Is geek culture sexist? Joseph Reagle, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at Northeastern University and author of a new paper entitled, “Free as in Sexist? Free culture and the gender gap,” returns to Surprisingly Free to address geek feminism and the technology gender gap.
According to Reagle, only 1% of the free software community and 9% of Wikipedia editors are female, which he sees as emblematic of structural problems in the geek community. While he does not believe that being a geek or a nerd is in any way synonymous with being a sexist, he concludes that three things that he otherwise loves—geekiness, openness, and the rhetoric and ideology of freedom–are part of the problem inasmuch as they allow informal cliques to arise, dominate the discussion, and squeeze out minority views. Reagle also comments on a unintentional androcentricity he has observed even amongst free software community heroes, highlighting the ways in which this behavior can be alienating to women and prevents geek culture from growing beyond its traditional base.
Reagle prescribes a 3-step solution to sexism in geek culture: talking about gender; challenging and expanding what it means to be a geek; and not allowing the rhetoric of freedom to be used as an excuse for bad behavior.
Reagle further supports efforts to form female-only subcultures within the geek community, which opponents argue goes against the free software value of openness. Instead of the balkanization of their movement that opponents fear, these closed-group discussions actually strengthen geek culture at large, according to Reagle.
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Gabriella Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University, discusses her new book, “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking,” which has been released under a Creative Commons license.
Coleman, whose background is in anthropology, shares the results of her cultural survey of free and open source software (F/OSS) developers, the majority of whom, she found, shared similar backgrounds and world views. Among these similarities were an early introduction to technology and a passion for civil liberties, specifically free speech.
Coleman explains the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. She also discusses the tension between the overtly political free software movement and the “politically agnostic” open source movement, as well as what the future of the hacker movement may look like.
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Tom W. Bell, professor of law at Chapman University and author of the concluding essay in Copyright Unbalanced, a new book edited by Surprisingly Free’s own Jerry Brito, discusses the ways in which copyright has evolved over time and why reform is vital.
Bell differentiates copyright from other types of property, arguing that conflating the two terms causes great confusion amongst laypeople and, over time, corrodes the value placed in tangible property rights. According to Bell, copyright is a privilege created by statute that doesn’t exist in a state of nature and is not recognized by common law.
As a special type of economic good, copyright must be treated differently than tangible property rights, according to Bell, who outlines five proposals for copyright reform.
While Bell is not opposed to copyright, he argues that copyright enforcement has gone too far, and lawmakers should structure policies to lead us towards a world in which we conceivably do without it.
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James D. Miller, Associate Professor of Economics at Smith College and author of Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World, discusses the economics of the singularity, or the point of time in which we’ll either have computers that are smarter than people or we will have significantly increased human intelligence.
According to Miller, brains are essentially organic computers, and, thus, applying Moore’s law suggests that we are moving towards singularity. Since economic output is a product of the human brain, increased brainpower or the existence of computers smarter than humans could produce outputs we cannot even imagine.
Miller goes on to outline what the singularity could look like and what could derail our progress towards it.
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In the wake of the election, Matt Hindman, author of The Myth of Digital Democracy, analyzes the effect of the internet on electoral politics.
According to Hindman, the internet had a large—but indirect—effect on the 2012 elections. Particularly important was microtargeting to identify supporters and get out the vote, says Hindman. Data and measurements—two things that the GOP was once ahead in, but which they have ceded to the Democrats in the past 8 years—played a key role in determining the winner of the presidential election, according to Hindman.
Hindman also takes a critical look at the blogosphere, comparing it to the traditional media that some argue it is superseding, and he delineates the respective roles played by Facebook and Twitter within the electoral framework.
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Perry Keller, Senior Lecturer at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London, and author of the recently released paper “Sovereignty and Liberty in the Internet Era,” discusses how the internet affects the relationship between the state and the media. According to Keller, media has played a formative role in the development of the modern state and, as it evolves, the way in which the state governs must change as well. However, that does not mean that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, as Keller demonstrates using real-world examples in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and China, the ways in which new media is governed can differ radically based upon the local legal and cultural environment.
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Scott Shackelford, assistant professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University, and author of the soon-to-be-published book Managing Cyber Attacks in International Law, Business, and Relations: In Search of Cyber Peace, explains how polycentric governance could be the answer to modern cybersecurity concerns.
Shackelford originally began researching collective action problems in physical commons, including Antarctica, the deep sea bed, and outer space, where he discovered the efficacy of polycentric governance in addressing these issues. Noting the similarities between these communally owned resources and the Internet, Shackelford was drawn to the idea of polycentric governance as a solution to the collective action problems he identified in the online realm, particularly when it came to cybersecurity.
Shackelford contrasts the bottom-up form of governance characterized by self-organization and networking regulations at multiple levels to the increasingly state-centric approach prevailing in forums like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Analyzing the debate between Internet sovereignty and Internet freedom through the lens of polycentric regulation, Shackelford reconceptualizes both cybersecurity and the future of Internet governance.
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Designer Dan Provost, co-founder of the indie hardware and software company Studio Neat, and co-author of It Will Be Exhilarating: Indie Capitalism and Design Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century, discusses how technological innovation helped him build his business. Provost explains how he and his co-founder Tom Gerhardt were able to rely on crowdfunding to finance their business. Avoiding loans or investors, he says, has allowed them to more freely experiment and innovate. Provost also credits 3D printing for his company’s success, saying their hardware designs–very popular tripod mounts for the iPhone and a stylus for the iPad–would not have been possible without the quick-prototyping technology.
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Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses the amicus brief he helped author in the case of Verizon v. Federal Communications Commission now before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Radia analyzes the case, which will determine the fate of the FCC’s net neutrality rule. While Verizon is arguing that the FCC does not have the authority to issue suce rules, Radia says that the constitutional implications of the net neutrality rule are more important. He explains that the amicus brief outlines both First and Fifth Amendment arguments against the rule, stating that net neutrality impinges on the speech of Internet service providers and constitutes an illegal taking of their private property.
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Christopher Steiner, author of Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule the World, discusses his new book. Steiner originally set about studying the prevalence of algorithms in Wall Street stock trading but soon found they were everywhere. Stock traders were the first to use algorithms as a substitute for human judgment to make trades automatically, allowing for much faster trading. But now algorithms are used to diagnose illnesses, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, and write newspaper articles. Algorithms have even been used to look at how people form sentences to determine that person’s personality and mental state so that customer service agents can deal with upset customers better. Steiner discusses the benefits–and risks–of algorithmic automation and how it will change the world.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.