A reimagining of women and technology
doesn’t end with addressing harassment or better representation in stem
Imagine if, instead of responding to every horrible thing on the internet, a piece of code could go into battle for you. In 2015, Sarah Ciston ventured onto Reddit. The more she dug into the platform, the more she saw the deep-rooted threads of misogyny and racism there.
The accepted slang and chat-room short forms alone were appalling.
SMV: Sexual Market Value.
Plate: Woman with whom you are in a non-exclusive sexual relationship.
LMR: Last Minute Resistance.
AWALT: All Women Are Like That.277
The Wall: The point in a woman’s life where her ego and self-assessed view of her sexual market value exceed her actual sexual market value.
Hypergamy: The instinctual urge for women to seek out the best alpha available.278
Oh, and let’s not forget this definition from the manosphere:
Feminism: A doctrine built on the pre-supposition of victimhood of women by men as a foundation of female identity. In its goals is always the utilization of the state to forcibly redress this claimed victimization. . . . Feminism is therefore, a doctrine of class hatred, and violence.279
A notion had struck Ciston: why wasn’t there a bot that could explain actual feminism to trolls on the internet? At the time, she was learning the programming language Python. A bot was something she could make. It was the best kind of light bulb moment — a fully formed idea had popped right into her head. She would build that bot.
It was the first time, in all her time learning coding, that she’d felt empowered by technology in a way that made her truly want to engage with it and to learn it. With a background in creative writing, she’d been drawn to digital technology in the first place because she was curious about how much the form of something shaped what could be said within it. How does the actual structure of something like technology and the digital worlds it embodies enable or disable what can happen within those structures? Would a woman operate and move through those worlds in a different way? “I had had a lot of stumbling blocks with feeling like I couldn’t access or learn the technology. That it wasn’t for me. That I actually wasn’t a very good coder,” she told me. “This was the first space where I felt like I had a project.”
She had big questions about artificial intelligence: How does the fact that it’s designed by looking through certain lenses, power structures, and biases shape what it is? Especially, she thought, when everybody assumes such technology to be neutral and rational? Truly, at the base of it, she wanted to know whether technology could intercede in a problem that was created by the technology itself. Could technology speak for her in a digital space where, as a “human, fleshy body,” she wanted to retaliate against misogyny but didn’t feel she had the power to do so? She had never felt as though she could speak through code as she’d seen others do. But this chatbot would let her.
She began beta-testing her new project in early 2016, programming it to scroll through Reddit and search for a compiled list of misogynistic terms. When it found one, like “cunt,” the most-used slur, the bot would post a corresponding quote from a feminist author or thinker. To wit: “‘A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.’ — Gloria Steinem.”
Ciston called her bot Ladymouth.
During the initial beta tests, Ladymouth operated for twelve hours and three days on two forums, respectively, before it was banned from each. During that time, the bot posted sixty comments and received forty-four responses. A typical back-and-forth went something like this:
Ladymouth: “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” — Audre Lorde
Misogynist Reddit user: Women are being called upon for anything? Oh please bitch. It’s men who are being called upon. To grow the fuck up and stop falling for the shit tests from feminism. . . . Idiot men freed you. But you only have power when you’re young and dumb. And you completely fail to realize that with power comes responsibility. And you’ll never understand what that means. Best if we just put you back under control. Everyone, you included, would be happier.
Ciston told me that she had expected her bot to get yelled at. She had expected that some of the exchanges would be absurd. So, on both those fronts, she quipped, “it was completely successful.” She was surprised, though, at exactly how successful the bot was. It took so little for Ladymouth to be yelled at. Even the suggestion that women deserve basic human rights provoked violent vitriol. It eventually got to the point where the bot no longer felt like an anonymous piece of code. Ciston had thought she’d be able to let it run and she’d go about her day, letting Ladymouth do the feminist work. But before she knew it, she’d be in the other room, cooking dinner, feeling anxious about how men were responding to the bot online. She started identifying with it. Weren’t real women getting the same targeted messages? The comments began to feel personal, especially when some men started direct-messaging the bot. Going through the messages en masse, Ciston felt the cumulative weight of all that hatred.
There was one response to Ladymouth that made her laugh, though. A Reddit user on a men’s rights group had written: “It’s probably a bot. And very likely coded by a man, because you know . . . coding.”
