Anticipating Feminist Backlash in Tech
We are creating, we are witnessing the infancy of a new age of feminist organization in tech.
Feminist hackerspaces spring up in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.
Feminist and intersectional critique of OSS free labor, engineering management mythologies and software culture bloom across the virtual community.
Codes of conduct are quickly becoming tablestakes for conference organizers, and the community, increasingly vocal and empowered, demands diversity and safety at our events.
Along with this increased level of feminist organization and vocality are worrying trends:
- Conferences springing up dedicated to tone policing feminist activism under the guise of social justice
- The increased rallying of white men behind white women who deny, minimize and derail feminist concerns and discourse
- A significant increase in the number of white women who feel personally wounded by the “tone” of intersectional feminist discourse and work against it. (Editor’s note: Cry me a fucking river)
- Marked increase in speech equating feminist critique with bullying and attacking — a time-tested technique for derailing and discrediting feminist speech that has accelerated significantly within the tech community in the past few months
- The vocal refusal of OSS leaders like DHH to engage with endemic gendered violence and issues of labor/capital conflict in the communities that make them rich
- The growing belief in a false “gender war” or community conflict that equivalates the power of the broader patriarchal system to that of a small and systemically marginalized population
These are the early warning signs of what we can expect to grow into a much more direct and coordinated backlash.
The community MUST maintain a relentless focus on critical consciousness, intersectional feminist politics, and the advancement of marginalized persons, NOT reconciliation with a broader system intent on protecting its existing power structures.
No truce is possible or desirable.
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