Descuartizadora: Interview with Imilla Hacker

The following was originally published in the Spanish-language zine Descuartizadora, which Guerrilla Translation is translating into English as part of our first Lovework Open Call. Individual articles and poems will be translated and posted here one by one until all the content has been completed, at which point an English-language version of the zine will be formatted and made available in its entirety.

How and why did Imilla Hacker come about?

Imilla Hacker came from a need to communicate with certain people in our environment, mainly young women, people who would say, “Me? I don’t know anything about technology.” There was a particular event which catalysed the decision to sit down and start writing a column we had been talking about for a while for a local newspaper. The event was when a girl and her mum were in a bookshop – the girl wanted to buy a book about Wikileaks. Somehow she knew that it was about hackers getting into places of power and getting hold of secret documents in order to publish them. The mum didn’t like the idea and asked for a romance novel instead. This made me really angry, and it ended up being the spark that got us to sit down and write. The column didn’t catch on in the newspaper, but it did allow us to find our voice, and it led to us launching our radio program.

What’s the situation like at the moment with regard to free, open-source software and technology in Latin America?

That’s a difficult question, because like with any struggle, it depends on how optimistic you’re feeling at any given moment. There are a lot of groups doing great work, but at the same time there’s a lot of capitalist takeover. A lot of battles are being fought on a lot of fronts and our sympathies always lie with grassroots projects over institutional activities. The problem is that grassroots projects tend to go unnoticed unless you’re looking for them.

I also think that there is still a lot of confusion about what we mean by “free” software. One time a guy in a print shop asked me why I was using Linux when Windows was free in Bolivia. It’s a question of ethics, whether in Latin America or anywhere else in the world: free and open-source software respects your liberty as a user and promotes community solidarity. Now that things are going to shit in places like Brazil, a lot of training in digital self-defence is being offered by allies who work with free technologies because, by definition, they are the only ones that can effectively combat surveillance and repression.

Do you think there are any differences between cyberfeminist movements in the global north and those in Latin America? Is it possible to forge alliances?

Well, there’s a bit of everything. I think that there are several differences between cyberfeminists in the global north and south regarding the use of technology that stem from how we access the internet, as well as how we understand harassment and gender-based violence.

In Latin America, many women develop this understanding in an environment of control and harassment: How many of our brothers and boyfriends have asked us for our passwords? When we connect to the internet from the family computer, or at university, or in an internet cafe, not only do we have very little privacy to access sensitive information (about abortion or sexuality, for example), we also get used to not exercising our right to privacy, to not protecting our information, to being surveilled. In the same way that we don’t act the same in private as we do when someone else is watching, we don’t use the internet the same way when we know that someone can go through our browsing history. Cyberfeminists in the North all have, with undoubtedly few exceptions, their own computer or device, which leads to significant differences in how we understand technology and how much we can appropriate it.

Another difference is how harassment and gender-based violence are understood in tech communities in the North. In 2018 over 100 Bolivian women were murdered; they were victims of hate crimes committed against them for being women, and the gender-based violence figures are alarming in surrounding countries as well. Cyberfeminists in the North live in a different reality where the parameters of violence are not the same, and this creates a rift which needs to be discussed and worked through.

As for alliances? I think that they’re definitely possible, but any alliance with communities in the North would have to be on equal terms, and to do that there is a long process of opening up communications, establishing bonds of trust and creating channels of communication which allow us to advance together and overcome any cultural differences.

Beyond bridging the technological gap between men and women, do you think it’s important to start understanding technology from a feminist perspective, as opposed to just adhering to a model preordained by white men?

You see, this whole whole technological gap thing isn’t just a banner that can be paraded around acritically. It’s become crystal clear that this agenda to bridge the gap amounts to little more than hot air from corporations who want access to new markets, as we’ve seen with philanthropic stuff like Free Basics, that thing where Mark Zuckerberg wanted to offer free access to what was supposedly the internet, but was actually little more than access to an enclosure belonging to him and four of his associates.

But on the other hand, if women aren’t involved in developing the networks that we want to see, these people will win. It is obvious that the privilege of the white engineer building the network is connected to a particular social group, at least that’s been the case since the 1980s.

