previous one—what’s happening isn’t a conversation at all, but rather, a power struggle. Hashtags as Decolonial Projects with Radical Origins 2014-03-17 As separate spectacles, we are less threatening. Learning the Rules: Empathy and Enforcement 2014-03-17 If I’ve noticed a pattern in all this, talking generally about empathy and compassion, or “service”, is a privilege reserved for those who get to chose when to use these tools. The Politics of Trending 2015-03-19 Criticism of tags like #solidarityisforwhitewomen situated the trending of such conversations as an exceptional and at the same time misdirected, mis‐use of digital energy by racialized and gendered users.  However, hashtags like #happybirthdaytaylorswift and #happybirthdaydemilevato have yet to receive “critical” scholarship, essays, exposes and op‐eds.  This is because their themes fit into the dynamic and expectations of what is expectedly visible, what a trend might constitute, and what cyborgs are supposed to be interested in. The exceptional attention given to hashtag discourse by critics, news platforms and journalists—to what they perceive to be evidence of visibility—takes the focus away from the spaces created by gendered and racialized users, and rewrites it as a singular confrontation racialized/gendered users are having with white audiences within a white space.  This rewriting positions trending tags to be isolated explosions.  It does not labor through the possibility of communal, ongoing engagement and sustainment, for better or for worse.  Though this is clearly their fixation, this fixation should not prevent us from thinking through and recentering the persistent and ongoing labors involving disobedience, disturbance and cyborg mutations: alternative discourses. The Trouble with Imposters 2015-04-28 What we call imposter syndrome often reflects the reality of an environment that tells marginalized groups that we shouldn’t be confident, that our skills aren’t enough, that we won’t succeed—and when we do, our accomplishments won’t even be attributed to us.  Yet imposter syndrome is treated as a personal problem to be overcome, a distortion in processing rather than a realistic reflection of the hostility, discrimination, and stereotyping that pervades tech culture. Halsey interview: "I don't believe people who say they're themselves all the time" 2015-11-05 For me as an artist, I think it’s more important to be believable than relatable.  I’ve a lot of fans who have never been in a relationship that involved drugs, or watched someone die, or been in a relationship that was emotionally or physically abusive or any of the positions that I’ve been in and write about, but they believe me.  I think that is more important than them relating to me.  They understand and that makes me a real person to them.  I think that is when the authenticity becomes important for me. Calculation for me means I’m gonna tell this girl she looks really nice at her sister’s wedding because I fucking care about her and I want these kids to know that I care about them.  So I’m calculating how I’m going to express that I care about them.  The calculation is not malicious.  “Let me calculate this situation, how can I make these kids know that I’m thinking about them right now and that I really fucking care about them?”  So I’m going to calculate this response and I’m going to say, “hey you, random fan, you looked fucking beautiful in that dress at your sister’s wedding—I just stalked your Twitter account”.  And what that does is it says to everyone, “she fucking cares about us”, and it’s not fake. It’s calculated and it’s not fabricated.  The calculation is that I’ve got five hundred thousand people here and I need to calculate the most organic way that I can present myself to them.  Do you know what I mean?  My biggest fear is being miscommunicated, I think that’s why I talk so much. Without Scars: Domestic Violence, Abuse and the Tech Pipeline 2015-04-28 Around me, I saw people “killing it” and “crushing it” and “disrupting,” completely oblivious to the world around them which they were killing and crushing and disrupting and suffocating. The Princess Who Carries the Blood of the Goddess 2018-06-25 2019-12-31 You have gathered already that the Calamity is the result of apocalypse deferred by generations that could not deal with it in their own time.  My generation is guilty of the same.  But that does not make you more responsible for the world; it only means that you are the last ones who have a chance.  Our failures weigh on you, but that does not change who you are.  All of you who are preparing to fight, all of you who have fought—you and the princess and the Zora prince and the Chief of the Gerudo and all the others—are still children.  You are still growing.  When you stop this end, when you keep the world from breaking, you will continue to grow. Mark Rudd’s Lessons From SDS and the Weather Underground for Today’s Radicals 2021-03-29 We made a fundamental mistake in understanding what had happened.  