Constructing Feminist Tech through Fiction

April 2, 2020

Speakers: Dalia Othman @DaliaOthman, Helene von Schwichow @HeleneSchwichow, Katrin Fritsch @KatrinFritsch

Slide deck (PDF hosted on CryptPad): https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/GotlkyapH1BLL40n0lweXmFm/

Imagination and narration are powerful feminist and collective tools for social change.

"Feminist internet works towards empowering more women aand queer persons in all our diversities to fully enjoy our rights, engage in pleasure and play, and dismantle patriarchy. This integrates our different realities, contexts and specificities, including age, disabilities, sexualities, gender identifies, and expressions, socioc-economic locations, political and religious believes, ethnic origins, and racial markers. The following key principles are critical towards realizing a feminist internet." From APC principles fo a feminist internet.

How do we create an internet that protects the most vulnerable peoples and groups in our societies

Through a feminist internet we can create spaces that resist patriarchy. and facilitate new forms of engagement, governance, etc. We can also improve access, movements and participation, expression, agency, and economy. Alternative economies which build on the commons, the cooperations, and the commons. Also focused on sustainability, open source and user security.

When participants were asked what is the internet, they responded:

• Inter-connected, which can be good or terrible.
• Full of possibilities
• Community
• Wild
• Very fun
• us
• international
• Massive
• Dumpster fire
• Innformation
• Powerful
• Fun and pleasure
• Constructing Feminist Tech through Fiction
• Another home we can go to

When asked why the internet sucks:

• inadequate digital education
• insufficient promotion of critical thinking
• It gives LOSERS the confidence to be hateful and angry, and hurt others
• Shows how violent, abuse and power imbalance exists in our society, especially towards vulnerable groups like women, people of color eetc
• It has broken our connectness as humans
• bullying and trolling
• gender bias in content
• self cencorship due to violence and all other mentioned problems
• gender and generational gap especially in rural areas
• lack of access in rural areas+++
• censorship of sexual/sexuality-related content
• the feelings of shame that keep people from being comfortable with the internet - i.e. shame about not knowing how to stay safe, knowing digital security, knowing what they “should” be doing re: passwords, etc.
• how the ideas of who should be comfortable with tech (“tech bros”, male hacker stereotypes) that keep people from feeling safe to explore, learn, and mess up
• Online harassment
• Sillicon Valley (masculine) culture about provinding solutions that are mean to be universal (but they aren’t)
• More here: https://pad.riseup.net/p/FeministNet-keep

Speakers lead the participants to create/draw/paint/write a feminist science fiction story of the internet or of technology.

Sample drawings: