Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Hacking Diversity by Christina Dunbar-Hester

✷ 01 January 2026

Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures by Christina Dunbar-Hester (on OpenLibrary)

As someone deeply involved in the maker/hacker scene who’d also like it to be more diverse and welcoming, this was obviously of interest to me. There’s a fair bit that I had some knowledge/understanding of beforehand, but it gave me lots to think about around the layers of overlapping issues and challenges that we face.

It reaffirmed and hardened my thoughts that the FLOSS and hacker communities need a clearer understanding of how we can build and wield power.

Here are the sections I “dog-eared” while reading:

Page 11

Historian of technology Leo Marx has persuasively argued that technological development was not initially bound to human progress; while it could be in the service of human progress, it was not interchangeable, at least in the early American republic.

Page 40

As [the preceding] passage illustrates, free software and open source both do and do not refer to the same thing. The practices that define and unify the mode of production to which these labels refer are sharing source code, conceiving of openness, writing licenses, and coordinating collaborations.

Page 41

A cognate offline phenomenom, with some of the same political ambiguities, is the hackerspace, or hacklab. Hackerspaces port the open-source software ethos to the domain of hardware. Their emblem is the 3D printer, which produces tangible objects whose design is endlessly modifiable. In these spaces, like-minded people come together to hack, learn, socialize and experiment.

[…]

Hackerspaces appeared around the turn of the millennium in Europe, picking up steam after 2005, and reaching North America in approximately 2006, via Germany’s Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest association of hackers.

Page 47

Arguably, to be a geek is to assume a subject position in a technologically advanced society where an abundance of gear and surfeit of time (whether one’s own leisure time, volunteer labor, time stolen from an emmployer, of something in between) can be presumed.

[…]

It is not a coincidence that some of the values of geek communities, including self-organization and peer production, can be easily ported onto discourses of entrepreneurship and bootstrapping.

Page 48

At present, exhortations to “learn to code” are all but deafening. This book shows why the reply, “learn history and social theory!” is not a snarky rejoinder, but an absolutely essential pointer to the means to effectively grasp the economic, technological, and cultural stakes in contestations over diversity in tech fields, and inequality and pluralism more broadly. Everyone becoming a technologist is not a way out; universalist longings cannot unseat sticky dilemmas of inclusion, belonging, and differential social and economic power.

Page 51

It is assumed that individuals will choose to participate [in FLOSS projects] on their own terms and largely define those terms.

This has often resulted in naturally emerging hierarchies based on technical skill and reputational capital. Technical expertise is notoriously undemocratic and prone to hierarchy even when participants are committed to democratization, which they often are not, in part due to a historical legacy of engineering as an elite body of knowledge and practice. Technical projects may be especially difficult to run in a radically egalitarian manner, as some people are bound to be more expert than others: egalitarian politics may sit uneasily along unequally distributed expertise.

Page 60

Continuing to dissect the failed promise of hackerspaces, Grenzfurthner raised issues of social inclusion. He claimed that in spite of their self-promotion as being some of the most open spaces, hackerspaces were “usually white, male, heterosexist.” He commented that, “Even in Germany, where there is a longer tradition of hackerspaces than in the US, it’s hard to find Turkish members in German hackerspaces.” Speaking of a neighborhood of Montréal, Canada where a hackerspace was located, he said you might find an area “where predominantly black people live, you might find a hackerspace that doesn’t have a single black member. . . . We’re the gentrifying nerds, but we’re not trying to talk to the people who live near to us. That’s kind of bad. […]”

[…]

While not blaming hackers for the existence of these stratifications, he argued that the present practices of hackerspace communities were not up to undertaking dialogue with or being truly welcoming to neighbors or community members different from themselves, and he saw substantial room for improvement.

Page 89

She advocated for having an accountable, transparent hierarchy, which was as horizontal and distributed as possible, instead of having unofficial leaders who governed projects through charisma, reputational capital, or technical prowess.

Page 95

The underarticulated politics of open source, useful in some circumstances, leave its practitioners ill-equipped to best manage current calls for diversity. If their political ethos is one of classical liberalism, it should not matter if some people want to depart to hack on a new project or space: there is ample room for the pursuit of many ideas. On the other hand, there is a communitarian umpulse that indicates that a greater good—and stronger movement—will emerge from everyone hacking together. In other words, to fork is not a solution if the goal is to make the community work better for all participants. There is a striking tension between hacking as meritocratic undertaking and the need to think about seemingly extraneous topics such as who’s in our group? or who is winning our arguments?

Page 104

The significance of the LilyPad exceeds the application of this particular circuitboard or any specific project that incorporates it. In combining hobbyist electronics and sewing, it locates hobbyist electronics as being within the purview of feminine craft.

