Deep Lab cyberfeminists are ninja, not geisha, wielding technology like a finely honed blade

“I definitely think technology and data are weapons,” says Addie Wagenknecht, an American-born multimedia artist based in Austria, who in 2013 organized Deep Lab, a cyberfeminist congress of hackers, artists, and theoreticians. The group’s December 2014 four-day session at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is the subject of filmmaker Jonathan Minard’s 18½-minute documentary that premiered at Motherboard on January 12, 2015. Both the film and Deep Lab project were funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, CMU’s Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art @ the Frontier, and CMU’s CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.

In the film, Wagenknecht’s statement is followed immediately by an unidentified woman speaker who says, “We’re all about using technology to subvert power.” These declarations go unchallenged, as if viewers are expected to take for granted that technology and data should be weaponized against an unspecified power that must be subverted. “It’s definitely digital warfare,” another disembodied voice later agrees.

This is a familiar meme of crypto-anarchism. Bypassing the obsolete structures of democratic reform, direct action is decided in secret by a handful of self-appointed visionaries, implemented surreptitiously by anonymous hackers, and imposed on everyone else without consent. After all, as Edward Snowden told the New York City conference Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) by video on July 19, 2014, “You in this room, right now have both the means and the capability to improve the future by encoding our rights into programs and protocols by which we rely every day.” Citizens in the digital age cannot be held hostage to political consensus or judicial review. Hackarchists don’t have time for such antiquated shit.

“As a group, we work to manifest actions better than any corporation or government,” confirms Addie Wagenknecht in her Introduction to Deep Lab, a 242-page book memorializing the Pittsburgh meeting and available free online.

“Until this week, until Deep Lab,” writes Denise Caruso, former technology columnist for The New York Times and now a research scholar at CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, “I didn’t think it was possible. But the women in this group — who they are, what they do — have changed my mind. They wield technology like a finely honed blade. They are ninja, not geisha.”

One Deep Lab kunoichi seems intent upon honing her blade to surgical precision. Harlo Holmes, the Guardian Project’s “Metadata Rockstar,” has now designed FoxyDoxxing, free software to automate the common household drudgery of building a case against anyone foolish enough to antagonize a woman on Twitter.

True, there have been other apps that police Twitter. In August 2014, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, introduced Block Together “to reduce the burden of blocking when many accounts are attacking you, or when a few accounts are attacking many people in your community. … If you choose to share your list of blocks, your friends can subscribe to your list so that when you block an account, they block that account automatically.” With Block Together, you can also auto-block accounts (usually in under a second) meeting certain criteria of awfulness.

Another such app, the Block Bot, is expressly for women. “Twitter is polluted by a number of anti-feminist obsessives,” we are told, “who viciously harass those who don’t support their warped views. The Block Bot [will] automatically block the nastiest of these people. Once installed, it works in the background, fetching the names of those to be blocked from a central server, and discreetly blocking them.” You can even fine tune the Block Bot by selecting from one of three “nastiness levels. Level 1 is sparsely populated with ‘worst of the worst’ trolls, plus impersonators and stalkers. Level 2 (which we recommend for general use) includes those in Level 1, plus a wider selection of unpleasant people, in the opinion of the blockers. Level 3 goes beyond The Block Bot’s main purpose, and expands the list to include those who aren’t straight-out haters, but can be tedious and obnoxious.”

What both Block Together and Block Bot have in common is the mindless delegation of shutting out your adversaries to automated sentinels, constantly on guard lest your hard-earned complacency be disturbed.

Harlo Holmes’s FoxyDoxxing, however, is the first post-Shepard open source engine to combat the Twitter menace. According to Holmes, FoxyDoxxing was “inspired by this interesting case” of Andrea Shepard, core developer at the Tor Project, an anonymizing network that the Guardian Project assisted in adapting its product to Android.

For those unfamiliar with Shepard’s Thanksgiving doxing of a New Jersey pharmacist who heckled her on Twitter, it’s a crypto-anarchist revenge drama not to be missed. In Shepard’s hands, the Internet is wielded less like a finely honed kunoichi blade than a blunt guillotine left over from Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.

Replying by email to my request for comment, Harlo Holmes writes, “I’d like to go on-the-record stating that I don’t think any attempt to automate ‘internet tough guy’-style sleuthing is in any way a good idea: it isn’t ethical, nor is it particularly efficient!” Her goal for FoxyDoxxing, Holmes explains, is to automate “analyzing clusters of ‘activated’ twitter accounts for sockpuppetry, which I felt Shepard did quite well.”

It’s unclear, then, why her app is called FoxyDoxxing. Oxford Dictionaries defines the verb dox as to “Search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.” That is exactly what Andrea Shepard did to her bête noire, outing his real name, parents’ names, their city of residence, and above all his employer, whom Shepard then urged her supporters to contact demanding that he be fired. Shepard did not newly discover the six sockpuppets belonging to the pharmacist. As Shepard herself wrote, “He openly confesses to having ‘more sockpuppets than socks.’” For Shepard, associating those sockpuppets was merely an additional pretext to justify doxing.

In a second email to me, Harlo Holmes concedes that “exposing someone’s sockpuppetry only scratches the surface of what people do to one another when they dox.” That being the case, FoxyDoxxing is a superficial app that entirely fails to address the malice with which it may be used. “In my mind at least,” Holmes adds, “algorithms have a lot of political power bundled within them. I do not want to exercise that type of politics personally or professionally.”

This strikes me as a copout. Holmes has contributed yet another weapon to the ever-expanding arsenal of digital warfare while remaining aloof from the underlying morality of cyberfeminist vigilantism. That’s like the gun manufacturer who says, I just make ’em. It’s up to you what to shoot.