Narrator: Eight years later….
Software Development as Direct Action
22 Jul 2015 at 19:36
maymay
Community, My Videos, Myths and misconceptions, Personal history, Politics of sex, Technology
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Recently, I was invited to speak at the local Code for America brigade in Albuquerque, Code4ABQ. The presentation I put together with the help of R. Foxtale was the first public articulation of the development methodology we have been using for some time in projects like the Predator Alert Tool, the WordPress SeedBank plugin, and other, newer projects still under development. It’s also a term we’ve coined to distinguish between common misconceptions of “hacktivism,” which seem to primarily invoke ideas of digital breaking and entering (cracking), or leaking.
Although “software development as direct action” can legitimately be called a form of hacktivism, its focus is explicitly productive: building new stuff. My presentation told the story of the Predator Alert Tool as a way to showcase what we mean when we say “direct action software development.”
A video of the presentation, along with a transcript, is below. As per usual, all of my presentation materials for “Software Development as Direct Action” are Creative Commons licensed; you are encouraged to download and remix this work for non-commercial purposes. :)
Okay, so we’re here to talk about Software Development as Direct Action, and we don’t have much time. There are big problems out there and they need solving today. In the next ten minutes, I’m going to show you how you can solve them.
But first, I want to introduce you to Professor_Oni. And to Mabus. And John Black. And GamerGeekGuy. And all of these people….
These people have been accused by numerous different women of repeated sadomasochistic rapes. We know who they are because of this tool, a tiny browser extension called the Predator Alert Tool. These two-hundred and sixty or so lines of JavaScript—the entire source fits on this one slide—sparked years of debate and has catalyzed hundreds of thousands of lines of criticism, praise, ridicule, panic, relief, and hope across the blogosphere and in corporate board rooms alike.
The Predator Alert Tool is one example of what we’ve come to call “direct action software development.” The purpose is simple: maximum social impact. The method, simpler: Minimum lines of code.
What is direct action software development?
First, I’m going to assume that you already know a bit about what “software development” is. This is a pretty familiar idea: writing code to build apps, websites, or other technology products for use by people with laptops or smartphones. Writing code is the basic act required to produce software. No code? No software.
But what is “Direct Action”? We’ve found that what people think “Direct Action” really is varies based on, bluntly, how much brainwashing they’ve been subjected to. So let me take a moment to quickly describe what we mean when we say direct action.
When we talk about “Direct Action” we mean:
Any action that immediately addresses the root cause of a problem.
That sounds rather obvious. You may even be asking yourself, “Why would people waste time taking actions that don’t immediately address the root cause of a problem?” Well, there are several reasons:
- Maybe certain actions aren’t permitted by an authority. Some people will limit themselves only to actions that they have permission to take.
- Maybe they don’t understand, or they misunderstand, the root cause of a problem. In this case, people will often take actions they think will help, even if those actions don’t make much of a difference.
- Maybe they don’t have some resource they need; they lack the skills, knowledge, or other materials to take immediate action.
Here are some examples of direct action in the physical world:
- Is your free speech zone too far away from the oil-and-gas billionaire’s conference for your protest to be heard? Move closer. Break the rules to get there, if you have to.
- Are oil tankers barreling through your town and causing huge, damaging explosions when they derail? Barricade the tracks. Chain yourself to the barricade.
In most cases, tackling a problem with the direct action approach provides the most immediate solution. It’s also often dangerous, maybe illegal, and definitely disruptive. If successful, it will piss someone off. But at the end of the day, direct action is the single most effective and efficient thing you can do to make meaningful positive change. Historically, no lasting social change has ever been accomplished without a direct action component. Not once. Not ever.
Back to software. “Direct action software development” is a translation of direct action to the digital realm. It is:
Any code that immediately addresses the root cause of a problem.