Page 106

This comment is going to sound gendered, but I think a great intro would be “hack your oven.” Find a device you already use, take out the proprietary crap that controls it, and control it yourself.

Page 113

Autonomy is a key component of both hacker and cyberfeminist beliefs about technology, which are complex but have roots in the Appropriate Technology movement of the 1970s and 80s, and in the older American notion of self-reliance. It also echoes the small producer ethos of indie and punk music scenes, and DIY, as practiced—particularly in Europe—within squatter movements and autonomist political movements.

Page 115

The servers are autonomous, but not along the lines of a notion of autonomy that foregrounds heroic self-reliance (“She decides for her own dependencies”). Their technology is recentered around social relationships (“Treats technology as part of a social reality”; “Builds on the materiality of software, hardware, and the bodies gathered around it”; are run by a caring community)

Page 119

I include this discussion of spaces because products are affected by their producers’ access to work spaces. In spaces where one cannot solder or leave behind a project in progress, material products are less likely than less tangible ones. Of course, New York City in the early twenty-first century is an especially daunting place to carve out an autonomous space. Nonetheless, pursuit of autonomy of infrastructure often means carving out impermanent spaces that are highly contingent—often borrowed from corporations or other sorts of organizations—and being prepared to move. These enterprises are thus fragile, and the difficulty of scaling up projects that revolve around tools and artifacts that are challenging to move is clear.

Page 121

[Dreamwidth, a fork of LiveJournal] is for-profit, but not especially growth-oriented; its leaders are content to cover costs, ensure reliability, and turn a small profit instead of focusing on ever-growing expansion. Two-thirds of the company’s profits were earmarked for developments, with half of that amount put toward developments chosen by the Dreamwidth user and developer community.

Page 126

But like other free software projects, in relying on enthusiastic volunteer developers, the [Dreamwidth] software project chose a relationship to remunerated acts of production in which it is indeed dependent on paid labor, but paid labor that provides leisure or volunteer time on the side. In all cases, projects stake their autonomous existences in relation to paid work, more and less self-consciously (and sometimes including employer or corporate munificence in the form of surplus or waste).

Page 131

The relationship between paid work and open-technology projects contains many somewhat paradoxical elements. As STS scholar Anita Chan writes, “Few practices seemed to be so effective at generating the intense enthusiasm and heightened investments of global free labor that free software participants—as highly skilled information classes, no less—so extravagantly displayed.

Page 136

Liane said in an interview that the social critique she believed in ran deeper than changing the gender balance in IT industry employment. She spoke of her personal history that had led her out of high-status programming work and into full-time diversity advocacy. She said that hackers and coders have

faith in progress, science and technology ... People want to do something with a purpose, that has a point. I think people want to believe that they're doing a good thing [But now I see it as,] if you're defining [progress] as building a better product that concentrating wealth a few, [the status quo] is working great, [but this assumption is wrong]. When I started [as a programmer] I was doing capitalism [and I was fine with that, but] I no longer make the argument about [building] a better product. There is a collision between science kids with a nerdy mindset who want to do good, who work for an industry that is corrupt.

Page 142

In both of these examples, advocates for diversity articulate an alternative value system they hope to implement around technology and technical practice, wherein not only who participates in technological production is changes, but why and how people engage with technology is altered.

Page 145

A founder of a Seattle hackerspace that emphasized inclusion remarked, “Hacker spaces are a sort of gateway into exploring everything. By encouraging the taking apart of ‘closed’ objects … we can begin to form mindsets which make exploration and understanding necessary joys in life.” “Exploration” and “taking apart closed objects” are politically inchoate, but they potentially point to realignment of power relations, especially when experienced collectively.

Page 146

Diversity advocacy appears to bring together people whose politics and agendas might not otherwise align. This diversity work could be viewed as building capacity and social infrastructure for sustained political challenge to prevailing technical cultures and industries. Another possibility, though, is that diversity is part of the problem: as Ahmed writes, diversity can easily “detach from scary issues, such as power and inequality. […]”

Page 153

This is an important point—for all the ink that has been spilled trying to nail down what the politics of hacking might be, it is definitely important to note that a significant proportion of contemporary hacking is essentially in line with the original iteration of DIY in the US, a project of suburban postwar homeowners’ infusing a bit of “autonomous production” into their consumption practices.

Page 154

technology is politics by other means, whether or not this is explicitly acknowledged.

Page 156

Sam, a genderqueer developer from the San Francisco Bay Area reflected:

There is a gulf between tech and [my background in] queer activism. "Tech for the common good" [as a framing] is missing an edge. [I think about] bringing a different or more radical kind of activism to open source or to tech. [If my workplace supports a cause like,] Let's make sure kids are web-literate, [I am thinking,] What about prison? There are people who really don't have access to communication.

