FeministBSD

To all who thought feminism would just go away, they're doubling down and trying to take ownership of major FOSS projects such as BSD and Linux. Things are about to get really bad...

http://blog.anthrobsd.net/046.html

To bring readers up to speed: on April 8, 2015, a Twitter user named @LadySerenaKitty posted a graphic designed to promote FreeBSD as being inclusive to all peoples. The graphic featured the FreeBSD logo (a translucent red sphere with a set of devil horns) with the following text:

FreeBSD does not care:
about your race or ethnicity
about your sexuality
about your gender
about your sex
if you are cis
if you are trans
FreeBSD only cares that you know what you are doing and if you don't, there's a huge community willing to help you learn.

First, a tiny bit of honesty. Free Software, Open Source Software, whatever your politics deems you call it, is feminist. Free software owes Feminism. Internalize it, embrace it, use it to make those who would deny it sweat just a little. By doing so, you open up all the feminist theory to work for creating a better culture. It opens up the doors to the excellent work of notable STS scholars such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway.

To take just one example, standpoint theory "articulates the importance of a group's experience, of a distinctive kind of collective consciousness, which can be achieved through the group's struggles to gain the kind of knowledge that they need for their projects" (Harding 2004: 36). That is to say, it is not enough simply to have minority group members around. Kristen Intemann (2010: 790), in comparing feminist empiricism with feminist standpoint epistemology, states it as "feminist empiricists have advocated for scientific communities comprised of individuals with diverse values and interests" while "[s]tandpoint feminists, on the other hand, maintain that it is diversity of social position (as opposed to diversity of values and interests) that is epistemically beneficial." I am throwing my weight behind feminist standpoint epistemology here: it will make a better science, a better technology, and a better *BSD.

We can start asking good questions such as "what would a truly inclusive FreeBSD look like?" This is a form of undone science and we can and should begin to put pressure on the community to begin asking these questions.

We ought to wrest away all claims towards inclusion and respect from Linux and their community. You could work with that community but it is a community that denies its intellectual heritage and goes out of its way to silence minority group voices. Or you could come to the *BSD community who are actively working to make this space congruent with the ideals on which it was founded and is awaiting its opportunity to embrace you and your standpoint into making this technological artifact into the best thing we all, together as equals, know how. *BSD ought to be the place all newcomers arrive first, not last. Because we have a better culture. A culture without patriarchy. A culture where it's not just white angry men.

>>7
That's exactly what this post is arguing.

To say FreeBSD the project does not care is curious. The project is comprised entirely of people. Those people socially construct FreeBSD. The graphic renders invisible the social forces embedded into FreeBSD the OS. Our technologies are not value-free, independent actors in our world. They are social representations of us and they reflect our power dynamics, social structures, and other human effects. FreeBSD today is the result of a majority white and male effort. It would look different if that were not the case. I believe it would look better if it were not the case. We ought to care about the way our technologies are socially constructed because such inquiry helps to shine light onto the power dynamics in play, the forces that include and exclude people, and the voices that are permitted to speak as well as those that are quieter and others that are silenced. While Langdon Winner correctly points out in his article, Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology, social construction of technology alone is not sufficient, perhaps it can be our start today.