Opengender

How does a collection of perfectly nice, open-minded, people end up forming a conflicted and discriminatory culture? This is the text of a particularly vicious flame sent to various women's FLOSS groups recently. It's a point of view which I know 99.9% recurring of FLOSS blokes would fall over each other rushing to distance themselves from. I'm only reproducing it here because the ranting of lunatics often articulates something uncomfortable and difficult about society – but which we may yet need to unpack: . . . Men created free software. Now women come along to take the credit with 'me too'. Go to hell. Death To women's Rights Death To women's Liberties Death To women's Freedoms You are not wanted or needed. Get the fuck out of our hobbies. You want to control all. Worthless c**** . . . Clearly this flamer is just a lunatic and we immediately invoke bans to shut him out of 'our' virtual world. There is no need to discuss such vitriolic rubbish. But I do think it identifies, albeit in an unbearably uncomfortable way, an element of how an exclusionary mesh works. Humans are 'pack' animals and, as such, make adjustments to the group culture in order to have a sense of belonging which is crucial to human identity. If people from another cultural group (this could be race, gender, class – anything you like!) want to integrate into a group, the original group can begin to feel threatened – often against their own better judgment and in a way which the members of the original group themselves find uncomfortably impossible to explain. If only one representative of an external group arrives, this individual will be expected quickly to learn and conform to the host culture. They will be expected to begin at the bottom of the group's internal heirarchy and gradually become more integrated as they become more competent in reproducing the group's conventions and conforming to its expectations. Groups always have mild forms of 'punishment' for non–conformity and heirarchical position depends on behaving in accordance with its conventions. People find it difficult to trust someone whose behaviour they can't predict (sad, but true). This is why conformity is so important to most people. If more arrive, the constructs of the shared culture of the host group begin to be challenged because the incomers will not understand or approve the conventions of the host group. If the incoming group is already subaltern to the host culture, they will resent being allotted to the bottom of the heirarchy. They may meet separately and create 'pockets' of communication structured by the conventions of their culture of origin and try to make sense of themselves in the host environment whilst avoiding a sense of being 'punished' for their difference, forced to abandon their own conventions, or allocated subordinated positions within the group heirarchy. A 'subaltern' group with cultural conventions hybridised between culture of origin and new environment begins to take shape. This may create tensions with the host group and they may try to contain the the subaltern group. Depending on the political ambience of the dominant group, this may be either by violence or by constituting the subaltern group as 'a problem' and setting sociologists to research and 'solve' the problem. The subaltern group will begin to feel as resentful as the original group and will begin actively and collectively to demand change. The original members of the group will begin to fear a breakdown in their comfortable sense of adjustment to the original group's well–known and understood requirements and reassuring sense of belonging to this group's culture. They may even fear that the group will be destroyed. I think all this is perfectly natural – but at the same time it unintentionally fosters exclusion and can lead to painful conflict – as we've seen again and again all over the globe. The trick is to find ways of adjusting the whole culture to be comfortable for all without making the original members of the group feel disempowered and insecure or new members feel excluded or subordinated. Of course, the ideal is that the original members of the group make voluntary adjustments – participate in the hypbridisation process – and so can feel equally 'in control' of the changes together with the incomers. But, too often, the original members of the group will draw closer together, forget existing internal conflicts, and collectively try to ward off the 'threat'. We're at a crossroads in FLOSS. We can work together to build a FLOSS movement capable of adjusting, learning, and growing through inclusion, adjustment and hybridisation of culture to new FLOSS movements in the developing world and among women (bearing in mind that neither are homogenous categories and cultural categories always overlap) – or white, western men can try to pull up the drawbridge and repel the 'invaders' in the name of cultural 'purity'. History will tell . . . Rubbish! I hear you cry – FLOSS is not a conventional environment. This is a happy band of non–conformists and it is not possible that such a process could be occurring in our anarcho/liberatarian El–Dorado. Hmmm. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana