Hello every­one. I want­ed to give a talk on how to be an ally but I can’t real­ly give that talk, so this is not a talk on how to be an ally. It’s a talk about try­ing to become one.

For those of you unaware, an ally is some­one who wants to sup­port the strug­gles of a mar­gin­al­ized group that they are not a part of. [So?] feels com­pelled for what­ev­er set of rea­sons, but they’re not in that group, and that puts one in a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion when try­ing to par­tic­i­pate in pol­i­tics that group. 

My back­ground is this. Well, I was­n’t in this band, but this band had a pro­found effect on me and real­ly shaped a lot of my young, bud­ding pol­i­tics when I was a pre-teen. And those pol­i­tics kind of stuck with me for the rest of my life. So a lot of that life [inaudi­ble] try to fig­ure out how to unpack this and make it into an ethics that I can live every day.

Here are a few things that I’ve learned about being an ally over the years. This is the first and the most impor­tant. This par­tic­u­lar point was put to me very well (not direct­ed at me, I have to say) by a woman that I work with now in the Design Media Arts MFA pro­gram who likes to talk about this as one of her opin­ions about work­ing with white peo­ple; she’s a woman of col­or. What I think is real­ly impor­tant about this com­ment is that she finds it very frus­trat­ing that it often alien­ates peo­ple, push­es peo­ple away. People get very angry. But what’s impor­tant here is that it’s not a metaphor in the sense that it does­n’t mean ​“go away” when you say that. It means just stop talk­ing. Don’t give up, don’t decide that you don’t care, don’t think that you’re not wel­come, just stop mov­ing your lips. Stop mak­ing sounds, and start lis­ten­ing. Because that’s real­ly the best way to contribute. 

A great YouTube video on how to be an ally that I rec­om­mend you search YouTube for these. There’s an anal­o­gy made between try­ing to help your friend build a house when you’ve nev­er built a house before, and you just show up and start ham­mer­ing things because you don’t real­ly know what you’re doing. So don’t do that. Just listen.

I and mine do not con­vince by argu­ments, sim­i­les, rhymes; We con­vince by out presence.
Walt Whitman, ​“Song of the Open Road”

This par­tic­u­lar point always makes me think of this Whitman quote about con­vinc­ing by pres­ence, and real­ly the impor­tance of being present as an ally, but not par­tic­u­lar­ly try­ing to con­tribute your own voice. Being present and lis­ten­ing puts you in a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion where [you can?] think of the priv­i­lege that you have being put in the hands of the mar­gin­al­ized group that you want to sup­port just by being there, just by listening.

Another impor­tant point, of course, is don’t get defen­sive, no mat­ter what, ever. It’s real­ly not about you at all. If you go on the Internet (and Tumblr in par­tic­u­lar is kind of bad about this), you’ll fre­quent­ly encounter a lot of peo­ple who are skep­ti­cal of your com­mit­ments. But before you speak up, before you react, before you do any­thing, just ask if the skep­ti­cism that you’re fac­ing is deserved. Not even deserved of you in par­tic­u­lar, but per­haps in gen­er­al. If this is a rea­son­able posi­tion for some­one to take. And then ask if what you’re about to do is going to sup­port the cause that you believe in or if it real­ly has noth­ing to do with it, because in this con­text that is real­ly all that matters.

Another impor­tant point here is this, which is to read the man­u­al. I think it could be inter­est­ing in this con­text to take this term away from the bro­gram­mers who like to throw it around on forums, and try to think about how this par­tic­u­lar phrase may be thrown back when deal­ing with issues of dif­fer­ence. In this con­text, it’s about doing the work, it’s about find­ing text, blogs, videos, lec­tures, the vines, the Tumblrs, read­ing them and think­ing about how they apply to your life. Reading blog posts and going for a walk. Thinking about sit­u­a­tions you find your­self in, things that you take for grant­ed, and think­ing about ways that the thoughts of oth­ers can desta­bi­lize those.