Conversations about diversity in technology often start and stop with representation. We need more women in tech. Tech is too white. True and true. The numbers, by now, are well-known. In 2018 only 21.4 percent of Google’s tech employees and roughly a quarter of the company’s leaders worldwide were women; only 1.5 percent of tech employees were Black and 2.8 percent were Latinx.280 At Apple, women made up 23 percent of tech employees and held 29 percent of leadership roles in 2018; 7 percent of Apple’s tech staff were Black and 8 percent were Latinx.281 Over at Facebook that same year, 21.6 percent of tech staff were women, and women occupied 30 percent of senior roles within the company; just under 5 percent of employees were Latinx and 3.5 percent were Black.282 And so it goes. Each company has promised to do better, and each has seen a glacial growth in its diversity numbers.
Previous chapters have shown that gender equality, however, is more than counting the number of women in any given company; nor can inequality be solved by hiring practices that encourage tokenism but do little to address underlying company and industry culture. In short, discrimination and misogyny run deeper than numbers, which means the corresponding problems run deeper, too. Still, I don’t highlight the slow growth in diversity to suggest we shouldn’t care about such underwhelming representation; we should. The culture, the priorities, and the products of the tech industry are created by the people who participate in it and, right now, those people are, overwhelmingly, young white men. That means that until these numbers shift, and until we stop playing by the rules of the game, technology will remain a stronghold of a certain brand of masculinity — one that literally has the power to define our future. Or, as the epiphany of one New Yorker journalist, thousands of words in the making, proclaimed: “It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”283
That, ultimately, is the problem with letting the conversation get stuck on diversity in the tech field: we never get around to imagining how technology itself might change. How it needs to change. Consider the long rehabilitation of Uber, one of tech’s most notoriously toxic companies. For context, its diversity numbers mirror those of other big tech companies. In 2018, women at Uber held 21 percent of leadership roles; just 2.8 percent of those in leadership roles were Black, and 1.4 percent were Latinx. Only 18 percent of the company’s tech staff were women, 2.6 percent were Black, and 3 percent were Latinx.284 As is well-known by now, co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick resigned from the company in June 2017 amidst a growing list of scandals that included a public accusation from a former employee, Susan Fowler, that the company fostered a culture of sexual harassment. In a much-circulated blog post Fowler shared her experience with the company:
On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
Both her HR department and members of upper management agreed that she was being harassed, but added that it was this man’s first offence and they didn’t want to punish him too severely. Fowler was told he was a “high performer” and that it was “probably just an innocent mistake on his part.” She was given the choice to either leave his team, the one that best suited her expertise, or stay, she wrote, with the acknowledged expectation that she would likely receive a poor performance review, but there was nothing HR could do about it because she had been given choice. She left the team, and after a year left the company.285
Given this environment, perhaps it’s no great shock, then, that it took until May 2018 for Uber to revamp policies that previously locked drivers and riders into a mandatory arbitration hearing in cases of sexual misconduct or assault. From no angle could the company be conceived of as one designed for women.286 With the same announcement, it also scrapped a confidentiality agreement that had prohibited anyone from sharing their experience and speaking out. The policy change wasn’t a coincidence; not only did Uber want to clean up its image, it was facing a lawsuit claiming it had created a service conducive to sexual assault.287 A few months later, its “Chief People Officer” — i.e., its head of HR — left the company after accusations surfaced that she’d repeatedly ignored internal allegations of racial discrimination and had made derogatory remarks about the company’s global head of diversity.288
The tension between diversity and actual equity — by which people have an equitable share of power, status, and influence289 — permeates all areas of STEM, right down to the educational level. Take, for example, the infuriating experience one seventeen-year-old girl shared with me. She was the only female on a team of fifteen students who were tasked with building an electric vehicle for a major engineering competition. As part of the project, students presented to various teams of potential investors, with hopes of earning more funding to build their car. Keen, she had already sketched a prototype design for the car. But, rather than look at it, her team insisted that, instead of working on the car, she focus on the investor presentations. At first, she assumed they were simply acknowledging that she was a good presenter. She knew she was. Then, one of her fellow students let slip that they thought they had a better chance of getting money if she were the face of the group. Wasn’t everybody keen on including girls in STEM fields now? “It felt as if they were taking advantage of a system that was used to overturn the oppression that women in STEM had to face,” she said. “I agreed to do the presentation because I knew they were right, but I refused to exclude myself from the engineering part of the project.”
