Wearing separates: The stripper & the hacker

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle. ~ Rita Mae Brown

Last year the FastCompany nominated (a mere) 'TOP eleven' women as the 'most influential in Web 2.0'. Immediately causing outcry about the chosen and the not chosen. In the UK, it is estimated of the near 460,000 strong IT workforce those who are 'ICT Professionals', less than 15% are women.

The technology industry has a history of overlooking or missing out altogether the female counterpart to the traditional male Geek. Nowhere was this distinction more sharply drawn than in the visibility of the girls at the Yahoo! hosted TwOpenHack09 yesterday.

Still today (that's a long time in digital circles) the event is continuing to cause controversy.

I thought that we were a long time from the days when the sight of a 'mere' woman at a commercially led (thanks Yahoo!) and 'professionally' run event would send in the lap dancers. Once in the States at an afterparty for one of the tech industries now most recognised companies (they shall remain anon) they sent in the fat-ogram. Another example of the perspex ceiling designed to be tread only by those in sensible flat shoes. Whilst there continues minimal opportunity for highheeled marks to be scratched into that ceiling, this IS happening.

It is not clear exactly how many female workers are 'in IT'. Certainly not enough. And not enough at the highest levels. But then the same could be said of Banking. I am, however, struck by the irony of the TwOpenHack09 event. Once led to believe that hacking as a subtext was to break through various walls, fire and otherwise, to infiltrate - and from a leftist ideal - reveal possible exploitation and conspiracy, as a young girl I was highly influenced by this most romanticised image of the hacker subculture. In my eyes this was a level playing field where it was talent that mattered not that if you were 'too delicate' to play on the pitch. So thanks to Yahoo! and TwOpenHack09 for bringing home the ultimate levelling message that what you wear, or rather take off, your booty matters. This separates the stripper from the hacker afterall. Women know your place!

Before I get too locked into just a M/F debate, as my handsome friend Ian Forrester will remind me, overall you have to wonder how much things have changed in Tech land. Following Ian's post 'Are you a self-described geek' as faaaaar back in time as 2005, there are cultural and race dimensions too. And the issues are worldwide.

Worldwide or not, closer to home and over in Leeds tonight is a gathering of some of the potential leaders of the tech industry. Leeds Girl Geeks we salute you. Especially with your booty's covered.

And, yes I am struck by the irony of using an image entitled 'sexy robot'. This is as a deliberate device all you commentators.

ZeroCool

It’s funny how the days quickly roll by as lives are streamed by the various portals of socially charged information. Hello to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dopplr…

It doesn’t seem over ten years since our alleged entry into the ethereal arena of cyberspace. And my, didn’t we take it all so seriously ‘back then’.

Over the weekend I re-watched Hacker’s. Director’s Iain Softley’s, 1995, vision of a New York situated cyberpunk culture. Lot’s of smoking, lots of inline - should that be online? ‘waaaaaaay cool dude!’ - skates and 'a 28.8 bps [sic] modem!’. And with Angelina Jolie.

Friends are made, lost along the way, re-made and the movie ends with Angelina getting wet in a pool with not-a-lot-a-on as a result of the games, territorial fights of fancy and the ultimate battle with a ‘big bad wolf’ corporation as led by the hacking community and culture.

So, today, why so 1990s?

One line in the film stands out, when a friend of the ‘PhantonPhreak’s’ asserts, ‘you’re nobody unless you have a handle’ – an individuals self-nominated ‘cyber’ name, the equivalent of what we would use as a username.

Today, it could equally be argued that ‘you’re nobody if you use anything but your real name’. An interesting turn of events. Where once the anonymous identity reigned supreme, now you’re only ‘insanely great’ if your friends can recognise you and be there to track your every movement. To this extent, the Hacker's suggestive nod to George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother ‘I’m watching you’ is suitably fitting.

Today this would be 'we're watching you'... Add to this observation, today the main protagonist ZeroCool would be zero cool, dismissed as a fake persona and consequently receive no friends on Facebook.

There’s been a steady change to the inclusion (intrusion?) of the arrays of technology, applications and resources that supplement our daily social highlights, lowlights and reveal the lowlifes. Perhaps we should all get used to suffering a new malady of data retention.

From today all ISPs will be ‘legally obliged’ to store all details of your internet content and telephony for 12 months. Whilst not the BigBrother central database of communications information – there are longer term outcomes that will affect our civil liberties. One example is how last month Facebook both defended its right to impose, and had users obliged to support, the sites new terms of service. For Zuckerberg this was promoted on the Facebook blog as an opportunity, 'On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information’ – in short, ‘we have your data and we’re not afraid to use it’. Faced with heavy criticism, the threat of legal action and rebel against Facebook by users (the Facebook group, People Against the New Terms of Service, grew to nearly 150,000 members) the company reinstated the old terms of service and with a new Facebook (trust us) group: The Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (with less than 100,000 members).

One day such events will tempt us to look back and recall not only ‘oh what a funny place that little cyber world was’, but to lament ‘oh how we used to be at liberty’… Now that was a funny old world which was far from ZeroCool.

Some questions to keep in mind: What is privacy? How are we surveilled across networks? What values do should we hold important for personal data? How can governments, corporations, and individuals make information safe?...