🌱 The Bros Club™ | Maintaining Tech Power At All Costs

Welcome Back! 👋🏼

Did you know the early tech field was primarily dominated by women? We dive into a high-level history of the tech industry, how we got to The Tech Bros Club™ of today, and how it impacts society. Read on for more...

In Case You Missed It: 🌱 The Coded Gaze | AI's Social Impacts

For this piece, I used two main sources: Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang and Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini. Highly recommend adding these to your reading lists!

Women's Early Tech Dominance

As with the medical industry, women dominated the early days of what is now Big Tech. Before ARPANET, the original internet, was built, women were pioneering the software development space. Grace Hopper, rear admiral in the US Navy, programmed the supercomputer Mark 1 in 1944. We luckily know NASA's Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson who calculated John Glenn's flight path in 1962, because of the 2016 film, Hidden Figures, but do you know the names of the six women who programed the US Army's first computer the ENIAC or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer? No? That would be because their names were not even mentioned in the press release.

It should shock no one that the women who led the new programming frontier
were belittled. Before the wealth potential of programming was realized, the term "programmer" referred to a negative connotation of women's work. Men assumed the work was menial and similar to telephone switchboards or secretarial typing. Men were slow to realize the wealth potential of the profession (probably for the reasons we will talk about). So how did the Tech Bros™ come to take over the developed tech industry?

🌁 By controlling the golden gated entry into the industry! As we discussed in our Comstock series, patriarchal men have been manipulating education and accreditation to dictate who is worthy of work, especially work that builds wealth and status in our society. Turns out, these dudes thought anti-social intellectual men were the best for these roles. In the 60s, a software company came up with a personality test to screen for the best job candidates. When only 13% surveyed were women, it's no wonder the "programmer scale" led to the big tech of today.

The problem is that anti-social nerds by definition don't understand society very much. You wouldn't get that based on how big tech talks. Instead of wondering if people who don't like other people should control the rails of our digital world, "the lone wolf trope" is heralded as the perfect Adonis of genius in Silicon Valley.

Today I get to destroy that myth. 😋

Nothing is Unbiased

Going back to the “ideal” tech employee. He is very analytical. He is anti-social because emotions and deeper conversations do not come easy for him. He’s focused on his work and that’s what’s important to him when he logs on. What does this sound like to you? This man sounds very polished. What our world would call “professional.” He doesn’t bring his stuff to work, he just works. That’s what we want, right?

Wrong. 😊

The old structures of our world continue to try to convince us that mathematical thinking is unbiased or left brain thinking is better. It all fits within the patriarchal structure of what a "man" is supposed to be. We can see countless examples of this in our everyday life. The New York Times continues to push a white-bodied supremacy ideology in it's anti-trans coverage, for example. You can imagine how this bias ripples out across the decisions of most major tech companies.

"Feminist scholars have long pointed out how Western ways of knowing, shaped by patriarchy, attempt to erase the standpoint of the observer, taking a godlike, omniscient, and detached view. However, our standpoint, where we are positioned in society, and our cultural and social experiences shape how we share and interpret our observations. Acknowledging that there is subjectivity to perceived truths brings some humility to observations and the notion of partial truths.” - Dr. Joy Buolamwini

A constant refrain in this newsletter is that we cannot build the future with old tools. We all know Audre Lorde's quote by now. The problem with AI is that Big Tech is building it with the master's tools.

A Pale Male Database on the Rocks

In our white supremacist, patriarchal world, we often don’t even recognize bias online and off. It’s so embedded into our everyday lives and inside our own belief systems. That is especially true when it comes to technology, precisely because we view tech and maths as unbiased.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini unmasked this early on as a graduate student and has been an advocate for algorithmic justice ever since. Her first experience of the coded gaze was not being recognized by facial recognition AI for a project. Can you imagine? This prompted her to go much deeper in understanding the bias. She illustrates that in her book, Unmasking AI. The problem goes back to what AI is and how it's created. When AI is built on categorization and labeling, we have to ask who is building the databases and how.

Can machines ever see my queens as I view them? - "AI, Ain't I a Woman?"

She found that most datasets were heavily skewed towards white men...and I mean heavily! In 2014, one analysis showed a major databased was 77.5% male and 83.5% white. An AI system will never represent society if it's using data like that!