It’s not a big stretch to draw a line from that teen’s experience to that of the thirtysomething woman who told me about her experience working at a major tech company. After the woman who had hired her left, a man became her boss. He had little understanding of the role she had been brought on to perform, and soon combined her job with that of another woman. “We’d each been hired for our expertise, but that had been erased without even talking to us,” she said. “After that, they immediately began to exclude us from meetings, reports, and even conversations with the very clients we were tasked to take care of. I saw my role diminish in stature and purpose and impact. I went from leading strategy discussions with stakeholders to silently taking notes, in a very short amount of time.” Tasked as the new note-taker, she found it difficult to participate in meetings or lead an agenda. As a direct result, she found it more difficult to build relationships with stakeholders and get the information she needed. When she raised the issue with her boss, she was told to take better notes.
“When bonus time came around, I was told that because none of my bosses had set any goals for me . . . I was ineligible for the payout that every other person on the team got,” she said. “Of course, no one ever got a bonus for being good at taking notes.”
Incidents like these underscore how little we’ve thought about diversity beyond simple optics and the shrug of because . . . ladies. Technology companies may say they want women and people of colour, and schools may encourage these demographics to sign up for tech clubs, but they haven’t thought much about how to support them once they’re in the room. Numbers rise through a lens of gaining tokens, not talent. As a consequence, some women and people of colour arrive and then crumble under the culture. They grow so tired from earning, and then keeping, their place. They’re downright exhausted from trying to fit into a field that is still not fundamentally for them. So, of course, once they’re there, they do not have the opportunity to spend much time thinking about what they might create. How do you ponder innovation, invention, and new ways to imagine the world when you’re simply trying to survive? Even when women are in the room, and that room is not overrun with IRL trolls, it can feel like we’re intruders, carefully navigating spaces men trample through with ease. But we stay because we want to love it. Or we leave because it breaks our hearts. That’s the trap we’re in.
Whenever I now think of the complexities of challenging STEM’s narrowness, I find myself reflecting on the question-and-answer portion of a tech event I went to, in late February 2019, called “deBrogramming App Studies.” If any place should have been a vision of a feminist tech space, it was this one. The room of fifty was about half women, two of the three presenters were women, and the entire theme of the night was, after all, focused on expunging the “bro”-ness from one of tech’s new(ish) fields of study. One presenter, a researcher from Ireland, made a point of repeatedly asking “Do you ever feel like you don’t fit?” and “Do you ever feel like the technology you use doesn’t work for you?” The answer to each of these questions, it was suggested, took the form of the classic breakup salve: It’s not you, it’s them. She also spoke openly about the difficulties in getting anybody who’s not a white man — the default tech-industry employee — to show up to things like open learning sessions. “Just because they’re advertised as being open to everybody,” she said, “it doesn’t mean everybody will show up” — because women and people of colour can read the fine print of who belongs in a space, even if it’s in invisible ink. Another presenter talked about the overwhelming “bro”-ness on apps like Tinder (hello, eggplant; hello, unsolicited dick pic). At the end of the night, the “bro” could not be escaped, even there.
After some others had asked questions, a young man raised his hand in response to the presenter’s detailed explanation of her research on the rampant sexual violence and harassment on platforms like Tinder — and Tinder’s tone-deaf response to it, which was to debut what the company called its “menprovement” initiative in 2017. (This allowed users to throw a virtual drink or send an eye-roll gif;290 many women felt it trivialized the problem, and some men felt it engaged in misandry.291) The young man with a question wanted to know if the presenter had heard of Lego’s massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that got cancelled several years ago because people kept building “dicks.” Moderators couldn’t keep up with scrubbing all the non-family-friendly content and had to scrap the game.292 He was laughing. Was, like, that harassment too? Did the presenter know about it? What did she think?
Nobody asked another question after that. A male presenter, who was also acting as a de facto moderator, urged the audience to continue. “Is this really the question we’re going to end on?” he asked, shaking his head. “Okay, then, we’re going to end on dick detection.”