Page 170

For Clara, there was a difference between being a techno-enthusiast and someone who had thought deeply about power relations and ethics in relation to technology—in other words, a “disciplined” technologist.

Page 181

But she also points to one difficulty for hackers agaginst colonialism: they are always already implicated in relationships of dominance and dependence. This is true for any person on earth, but it is uniquely true for technologists, who are so often called upon to execute political mandates under the guise of neutral technocratic intervention.

Page 191

This comment is quite illuminating. The hackerspace member allows for a range of hacking practices, first invoking an independent producer ideal, exemplified in Make magazine (though Maker Faire and much of DIY actually reproduces consumer culture). He next refers to a more politicized, Wikileaks-esque, information-wants-to-be-free sort of hacker. Then, he correctly signals the heritage of DIY as a way to impart technical affinity to boys. Notably, while he allows for different motivations for hacking, they are all tied to masculinity, which is marked, and whiteness, which is not. In other words, part of what diversity advocates struggled to address was that even as hacking itself might be malleable enough to encompass a range of politics and practices, the default hacker was under all of these scenarios a man or a boy.

Page 192

Joseph Reagle writes that the RTFM norm can provide a positive incentive toward self-cultivation: one will be valued if one strives “to learn [to code], to write a useful utility, and [then] to share [one’s] learning and its fruits with others.” Less positively, of course, this directive to independently cultivate and exhibit mastery can also be used to intimidate, to shame, and to turn off newcomers who are for whatever reason unwilling or unable to flourish under these conditions.

Page 208

To this, another woman replied, “I get a comment if I wear a skirt or pants. It underscores that I’m being watched.” All these comments make evident that there is no neutral or default way for women* to present in tech workplaces or hobbyist spaces (which clarifies the appeal of separate spaces, as discussed in chapter 4). As I found entering the 2011 PyCon, eyes will be on you if you present in a way that deviates from the expected masculine presentation; even though this may not feel like hostile attention, it can be palpable.

Page 209

“hair color is not a solution, but it’s mitigating. It can draw attention, but in a way that’s respectful.”

[…]

And geek identity has long been bound up with certain kinds of outsider-ness, as described in chapter 2. In FLOSS hackerspaces, geekhood carries echoes of countercultural selfhoods as well: hippies, back-to-the-landers, squatters.

Page 215

Because of this legacy, the people-of-color-led makerspace in Oakland self-consciously called itself a makerspace, not a hackerspace. June, a founder who is East Asian-American, said in an interview, “‘Makerspace’ is more welcoming than ‘hackerspace.’ We do a variety of activities here, and we want people to be attracted to us, not to put on [events] where we tell them what to do—we want there to be cross-pollination [between what they are already doing and our mission].”

Page 228

Recognition within a segment of culture affectively devoted to technological production is not equivalent to just conditions within the wider society, and while the former may be ameliorative, it is no substitute for the latter.

Page 230

At stake for members of this social formation are large, important, and often quite abstract social goods, including democratic participation, agency over technology, and often social justice; all of these concerns are imbricated for them. The preceding chapters explored a variety of diversity advocates’ interventions, which include changing rules and norms in open-technology communities, creating separate spaces for feminist hacking, bringing to the surface other political concerns like militarism and colonialism, and questioning the makeup of open-technology communitites.

Page 239

In other words, not only should we push back on the notion that all must learn to code, we should also push for geeks and technocrats to learn more social theory and history.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 29th 2025 Edition

✷ 29 December 2025

• Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? I read this with (somewhat smug, because I wasn’t just holidaying there, but I was also part of the problem) memories of life in Torino mixed with a view of the Beatles-football-stag-and-hen-dos commodification of Liverpool. It would be nice if someone other than the property developers got to shape the city.
• The world is something that we make ” I’m just saying that the business guys who got richer than your mind can ever imagine by controlling access to almost all of today’s music now pay a lot of science guys to make robot weapons.” The world is messy and a mess and we can’t solve the problems individually. But we’re not. We’ll keep sharing stories about how and what we’re trying.
• How to save bureaucracy from itself I’d love to find better ways to discover the folk locally who are working to reform the broken systems. And reading this I’m also reminded that one of, I think, the key lessons I thankfully learnt fairly early in my management career: project planning tools are ways to get a view of what’s going on, so you can spot problems earlier and re-jig or try to solve them; not a prescriptive laying out of the future.

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 1st 2025 Edition

✷ 01 December 2025

• You probably shouldn’t block AI bots from your website. An excellent polemic. The Museum in a Box website has been getting hammered by bots for a while now; I should install iocaine to improve matters for the humans who visit.
• The American Pay Cut That Gave Us Obama and Trump, Twice. I haven’t checked the numbers, but the time-taken-to-afford-X framing seems a sensible approach. And I think this, and the middle- and political-classes’ insistence that the only options are rearranging deckchairs rather than things to make life better for all, helps to understand both Brexit and the popularity of Reform. And doing more than rearranging deckchairs is really hard but also, you know, the work that politicians should be doing.

