A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau April 27, 2006

P was so kind as to send me the collected poetry of W.H. Auden (less the few poems that he repudiated as being insincere, later in life) for a birthday present. I find it grippingly readable and sometimes very affecting, and bearing a lot of resemblance to the sort of thing i'd like to be able to do:

Sometimes we see astonishingly clearly,
The out-there-when we are already in,
Now that is not what we are here-for really.

All its to-do is bound to reoccur;
is nothing there-fore that we need to say;
How then to make its compromise refer

To what could not be otherwise instead,
And has its being as its own to-be,
The once-for-all that is not seen or said?

Under the influence of Auden, I wrote a reasonably long poetic letter to Thoreau. I could bang on at it for a while longer, but sometimes it's better just to finish these things and send them. Perhaps i'll one day reach some optimistic conclusions.

A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau

A sensible measured decision
becomes an inviolable standard;
It's not clear from the documentation
how to get out when one's stranded.

Somhow you avoided becoming branded
a cynical tout of subversion;
today not even the naive are candid;
the canon of public speech has become recursion.

Never a big fan of the establishment,
you called for "Civil Disobedience"
and tax refusal; "Government
is at best but an expedient".

"What is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to
transmit itself unimpaired to posterity,
but each instant losing some of its integrity?"

I don't think that much of your poetry,
to be honest, but I hear this piece
helped inspire Mahatma Gandhi
to 'Satyagraha'; resist in peace,

work hard, seek equal representation;
"Law will never make men free;"
you dictated, "it is men
who have got to make the law free,"

"That government is best which governs not at all",
doesn't bankroll the new downtowns,
bunker its embassies, respond to heaven's call
or declare war on abstract nouns.

We investigate the space around
us, looking for the world, for all
that are unsatisfied with what we've found;
unable correctly to make or hear the call.

We are vulnerable in numbers,
it takes practise to stay of sound
mind, and our effort to share endangers
the profit to be found in rallying round.

Lewis Mumford saw a lot coming;
he thought that Marx had it all figured
out, saw the structure's future becoming,
the tend to collectivisation that he triggered.

He says that at each shift, a successor machine
helps a system that's not of its essence
to prosper; to automate mental routine,
to oppress people and to compel acquiescence.

I hear often, "the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate
intensity"; our laws have become science fiction,
the sum of our customs extortionate.

Most people scurry and scrap, a few become fat
off the land; the rest suffer retaliatory eviction
from public space; cut out of a silly spat
that is quite indifferent to ex-urban dereliction,

Suburban isolation, post-industrial flatlining,
collapsing infrastructure, tit-for-tat
planning; oh, please forgive me for whining;
if we can fix this, if only we can see that.

One may still visit Walden Pond; your shack
is painfully reconstructed; a fence
keeps the wanderer on a predefined track,
within two hundred yards the suburbs start to condense.

"Let everyone make known what kind of government
would command their respect,
and that will be one step toward obtaining it."
Sir, with the greatest of my respect,

I am your servant.

advaita, or so i am told January 29, 2006

A friend of mine once took me along to a kind of postmodern sorority party in West Oakland. My friend was the only non-female at the party (he was DJing, and i think wanted me along as the functional equivalent of a “beard” – a “muff?”). The crowd were all peers, all about 10 years younger than me, and having a triumphant experiment with the cultural stance of lesbianism.

What blew my mind, was that everyone there was mimicking the polarisation of gendered self-representation which is in the world around them. They were either in baggy plaid shirts, jeans and shaved heads, or terribly, ostentatiously femme, long hair and lipstick and PVC miniskirts. No-one there really knew how to look at me or talk to me; you have short hair, but you’re wearing a skirt? Where do you fit? How do you fit? I spent most of my time at the party hanging out with a couple of gangster girls who didn’t fit either (long hair, but jeans and black t-shirts), who taught me to make the different West Oakland gangster hand signs, and tried to explain which ones not to make where.

Another friend took me to a transvestite party in the basement of a nondescript office building on the edge of the City. I’d never been in a scene like that before, but once my eyes refocused, i started to relax and have a great time right away. My highlight was, taking a break from the dancefloor and gossiping in a corner; my friend gleefully pointed out a particularly beautiful and unusual person across the room. “You see that girl, there? She’s really a girl!“

In the course of what i do, because i enjoy talking about the toys that i make, i speak at a lot of open-source oriented technical conferences. More than once, especially when i started out, i’ve been billed as ‘Mr.’ on the programme. It often seems to be a default assumption about any active and vocal technologist.