Code is action. Remember Professor_Oni? He is a member of a fetish dating website called FetLife. In January 2012, a controversy that had been brewing amongst the FetLife community for years finally rose to national prominence when women came forward to accuse numerous prominent FetLife members of sexual assault. In response, the FetLife management deleted the survivor’s postings and threatened to ban them for violating the site’s Terms of Use. This went about as well as you’d expect: word of the heavy-handed censorship spread like wildfire and within a few weeks, many more women had come forward with similar stories, including some who accused the site’s founder, John Baku, of sexual assault. Once again, FetLife’s response was to delete or edit the new postings.
But by June of that year, the topic of sexual assault within the supposedly “safe, sane, and consensual” BDSM subculture was flashing across headlines of Salon.com, the New York Observer, and other high-profile media outlets. Activists from within the BDSM community had been organizing “Consent Culture” working groups for some time, and their membership numbers swelled.
Rape is exceedingly common in the BDSM scene. In fact, even the community’s own lobbying groups such as the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom—one of their board members doubled as FetLife’s community manager, by the way—admit to a 50% higher occurrence of consent violations among BDSM practitioners than the general populace. That’s nearly as bad as police officers, who statistically speaking are also twice as likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence. The BDSM scene has a self-delusional belief that they are “all about consent,” but in reality, they are at least as bad with sexual consent as everybody else, and likely a lot worse given their penchant for eroticizing abuse. Many women and Submissive-identified people within that community, including myself, had been saying this for a long time, but had been routinely ignored.
Even during the height of these national debates about “the BDSM community’s consent crisis,” the Consent Culture working groups were pitifully meek. They had collectively decided that “something must be done,” but what they chose to “do” was make a petition calling for the removal of the clause in FetLife’s Terms of Use that the site’s management was using as justification for censoring rape survivors. But as is often the case, when you must beg for something from a master, you find that they will not grant your request. Three years later, FetLife has still refused to change their policy and is still censoring rape survivors—unless those survivors use the Predator Alert Tool.
In October 2012, I realized that the root cause of the FetLife problem was simply that site management got to control what users saw when they browsed the site. But the Internet, which was made famous by mashups, allowed a unique opportunity to route around FetLife’s censorship in a way FetLife could not control. I wrote a simple mashup between a public Google Spreadsheet and FetLife that enabled anyone to report a negative experience with a FetLife member. With a mere 260 lines of JavaScript, that information could then be overlaid directly on FetLife.com.
With Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, the problem of FetLife’s censorship all but vanished: FetLife users could now warn other FetLife users about predatory behavior, and FetLife’s site management was powerless to stop it. Just a few weeks ago, we met a woman right here in Albuquerque who had used the tool to alert others about a local “Master” violating her consent.
Users of the tool then began asking for a similar capability on other sites, like OkCupid and Facebook. There are now seven variations of the Predator Alert Tool browser add-on, each designed to work with a particular social network or dating site. Importantly, none of these tools has been developed in collaboration with the social network in question. Most sites have refused to acknowledge the tool, despite inquiries from journalists and community members. Some sites are actively hostile, sending DMCA takedown notices and even threatening to ban Predator Alert Tool users. Meanwhile, the already overwhelming positive response from the user community continues to grow.
Predator Alert Tool arose directly from the needs of the community that it serves. It enabled the user community to do exactly what the authorities at FetLife didn’t want done, or what OkCupid and Facebook don’t want users thinking too critically about. And it accomplished this by just implementing that capability rather than waiting for permission to do so. Its impact was immediate and disruptive—on purpose. These characteristics are indicative of all direct action software development projects.
Today in 2015 the petition proposed by the “Consent Culture” working groups has still not achieved its goal of stopping FetLife from silencing rape survivors. Predator Alert Tool was able to accomplish that goal in one night of coding, with these 260 lines of code, three years ago.
In 2014, Creative Commons creator Larry Lessig appealed to technologists, to you, to take up this cause of immediate, direct action software development:
[T]here is a movement out there that has ENORMOUS needs which you, uniquely, can provide. The obvious ones, the technical needs. This is a movement that will only succeed if we find a way to knit together people in a different model from the television advertising model of politics today. […] This movement is STARVED for people with your skill who can figure out how to make this work. It desperately needs this type of skill offered by people who genuinely believe in the cause as opposed to people who are just trying to get rich.