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Changemakers by Jane Holgate and John Page

✷ 30 November 2025

Changemakers: Radical Strategies for Social Movement Organising by Jane Holgate and John Page was an interesting read about organising. A much more traditional activist perspective than any of the work I do. Plenty of food for thought on topics of building power, developing successive and additional leaders, and more.

Here are my dog-eared pages from the read.

Page 12

In transformational organising, the question we need to ask is: when the organiser moves on to the next issue, what level of agency is left behind? Is the community better able to fight its own struggles?

Page 15

Myles Horton, on the other hand, believed that developing people’s vision of themselves as agents of change and unleashing their capacity was more important.

Page 17

[…]the most important divide was not between left and right, or between so-called ‘revolutionary’ and ‘democratic’ socialism, but between socialism from above and socialism from below. What unites the many different forms of socialism from above is the belief that socialism (or their image of it) must be handed down to the working-class in one form or another by a ruling elite who are not subject to their control; this elite could be Fabian reformers, armed guerillas or the central committee of a so-called vanguard party. On the contrary, at the heart of socialism from below is the view that socialism can be realised only through the self-activity of the working-class, reaching out for freedom with their own hands.

Page 25

In contrast, in a power deficit model of change, our objective is not to reduce the subjects of this injustice to the role of begging for help, but to support them to develop and exercise their inherent change-making capacity. It’s not that evidence isn’t necessary, merely that it isn’t sufficient to effect transformational change.

Page 28

It is the process of collective reflection that probes the validity of people’s first assumptions, and moves their answers from what the philosopher and Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci would describe as ‘common sense’ (reflecting the dominant narrative) to ‘good sense’ based on an analysis of their own lived experience and that of people they know. Once you have established your theory of change, it becomes the foundation of your strategy — ‘how to change the resources you have into the power you need to get what you want’ (Ganz 2011a: 15-16)

Page 50

Sometimes to achieve our objective we have to acknowledge that the strategy we have adopted is not working, analyse why it is not working, and then consider what we can do differently to overcome the obstacles.

Page 69

There are two separate concepts here: building power and exercising power, and as usual, while it is useful to separate them out for analysis, in reality in transformative organising, we often build more power by effectively exercising the power we already have.

Page 85

The people who painstakingly create these organisations and leaders at a time when most people attend to the problems of everyday lift — these are the organisers whithout whom no movement can win. (Schutz and Miller 2015: 48)

Page 86

Spontaneity and organising are not in conflict; in fact, the real magic happens when they coincide.

Page 87

This relationship between spontaneity and organisation, between mobilising and organising, is therefore a complex one. Established organisations that can’t relate to new waves of activity outside of their plans, will ossify, while new agency that can’t create organisational infrastructure may burn brightly for a while, but will inevitably fade. Black Lives Matter, Momentum, #MeToo and the Mutual Aid movement during the pandemic are just some examples of moments when vast numbers have become involved in activity, but where there has not been a successful strategy to incorporate those numbers into a long-term organising plan. As campaigners for social justice, we’re in a constant battle to hold on to the gains we have made (and to win more) as opposing forces push against us and seek to reassert their power. To succeed we need more than fleeting mobilisation responses to moments of crisis or opportunity. We need stable and sustainable, but also nimble, organisations, and building them involves strategy, power and a theory of change to get us to the place we want to be.

Page 92

If we are to ‘tie our struggles together’, then our organisations must strive, however imperfectly, to be models of the vision of a society we wish to win. This is not merely a tactical choice, but a definitional restatement of who we are.

Page 108

As with so much of organising, the key to building a diverse base is to go to where the people are, find the natural organic leaders and engage with them. In a society rife with structural inequality and exclusion, simply expecting a diverse group to reach out to your campaign is a flawed strategy. It takes a conscious effort to organise inclusively. It’s not hard or rocket science, and the benefits repay the effort, but like anything else, it doesn’t happen automatically.

Page 112

[…] leadership is about enabling others to achieve results, rather than directing, managing and expecting people to follow blindly. It’s about building relationships that enable groups to grow and increase their influence, while drawing upon the diverse lived experiences of supporters to find appropriate strategies to win.

Page 128

An important, if little understood, element of leadership is therefore simply giving people permission to act. This process of giving permission can also be described as ceding control. Marshall Ganz makes this distinction between power and control.

Page 133

Real movement democracy actively involves the supporters — not merely a small group of activists — in making decisions on a day-to-day basis.

