Part 3: Hacker feminism at the intersection
In Hacker Women, Sollfrank writes: "even within the cyberfeminist community,
there are only a few computer professionals and fewer nerds.
Currently most women seem to prefer to undertake politically engaged work
in a purely cultural environment and on a non-technological level.
Women are not actively influencing the development of hard- and software,
and therefore are surrendering any chance to share the related power."
That power grew to form the new dominant mode of production and took over the world,
so ignoring it is impossible but imagining a different world seems almost equally hard.
Nobody talks about cyberfeminism anymore because thats just feminism now,
Cyberspace is enmeshed with the earth
and the techno utopianism of the 1990s devolved into a full blown dystopia.
Today asking someone to quit vectoralist media can be absurdly presumptuous,
like asking a peasant to quit the feudal land or a proletarian to quit the capitalist factory.
Class domination means we really don't have a choice.
To survive we are forced to carry smartphones
that either run on iOS (owned by Apple) or Android (owned by Google)
get jobs by signing up to sites like Linked In (owned by Microsoft)
or Amazon Mechanical Turk or Uber (hosted on Amazon).
To keep our jobs we are forced to sign in to apps like Whatsapp (owned by Facebook)
and Zoom (hosted on Amazon).
We have to be liked on Instagram (owned by Facebook) or Github (owned by Microsoft)
before we can sell the fruits of our labor.
As April Glaser puts it: "Deleting Facebook is a privilege."
However, since our personal data is the source of vectoralist political power,
feminist slogan "the personal is political" becomes even more meaningful & important.
We have to make it clear
that when we invite someone to our feminist whatsapp group
and our google drive to organize our new hashtag campaign,
we are inviting them
to do voluntary work that benefits the richest white cis men in the world
like Larry Page, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
When we invite someone to our feminist Zoom assembly,
we are inviting them to use services of a company
that infringes the freedom of assembly to Uighur and Palestinian people
on the servers of a corporation that provides Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition
to the racist police force of the country with the highest prison population in the world.
There is no good reason for using vectoralist apps
to organize ourselves and our emancipatory struggles,
because there are free open source alternatives
for almost every popular vectoralist software
and there is a federation of decentralized public servers
for free open source social media that we can use right now.
We can use IRC, Jabber, Matrix etc. instead of Whatsapp,
Nextcloud instead of Drive,
Mastodon instead of Twitter and Meet Jitsi instead of Zoom.
These FOSS apps are not just as good, but they are better,
not just ethically and politically
but also because they dont try to mess with our psychology through algorithms
and thats why they need much less resources, which is better for the earth.
As intersectional feminists we should be aware that we are all cyborg hackers
and we have different response-abilities depending on our situatedness.
Intersectional feminism upgraded with hacker class consciousness can and should
be an entry point for people to learn
how vectoralism intersects with all forms of oppression
and which tools to use for hacking them in a revolutionary way.
To begin with, we should differentiate between organization and outreach.
For the purposes of organization and for personal/political communication,
we should use free and open source software, not just because it's more secure
but also for liberating ourselves from vectoralist exploitation
and empowering each other.
For outreach it might still make sense to use vectoralist platforms
until most of the population is not there anymore
but doing this successfully already requires a well organized hack,
otherwise we would be just blocked like Signal ads were blocked by Facebook.
On a personal level, we can start by migrating to foss operating systems
installing peer to peer and darknet apps, getting a nextcloud, a matrix, a mastodon
and even hosting our own servers,
but we won't get much use of these if we don't have a community there.
Also the learning curve is much lower when it's approached collectively.
In the end,
the greater part of the work is convincing our communities to come along with us.
There is no technical solution to a social problem.
For any of these FOSS to start genuine change, we need to reach a critical mass
with network effect.
To host and facilitate a digital mass migration,
existing infrastructures wouldn't be enough,
we would need to invest in decentralized infrastructure
and disperse the cloud by reclaiming our data.
To spread this idea and turn it into reality,
we can organize feminist hacker literacy campaigns,
not just for coding but for everything we need
to liberate and maintain our cyborg lives,
like system administration, telecom engineering, hardware assembly and repair,
and most importantly, wetware, which is the organic part of our cyborg bodies.
