Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/14/smartphones-on-feminism.html
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Since I’m one of those people playing Life on a very easy setting, this is a good reminder.
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First we need to get feminist pants )WITH POCKETS) then we can move on to shrinking these phones. (But make them thicc so we get better battery)
Edit: but to be serious, removing FB and Instagram from my phone increased my happiness. I don’t feel the same dopamine rush from strangers liking my posts here or on Reddit (which has some good communities) and instead use it more as a tool to find wonderful things
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Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism
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I hate using the phone. I have that printed on my business card instead of my phone number. I have a cell phone that I use as a camera, sometimes for Twitter and mostly for playing Solitaire. It doesn’t work as a phone. I have no data plan and can only connect through wifi. I have a landline phone. It’s not in my name. I don’t answer it. I have an answering machine. I hate the cloud. It also says on my card (in my list of occupations) that I’m a curmudgeon. I hate using the phone. Fuck the phone. I love Alexander Graham Bell. I hate the phone. Get that phone off my lawn. Phones can blow me.
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And yet:
Certainly tech companies deserve blame for presenting pliant “female” personas informed by negative stereotypes.
I honestly don’t see personas in these voice interfaces. Perhaps because I’m a command line guy, for whom a spoken “new appointment dentist at January 5th at 8“ is conceptually the same as a “rm *.h”. Nice toys, but far less amazing than than a cat and a human can learn to exchange information by movement and sounds.
Also, at least Siri comes with two voices, mine runs the one closer to a human male.
Nothing we humans create is free from our personal bias.
Our inherent flaws get baked into the very foundation.
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Yep, and in order to undo that, we have to understand our biases in the first place. But you talk about it, and you get a bunch of fragile bro-flakes whining about how it’s reverse discrimination…
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If I were a different kind of creative person, say the type who codes, programs and creates tech, (as opposed to one who uses ink and paint) I’d like to think I would put my products through some sort of gauntlet before releasing them to the public.
Have large test groups of different people who are completely outside my personal demographic ‘go ham’ on the product during the R&D.
But that probably makes way too much logical sense, not to mention quality control like that would inevitably cut into the overall profits…
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Indeed, if a wide variety of people are going to be using your product, you want it to work well for all your end users, not just assume that how one group uses something is how all groups would use it. But as long as “white, straight, cis-gendered male” is the default assumption about humanity by people who dominate this field, that’s what we’re going to get. Same is true of other creative fields as well, not just the tech industry.
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It’s almost as if diversity in the world of software and hardware engineering is a good thing.
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Not just that one field, sadly.
As you know all too well, that detrimental mindset has dominated our entire society for centuries, and that’s why everything is slowly crumbling around us.
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Couldn’t you just buy a librem 5?
We’ve all been trained that, and for a certain class of people (hmmm, could it be the ones dominating tech), it works, because it caters to them. They design tech the way they do, without thinking it through, because to them, the risks are minimal.
Look at the whole “real names only” thing that keeps popping up, pushed by tech guys as a way to solve the “anonymity problem” on the net. “If people couldn’t hide behind fake names, they’d be nicer!” Really? Look around this board. There are a lot of men using their names. Very few women do. Because we know people have no trouble attaching themselves to horrible behavior. Using real names would make it easier for abusers to track down victims in real life. But it’s always the first go-to for tech bros who all know each other and have never experienced the harrassment and abuse women and other less powerful groups have (gods help you if you belong to more than one of those categories). They only think they have when more than one member (or sometimes just one) of those groups says “Um, guys, that’s not quite right.”
Fish have no word for water. It’s no surprise that many of those in money and tech are confused by the term “toxic masculinity”.
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Complacency is another powerful “root of evil,” right after unchecked greed.
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How is that cartoon supposed to be interpreted?
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Excellent question.
Reverse image query says:
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All I could guess was…
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Nice nostalgic throwback; kudos!
If the point is supposed to be “we have never actually been civilized, that’s just lie we tell ourselves,” then I agree.
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