CW for discussions of transphobia and violence.
In this, the final episode of 2018, I got to talk to weightlifting pal and femme genius Tara Robertson about her work on diversity and inclusion at Mozilla — and like a million other things, including why we want an open Internet, whether libraries are neutral (hint: they’re not), the conservative politics of tone policing, the danger of corporations replacing the public sphere, and more! That’s a lot of topics, so here are a bunch of links!
- First up, if you want to hear more from Tara (which you obviously do), why not check out the keynote she delivered last month in New Zealand?
- Want to read more about Mozilla’s work on diversity and inclusion? Do that here.
- Here’s the article Tara mentioned from Dr. Katherine Phillips on why diversity makes us smarter aka the business case for diversity
- I also found a recent-ish piece on Facebook’s “free internet” and how it violates net neutrality and functions like “digital colonialism”
- Ready to get freaked out? Here’s a piece on what Facebook is doing with your data.
- Oh, and in case you have no idea what net neutrality is and why it matters, this is a great primer.
- On the topic of neutrality in libraries, here’s a really interesting summary of a variety of perspectives based on a panel organized by the American Library Association.
- An iconic piece: Anil Dash on the web we lost
- If you’d like some context around our conversation about the Vancouver Public Library and transphobia, read this public statement by jaye simpson
- And while you’re reading awesome things, you should definitely read the Femme Shark Manifesto
- To back up our discussion about heightened violence against the trans community, here’s some information from the Human Rights Campaign
- And if you’d like some context around my discussion of Grace Lavery’s experience of transphobia in the context of queer studies, here’s her Twitter thread explaining the situation
- On the topic of keeping your data safe, here’s a great piece Tara shared with me on quitting the “Big Five” tech companies
- Didn’t know that Turnitin is a corporation mining your data? Read up on the case against it.
- And here’s a little more reading on Starbucks, public spaces, and anti-Blackness
- Finally, because I promised it: here’s the list Kaarina shared of helpful self-care tips for the holiday
Download Episode / Transcription To Come
The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Tara’s theme song is “Good As Hell” by Lizzo.
Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
Secret Feminist Agenda 
For what it’s worth, my experience on the “we support everybody, but that means being super-nice to bigots” has boiled down to people not understanding that Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance” only seems like a paradox if you can’t identify destructive behavior.
This is sort of the same “gotcha” with the anti-transgender “arguments,” where it seems like the entire mindset is that it’s too confusing to actually deal with the totality of life and so someone from on-high needs to draw a bright line for us so we don’t need to think about more than two karyotic genders, shifts in gender roles, AND the presence of transgender people…
On “move fast and break things,” everybody should do themselves the favor of thinking about how often the broken things were of immediate monetary value to the company in question. Payroll? Trade secrets? Bank account numbers? Market research? Very strange disparity that I’m (cough, cough) sure is completely accidental. Between that philosophy and the “sharing economy” nonsense suggesting that people shouldn’t own things, a cynical person might almost be inclined to believe that people are being scammed out of assets in addition to trying to keep wages low.
Anyway, thanks so much for (a) the podcast in general and (b) an episode that makes me feel even better about having used Firefox since its first release.
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Oh! And there is an open source voice assistant system that doesn’t ship data off to anyone, Snips (https://snips.ai/). I haven’t installed it, yet, though, so I can’t vouch for it.
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Thank you for this delightful comment!
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If you’re horrified about your students’ papers being automatically submitted to Turnitin, you should take a look at what kind of relationships the academic journals you publish in might have with them. A lot of publishers make full text available to Turnitin for crawling, via their DOI registration process with Crossref, regardless of whether or not that full text is available to the public or not.
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Good to know! Do you know of any resources that list which journals do this?
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Crossref used to have public lists of which publishers used each of their services, but they don’t do that anymore. It’s not a journal-by-journal listing, but you can search by publisher here https://www.crossref.org/members/prep/ and anyone that has an significant percentage for “Similarity Check URLs” is giving full text to Turnitin.
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