Page 139

We all need such safe spaces to unwind, reflect and recharge, but for changemakers to permanently retreat into these ‘safe spaces’ is a mistake, because if we want to win, then we need to be building our base and widening the scope of our engagement. Too often organisations that begin as outward-looking can over time become almost cult-like as they exclude, consciously or unconciously, people who hold different opinions on a particular subject.

Page 157

Yes, they have prisons, riot squads and even the military at their disposal, but these are only used in times of crisis, the day-to-day business of control is to convince us either that there is no better way to organise society, or that there is no better way to organise society, or that there is no way to achieve an alternative vision. [Gramsci] described this narrative control as ‘hegemonic’, meaning that is can appear incontestable, it becomes what he refers to as ‘common sense’, something which he contrasts with ‘good sense’.

Page 220

What these examples show is that if we want to organise for social justice, we should expect that there will be attempts to disrupt, spy upon, misrepresent and disorganise us. The state, far from guaranteeing our freedoms, will at times conspire to frustrate them.

Page 221

But if we want to maximise our effectiveness, then part of our planning should include considering the likely actions targeted at us, and how we can minimise their impacts.

Page 230

As a movement progresses towards success, there will be a need for different outputs, and different relationships, suggesting perhaps that groups need to be flexible — almost chameleon-like — constantly adapting to the needs of the movement, or perhaps there just need to be a number of organisations, whereby individual groups are able to move in and out of prominence depending on the specific needs of the overall movement at any particular time.

Page 233

This is a militant optimism, a determination that we will not continue to live the way we have lived, we will not be silent and more than anything: we will win. This is not the optimism of the fool, who believes against all evidence to the contrary, but the optimism of the reflective activist who sees the tectonic plates of our society shifting, and knows that opportunities will arise which, if seized and used strategically, will deliver the desired goals.

Page 235

Both #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were huge moments in the UK and elsewhere, yet the energy and potential to drive systemic change largely dissipated within a short period of time. The lack of a plan to move people from protest to systematic work meant that town hall steps protests became less frequent and ever more poorly attended. Eventually, the anger and the opportunity were gone.

Page 247

In [Deepa Iyer’s] social change ecosystem framework, ther eare shared values at the centre of activism and a range of roles that people need to perform within social change activism. She describes these as follows: [Weavers; Experimenters; Frontline responders; Visionaries; Builders; Caregivers; Disruptors; Healers; Storytellers; Guides]

Page 252

norms can be even more powerful than rules. Rules are someone else’s idea of what you should do. If you break a rule, just don’t get caught and you’ll be okay. But with norms, it’s about what you as a member have signed up for, and what you’ve created. (Brafman and Beckstrom 2006: 89)

[…]

The essence is captured when they say they recognise a regular pattern across decentralised organisations: a catalyst gets the organisation going and then cedes control to the members. The role of the catalyst is to make a start, to set a vision and to involve people. They are lighting a fuse, and the organisation will then take its course when they step away: ‘In letting go of the leadership role, the catalyst transfers ownership and responsibility to the circle. … A catalyst isn’t usually in it for praise and accolades. When his or her job is done, a catalyst knows it’s time to move on’ (Brafman and Beckstrom 2006: 92)

Page 254

When COVID-19 struck in Britain in 2020, a small group of anarchists got publicity for a concept known as ‘mutual aid’. They asserted that we couldn’t rely on the state to provide us with care in the crisis, and that communities must organise to ‘do for self’. No doubt to their complete surprise, a mass movement of COVID mutual aid groups rapidly sprung up across the country. However, they didn’t arise entirely out of nowhere. Local community groups, and the connections between people involved in them, were the base upon which the biggest decentralised organising drive in a generation was built. Tenants’ associations, church groups, ethnic minority community groups, community centres, even trade union branches, became the backbone of a mass, inclusive, decentralised network that saw neighbours looking out for neighbours, collecting food and medicine for those who were isolating, and creating online community chats for people who had previously just passed each other in the street with a nod and a ‘good morning’.

There are two reasons why pre-existing networks are so important: the first is that they create a shortcut that means that not every connection needs to be built from scratch, but equally importantly, they are a source of people with experience in organising. People who, because of their experience, know what needs to be done, people who are recognised and perhaps trusted in their communities, the organic leaders who have already been surfaced.

Page 259

When people are faced with the opportunity to act with a confidence that their actions will make a difference, they move. Our job as changemakers is to help our people remember a truth that they already know but have been persuaded to bury: that when we act together, there is no force that can stop us. We have both the power and a duty to remake the world.

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield

✷ 29 November 2025

Another from the overlooked-drafts pile. Seems like this just stalled on me writing the intro blurb.

Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield (on OpenLibrary) is (was? It’s probably missing some of the “AI” bullshit, and the cryptocurrency section thankfully is less important a few years on) an excellent primer on a whole range of recent waves of the technology hype cycle; all viewed through a suitably critical lens.