In the same way, Sarah Ciston is rarely able to present her Ladymouth research — which she has turned into both live poetry and video art installation — without a man admonishing her for trolling the trolls. It’s as if she was breaking some gender code by, first, using the technology, and second, using it to not be the bigger person. It’s the burden, Ciston tells me: women are expected to be nice, to educate people, to always invite them into the conversation. Her chatbot is a prime example of what women might build if they weren’t being kept busy advocating for their right to be there and speaking out about equality. What they might build if they had access to the funding, research, and teams. What women might build if they were building for themselves. Sure, men might also be invested in ridding digital spaces of violent, hateful rhetoric against women, but this particular piece of technology was not built with them first in mind. With Ladymouth, Ciston has stepped far out of bounds, in multiple ways, earning a degree of power in the process. Many people would like to stuff her back into her expected place. They’d also like to dismiss the severity of the violence online. “When people say, ‘Aren’t you just adding fuel to the fire?’ they’re kind of missing the scale to the issue,” she said. “As if my tiny match would do anything to this fucking forest fire that is misogyny and toxic masculinity.”
Around 2016, it became popular to debate whether technological innovation was, in fact, slowing down. Numerous media articles and research studies pointed out that while it had become conventional wisdom to believe in the acceleration of invention, technology had not drastically evolved.People were not making new things. “We can expect a significant slow down in the years to come,” warned one article.293 “In a three-month period at the end of 1879, Thomas Edison tested the first practical electric lightbulb, Karl Benz invented a workable internal-combustion engine, and a British-American inventor named David Edward Hughes transmitted a wireless signal over a few hundred meters,” lamented another in the mit Technology Review (naming all men, naturally), adding that even modern-era technology wasn’t so impressive. “Think the PC and the Internet are important? Compare them with the dramatic decline in infant mortality, or the effect that indoor plumbing had on living conditions.”294 Past innovation, added a Washington Post article, meant “finding ways to increase Americans’ material well-being by reducing the cost and improving the quality of goods,” whereas today’s innovation focuses on small technological shifts that do little to improve everyone’s base quality of life.295
I wonder how different the technology forecasters’ visions might look if it weren’t the same demographic endlessly inventing our future. So, too, does Sarah Sharma, director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, whom I first spoke with about the #MeToo movement. Looking at the most ubiquitous technology today — the kind that has changed the texture of everyday life — she pointed out, as others have, that a lot of the latest innovation is really just duplicating the “Mom” role in robot form.
“We’re inventing the post-Mom economy, which — not to insult mothers or anything — should make us all happier and richer and finally bring us the leisurely future we were promised 50 years ago,” argued one Newsweek article, dubbed “Silicon Valley Needs Moms!”296 An instalment of the web comic Joy of Tech that circulated around this same time joked that developers were merely replicating technology to replace mom’s loving reminders: “It’s a beautiful day. Go outside and play!” (Fitbit); “Don’t use that tone with me, young man” (Siri asking, “Could you please rephrase the question?”); “I’m not your maid” (Roomba).297 Since then, Mommy apps have only become more entrenched: TaskRabbit for chores, Uber and Lyft to drive you to the mall, LiveBetter to alleviate your boredom, Rinse to clean your clothes, Skip the Dishes to feed you, and on and on.
The singular focus on Mommy apps, warned Sharma, is not as innocuous — or as universally beneficial — as people want it to seem. “The classed and heteronormative obsession with work–life balance, efficiency, and time management displayed by Mommy’s-basement apps suggest that one can escape patriarchy or gendered labor in an instant — one just needs the right app! But this propaganda obscures the inescapable realities of care work that so many women, people of color, and precarious workers undertake out of survival,” she wrote in the Boston Review a few months before we met in fall 2018.298 As she later told me, the endless reimagining of technology as mere replications of women’s traditional roles, without doing anything to change those roles, keeps us from creating a future that looks any different. It says, over and over, this is what innovation looks like, while simultaneously excluding women from the reconstruction of their supposed roles. What might a feminist vision of care technology look like? We’ve hardly had a chance to find out. Or, as Sharma put it at the close of her article: “The technology that comes out of Mommy’s basement will never liberate Mommy from the basement. It is about control and the maintenance of power.”
At the same time, before many women and people of colour can imagine building their own jetpacks and flying cars, they want to imagine what it would be like to be safe. Such a goal is, in its own way, revolutionary — a direct response to the types of things we might make if we weren’t driven by the needs and wants of a particular subset of the population. Because if STEM has failed to account for women in its design, so too has the engineering and design of most things, including the cities we live in. Perhaps this isn’t wholly surprising. Over the course of history, “respectable” women in cities all over the world were expected not to leave the house, or at least not without the protective presence of a chaperone. Nobody really guessed that one day women or people of colour would be traversing the city, with the presumed power to engage with it as the men who built it might. I say “presumed” because it hasn’t really worked out that way.