It used to drive me crazy, when i first became a software hacker and started going to meetups and talks by Famous Geeks, how unbalanced the “gender ratio” was. I got used to being one of three women in a room of 150 people (usually me, the Lost Journalist and the Fearsome Stalwart), or the only woman in a gathering of 20 people. I saw one technical community i was involved in, really change shape, gain balance over the time i was there, following a slow momentum. I moved away for a long time, and when i came back to visit, the balance was gone again.

Ten years later, the balance does not publically, visibly seem to be getting better. I didn’t start speaking at technical conferences because i wanted to address this; i just wanted to spread messages about the tool-building techniques, the evocative prototype applications, that were burning a hole in my head. I used to think i got more slots than i “deserved”, because conference organisers are concerned about addressing gender balance issues in who they put on the stage. I come to realise that most people don’t even think about it.

At a big Euro Open Source conference last year, i got hauled in, right at the last minute, onto a panel on “Women in Open Source”. I felt abashed about it, because the other panellists were all Big Names with Big Affiliations. But that was not the only reason i did not think that i belonged there.
It’s such a difficult thing to resolve. Back in 2001 i met a lot of people from the original genderchangers – a group who’d all got together to teach each other computer recycling, linux sysadmin and hacking, because they felt more comfortable that way, had more fun, and got to throw off their dependencies. I tried for a while to start my own local chapter. There was an internal imbalance in the people i knew; they were either hardcore , Sun-trained network admin gurus, who weren’t really motivated by teaching because there didn’t seem to be much they could learn; or they were complete newbies, very enthusiastic, but without enough bootstrap knowledge to teach linux to each other collaboratively.

Recently, I hear a lot more people trying to make noise about the appearance and possible reality of gender imbalance in open source software culture. Gender Dimensions of FLOSS development was a recent summary article in MetaMute – they tend to notice a lot of things just before they come to the surface. The article claims that only 1% of people actively involved in open source software development are non-male. I struggle to believe that absolute; but even if the true figure (echoed in the balance at technical conferences) is 5%, that’s still really not very good.

This is one of the cores of what i am talking about, here on this blog and in the book, but it’s part of a nested complex of shared cores: not, i think, something that can be “fixed” on its own, especially by staring harder at it directly, by selecting highlights of hackers who represent an ideal of women’s engagement in the many different threads of how the open source software creation process, the open source culture process, generally work. I tend to think that the bar to casual contribution, of an improvement however small, however irrelevant, is often set too high; it takes a long time to bootstrap yourself into the position where you have the skills, and the rights, to commit to a project.

Ubuntu Linux seems to be thinking about this pretty hard – i see tabs on some of the system user interface saying things like “Translate this into your own language right now”. I wonder how this process works on the inside; is someone at Ubuntu always watching, being rapidly helpful, encouraging. I hope the people making even the tiniest contributions are being given a conduit through which they can read a message which says,

Your smallest action improved the life and effort of someone who’s working really hard at being committed to this.

There are many weird theories about The Singularity, but this one is mine. January 28, 2006

It always surprises me when i hear that people have a 2012 fixation. It reminds me of one storyline in Philip K Dick’s “Confessions of a Crap Artist”, which i heard was based on a real-life sequence of events in California (to the extent that any sequence of events happening in California can be called part of “real-life”). A group of people are convinced that Everything Will Change, and that Only They Will Be Saved. They pick a definite place and time for it to happen, out of the ether. The protagonist doesn’t turn up at the meeting due to a nested complex of personal reasons. And what happens when Everything Still Looks More Or Less The Same? The group blames the person who didn’t show up; they start Talking About It Even Louder; and life goes on.

I decided that i had a weird theory about The Singularity back in 2002, when i actually read Vernor Vinge’s writing about it for the first time:

This is my theory:

How people look at, and talk about, The Singularity, is dictated by their experience of orgasm. Either it’s a one-shot, big pulse, big mess, and all over, or it’s a series of augmenting waves, each driven by the impetus of the last, without a definite endpoint, just a glorious supercession.

Of course even the best orgasm has to stop sometime. Then what happens? You nap for a little while, get up and have a snack, go to the toilet, and life goes on.