Page 23

[…] you’ll realize with a start that what manufacturers are generally pleased to describe as “intuitive” is in fact anything but.

Page 24

There are two aspects of [Google’s decisions over what to diplay (and what not to) on its maps] to take note of: the seamless, all-but-unremarked-upon splicing of revenue-generating processes into ordinary behaviour, which is a pattern that will crop up time and again in the pages to come, and the fact that by tailoring its depiction of the environment to their behaviour, the smartphone presents each individual user with a different map.

Page 89

Significant areas of the economy might stand to be reclaimed for the commons. [Sounds like a good plan to me.]

Page 90

But straightforwardly, making things close to where they’re needed opens up the possibility of a denser, more compact and efficient way of living in cities. And with clean, city-center worksops sited cheek-by-jowl with living quarters, even urban planning’s basic distinction between industrial, commercial and residential zones comes into question.

Page 117

For all the hype around Bitcoin, it is clear that in its design, important questions about human interaction, collaboration and conviviality are being legislated at the level of technological infrastructure. its appearance in the world economy gives disproportionately great power to those individuals and institutions that understand how it does what it does, and are best able to operationalize that understanding.

[I don’t think it occurred to me at the time, but that comment about power could equally apply to the Internet. The main difference seems to be the lack of people trying to spread that understanding and power.]

Page 172

[…] the smart contracts on which DAOs are built, by their very nature, render decisions in the present on situations that were conceptualized at some arbitrary point in the past. In other words, a smart contract intervenes in a state of affairs that may have evolved in ways that were not forseen by the parties to it at the time they agreed to be bound by its terms, and does so irreversibly.

Page 194

As far as industry is concerned, though—and in this instance it really is their perspective that weighs heaviest and counts most—automation also means far less elaborate technologies, like the touchscreen ordering kiosks McDonald’s began introducing into its locations in the fall of 2014. In fact, automation means anything that reduces the need for human workers, whether it’s a picking-and-packing robot, a wearable biometric monitor, a mobile-phone app or the redesign of a business process.

Page 195

This shrunken workforce will be asked to do more, for lower wages, at a yet higher pace. Amazon is again the leading indicator here. Its warehouse workers are hired on fixed, short-term contracts, through a deniable outsourcing agency, and precluded from raises, benefits, opportunities for advancement or the meaningful prospect of permananent employment.

Page 196

Most of the blue-collar workers that do manage to retain employment will find themselves “below the API”—that is, subject to having their shifts scheduled by optimization algorithm, on little or no notice, for periods potentially incommensurate with their needs for sleep and restoration, their family life, or their other obligations.

Page 199

The prejudicial findings of such “HR analytics”, i.e. that a given employee is unreliable, costly or a litigation risk, may be acted upon even if the algorithm that produced them is garbage and the data little better than noise.

Page 205

On our way to a world of total automation, we may often have time to contemplate what a society winds up looking like when its most mutinous voices have fallen silent.

Page 206

All too often work cost us our health, our dreams, our lives. But it also offered us a context in which we might organize our skills and talents, it gave us some measure of common cause with others who laboured under similar conditions, across all bounds of space and time, and if nothing else it filled the hours of our days on Earth. Though these goods came at far too high a price, I don’t know that we are wise to consider living entirely without them, or are practically prepared to do so.

Page 226

[…] the more people affected by a particular act of automation, the more vulnerable those people are, and the harder it would be to reverse its effects, the more cautious we should be in enacting it. Our task as a society would then be to determine just where in this envelope any given proposed displacement lies. By these lights, we ought to have a great deal of concern when someone is proposing to bring learning algorithms to bear directly to bear on decisions of great public consequence, on a population that is already at risk, with immediate and life-changing consequences.

Page 238

You can teach an algorithm to recognize a table readily enough, based on its characteristics and the ways in which it relates to the world’s other contents. it might be able to identify, with successively finer degress of precision, a vehicle, a car, a police car, a New York City police car. That’s straightforward enough. But how do you teach it to recognize poverty?

Page 244

Quite simply, some parties derive advantage from the fact that we don’t understand the tools used to rank and order us.

Page 256

What comes to be the object of belief, in short, resculpts the space of possibilities we’re presented with. The conviction that autonomous operation isn’t merely possible in principle, but actually imminently practicable, operates at multiple levels, and creates multiple kinds of consequences. I think it’s by now reasonably well understood that the truly vexatious complications of automation are almost never technical but legal, regulatory, institutional, and those invariably take longer to settle out than any mere matter of invention and development.