Today, the design of both urban and suburban landscapes often means that many people still don’t have the freedom of mobility that most white men have. In fall 2018, the Rudin Center surveyed New Yorkers about their travel habits and learned that women spend a median extra $25 to $50 each month on taxis, Uber, or Lyft for safety reasons — for example, when travelling alone at night — because they perceive such methods to be safer than public transit. The median extra cost for men was $0.22. “The financial discrepancy raises red flags in late-night service safety,” wrote the study’s lead author, Sarah Kaufman. And there are implications for women’s capacity to safely take part in the economy of night work, like nursing, janitorial work, and bartending.299 Other, similar studies have found that women also take more onerous, expensive, time-sucking routes than men, owing to household and child-care duties, and this can influence their decision to take or stay in a job.300 This isn’t even taking disabilities into account, and how vastly inaccessible (and thus expensive) our cities can be for those who have mobility issues. Nor does it take into account how a person’s various identity intersections may contribute to their safety concerns, further curtailing movement.
“With most companies, institutions, and corporations, the culture was not necessarily designed to put women forward or to have women in mind,” says Aisha Addo, founder of the company DriveHer, based in the Greater Toronto Area. The rising gig economy (or what Sharma might call the “Mommy app” economy) did not, she added, give serious consideration to the safety or mobility of women, even though much of it focused on transportation, whether that’s a gig worker zipping around the city or a passenger in a car. Whenever something new was designed, she said, nobody really thought about how it would “work for us.” As a ridesharing service for women only, both at the driver and passenger level, DriveHer, on the other hand, was designed entirely around the “work for us” mission. “When we talk about safe space, for instance, at DriveHer, we’re not just talking about putting a woman behind the wheel, we’re not just talking about having a woman as the passenger,” Addo said, “we’re talking about the entire experience.” A safe space, she added, is not just about making an existing space comfortable or free from violence. “A safe space is thinking from the very beginning, What is my encounter with you? What is my experience with you? And how does that translate into action?”
Addo founded the company after her own uncomfortable late-night cab ride home to Mississauga from Toronto. The driver’s conversation quickly turned sexual, and he asked Addo personal questions, and also whether she lived alone. I’ve had similar rides, and so have many women I’ve known, including a man who remarked on my “exotic” looks and insisted on dropping me off at my street address, even though I’d only entered the intersection; another man who demanded to know why I wasn’t married, while insisting he needed to find a good woman to date (hint, hint); and another man who, upon learning I was heading to the nutritionist, asked if I needed to lose weight and speculated on whether or not it was working. The only time I’ve ever felt safe in an Uber, Lyft, or cab was on the rare occasion when my driver was a woman — but more than three-quarters of Uber’s drivers are men.301 And still, for many women I know, these options feel safer than public transit at night. Many of us, including me, brush off these incidents as a creepy but necessary gamble — a still-awful experience, but a less awful one than we might find on public transit. It’s worth asking, though, as Addo did, why we think it has to be that way.
For Addo, DriveHer is not just an app. It’s a way to address the uncertainty of safe transportation and how it curtails a woman’s ability to move through the city, thus diminishing her opportunities. Similar questions of safety, mobility, and design were on AnnaLise Trudell’s mind when she successfully pitched the idea of London, Ontario, becoming a United Nations Safe City to councillors in 2017. As the UN puts it, the Safe Cities initiative (not to be confused with sanctuary cities) is “the first-ever global programme that develops, implements, and evaluates tools, policies and comprehensive approaches on the prevention of and response to sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls across different settings.”302 Trudell, who is a manager at London’s Anova, a shelter plus counselling and resource centre for abused women and their children, wanted to see how a city’s very geography influenced the safety of those who lived in it. While London isn’t the only Safe City project in Canada — others include Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg — it is one of the few in the world that has undertaken the initiative using geo-mapping.