What is certain is that we have begun to understand technology from a feminist perspective. In terms of content, we have things like this initiative to imagine and construct a feminist internet (https://feministinternet.net/), and there are also nascent networks built on feminist infrastructure which are made up of projects like Kefir (https://kefir.red/) and Vedetas (https://vedetas.org/). There is still a lot to be done before we can talk about feminist technology, and a lot to be worked out: What do we mean by feminist technology? I like to think it would be less oppressive, that it would make fewer assumptions about the user of a program, and that it would do more work for the commons and less for the capitalist war machine.

It’s difficult to engage in subversion or sabotage completely from the outside, this is the magic of the hacker spirit: having enough focus and discipline to understand and penetrate a system, sometimes even better than those who designed it in the first place, and at the same time being consumed by something burning deep inside. There’s a certain sense of justice, of rejecting institutional order, and this wild and indomitable spirit allows us to not play by their rules.

Is there, as far as you’re concerned, a Latin American cyberfeminist movement?

It exists, sure, but another question is whether it is visible on the surface, where there’s always a lot of noise. We’re here, underground but very active 😉

What were the dynamics of Latin American hacklabs like?

Well, I don’t really know enough to speak in general terms. My perception is that hacklabs were important in their time, and every self-managed social centre had its own little hacker community, but they were also subject to the dynamics of precarity, division and apathy that run through a lot of collectives. Recently I may have seen more initiatives that are riding the hackerspace or fablab wave, by which I mean young people who get into tech because they see that they can make a quick buck and climb up the commercial ladder, but without any kind of critical vision.

It’s natural, because to get involved in that world you need your own computer and time to spare, so of course you’re going to get young, white, middle class university students playing with their Arduinos, and this puts off more critical, less privileged people from getting involved.

There have been, and continue to be, significant and important hacklabs in South America. Perhaps the formula isn’t so attractive nowadays, but it’s still necessary, when possible, to get together in the flesh and see some real faces.

In what ways can we decolonise technology?

Technology is appropriate when it suits our needs, but we can also appropriate it in new ways to fit those needs. We can decolonise it by calling it into question, by getting involved in understanding it, hacking it and by regaining our capacity to reimagine it. But we have to do this without losing sight of the ability to collectively organise, as best we can, the infrastructures that make it possible, as well as the autonomous management of combative, antagonistic networks. The first step in ousting the colonisers is not confusing spaces of capital with spaces of freedom.

What technological and feminist projects have you taken part in?

Imilla Hacker does very little publicly.

El Desarmador, which is the radio programme we make, and a few training workshops in autonomous, self-managed feminism, several articles in Pillku and GenderIT, not a lot else really. The clandestine work that we do under cover of darkness is on a strictly need-to-know basis 😉

How can we talk about cyberfeminism from a perspective of precariousness, keeping in mind that in Latin America a high proportion of women don’t even have internet access, and even those who do often lack the basic skill to use technology?

The defence of women’s rights is a struggle that must be fought wherever we can. Our territories and bodies will always be vitally important spaces in the feminist struggle, and the internet is merely a tool to aid in these processes. But it’s a tool that is becoming more and more valuable as it gives us the chance to learn about other experiences of resistance from women around the world, and to interact with them. Cyberfeminism aims to balance out the hegemonic forces of capitalism and sexism – which feminist movements have been doing offline for a long time – in a new territory: the internet. Those of us who have access to the internet and the skills to engage with technology in a critical way can form a bridge, and we have two significant responsibilities: to share our knowledge with other women, and to go online and spread word of our struggles and our movements.

We have to look at the big picture when we talk about internet access. Sooner or later almost all of us will be connected, and the question is whether that will be to our self-managed feminist community networks, or to the internet we currently have.

What kind of community-inclusive activities have you done, and what challenges did they present?

Mainly, we’ve worked as learning stewards in digital security programmes with grassroots feminist communities. Here it’s an issue that a lot of content for this kind of training isn’t well translated or contextualised. Often we learn the hard way, out of necessity, but we can’t always afford the luxury of being able to integrate this into our daily lives.