We fell into the trap of thinking we were so important—that Mark Rudd was the leader of the Columbia strike.  It was like we accepted the media image of white people as the protagonists.  We saw ourselves as that important. But another big mistake that I was directly responsible for was eliminating organizing we had done so much of and substituting it with militancy.  The last few months of Columbia SDS, a new faction that I led, the Action Faction, took over the chapter from the Praxis Axis, who were the old red diaper babies who taught us to build the base.  But we said, “No, it’s action that’s important.” We forgot that it took years to get people to the point where they would join SDS.  It doesn’t happen suddenly—it happens through building relationships. There’s a wonderful book that came out in the early ’70s, by Todd Gitlin, the sociologist and one of the original founders of SDS, called The Whole World Is Watching.  He shows that over time, the experience at Columbia and Weathermen was a good example of substituting the media as our base for our original base.  Our original base was students at Columbia University.  That’s the base!  Those are the people we’re trying to move.  They’re the people we’re trying to mobilize and politicize.  That’s the base.  But we abandoned them. Productive Misunderstandings: an Interview with Sandy Kaltenborn 2021 From my perspective, these are not real bodies because there’s no problems attached to them, and of course bodies have problems attached to them as life bears a lot of problems. Like there’s a big tension in many ways between the racialized immigrant communities that we’re working with and the white anarcho hardcore organizers, where it’s like, no . . . we want to actually live together.  And through that living will be the engagement and the activism and the organizing and everything.  We’re not just going to come to your six‐hour meeting and agenda, we want to be able to eat, socialize, we want to be able to dance.  It’s such a clear difference between the organizing I do with the more militant white activists versus the kind of community building initiatives we’re doing with racialized folks.  I wish we could find ways to bridge them, but it’s so hard. Designer + Educator J. Dakota Brown Is Untangling the Relationship Between Design and Labor 2021-04-14 When these writers did address the constraints of the workplace, it tended to be this thing about how The Man was going to put you in a Helvetica straitjacket and take away your personality.  It seemed to me, on the contrary, that designers were increasingly expected to mine their souls for marketable new expressions. And students are understandably focused on the kind of professional training that will make the immense cost of college worth it.  Then, as they enter the field, they face unprecedented expectations of flexibility and versatility.  They are coached to ceaselessly adjust and retrain, but they aren’t offered a lot of space to question where those compulsions come from or why they exist.  The emphasis is always on transforming yourself to meet social demands which defers the question of transforming society to meet human needs. continuous partial mythologies 2021-11-12 Exascerbating this problem is the belief that digital infrastructure is more like a book than, say, a garden.  That, within the limits of aging, it can simply sit unattended on a shelf and be revisited only by brushing off any accumulated dust.  Just to be clear about something:  I love books.  Books are amazing.  But a field guide of plants is not the same thing as a living, breathing garden and no one pretends that a garden left unattended will flourish. When we talk about virtual worlds we are not only talking about walled gardens governed by the whim and folly of shareholder value.  We are also talking about infrastructures that only a few enterprises are in a position to operate. No one can pretend that web browsers are “simple” anymore, but that's not really my point.  Neither is it that we should do away with all the complex and sophisticated interactivity we've developed over the years. I am not suggesting that we return to the web of the mid‐1990s with its grey backgrounds and blue and purple links.  I am suggesting however that we ensure that web is our guaranteed failure scenario, should it ever be necessary, and that we layer everything on top of it. This is as much about safe‐guarding against other people’s browser decisions as it is giving the cultural heritage sector the freedom to engage with the walled gardens of platform vendors, without that participation turning in to a black hole from which it is impossible to escape. Weeks or months, years even, may pass before someone else finds what you’ve written but it’s important to understand:  This is what separates the web from what came before it. ✨ Fortune ✨