The Myth of Justice Hacks: on Christina Dunbar-Hester's "Hacking Diversity"
When people ask me about my day job as a museum social media manager, I often tell them that I spend half my time making science jokes on the internet, and the other half sitting in meetings. In the case of both the meetings and the joke writing, I find myself grappling with the ethics of being a tech person (or at least a tech-adjacent person) trying to do good in the world. Is it weird that I buy ads on Facebook, a company that I find deeply problematic, in order to boost a story written by a colleague about the history of environmental activism? Yeah, it is. Do I worry about the sexist behavior of many of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, even as I enthusiastically promote my organization’s efforts to increase the number of articles about women in science on the platform? You betcha. Do I wonder if the museum workforce can ever become less white, given its colonialist beginnings, even as I take part in diversity and inclusion efforts led by the professional organizations to which I belong? All the time!
All of which is to say that despite not identifying as a “hacker” or a “coder,” I related deeply to the communities that Dr. Christina Dunbar-Hester examines in Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures. I can’t program software and I’ve never even visited a makerspace, but I filled my copy of this smart, thoughtful book with underlines and enthusiastic marginalia. Although Dunbar-Hester, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California, focuses on a fairly niche community, her conclusions are refreshingly universal and her insights will be valuable to many people seeking to make their industries more diverse and inclusive.
In Hacking Diversity, Dunbar-Hester traces the history of open-source communities, from ham radio geeks, to early “free software” programmers, to today’s open-source coders who gather in online forums and offline “hackerspaces.” Between 2011 and 2016, she interviewed participants in these communities, attended conferences, and gathered data from conversations on electronic mailing lists, social media, and other virtual gathering spaces. The book examines how and why these communities became so heavily white, male, and middle class. According to a 2006 study, less than two percent of people involved in open source technology communities were women. Generous and sympathetic to grassroots activists working to make these communities more diverse, Dunbar-Hester nonetheless concludes that too often their efforts remain shallowly focused on increasing representation in the technology industry. Making the world a better place–something many activists claim as a goal–requires a deeper commitment to structural change, both within open source communities and out in the wider world. If the question implied by the book’s title is “Can we hack our way to a more just and inclusive society?”, then the answer Dunbar-Hester offers is, “Unfortunately, no.”
The book neatly divides into what I have come to think of as the “what?” half and a “so what?” half. The first four chapters cover the “what?,” defining the open source community and describing some of the ways that advocates are trying to make it more diverse. Dunbar-Hester explains that what holds together the variety of projects taken on by hackers and open source coders (terms she uses more or less interchangeably) is more of an ethos than a commitment to a particular product. Largely focused on the collaborative creation of software code that is made available for other coders to adapt, change, and otherwise “hack,” these communities are ideologically committed to transparency, freedom, and unrestricted free speech. It is important to many people in the open source community that their activities are purely voluntary, and they hold strongly to the idea that one’s coding prowess is the only thing that matters.
Why, then, is a community devoted to freedom, transparency, and pure meritocracy so breathtakingly homogenous? While anyone with an interest in coding is in theory welcome to join open source projects, their libertarian-leaning principles have created a community that is not only overwhelmingly white and male, but also actively hostile towards efforts to institute structural change. One significant point of contention within these communities is the creation of Codes of Conduct for conferences and online spaces. Many diversity advocates have pushed for CoCs that discourage harassment and create more actively welcoming environments, while other participants insist that any such efforts go against the community’s experimental culture and commitment to openness and freedom of expression.
Dunbar-Hester also describes efforts by diversity advocates to create new spaces and communities. One example she gives is a community-based workspace in Oakland, California for hackers, coders, and makers of various kinds, specifically run by and for people of color. Another, less literal “space” is Dreamwidth, a nonprofit online blogging platform with majority non-male staff and users. Although different in many ways, both of these projects developed language and practices meant to welcome people who did not already identify as “computer geeks” and “hackers,” built around written Codes of Conduct and statements of values.
The second half of the book–the “so what?” half–explores the motivations of the people who are trying to remake the open source community. Is diversity advocacy about representation, with the goal of increasing the number white women and people of color involved in open source projects? Or is it part of a grander, more liberatory political project to use technology to build a more equitable world? Can those two goals coexist, or are they fundamentally irreconcilable?
These questions of representation versus liberation are hopefully familiar to people trying to diversify all kinds of spaces, from the national political arena to individual workplaces, and Hacking Diversity is at its best when teasing out the differences between the two. Efforts that focus on representation tend to be the most obvious, visible, and digestible diversity initiatives. They include advocacy activities that strive to bring more white women and people of color into tech workplaces–with the goal of increasing upward mobility for marginalized people, but also to reach markets that remain neglected. Such efforts are not necessarily interested in dismantling the world’s problematic structures; their goal is to give more power to traditionally marginalized people within them.
Other technologists seek to diversify their workplaces and volunteer open source communities as part of a larger effort to build tools that address structural social problems. But radical change is a more difficult sell, and many advocates are forced to compromise. In one of the most interesting parts of the book, Dunbar-Hester describes speaking to activists in open source communities who are committed to politically progressive causes, but who strategically use the language of representation when seeking funding or trying to raise the profile of their particular technology projects. One of the people Dunbar-Hester interviewed succinctly summarized the compromise involved, observing that “Advocates often have social justice motivations but work in for-profit organizations that aren’t equipped, much less motivated, to do the right thing for its own sake. The advocates learn the language that will get an initiative funded, or whatever the goal is.”
This is where Dunbar-Hester’s mix of sympathy and careful critique really comes into focus; she thoughtfully describes the practical work being done by these activists, acknowledging the material circumstances under which people with liberatory politics do their best with the skills and resources they have. But she is skeptical that truly structural change can happen if activists remain overly focused on championing bland and uncritical diversity.
I didn’t walk away from Hacking Diversity feeling like there was anything particularly unique about diversity advocacy within open-source—and perhaps that’s the point. Technologists often believe that only technology can save us from social ills; open source advocates can be particularly evangelical about their ability to create radically free communities. But many of the book’s observations could easily apply to other industries, from higher education to environmental activism. People who work in technology industries or volunteer with open source organizations might find themselves relieved or disappointed to discover that their problems are not so very unique. Either way, the realization is a valuable one.
In the introduction to Hacking Diversity, Christina Dunbar-Hester writes, “It is not enough to act locally while thinking globally–there are structural forces at work that dictate that these hacks will fall short of advocates most elevated intentions.” It’s an observation that feels both unsettling and true in a world where the fixes to structural injustice often feel beyond our reach. Hacking Diversity hasn’t convinced me that it’s pointless to make smaller changes to one’s immediate community in the name of bettering the world, and I don’t necessarily think that Dunbar-Hester would want to convince me of that. But books like this remind me that there are no easy answers to the world’s biggest problems. There are no “justice hacks,” technical or otherwise.
Image Credit: Summer School 2014 im Makerspace der SLUB | TU Dresden / Fanny Hauser on Flickr | CC BY 2.0