Of course the most impor­tant is to think about priv­i­lege, and real­ly think about it close­ly. Consider it at arms’ length but con­sid­er ways that you have priv­i­lege, how you use it, what you do with it, and what it means if you are a per­son with priv­i­lege to try to be an ally. How that priv­i­lege is inter­fer­ing with your sup­port­ing the cause you believe in.

Then of course, some­thing so obvi­ous, but it seems so often missed is sim­ply that pro­nouns are pow­er­ful. When you’re giv­ing lec­tures and you’re try­ing to teach a pro­gram­ming con­cept and you’re talk­ing about a pro­gram­mer who devel­ops some­thing, just use [she?]. It’s quite sim­ple and it has an amaz­ing effect. I’ve done it for years with my stu­dents, and many of them come up to me and talk to me about it lat­er because it’s such a small thing but it shifts the way the con­ver­sa­tion hap­pens and brings oth­er per­son­al­i­ties into the forum. Language real­ly does mat­ter. There was a back­lash of course with polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, but we’re kind of past that now, we’re far past that now. [large­ly inaudi­ble sentence] 

Moving from here we’ve got all of these anti’s. Anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism, [inaudi­ble] an exhaus­tive list of some of the poten­tial posi­tions that’ve come up just today in this pan­el. Something that’s impor­tant to me per­son­al­ly is that these par­tic­u­lar con­cerns don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly affect the larg­er struc­ture that we find our­selves in. We have to con­sid­er and not be con­tent with just cri­tiquing the sta­tus quo. There’s this term from the polit­i­cal philoso­pher Mark Fisher called cap­i­tal­ist real­ism. What cap­i­tal­ist real­ism is is the notion that our world has been struc­tured by cap­i­tal­ism that we are no longer able to imag­ine our­selves out of it. This crops up a lot in encour­ag­ing [women?] and peo­ple of col­or to learn to pro­gram so that they can very quick­ly [go to?] Silicon Valley and [inaudi­ble] make mon­ey and contribute.

Those pol­i­tics are not my pol­i­tics, and I think it’s impor­tant for peo­ple to con­sid­er where they stand on this issue and con­sid­er how we can pos­si­bly think these terms [anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism] into these terms [post-racism, post-sexism, post-capitalism], and try to con­sid­er what hap­pens when we get through racism, we get through sex­ism, when we over­come cap­i­tal­ism. What kind of world will we find our­selves in, and try to put a lot of think­ing into imag­in­ing what that world would be like.

One tem­po­rary school of thought that’s try­ing to do that is called accel­er­a­tionism, close­ly relat­ed to Luxury Communism, or some­times more enter­tain­ing­ly called Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The idea here is that we’re quick­ly fac­ing a future which will be post-scarcity. We will have automa­tion of so many tasks that we need to start con­sid­er­ing whether the jobs that are [invent­ed?] away through automa­tion, whether those peo­ple are just going to starve, what we’re going to do with the sur­plus pop­u­la­tion that has nowhere to work [because they?] work to live.

The oppor­tu­ni­ty that some­thing like accel­er­a­tionism offers is we can take [hold?] of the cap­i­tal­ist machin­ery and try to accel­er­ate tech­no­log­i­cal progress and put it to the uses of humans and envi­ron­ments and peo­ple. So we can actu­al­ly make a world designed for liv­ing in. So I think that we’re in a par­tic­u­lar moment here where bring­ing in a mar­gin­al­ized group into this project, pro­gram­ming and tech­nol­o­gy in par­tic­u­lar is going to be, as Phoenix men­tioned, vital­ly impor­tant to this future, to decid­ing what kind of world we’re going to [be in?]. 

I sug­gest look­ing into accel­er­a­tionism. One of the inter­est­ing points there is the thought that cap­i­tal­ism goes through phas­es where you have inno­va­tion, but then inno­va­tion gets capped because there’s a long peri­od of try­ing to mon­e­tize [instead of?] invent­ing, and that inno­va­tion is no longer [quite?] to the human pur­pose. So we’re at an oppor­tu­ni­ty [inaudi­ble] where we can do that.

One final thought from all of this is to always try harder. 

Thank you.