The Feminine Meme: Geeks, memes, incels and toxic masculinity at tech hackathons
A conversation with Dr Siân Brooke
Happy Valentine’s Day! If you’ve ever wondered whether you can major in memes, this week’s guest is here to tell you: yes.
I talked to Dr Siân Brooke, a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and an associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute. We discussed gender, memes and hackathons: What exactly is a meme? Can geeks have toxic masculinity? How does gender and femininity get marginalized in tech spaces? And how do fedoras lead down the road to incels?
As always, you can listen to it here or subscribe here (Spotify) or here (Apple Podcasts). If you like us, please rate, review and share the Anti-Dystopians to help us get new listeners. If you want to support the production of the show, you can visit here.
Further reading from the episode
Other articles by Siân
Other Reading
Tweet of the week
What I’ve been reading
Vice reports that a tech firm has offered cops facial recognition technology in order to ID homeless people. (I don’t know about you, but this seems . . . dystopic.)
In related news, my colleague Jennifer Cobbe finds she can’t ever escape her work when Heathrow airport tried to use facial recognition technology before she boarded her flight, and she—a tech lawyer—demanded to know the legal basis of such a requirement. Stay tuned for more updates.
Break-ups can be bad, but this break-up has been particularly bad for users of the college scheduling app “coursicle”. After the founders of the app romantically split, co-founder Joe Puccio began pushing out bizarre push notifications to users of the app (including “It’s time, Twitter dies tonight” and soliciting nude photographs) and re-directed the official website to a rant about cancel culture. Another warning about relying on digital infrastructure. ?
Very bad news for and from Elon Musk this week:
Firstly, California is suing Tesla, alleging it runs a "racially segregated" workplace and discriminates against Black employees, including calling the factory “the plantation” and subjecting employees to racial slurs.
Secondly, his really disturbing experiments implanting Neuralink chips into the brains of monkeys have killed 15 of them, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has filed a complaint with the the US Department of Agriculture, accusing UC Davis and Neuralink of nine violations of the Animal Welfare Act.
Finally, a geomagnetic storm has destroyed 40 new SpaceX satellites in orbit. Luckily they’ll be incinerated when they re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, but there’s a crisis brewing in poorly coordinated space objects
Academia is reeling after details of the lawsuit against a Harvard professor who psychologically and sexually abused his graduate students dropped (including revelations that Harvard obtained a student’s private therapy notes without her permission and gave them to her abuser). In light of the allegations, some thoughtful posts about abuse in academia by Paula Chakravartty and Claire Potter. (Plus, if you missed the original Harvard Crimson investigative report into serial sexual predators among the Harvard faculty).
For LGBT history month, Cambridge University’s Gonville & Caius college voted to take down Pride flag as academics there claim it’s ‘political’ 🙄
At the other Oxbridge university, Mansfield College received a £4.9m donation to create Oxford’s Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexualities, the first Professorship in LGBTQ+ History and fully endowed specialist post of queer history the UK. (This means Oxford gets extra points in the boat race, right?)
This absolutely WILD read in the LRB about a poet who confronts his own social media identity thief (spoiler alert: it ends with a crypto currency scam).
Excerpt: “A few months ago a poet contacted me to ask if my Instagram account had been hacked. This was surprising because I didn’t think that I had an Instagram account. But when I looked online I discovered that I did and I was really quite popular. . . My replicant had more than six thousand followers after only four months. If fake me continued at this rate then he would quickly become more popular than real me, and – since popularity is now the only true measure of legitimacy – I would, at that moment, become my own impersonator.”
It reminded me of this story in the Guardian about an academic who found out a graduate student had been impersonating him, attending conferences in his name, presenting his papers and even getting identical tattoos . . . the important question is—are we allowed to add imposters’ conference presentations to our own academic CVs?