April 13, 2015
046
Inclusionism in the *BSD community
or, Why digital colorblindness can't work
As one person, I cannot do everything. Nor do I think I would want to do everything even if I could. With that said, I have a personal image of what the *BSD community ought to look like. And when you see something that you know will produce the opposite effects from its intended purpose, you feel compelled to speak out no matter how unpopular that voice might be. This is one of those moments. Applying an STS lens to this situation will help get us out of old ways of thinking and hopefully on to newer and more effective strategies for incorporating others into the *BSD community. This is explicitly political and I feel an obligation to be political and partisan in these matters. But I do it from the perspective of one who wants to see the best for his community. I offer this article as food for thought and an invitation to collaborate on what should be the digital revolution of our time.
To bring readers up to speed: on April 8, 2015, a Twitter user named @LadySerenaKitty posted a graphic designed to promote FreeBSD as being inclusive to all peoples. The graphic featured the FreeBSD logo (a translucent red sphere with a set of devil horns) with the following text:
FreeBSD does not care:
- about your race or ethnicity
- about your sexuality
- about your gender
- about your sex
- if you are cis
- if you are trans
I want very much to cheer on such things. @LadySerenaKitty's heart is clearly in the right place. But unfortunately such mantras will not actually yield the inclusionary results for which one hopes. Instead, this graphic creates a type of digital colorblindness. As traced by Aneeta Rattan and Nalini Ambady (2013), colorblindness historically comes from American attempts at resisting de jure racial segregation and inequality. However, they also note that such terminology tends to be preferred by majority group members and are more likely to be rejected by minority group members. Additionally, among other problems with colorblindness noted in the article, majority group members may come to "dislike minorities who embody their group memberships" (17), are less likely to exhibit friendliness, and fail to recognize blatant prejudice. Minority group members are more likely to perceive bias. As Rattan and Ambady put it, colorblindness is not "a panacea for improving intergroup relations" (19).
This digital colorblindess in part lead to the recent Linux code of conflict which has its fair share of deserved criticism. Indeed, one need not search far or wide to find examples of the problems that the code fails to address.
Moreover, turning our differences invisible helps contribute to dominant voices being the only voices heard. As Vanessa Au (2011) reminds us in her chapter My day of fame on digg.com: Race, representation, and resistance in Web 2.0 in the book Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, Web 2.0 technologies such as social media voting and ranking content simply reproduce the status quo. "And, as in real life, marginalized voices get pushed out as dominant voices support other dominant voices and they, both figuratively and literally, rise to the top" (210). We should not make that easier by denying that there are dominant and marginalized voices.
Especially in a group that is already marginalized!
In the Twitter conversation that ensued between myself and @LadySerenaKitty, some spurious claims are made. The main one is "FreeBSD, the project and OS, doesn't care about [labels]. Meaning it doesn't matter what labels can be applied to a person. All that matters is you're a person." While that might be superficially true in that the source code and object code that make up FreeBSD has no agency to care, it is a shallow analysis at best.
To say FreeBSD the project does not care is curious. The project is comprised entirely of people. Those people socially construct FreeBSD. The graphic renders invisible the social forces embedded into FreeBSD the OS. Our technologies are not value-free, independent actors in our world. They are social representations of us and they reflect our power dynamics, social structures, and other human effects. FreeBSD today is the result of a majority white and male effort. It would look different if that were not the case. I believe it would look better if it were not the case. We ought to care about the way our technologies are socially constructed because such inquiry helps to shine light onto the power dynamics in play, the forces that include and exclude people, and the voices that are permitted to speak as well as those that are quieter and others that are silenced. While Langdon Winner correctly points out in his article, Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology, social construction of technology alone is not sufficient, perhaps it can be our start today.
As a final critique of the graphic, I point to the issue of access and how the graphic silences those without access. Access is not a problem localized to the far distant "other" either: a not insignificant number of students who I work with in my NSF fellowship, right here in the United States, do not have access to a computer at home. They also likely lack the knowledge to know where to go to obtain and use FreeBSD.