While most other cities have used more conventional methods, such as focus groups, Trudell wanted to gather quantitative data using crowd-mapping and -sourcing technology. Why not use technology to make a city more humane, livable, safe? She wanted to be able to see where people felt most unsafe — where the hotspots were, and what the “geography of harm” looked like in London. “It’s broader than the moment of ‘someone hurt me here,’” she told me. “It’s ‘I feel unsafe here for all kinds of reasons.’” One of those reasons might be a physical attack, yes, but feeling unsafe could include a multitude of cross-sections between spatial use, belonging, and a perceived threat to safety: say, cat-calling and leering, but also unlit parking garages and isolated transit stops. The map itself can be seen by members of the public, who are all able to drop pins, but only project members can view the reasons someone might give for feeling unsafe. When I met with Trudell in late October 2018, a few months before she and her team had finished collecting the data, they’d already discovered that about 70 percent of the pins were related to sexual violence, by its broadest definition, which includes things like street harassment.
“We don’t want women to navigate the world based on that map,” Trudell told me. Meaning, she didn’t want a Band-Aid solution that focused merely on alerting women to the “hot spots” and doing little else — just another solution that limited them. Trudell stressed that the project was not an “academic” one, either. Stakeholders included the city council, its urban planning department, the London Transit Commission, and the city’s police force — all groups that had the power to transform how the city operated. To create their new Safe City, these groups would examine the gathered data and use it to plan real, concrete change. Physically, the city would not even look the same after they were done. That could mean adding street lamps to public parks, or it could mean changing bus stop locations. It could even mean rerouting roads or creating pedestrian-only streets. They’d let the data — and, by extension, women’s own stories, feelings, and experiences — determine how their future city would work.
Certainly, that would include changes to the city’s downtown core. I met Trudell there at a bright and trendy-looking coffee shop with pastel Eames-style chairs, polished concrete floors, and white-painted brick walls. Outside, a sign announced: “Coffee is always a good idea.” It seemed quaint and quiet, but Trudell told me that, just a block away, at the city’s core intersection, was the place that had so far received the most pin drops: more than six hundred. I walked by the spot later, looking at the jostling line of commuters waiting for the bus in front of a church courtyard. Yes, I could see feeling vulnerable there stuck in line, sandwiched between strangers, especially at night.
Women like Addo and Trudell might not be creating new technology — in fact, Addo quipped to me, “I’m in the business of women, not necessarily in the business of technology” — but they are devising applications that are tailored for new audiences and users. For us. At their core, what they are really doing is changing power balances. So, naturally, both initiatives have been attacked.
Trudell was hacked one day, she told me, by someone dropping over 200,000 pins in a matter of twelve hours, all full of useless data. That wasn’t the worst, she added — although, she grimly joked, “It does show that people are invested in fucking with us.” The worst was reading the online comments section after three women shared their stories of navigating the city with local media. People were debating who was more “rapeable,” said Trudell, with much of the discussion focused on a young Muslim woman who wore a hijab. Meanwhile, DriveHer was back in testing mode after a man hacked the platform and proudly went public, boasting to media about his data breach. Addo was forced to put the company on hiatus while she made sure it wouldn’t happen again. She knew she wasn’t targeted randomly; they wanted to focus on a company that catered to women and their safety. The man wanted to make them feel unsafe. “There are a lot of giants that we have to slay on a daily basis,” she said, “but you have to keep going.”
As a digital editor, I’m someone who spends most of my days (and nights) online. I was lucky enough to start my digital career working largely with women. Unlike others whose working lives intersect with technology, I did not have to witness a “bro”-saturated workplace, live with daily mansplaining, or have my skills and knowledge constantly undermined because of my gender. Offline, I have never been made to feel like I don’t belong. Online, though, it can be a different story. Every time I’ve published a story in a digital space, the trolls have arrived to slay me. From the comments I’ve read, it’s clear that I am the villain — poisoning a place of presumed pristine maleness with my lady-mouth — and they are the heroes. I’ve been called a race-traitor, an idiot, a bitch, and various other iterations of things horrible people call other people they don’t like. I’ve been told to get raped and killed, sometimes in that order, sometimes reversed. Think about that for a second.
I don’t use social media because I do not find this discourse to be beneficial to my life. Admittedly, I often wonder if I’ve made the right decision in opting out. It isn’t only that I cannot help others turn the tide against such online violence if I’m not on social media, although there is that. It’s that I often feel I’m missing out: on good conversations, on marketing opportunities for my writing, on connection. Our online lives have become part of our everyday lives, offering many people a sense of richness and community that they might not otherwise have. I know that the ability to transcend geographic boundaries has saved many people from loneliness, from shame, from disconnection. Like anything else, social media has positive aspects that present a foil to all its negativity. Still, those fleeting feelings of isolation are never enough to make me wade through the inevitable messages about how I must be the stupidest person on the planet, the threats of bodily mutilation, and worse. (If you don’t know how it can get worse, then — bless you! — you have never had to spend large amounts of time online. Rejoice!)