If you want to change the world, but you don’t want to make a lot of money doing it, let’s talk. We’ve been doing direct action software development since before we knew what to call it, and we’re going to keep doing it. It would be wonderful to find other people who are excited about working with us. There are big problems out there. And they need solving.
Today.
On Rolequeer Methodology: Effective ideological anarchism
11 Jul 2015 at 00:08
maymay
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R. Foxtale has a new blog post up discussing some interesting meta points related to rolequeer theory and, specifically, the methodology behind its own theorizing:
We’re not professional academics, not professional activists, not professional writers, nothing – nor do we aspire to any of those positions of authority. We are kids on the Internet trying to make the world better ASA fucking P. And this means getting our ideas out of our heads, and into the hands of more people who might be able to use and improve them, as fast as we can. Even if we don’t look good doing it. Our priority is to be memetic, not to be impressive. This is an explicitly rolequeer ethic.
We’ve taken to using the shorthand phrase “Iteration Not Concentration” to refer to this way of being in constant flux in relationship to our own theorizing. Mimesis, not attribution, has always been more important to us—and has historically always been more impactful.
Between the two of us, however, R. foxtale is the “educated” one, a trained academician and researcher, whose been unlearning academia:
I came up in an academic milieu where my intellect (and self-esteem) were defined by my ability to make a logically-sound philosophical argument, extra bonus points if it was painstakingly articulated and rhetorically elegant, even if that meant moving the conversation forward so fractionally as to be effectively meaningless, or even just reiterating stuff other people already said 300 years ago. It’s been HARD work for me to unlearn the deeply-internalized programming that tells me publishing ideas before they’re perfected makes me “intellectually lazy.” I’m still working on it.
I’m the hothead, the middle-school drop out, the impatient one. We make a good pair. :)
All ideas, or at least all good ones, go through a kind of neonatal, bisociative, “see what sticks” stage in which the thinker is just lumping random shit together because it sounds good, or they’re curious what will happen if they try this chord instead of that one, or if they add cumin and bananas to this stir-fry. This is often thought of as a sort of drafting/note-taking/raw processing/experimental stage and it’s fine to do, and to do messily and poorly, as long as you mostly do it in private and don’t go serving your paying customers banana and cumin stir-fry.
What rolequeers do, however, is that we tend to “publish” our work (aka be like, “You have to try this thing I made!”) at a MUCH earlier stage of development than is generally considered “professional.” This is because we are not professionals.
But, as I said above, this is an explicitly rolequeer ethic. Behaving in a maximally transparent and generative way, if doing so has even the tiniest potential to shift our collective theoretical consciousness towards disrupting oppression, has a clear ethical priority over appearing smart, cool, consistent, or even correct.
I’ve pointed this out many times before, too, but it’s worth emphasizing that there’s a gigantic difference between a professional activist and someone who actually makes meaningful change. We’re not the only ones making these anti-institutional arguments, of course. Another good primer is William Gillis’s “Organizations versus Getting Shit Done,” which may be easier to understand because it discusses institutions in the more traditional sense, whereas I defined and discuss “professional activist” as an institution in the sociological role sense (because the context is rolequeer theory, of course).
This is not to say that rolequeer thinkers never do any pre-processing. Maymay and I have hours of conversation that never make it to paper. We try out ideas, throw away bad ones, and even (gasp!) disagree. There are a handful of private threads and other little forums scattered about the Internet where various rolequeer folks are working through concepts that are still a bit too unarticulated (or incendiary) for public consumption…yet. But our threshold for releasing idea-seeds into the wild is FAR lower than almost any other strain of political theory I’m aware of. […] And we do this on purpose, because we believe that the Internet as a collective effort is infinitely more intelligent, creative, and visionary than even the brightest individual one of us could possibly be.