Page 280

Whether intended or otherwise, one of the primary effects of the Stacks’ investment in young and emerging technical talent is to create a robust market for high-risk innovation with equally high “upside potential.” At any given moment, there are thousands of startups busily exploring the edges of technological possibility, and shouldering all of the risk involved in doing so. If their ideas come to nothing, so do they; they fade from the world without any further ado, and perhaps disperse their talent to other ventures. Should one of those fledgling concerns come up with a technique, a process or a useful bit of intellectual property, however, they will wind up being courted by one or more of the Stacks, with an eye toward eventual consummation in purchase. In fact the technology doesn’t have to be anything flashy, so long as it shows insight or promise; the Stacks routinely acquire startups not so much because they need access to a particular technique, but because strategically denying their competitors design talent is a cost-effective way of preempting them.

Page 284

For all the weirdness and vitality percolating up from the bottom of the technological food chain, a profoundly conservative tendency reigns at its apex.

Page 299

As individuals and as societies, we desperately need to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of how technologies work in the world, and who benefits the most from the way they accomplish that work. In part, this means applying the tools of institutional and discourse analysis to the technical innovation ecosystem, both to prise out latent patterns of interest and to demonstrate that certain statements and framings are the product of interest in the first place. But part of it is just learning to ask the right questions whenever we’re presented with a new technological proposition.

Page 302

This is what the great British cyberneticist Stafford Beer meant when he argued that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” On this theory, it doesn’t matter whether some technology was intended by its designer to enslave or to liberate, to preserve or to destroy. All that matters is what it is observed to do, and we ought to evaluate it on that basis alone.

[…]

And if given technologies cannot be evaluated at the level of their designers’ intention, we need to be still more wary of the promises made to us by developers, promoters and others with a material interest in seeing them spread.

Page 304

In every case the hard, unglamorous, thankless work of building institutions and organizing communitites will demand enormous investments of time and effort, and is by no means guaranteed to end in success. But it is far less likely to be subverted by unforeseen dynamics at the point where an emergent and poorly understood technology meets the implacable friction of the everyday.

Page 309

Whenever we get swept up in the self-reinforcing momentum and seductive logic of some new technology, we forget to ask what else it might be doing, how else it might be working, and who ultimately benefits most from its appearance. Why time has been diced into the segments between notifications, why we feel so inadequate to the parade of images that reach us through our devices, just why it is that we feel so often feel hollow and spent. What might connect our choices and the processes that are stripping the planet, filthing the atmosphere, and impoverishing human and nonhuman lives beyond number. Whether and in what way our actions might be laying the groundwork for an oppression that is grimmer yet and still more total. And finally we forget to ask whether, in our aspiration to overcome the human, we are discarding a gift we already have at hand and barely know what to do with.

Page 313

We don’t even speak of progress any longer, but rather of “innovation.”

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Ignition! by John D. Clark

✷ 29 November 2025

I found this in my drafts in the recent blog revamp. “Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants” by John D. Clark is book I keep recommending to people. For something that sounds dry and technical, it’s actually really enjoyable and readable.

I think I stopped making notes as I was too engrossed in it. However, hopefully these notes will pique your interest and you’ll visit this Hackaday post which has a link to an online version.

Page xii

For I have discovered that [the professional rocket engineer] is frequently abysmally ignorant of the history of his own profession, and, unless forcibly restrained, is almost certain to do something which, as we learned fifteen years ago, is not only stupid but is likely to result in catastrophe.

Page 14

The discovery of hypergolicity was of major importance. Running a rocket motor is relatively easy. Shutting it down without blowing something up is harder. But starting it up without disaster is a real problem.

Page 59

By the time these groups were finished (all of the work was published by 1955) there was nothing worth knowing about nitric acid that hadn’t been nailed down. Thermodynamics, decomposition, ionetics, phase properties, transport properties, the works. Considering the difficulties involved in working with such a miserable substance, the achievement can fairly be classified as heroic.

Page 73

All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when [chlorine trifluoride] is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water —with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminum, etc. —because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

Page 162

The job of the [test methods] committee was to examine all the methods used, to pick out those which gave more or less reproducible results, or to talk people into developing such methods, then to standardize these, and finally to try to persuade the people in the field to use those methods.

Page 163

[the OM drop weight tester] was, and is, quite a satisfactory instrument once you got used to its little foibles. For instance, it has to be on a really solid foundation if you hope to get reproducible results. We ended up with the instrument bolted to a three-foot square of three-inch armor plate, which was in turn bolted to a six-foot cube of concrete which rested on bedrock —granite. That way, it worked fine.

