Welcome to 2022 Critical Code Studies Working Group! In this first week, as our goal of thinking about decolonizing code collectively, we would like to ground this discussion in the potential incommensurable goal. On the one hand, we would like to confront the lineages that software brings with it: the histories and financial investments of the military and business industries in computation and the use of computers as techniques for ongoing discriminatory practices in the wider context of settler colonialism. On the other hand, we would like to build alternatives to these lineages, imagining and developing code that is ethical, that is queer, that is feminist, that is anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-settler colonialist. At the outset, we would like to make space for whether this is possible. Does decolonizing code fall under an "ethics of incommensurability" as Tuck and Yang invite us to consider as other calls to decolonize do? In other words, how can this discussion about decolonizing code not use decolonizing as a metaphor?

We have picked three main themes as starting points for our discussion.

Narratives of code / Narratives tied to code

• Problem of Default: Oftentimes, the push for creating a default is based on the argument that there is a natural, progressive, or common design of code that would be applicable and beneficial to all. At the same time, it often requires an enormous amount of financial fundings and cultural capitals for an idea to establish broadly as a default. As a result, narratives that inform the default are often complacent and entangled with the oppressive and extractive agendas used in military, corporation, and industries. Who this default centers and at the same time leaves out is a potential starting point for thinking about who a particular piece of code is for. We are interested in learning about your examples where the default creates roadblocks that obstruct, delay, and overpower decisions that may otherwise be made on a local level.
• Funding: Continuing our first point, we also find the efforts around making tools for all shying away from a critical discussion around the source of funding and funding models. Tracing where the money comes from; who the beneficiaries are and how a project is supported sustainably is crucial in understanding its impact and limitations. Broadly speaking, we are interested in asking the question of "we want to decolonize, but who is going to fund it?"

• Monopolies in Context
  We find it difficult to consider the ongoing colonial/capitalistic violence without studying the context of the software

• Example: Taiwan’s COVID app using Google Maps to prototype. The programmer used Google map to prototype a mask tracking app that benefited the residents of Taiwan but put him in enormous credit card debts. Too often we are dependent on Big Tech products to prototype responses to emergencies like this one, how do we set a long-term goal to move beyond this paradigm?

• Open Street Map and native-land.ca map.
  Crowd-sourced projects, such as OpenStreetMap and Native-Land, can shape their projects according to the value systems their respective communities expect them to. This allows a very different evaluative system than a corporate entity. What implications does this have on who keeps developers accountable? How do we evaluate systems beyond the values of whether they work, how efficient they are, and whether they are written elegantly? In addition, we can return to the question of funding: if the evaluation is dependent on profitability, then what strategies can be leveraged to fund independent projects who can set different evaluative priorities?

• Finally, open-source software, as discussed in previous CCSWs do have the possibility of being shaped by their communities and maintained. However, many also tend to mimic proprietary software. How can we escape that binary so as not to end up with what is seen as a lesser version of the mainstream software?

• Native-land.ca’s API: https://native-land.ca/resources/api-docs/

Language Justice

• Programming language: it seems like a settled question that a non-English speaker may not practice code proficiently without using English. Code educators who are interested in addressing language justice might often themselves in the situation of referencing inspiring esoteric programming languages written in non-anglophone languages such as Yorlang (Yoruba), Wenyan (Chinese), and قلب (Arabic), but ultimately need to return to reading and coding in English in the process of researching, troubleshooting, and incorporating modules and dependencies. As inspiring as some of the projects mentioned above are, we are interested in asking what strategies are possible to not just point to the lack of language justice in the landscape but to live with it?
• Documentation: The current mindset around inviting contribution or feedback often requires one to learn how to code (in English!). This sets up a false programmer - consumer binary and excludes non-coders from contributing to tools that greatly impact their everyday life. What are ways to reimagine the ways documentations are written in order to remove barriers around tech jargons, which are more often than not inaccessible, obfuscating, alienating and even off-putting.