Dr. Joy offers many examples in her book, my personal favorite was the Black Panther Scorecard. In each example, women and especially Black women were being misgendered, mis-aged, and misidentified. I mean, I know Angela Basset looks good, but is she really 18-24?! It was practically universal.

While it's funny to laugh at how poorly AI can identify members of the Global Majority, it obviously has real-life consequences. In San Francisco, we are living crash test dummies for General Motors and Google as they test out their driverless cars that use AI technology to recognize people. What happens when it has a harder time identifying women or Black men, both of which are more likely to be unhoused? A woman died earlier this year when a robotaxi ran her over and trapped her under the car for hours. Our local news is filled with "random" incidents of robotaxi's doing wild things. I'm constantly questioning the polished tech environments that built those cars and its AI, especially when I have no legal rights to stop them from driving through my neighborhood and capturing my face on video. Tech's harms come from their inability to give up on supremacist thinking and represent society.

This week, I encourage you to reflect on what you notice about tech that feels baked-in, but actually is unaddressed bias? Let us know about your journey of discovery in the comments! We get into the racial capitalism of AI next week.

Make sure you catch out chat with Dr. Linda Berberich on our podcast! Enjoying our newsletter? Subscribe for free or upgrade for resources, bonus content, and Seedling-only podcasts. Plus support our 100% reader-supported work!

• 📚 Reacting to Trump Shooting Messaging Guide - Praise be for the people at ASO Communications and Way to Win for their timely messaging guides!
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - “As we grapple with the events of the Trump campaign rally, the following are overarching messaging guidelines and suggested messaging.” Read the 2-page report.
• 📚 The Enduring Disrespect of Black Women - In 2024, the prose of Malcolm X remain true, the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. We’ve seen it when Representative Jasmine Crocket was harassed on the House floor, Claudine Gay was pushed out of Harvard, and now with VP Harris given the presidential nominee is uncertain.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - We have seen a real lack of coverage of VP Kamala Harris since 2020. Now that she’s back in the spotlight, the racist tropes and disrespect endure. When professional news anchors call the Vice President, just Kamala, it’s a clue to everyone else to disrespect her. Regardless of her past, she is a Black Indian woman who could be President. She should be covered as such, not as an afterthought.
• 📚 Get to Know Project 2025 - My friend, Joe Cardillo, wrote an awesome breakdown of Project 2025 and what it could mean for everyday people. It’s especially timely given the president of the Heritage Foundation is itching for war, “There will be a second American Revolution…” and it will be bloodless, if the left allows it to be.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - If there’s one link you click today, make it this one. I’m hearing that content about Project 2025 is being suppressed online. That’s a sign that it’s important. Please get to know what is in this plan so we can stop it in November.
• 🎬 The New York Times Anti-Trans Assault - The paper of record continues its hateful and dangerous disinformation about trans healthcare. Dr. Blair Peters (@queersurgeon) explains exactly how dangerous their lies are. The NYT continues to platform Pamela Paul’s lies in their Op-Eds
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - As I mention above, the piece I wrote back in March 2023 remains true. “we internalize the idea that white cis bodies are the human standard.” That’s what the New York Times is doing when it prioritizes anti-trans pseudoscience over trans people’s lived experiences.

Last Week: 📚 The Curb-Cut Effect's Impact on Social Change Communications

Anonymous AI Search Browsing 🔎

Independent search engine, DuckDuck Go, has released a new feature to allow “anonymous” access to AI chatbots including Chat GPT.

• Private searches allow for more privacy for the user and the ability to test out each model for free
• The featured include 4 large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral
• I’m interested in testing how each LLM answers similar questions to see how their models were trained
• The service is free to use, but have daily limits and can be accessed through DuckDuck Go’s site.

DuckDuckGo offers “anonymous” access to AI chatbots through new service

DDG offers LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral for factually-iffy conversations.

Ars TechnicaBenj Edwards

What is political violence? How the media and elected leaders are responding to that incident this weekend! Find our latest social posts on our 🎬 Quick Bites page.

And that's a wrap on this week’s newsletter! We hope you found this helpful in your work. Forward this to a friend and help democratize communications! If you have any topics you want covered or have any questions, please reach out and let me know.

In Solidarity,
Sam Chavez
Roots of Change Founder