Even so, there’s no question that I move more easily through technology spaces than many others. Takara Small is a Toronto-based technology journalist, web developer, and founder of the non-profit Venture Kids, which aims to help under-served and low-income communities learn how to code. Despite its myriad challenges, Small was drawn to tech because of what she sees as the even greater multitude of opportunities within it — something she believes has the potential to outweigh its lack of diversity. When it takes diverse voices into account, technology can help people create some truly amazing things. It can change the lives of users and creators. It can uplift entire communities. After all, technology is, by its nature, a field that makes an infinite number of once-impossible things possible.
None of this means that Small is naive when it comes to the incredible challenges that form a fortress-like wall around diverse participation in technology. As a Black woman, she knows first-hand how rare it is to find a face like hers in a sea of white — and, consequently, what that means when she walks into tech-centred spaces.
“It’s very apparent,” she told me, “and I say this all the time, that whenever I enter a conference or enter a room I might not necessarily be welcomed with open arms. I can tell you so many stories.” Small attended one major U.S.-based conference while working as a journalist for a major publication — and here she carefully clarifies that this type of incident is not specific to this conference, but something she encounters often in tech spaces. It was the first year she’d gone to the event. At some point, she went to walk into the dedicated press room, as any journalist would. A white woman stopped her, telling her the room was for journalists only. Small assured her she was media. The woman assumed Small was confused. Perhaps she was looking for the booth area? The not-so-subtle assumption underlying that question: Small must be a “booth girl,” helping to showcase products. She has been mistaken for a booth girl, or for hotel staff. In this case, Small pulled out her press pass. The woman asked her how she got it, suggesting it wasn’t hers. So, Small pulled out her wallet and produced her ID.
“I saw her immediately blush a very deep crimson red, and then welcome me with open arms,” said Small. “And every time I walked into the press room after that, she would go out of her way to offer me coffee, offer me food, ask me if I needed a phone charger.” It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, she added, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last.
Constantly encountering such biased, and outright racist, behaviour hasn’t pushed her out of the industry, however. It has only made her more ambitious. Every time she gets admonished for not knowing where a bathroom is at a conference (something she told me happens often) it only makes her that much more focused on creating a more diverse space within technology. Venture Kids came out of that determination. “Under-served” does not have to mean “racialized,” she stressed. Such considerations should also encompass those who are lgbtq, disabled, newcomers to Canada, and more. As someone who grew up in a small farming town, she also wants to ensure that rural children are given greater opportunities to learn coding skills. For her, the future of technology must incorporate diversity in all of its forms. If we want to get anywhere different, she believes, we can’t afford to keep thinking in the same binaries: men and women, white people and people of colour, rich and poor, ability and disability. We have to embrace intersectionality. We have to think creatively.
For many people who inhabit the technology sphere, a different way of thinking extends past the things we make with technology to the internet itself. They ask: What if the mistake came at the very beginning? What if, to fix the toxic inequality that permeates the internet, we have to break it first? To do so would mean pushing for deeper solutions, ones that question the very purpose of the internet and its model of, as T. L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault put it to me, a maximum network, maximum exposure, sharing economy. In other words, it would mean questioning what we’ve previously been sold as the internet’s greatest strength: its ability to connect everything and everyone, give us all the most massive platforms and soapboxes we could ever desire, and allow us to access and publish every piece of information invented, to live online, seemingly forever. Prizing those things isn’t necessarily wrong, but even critiques of our hyper-connected lives rarely consider how, practically, the internet could look any different.
Cowan and Rault are both faculty at the University of Toronto, where they study digital cultures through a trans-feminist and queer lens. They first came up against these questions when they set out to create a digital archive of the Montreal-based queer cabaret Meow Mix.303 With grant money in hand to gather photos and stories from the event, held monthly for several years, they wanted to create an online networked space where people in Canada could be in conversation with people in, say, Buenos Ares, all learning from each other. They could discuss cabaret as a political act, engage in each other’s social lives, talk about survival strategies. Everybody would discuss the methods they used to address their specific, local issues, and they’d all learn from each other. In this way, Cowan and Rault could be part of a growing movement that’s questioning how women and others are erased from digital spaces — and, more than that, how they’re often exploited.