So FreeBSD does care about some things: it cares that you are a person who has access to computers, the Internet, and already possesses enough knowledge to engage with the system on some normative level. The graphic suggests that my students are not people. That is offensive. Moreover, FreeBSD is more likely to care if you are in the majority group, i.e. white and male, than if you are not. These are not problems unique to FreeBSD; these problems permeate Free Software. But we, as the *BSD community, ought to be better and do better. And every step of the process is difficult, from this early step of admitting something needs to be fixed to the final implementation of whatever actions we decide, collectively, will ameliorate these issues. But we have to start somewhere. And we have to start at some time. I suggest here and now.
We should eschew notions of colorblindness: from a distant perspective it appears to do good work for the community. But as demonstrated, a close reading makes clear that instead of moving the *BSD community towards a more inclusionary model, a goal for which we absolutely should strive, it serves to harm our efforts.
We should take the time to reflect on this question, routinely posited to me by one of my professors: what would a better culture look like? For our purposes: what ought the *BSD community look like? The answer is not simple, there is no silver bullet, but it is one of those questions that never goes away. Even if we manage to come up with the definitive answer today (assuming for a moment such an answer could exist) it will be different tomorrow. Because our community will be different tomorrow.
But maybe I can offer up some small prescriptions for today. A proverbial first step. With the hope that tomorrow we take another step. And another step the day after. Perhaps we can look back in time and find we have walked to the ends of the earth and we are so much better for it.
First, a tiny bit of honesty. Free Software, Open Source Software, whatever your politics deems you call it, is feminist. Internalize it, embrace it, use it to make those who would deny it sweat just a little. By doing so, you open up all the feminist theory to work for creating a better culture. It opens up the doors to the excellent work of notable STS scholars such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway.
To take just one example, standpoint theory "articulates the importance of a group's experience, of a distinctive kind of collective consciousness, which can be achieved through the group's struggles to gain the kind of knowledge that they need for their projects" (Harding 2004: 36). That is to say, it is not enough simply to have minority group members around. Kristen Intemann (2010: 790), in comparing feminist empiricism with feminist standpoint epistemology, states it as "feminist empiricists have advocated for scientific communities comprised of individuals with diverse values and interests" while "[s]tandpoint feminists, on the other hand, maintain that it is diversity of social position (as opposed to diversity of values and interests) that is epistemically beneficial." I am throwing my weight behind feminist standpoint epistemology here: it will make a better science, a better technology, and a better *BSD.
We can start asking good questions such as "what would a truly inclusive FreeBSD look like?" This is a form of undone science and we can and should begin to put pressure on the community to begin asking these questions.
We ought to wrest away all claims towards inclusion and respect from Linux and their community. You could work with that community but it is a community that denies its intellectual heritage and goes out of its way to silence minority group voices. Or you could come to the *BSD community who are actively working to make this space congruent with the ideals on which it was founded and is awaiting its opportunity to embrace you and your standpoint into making this technological artifact into the best thing we all, together as equals, know how. *BSD ought to be the place all newcomers arrive first, not last. Because we have a better culture.
That is inclusionary. It has the potential to start a revolution the likes of which have not been seen since the advent of the Free Software movement. I want to get on board that movement. But, as I opened this article, I am only one person. I cannot do it all. I am probably not even the right person to lead such a movement. But we can do something truly radical working together.
Let's get started.
Works cited:
Au, Vanessa
2011 My day of fame on digg.com: Race, representation, and resistance in Web 2.0.
In Transgression 2.0: Media, culture, and the politics of a digital age.
Ted Gournelos and David J. Gunkel, eds. New York: Continuum.
Harding, Sandra
2004 A socially relevant philosophy of science? Resources from standpoint theory's
controversiality. Hypatia 19(1): 25-47.
Intemann, Kristen
2010 25 years of feminist empiricism and standpoint theory: Where are we now?
Hypatia 25(4): 778-796.
Rattan, Aneeta, and Nalini Ambady
2013 Diversity ideologies and intergroup relations: An examination of colorblindess
and multiculturalism. European Journal of Social Psychology 43: 12-21.