The intersection of feminist and hacker politics goes back to witches
who were hunted for having the power of knowledge
detrimental to capitalist racist cisheteropatriarchy.
Half century ago, when abortion was illegal in the United States,
underground Jane Collective reappropriated the knowledge of performing abortions,
to train and maintain a feminist network of illegal practitioners.
In 2001,
Gender Changers Academy started doing feminist hack workshops in Amsterdam
which then toured cities in different countries
under the name Eclectic Tech Carnival.
In 2014, Feminist Principles of the Internet were drafted in Malaysia,
meanwhile in Catalonia, TransHackFeminist convergence featured workshops
ranging from do-it-yourself gynecology to creating feminist servers.
Feminist principles of the internet on feministinternet.org
is a good starting point for imagining a feminist internet
but as it says on the Anarchaserver: "A feminist internet also requires
self-managed and autonomous feminist servers."
"This is about regaining control and gaining autonomy
in the access and management of our data and collective memories.
It is also about being able to have feminist mailing lists,
pads, wikis, content management systems, social networks
and any other online services managed by feminist tech collectives.
It is also of course about continuing to argue that
social justice in technologically driven environments
needs a more gender and culturally diverse presence in general."
Today there are a few feminist hacklabs and feminist servers
that are doing a very important job by setting paradigms and leading by example.
What we need urgently is the popularization of these practices
by sharing material, technical and emotional resources.
To have our own infrastructure, we have to make a collective decision
to invest in it.
In the article "Feminist autonomous infrastructure: from zombies to ninjas"
it explains how volunteering risks invisibilizing labor
and donation campaigns are not enough to sustain feminist infrastructure projects.
The article titled "Feminists are building their own technology to organise
but where are funders?" explains how a feminist server project ceased to exist
because it lacked proper funding.
"The internet, like the streets, needs to be reclaimed.
We can build new spaces of engagement, organizing and transformation
but in order to achieve this,
we need funding that can ensure those building the feminist internet
that they can make decisions over where their knowledge goes."
A server can cost less than the cheapest smartphone
or cheaper if you use a second hand computer
but we also need the funding to spread the idea
and give people the time and space to learn, exercise and develop.
In cities like Barcelona where every neighborhood have feminist groups,
every neighborhood can have a feminist hacklab with servers that federate.
For neighborhoods that don't have a secure physical space,
bigger feminist organizations like Ca La Dona can share VPS and other services.
Every feminist group should have access to feminist servers,
if they're too small or ephemeral and can't afford to have their own,
they should be able to find help from other feminist collectives that share services.
Bigger feminist organizations in more privileged parts of the world should
also have programs to share services with the feminists from rest of the world.
Feminist infrastructure and servers should be seen as a necessity,
especially for separatist feminist groups.
We can't have truly no-mixto spaces on vectoralist platforms, because there
even our close groups and personal messages are exploited by white cis men.
On the other hand, imagine an internet without cis men at all,
and believe that we can create it together.
To realize that dream we don't need a new technology, we need a new culture.
Hacker class consciousness must be a part of our intersectional feminist consciousness.
We can update our consciousness raising practices
by including conversations about how vectoralism effects us personally
and sharing the knowledge of how to hack it for good
with care and not condescension.
We can throw crypto install parties combined with tupperware/sex parties
where we demonstrate signal blocking pouches, tails sticks,
single board computers, linux phones, etc.
When we do these parties at each others homes,
we can help set up home servers and labs.
We can make signal blocking purses for smart devices fashionable.
Take that textile back from military machis.
If we do it on our own we could be singled out,
so we should do it as a movement
and exercise it as our right to not be accessible 24/7.
Our culture should value a repairable cheap phone with killswitches
more than the latest most expensive phone
that doesn't allow a battery removal without breaking the warranty.
Meanwhile, we can't forget where the lithium, koltan
and everthing else that goes into a computer comes from,
the people who mine it, carry it, process it, assemble it.
We must interfere with technology at every layer
from internet service provisions to supply-production chains
to stop reproducing injustice and destroying our planet.
To be able to take good care of each other and the earth,
we must cultivate our response-abilities and radically change our culture.
The future will be feminist or there won’t be future!