Page 165

But detonation traps aren’t always the complete answer. We discovered that when, in the summer of 1960, we tried to fire a 10,000-pound thrust Cavea B motor. We didn’t have Mike’s trap at that time, so we inserted a battery of sixteen 0.25-inch loop traps in the line. Well, through a combination of this and that, the motor blew on startup. We never discovered whether or not the traps worked —we couldn’t find enough fragments to find out. The fragments from the injector just short-circuited the traps, smashed into the tank, and set off the 200 pounds of propellant in that. (Each pound of propellant had more available energy than two pounds of TNT.) I never saw such a mess. The walls of the test cell—two feet of concrete—went out, and the roof came in. The motor itself—a heavy, workhorse job of solid copper— went about 600 feet down range. And a six-foot square of armor plate sailed into the woods, cutting off a few trees at the root, smashing a granite boulder, bouncing into the air and slicing off a few treetops, and finally coming to rest some 1400 feet from where it started. The woods looked as though a stampeding herd of wild elephants had been through.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 24th 2025 Edition

✷ 24 November 2025

• Time to Migrate. Tim Bray lays out why you should join the Fediverse. If you prefer Twitter, then you’ll want Mastodon (HMU if you want an invite to mastodon.me.uk where I hang out); if you’re more of an Instagram person, then try Pixelfed. With either of them you can follow me (even though I’m only on Mastodon, that’s the joy of open social networks!) at @amcewen@mastodon.me.uk.
• ‘Send Lawyers, Guns and Money’: Lawfare Against Labour Organising in the UK since 1970. An interesting exploration of union laws and how the UK has ratcheted things in favour of the powerful over the decades.
• Holed below the Waterline. A review of Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain. I suspect there might be a blog all dog-eared pages of that some time in the future.
• Open Source Power If the only correct and righteous way to make Open Source software means strictly making non-discriminatory software stripped of protections for its laborers, consider me out.

Modernizing McFilter

✷ 23 November 2025

Hello! It’s been a bit quiet round here this year, partly because I’ve been busy, but there’s usually still the occasional Interesting Things on the Internet post even then and it’s been almost six months.

That’s because a friend pointed out that the site wasn’t loading on their phone because, shock horror!, it was http rather than https. I fixed that by turning on a certificate on the old hosting account it’s been hosted on forever; but that actually broke the back end for writing new posts. Doh.

Rather than dig around in that to update the assorted hard-coded http URLs, that was the final push to get on with something I’ve been meaning to do for years.

So now, rather than running a ridiculously ancient blogging engine of Movable Type(!?!), I’ve migrated it all to Jekyll. mcqn.com went through that move (from Drupal, in that instance) ten years ago, so it’s a long time coming.

I’ve got an off-the-shelf theme at the moment, just to get things started (he says, before it then takes another decade or something to replace that). Hopefully I’ve not broken too much (and please, shout if you spot anything!) and have rewrite rules in place because cool URLs don’t break.

Moving to Ruby will let me play around with things more easily. It’d be nice to bring back the microformats for the event and the blog all dog-eared pages entries, for example. And pull in more of the IndieWeb stuff. Let’s see how quickly that happens.

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 9th 2025 Edition

✷ 09 June 2025

• The Era Of The Business Idiot "our economy is riddled with power structures controlled by people that don't know stuff and find it offensive when you remind them."
• Kate Nash dismisses backlash to fiercely pro-trans song: ‘I can f***ing handle it’. Kate Nash is a star. Her new song GERM is superb.
• Egg Song. Planning for food autonomy with neighborhood chicken coops. I'd love more of this in Liverpool. I remember my gran had chickens in her council maisonette yard when I was a kid.
• Blog post-length Mastodon post on Bell Labs innovation and why today's companies don't match it.
• Lost Loops. It does feel like we should be experimenting more, and rediscovering more passive ways to heat and cool our buildings rather than relying on ever more air-conditioning.

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

✷ 08 June 2025

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, the story of how Pixar are managed, has been sat on my to-read pile for a while. Finally got round to reading it recently.

I remember it getting feted when it came out, but I was a bit underwhelmed by it. It’s a very readable book, and I pretty much agree with all of the advice in it; I just didn’t feel like I learnt all that much. Maybe it’s because I’ve already got a similar approach to management, or maybe I just left the overly-restrictive corporate world decades ago.

Maybe it’s more useful for new managers or those stifled by process in larger, more boring organisations.

Page 75

Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas.

Page 76

You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took—we were protecting that culture.

Page 92

That does not mean there is no hierarchy here. It means that we try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes, even when those notes are challenging, and where everyone has a vested interest in one another’s success. We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility.

Page 93

The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Braintrust meetings are not top-down, do-this-or-else affairs. By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential.

Page 134

Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

Page 141

Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.

Page 213

I want to add an important side note: that artists have learned to employ these ways of seeing does not mean they don’t also see what we see. They do. They just see more because they’ve learned how to turn off their minds’ tendency to jump to conclusions. They’ve added some observational skills to their toolboxes. (This is why it’s so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In face, they are about learning to see.)

Page 223

In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint.