The Feminist Internet
DecodingsInternet culture is now a matter of social import. At a time when its structural inequalities are becoming apparent to the public at large, several voices have suggested integrating a more balanced vision.
The Internet is supposed to be the definitive public space, a forum for learning, speaking out, thinking and sharing. Last March, this view was challenged publicly by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, who observed that despite “all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division”.
In recent years, similar public statements and demands have been highly visible and many think it’s time to do something about changing attitudes towards the Internet by adding feminist principles (e.g.open source practices, the possibility of anonymity, the move towards decentralization and consent to personal data processing).
The feminist takes on the digital environment
At the end of 2016, former Wall Street analyst Cathy O’Neil published « Weapons of Math Destruction », sounding the alarm about “the mathematical models that pervade modern life – and threaten to rip apart our social fabric.” Attracting a lot of attention in the United States, the book came out at a time when trust in the algorithms that govern the Internet had already started to waver.
Three years later, an Amnesty International study of 288,000 tweets found that racism, misogyny and homophobia flourish on Twitter, one indication that the social media have aggravated online inequalities and abuse. In addition, the controversy over the choice of a female voicefor digital assistants like Siri, Alexa or Google Home has added to the overall feeling that technology is often developed with a pro-masculine bias.
This sentiment is borne out by statistics on gender representation in the tech sector. In its “Women in Technology Leadership 2019″ study, the Silicon Valley Bank found that only 40% of startups in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and China had at least one woman in a leadership position.
And the observation concerns the other scales of the company: while women represent 48% of employees in all sectors, they represent only 28% of employees in digital and 16% of employees in Tech (as developers, data scientists, etc.), according to Urban Linker.
A engaged shift towards digital economy
Five years after the first “Imagine a Feminist Internet” meetings, which gave rise to 17 “Feminist Principles of the Internet“, the ensuing conversation about access, governance, data confidentiality or anonymity largely inspired Code 2019, the annual conference on the Internet in the United States.
Former White House deputy chief technology officer Nicole Wong has repeatedly observed that the problem of the GAFA*AHs has less to do with size with the governance of the Internet and now Antonio Garcia Martinez and Jessica Powell, formerly senior executives at Facebook and Google, respectively, have asserted that a new wind of regulation is coming in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Within this same time frame, many individual and collective initiatives have been undertaken to make these little-discussed issues heard.
One of the most active communities is the Feminist Internet, which seeks to create emulation on web-related ethical issues. The collective is evolving towards brand consultancy, with two main objectives in mind: to focus more on creativity than on the dynamics of disseminating what is created and serve as evangelist in finding ways to decentralize power.
Cover photo / Feminist Internet (UK)