It’s this final point — the idea of complicity and exploitation — that gave the two academics pause. Yes, the project sounded great. But would it have unintentional consequences for those people who would join the archive, were it to go online and be connected to the entire digital world? “As soon as it was going to go online,” said Rault, “we were like, ‘Oh damn, this does not feel right.’ And it didn’t feel right for a lot of different reasons.”
For starters, they didn’t have everybody’s names. Even if they did, though, Rault added, they began to wonder if it would be enough. They realized they wanted to ask people if it was okay if they used video of their work in the online archive. That would mean tracking down dozens of people who performed in the 1990s. What if their names had changed? What if some of them had transitioned? What if, in trying to find performers, said Rault, they set off an “algorithmic detonation system across Google” that put people at risk? Every conventional research method encouraged in the Online Age, they realized, came with huge ethical pitfalls, particularly for those who wanted to do research in a way that valued the people and practices they were studying. Together, they began to ask new questions: What are we putting online? How? What are we keeping offline? What are better ways to engage with the extreme latitudes digital research can provide? And, ultimately: Just because we can put all this material — this content — online, should we? They’d started to make a mistake, but in stopping themselves they decided to fuse the internet and their research in ways few others were doing.
“You can never assume you know what somebody wants. And that’s just basic feminist consent,” said Cowan. Seeing your work (and yourself) used online in a way you never intended can feel like a “violence of scale,” they added. In terms of a cabaret performance, it could be that the original person only said yes to participating in the show because they knew it would be seen by a small audience of mostly friends. To see the scale of that change without consent, added Cowan — an audience reaching into the thousands, with exposure to misogynistic and transphobic trolls — is a massive potential violation of that initial performance. The silver lining in all this, said Rault, is that both the lived experience of harm — losing control over online content; experiencing digital violence; feeling the mass influence of toxic social media — and the fatigue of constantly navigating your life through today’s digital expectations and parameters is fuelling change. People know something feels off. It’s just a matter of figuring out what, exactly, isn’t working, and why. Cowan believes that urgent sense of “not working” is hurtling toward a Take Back the Internet moment: finding a way to recreate an online space that prioritizes safety, vulnerability, and connection, while also protesting against violence.
Practically, that could mean online spaces that don’t stay online forever — not necessarily because they’ve done harm and need to be taken offline, but because they were envisioned on a different scale. It also means a willingness to take content offline that is doing harm. Or it could mean gathering information in ways that are participatory, collaborative, and transparent, not extractive. In many ways, it’s as simple and as difficult as asking for permission to include something or somebody — as simple and as difficult as believing the internet, for some people, is not an easy, free, and infinitely large playground where we all share information and content. Beyond that, it could mean restricting access to some people, or closing access for some parts of the year.
Take, for example, one content management system (CMS) that’s gaining ground, called Mukurtu.304 As an Indigenous-created, grassroots project, Mukurtu is designed to help communities manage, share, and digitally compile their heritage in ways that are both ethical and culturally relevant. At the core of this CMS are cultural protocols that allow those using it to determine “fine-grained levels of access” based on what a community needs: from completely open to strictly controlled. Everything is there, but not everybody — especially those outside the community — needs to see it.
For many people, the idea of not seeing something is antithetical to the internet itself. After all, we’ve been told that’s where we derive our power online: as sort of Great and All-Seeing Wizards of Oz, with the apparent freedom to say and take and do whatever we want. But Oz was an illusion, his power smoke and mirrors. Breaking the internet doesn’t have to mean making it smaller, more restrictive. It doesn’t have to mean increasing regulations (although both those things may be part of it — hello, Facebook, I see you). What it does mean is letting the humanity back in. It means asking what equitable digital spaces would look like. It means, as Rault put it, designing these spaces according to anti-colonial, trans-feminist, and queer cultural protocols. “Honestly,” they said, “it’s not an easy thing to see. People are cobbling it together all over.” The point is that they’ve started. “It’s fun and frustrating and slow,” added Cowan. “That’s what we all know now: most things that are ethical move quite slowly.”
And if that breaks the ultra-fast, too-big internet — good. We’re already building something better, something for us.
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