About 8 people came to our first Anarchafeminist Hackerhive meetup. We sat in the Noisebridge library, read a couple of things out loud, introduced ourselves, talked about ideas for action and activism, and ate tacos. And plums from someone’s tree. A couple of women walked by and we laughed at their doubletake at the sight of so many women sitting together and having fun at Noisebridge. They joined us!
Stuff we discussed included Occupy SF and Oakland, laurenriot leaving #OO because of misogyny, general politics, the feeling of “waking up” to see misogyny and realizing it is part of alienation, the Talkbackbot and how its author got a new job, Feminist Frequency and the backlash from that and responses to the backlash, forking Mikeeusa‘s code, the EFF Surveillance Self-Defence Project, the Ada Initiative and codes of conduct and what to call them (“friendly” something… I can’t remember), and then various war stories from open source projects. We talked about the word “hacker” and people’s gender assumptions. Some people felt it was reclaimable from male domination and others thought “maker” was better or we need better words.
We talked about a browser plugin, a distributed tagging system so we could basically bookmark douchey behavior; hover over someone’s twitter handle and see a tooltip that says “8 of your friends tagged DudeBro as a creeper based on X, Y, and Z” with links to the citations and/or screencaps. Rather than marking a person based on hearsay it would point out public bad behavior, racist or sexist statements etc, that people can look at and judge for themselves (and engage that person in dialogue if they want to.) Someone suggested starting, as with lots of what happens on Tumblr, with a tagging system so people can point out dumbassery conveniently.
A guy came by and offered us really nice cupcakes and cucumber sandwiches.
We talked about the class implications in Hollaback, and the differences between street harassment (and who reports it and against whom) and harassment by people you know who you have to get along with and yet find some way to make them quit it.
I mentioned Homicide Watch as a great project (but one that is pretty much a full time job). A bit of speculation on what we might look for in leaked information that is already out in the world. It was a nice meeting and great to have some laughs and meet people.
More people want to come for next week and we will probably start going through the Surveillance Self-Defense Project and do some keysigning. Everyone at the meeting seemed interested in improving their ability to act on the net with more anonymity and privacy. There are 15 people on the list now, so next week’s meeting should be fun — and then we can segue to Circuit Hacking Monday if everyone’s up for it. I am ordering extra MintyBoost kits.
The green hive artwork is by Zeph Fishlyn. I had a really amazing meeting with Zeph to talk about the “hive” and what kind of art might fit. Sadly if you google “feminist hacker” or things like “woman with laptop” or anything like that you get horrible stock photos of women in business suits having Feelings Alone with Salad (except with a laptop). And I am so over the feminist fighting fist no matter how classic, and the less we see rosie the riveter the better imho. I cannot even find Oracle with her laptop and the Birds of Prey around her in a format that would be handy (plus she is proprietary anyway.) We need new images and metaphors, myths, banners and tshirts and cool shit.
When is your next meeting? Do attendees have to be coders?
I would also be interested in coming to the next meeting, if cismen are welcome. Though I understand why we wouldn’t be.