Furthermore, there is some strategy around packaging these probably-mostly-wrong proto-ideas in rhetoric that invites people to really argue with us about them i.e. by stating them as if they are simply factual rather than just wrapping them in, “Oh, I’m just thinking aloud here. I’m probably wrong. Don’t mind me.” Because we tend to engage quite politely with ideas sandwiched between caveats but, ultimately, people who tell me I’m fucking wrong and then tell me exactly why are going to move my intellectual process forward much faster than people who give me polite “constructive criticism” or none at all — even though receiving the former genuinely hurts WAY worse than receiving the latter.
And finally, the thing about being consistently, embarrassingly wrong in public is that it is fantastic insurance against becoming an authority figure. I never want people to consider me an authority on rolequeerness, because with authority comes the power to coercively impose your ideas on others’ minds. With that power comes the responsibility to slow way down and be much more careful about where, when, how, and with what degree of completeness you share your thoughts. And with that slowness comes the continued rape, violence, and oppression of vulnerable people who might’ve otherwise been protected from or avoided a dangerous situation if they’d only just seen the word “rolequeer” come across their dash a little earlier and had the opportunity to think for themselves about what it might mean.
This, too, is an explictly rolequeer ethos: understand that rejecting authority offers concrete, tangible benefits, not only to oneself, but also to others whose freedoms your non-cooperation with (active resistance against) said authorities inevitably supports.
I’ve been seeing R. Foxtale mull this post over for a while. Check it out in full on her blog. It’s nice to see the whole thing published, perfection be damned. ;)
Search for FetLife profiles by all profile fields (age/sex/location/orientation/about me/looking for/number of pictures, and much more) without needing to login
08 Jul 2015 at 20:10
maymay
Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Technology
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So, this has been available for quite a while, but now that FetLife is actively removing links to it from venues they control (according to this tweet, which was part of this conversation, anyway), I figured it’s time to spread more links to it. :) Try it out:
- Log out of your FetLife account (if you have one and are logged in).
- Go to this page.
- Do a search! (This GIF screencast shows a demo.)
To reiterate, you do not need a FetLife account to use this search tool, though you do need one to “Send username a message on FetLife” (obviously?). It’s like your very own FetLife Meatlist. :)
Notice that you can search and filter profiles by pretty much any field, including their website lists (to easily limit your search to users with Twitter or Facebook profiles, for example), their “About Me” bio description, and how many photos or friends they have. Excluding profiles with no friends makes it easy to weed out sock puppets. :)
This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. By clicking the “Find username on other social networks” button, you can do a search on Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and about a dozen other sites for the same user profile. The “Find username‘s profile pic on other sites” button makes it easy to do a reverse-image search for a person’s profile photo across the entire Internet. Finally, the “Report username for predatory behavior” button makes it easy to file a statement about that person in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife. Again, since you don’t need to have a FetLife account to perform a search or to file a statement about a FetLife user in the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, this is a very handy way of finding people to report even if you’re not on the fetish dating site yourself.
If you do have an account on FetLife, though, you can just install this tool directly into the site. That way, you can access the search form with the click of a button, directly next to FetLife’s own search bar. Simply follow these instructions. :)
For those who are wondering, “Hey, I thought FetLife was private and secure!” this is probably a rude awakening. Turns out you’ve been bamboozled. I know, I know, you (and the FetLife “Carebears”) are probably “shocked, SHOCKED!” that this was even possible in the first place.
Fact is, this was all made possible because FetLife has a financial incentive to erode user privacy, to ensure that it is very poor. Everyone who’s bothered to do a Google search on the matter knows this, because it’s been written about many times for many years now. In plainer words: FetLife doesn’t want to enhance user privacy because doing so directly conflicts with FetLife’s business model. That’s why, despite saying they’re improving security, what FetLife is actually doing is, well, nothing at all, and sometimes making it much, much worse.
Thanks for the insecurity, FetLife. I’m looking forward to your next frivolous copyright takedown notice now. ;) Let me know if you’ll ever paying the $2,000+ invoice you owe me from 2012, eh?