To a lesser extent, we’ve had the good fortune of being able to work with indigenous and rural communities. In these situations, technology is a challenge because our colonial attitudes run very deep: bad governments, the Church and shitty NGOs might send us all sorts of gadgets, but they rarely try to implement a dignified process, based in solidarity, where we can be empowered through different sorts of technology, be it solar panels, an engine, a radio or a video camera. We need to stand up and take the reins in these processes, and that’s not always easy because it goes against the grain of what we’re used to, it involves continually questioning the president, the authorities, priests, teachers and aid workers. It seems that being indigenous means your only options are farming or fishing, and that’s the way it goes. Coming from the countryside, you get ripped off in the city for a simple soldering job. We’re saying that this has to change, the machete or the sickle today is just as important as the soldering iron.

Do you have any advice or warnings for women who want to get into free software and technology? Any resources, links or IRC chat rooms that you’d recommend?

Don’t give up hope, and above all believe in yourself. With time, patience and good company there is no problem too great. The essential thing might be finding a mutual support group, however small it might be, because this can help you to solve problems, both in the study and practice of what we’re interested in. And the thing is that we might, at the start, not even know exactly what it is that we’re interested in and the only way to move past this is to be very curious, read a lot, and ask questions again and again.

There are a lot of resources, bad ones, on the Internet, so you need to learn how to sniff them out. Staying away from exaggeration or sensationalism is always a good rule of thumb; for example, if you want to learn about the Tor browser DON’T go to Youtube, go to the Tor website.

Here are a few resources that we know and recommend:

Zen and the art of making tech work for you

To learn about free software projects you can look at Pillku magazine (in Spanish)

Our podcast (also in Spanish)

In your experience, what role do men play in all of this? Are they our allies or is it better to keep spaces segregated?

In theory, we prefer mixed spaces where collaboration can happen among equals, although depending on the dynamics of each community, we get that it’s often necessary to establish female-only spaces.

But as Gata Cattana says, segregation and positive discrimination aren’t the solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipkjRGXikn4

In the world of tech communities, men are usually the techies who have a better grasp of coding and programming, and women are more often content creators, video editors and graphic designers. This division of knowledge and tasks generates power imbalances and friction when it comes to social interactions, so we need a collective, stewarded learning process which enables more women to take control of our most vital communications technology. A non-mixed space makes a lot of sense in a context like this, where the role of men is to take on the care-based work which generally falls to women, as it can give us the space and resources we need to learn how to do this stuff. We can’t talk about allyship with men without first having an equal division of labour. On a more macro level, even if this state of equality and autonomy with regard to men and the use and design of technology is reached, women are generally more committed to collaborative work when it comes to transforming the capitalist approach that surrounds technological development. To us, it makes more sense that an anarchist man be considered an ally than a capitalist woman. The condition of being a woman is not revolutionary in and of itself.

We know that Instagram and Facebook are hotbeds of misogynistic violence, and that they have enabled the rise of fascism across the world. Do we have to get off these platforms, or is there value in staying there and resisting?

Imilla Hacker left corporate social media many years ago, and now, every time we go on these platforms we realise how little we know about using them. Being a user of these platforms involves a process of continuous learning and adaptation to the tools, as well as an investment of time and dedication that, generally, we concede silently, gradually and constantly, without kicking up much of a fuss. However, we often aren’t as willing to put the same time and effort into our own decentralised and autonomous technology projects.

I don’t think there can be true resistance on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. These platforms aren’t designed for debate or militancy, they’re designed to be addictive, monetising every second that we spend on them to generate data and metadata which feed their business model. In the eyes of Facebook’s artificial intelligence, our anticapitalist or feminist rhetoric is equivalent to fascist or misogynist rhetoric. The information is labelled and made visible only to those of a similar political persuasion (the now well-known “social media bubble”). They store information about which profiles generate this kind of rhetoric, they censor them if necessary, they divvy up advertising, they sell data to third parties, etc. The rest is dark magic which serves only to make sure that Facebook’s share prices keep climbing.

But we’re not here to lecture or preach. Whether or not to get off those platforms is a decision each individual must make based on what they stand to gain or lose, both on a personal and collective level.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License

– Translated by Alex Minshall
– Edited by Timothy McKeon
– Original Spanish-language article published in Descuartizadora 1
– Images taken from Descuartizadora 1