Alternatives

• Modularity: we are intrigued by the idea of modularity. I am thinking of John Brown Childs' description of the Haudenosaunee practice in his book Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect.

  "As I understand the work of scholars with Haudenosaunee roots and involvement, such as John Mohawk, Jake Swamp, Oren Lyons, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, and Lynne Williamson, this word for their culture means, in essence, "People of the Longhouse." The Haudenosaunee dwellings were longhouses containing several families. Each family was connected to the family next to it. But each had its own space, its own identity, and its own autonomy. The Haudenosaunee took this longhouse image of togetherness and autonomy and applied it to the geographic area that is their historical territory. This land ran from the Seneca people of the west, near what is now Buffalo, New York., through the land of the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and the Mohawk, farthest east near what is now Albany, New York. West to east constituted the "Longhouse" of these nations, each linked to the others while maintaining its own space and autonomy." (p.47-48)

  In this chapter titled "Learning from the Haudenosaunee", Childs continues to describe how each family continued to be distinct and retained its individuality and differences while remaining connected to others. The differences are respected. Is there a way to develop software with modular pieces that can be exchanged and have a standard for communication across these differences in a similar way to the longhouses? This opens up questions of standardization but also perhaps templates:

• Templates / Toolkit?
  Continuing our thought on modularity, we are interested in opening up the question of whether it is possible to create an ethical template. Would it be possible to design a template that is programmed to support differences? And when that template isn’t responding to lived experiences, how can that template be challenged? How can it change/evolve? Can a template follow the intention of a toolkit, programmed in a way to give programmers the utmost agency to modify?

Please feel free to respond to any of these themes/questions in the form of comments below.

References:

• Tuck, Eve, and K Wayne Yang. "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol 1, Issue 1, p1-40. PDF hosted here
• Brown-Childs, John. Transcommunality: From The Politics Of Conversion. 1st edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

In his 2019 book How to be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi defines the anti-racist as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” The anti-racist actively works against racism. They work to produce change. Throughout the book, he offers more specific definitions for anti-racism with regard to biology, gender, culture, and other areas. What would a definition of anti-racist critical code studies look like?

During recent years, scholars have been teaching us how to approach software through race-critical lenses. Jessica Marie Johnson, Safiya Noble, and Mark A. Neal ran a pivotal week of the 2018 Critical Code Studies Working Group, entitled “Race and Black Codes,” which examined the relationship between codes that regulate Black bodies and human and technological responses to them. That week was built on a special issue of The Black Scholar entitled “Black Code.” Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and Ruha Benjamin’s Race after Technology also provide direction for how to approach software and other technological objects through the lens of anti-racism.

Our reading group gathers at the intersection of race and software studies, following the lead of such luminaries as Lisa Nakamura and Alondra Nelson, who was recently appointed the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s inaugural Deputy Director for Science and Society. We look to Joy Buolamwini’s work in the Algorithmic Justice League. We have arranged a screening of her 2020 film Coded Bias during the reading group.

We also learn from the example of senior research associate Tara McPherson, who offers a key methodological model in “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and Unix.” In this article, which we will discuss in the group, rather than removing technology from its historic contexts, McPherson traces the relationship between an operating system and the racist culture in which it emerges.

In this reading group, we hope to explore strategies for incorporating anti-racist thought and practice into Critical Code Studies. Using the readings, we will discuss broadly the many ways that computer programming inherits racist histories of its authors, even how seemingly neutral code can operate in, reproduce, and also resist the racialized systems in which it operates. We will look at concrete examples of source code which intersect with these concerns. These code snippets will be added to the code channel. We invite you to post new ones.

We invite participants of the Anti-Racist CCS Reading Group to bring insights from those discussions here and for all in CCSWG22 to join in this topic.

Our initial conversations were about Tara McPherson's article and Beth Coleman's "Race as Technology"

But feel free to pick up any of the threads that came up in that Reading Group.