Global

If an object has a chip, it becomes smart, and by extension our houses become smarter - and so do our cities, hospitals, toys, phones. But what about the inventors, the creators, the owners, the users of all these smart and tiny things - are we becoming smarter? Reflecting on sessions in Rights Con 2017 in Brussels, Vale examines the ways in which the internet of things can lead to invasive…

How to bring the powerful agency and discourse of women's rights movements and feminism to the digital age of Twitter and other social media. Samukelisiwe Mabaso has researched on various movements across Africa and Asia that successfully and effectively use technology, and shows us ten ways in which to make Twitter work for feminist activism. Lets get in formation!

The gender balance is far from equal even in progressive movements such as the free and open source software community, Mozilla user groups, and others. Despite all the rivers of ink that were written about the gender imbalance in these areas, the changes are slow to arrive.

The Internet Freedom Festival is refreshingly different from most forums around internet rights and technology - it is almost equal in gender ratio, welcoming of gender non conforming and trans persons, and takes privacy of its participants at the venue seriously. Smita Vanniyar tells us more about their experience at the festival this year in Valencia, Spain.

'Interpreting the internet: Feminist and Queer Counterpublics in Latin America by Elisabeth Jay Friedman looks at a decade long engagement of feminist and women's movements with technology. Alan Finlay reviews the book for GenderIT.org, and finds it to be essential reading for anyone interested in how feminist (or any) counterpublics are formed and shaped by appropriating whatever technology is…

While Chelsea Manning has been pardoned by the Obama administration, there are still many political prisoners facing incarceration and lengthy trials for their exercise of freedom of expression and for whistle blowing. Very few countries have enacted laws that protect whistle blowers. Mallory Knodel writes about the benefit fundraiser to welcome home Chelsea Manning that took place at the…

Online harassment has taken various forms on the internet, including doxxing, intimate violence, stalking and so on. In this article, Part 2 of the series, Maya Ganesh explores a different way of thinking through this contemporary phenomenon by using an approach that emphasises 'design-thinking'. Possibilities that are explored include whether the system or platform can predict or respond to…

We can no longer ignore the pervasive datafication of our lives - the ways in which our habits, illness, abilities, relations are abstracted, and our bodies made into data by an intersecting range of institutions and processes. In this article, the gendered, sexualised and racialised nature of surveillance is unpacked, so we maintain a focus on the power relations involved. Surveillance…

The Distributed Denial of Women strike borrows the metaphor of the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack as a radical and subversive tool by activists, but currently DDOS attacks powered by zombie-bots are part of the anarcho-capitalist economies of the internet. Ganesh in their article unpacks the many levels at which gendered labour is extracted, and while positing feminist autonomous…

Research suggests that women are underrepresented at every level in technology(McKinsey survey, 2016). Why is this the case? And how do we educate, hire, and retain more women in it? In this article, Radhika Radhakrishnan highlights the underlying realities that women face in technology beyond just a numbers game, and offer insight to such questions by interviewing diverse, pioneering women…