Humans That Code : Neha Chriss (Part I)
An Interview for Bitscademy
“I work in Information Security, and I consider myself something of a hacker, a radical, and an experimentalist. I navigate a professional world where I have different titles which are mostly concerned with Information Security. I currently work as a “Security Engineer”, although I’ve also worked in Ethical Hacking, or “Penetration Testing”, application security and related fields. I have a parallel career as a sound artist.
I was always a tinkerer at heart. Often, out of curiosity, I liked to take things apart. As a kid, I didn’t have a notion it could be something I might get paid for. I saw people in small mom & pop PC shops repairing computers, and I thought it looked like interesting work. Or I thought I could work for a telephone company, fixing telephone lines. It wasn’t long before I was attempting to put systems together on my own. I’d get most of my parts from swap meets and university bins.
At 14 I had an experience that instilled the desire to understand and control my own hardware. I had tried to install a new drive into a frankenstein system that I’d put together over the summer. When I ran into trouble, I went to a local PC repair shop to ask questions. I figured maybe I was missing something, a part or just a concept. Instead of offering any insight into the issue or any advice, the guys behind the counter scoffed. They told me they wouldn’t answer any of my questions unless I paid them between $100 to $150 an hour. Of course, it had already cost me quite a lot money to buy the drive to begin with. My hopes were dashed, and I went on a one- to two-month-long odyssey to figure out what I was doing wrong. In the end, the problem was something relatively simple, but I never forgot how I was was dismissed and disregarded in that situation.
It wasn’t long after that I connected with people who were more knowledgeable, and ultimately I began to repair and build computers for low-income people of color around my neighborhood. That work continued throughout my teens, and I still do such work within my local community today. It took me a while longer to learn more about software. Writing code came not long after.
It was during my mid-to-late teens that I began to develop a more critical understanding of radical politics, and how computers and digital communication systems were used in corporate industry and law enforcement. This is what initially led me to Information Security, nearly at the same time I was discovering Open Source Software.
My experience overall has been not unlike the early experiences in computer repair shops and tech conventions. The elitism and the dismissiveness I’ve encountered over the last 20 odd years demonstrates the toxicity of a dominator/colonizer-oriented culture. The tech industry at large often depicts itself as a Darwinesque landscape, where only the strong (technologies or companies) survive — survival of the fittest — when the reality is different. At the level of organizations and companies embedded in the tech industry, there’s a sense of meeting the needs of global business and corporate interest. This involves a strange paradox where often the technically ‘best’ individuated technologies are shelved, in favor of what’s well marketed, or perhaps more specifically, what technology is most easily, and superficially replicated and paired with marketing dollars. The products that survive fluctuating market interests are presented as most appealing and accessible, but even then, only to the relative minority of people who have the resources and affluence to utilize and capitalize on certain software services. The consumptive quality of technology is such that there’s always some new gadget, service, architecture, language, application platform, or methodology to ‘buy’ into, and often in the worst cases, the end result is a culture of waste and disposability — in terms of financial human, and personal investment. In the workplace, this shows up in many ways. You find technologists whom, despite their ethnicity, are often initiated and conditioned within the same profiteering, white male-dominated, authoritarianism, destructive, zero-sum, heteronormative, monoculturist framework that this country was founded on.”
(continued in Part II)
