Putting Lipstick on a GNU?

Abstract

This chapter explores social identity and multiple conceptions of who might embody the missing diversity in open-technology cultures, from the perspectives of diversity advocates. It discusses gender, race, and ethnicity. It also proposes that representation has its limits as a project of empowerment and suggests that workplace relations to some degree constrain the criticism that advocates express. The chapter focuses on how advocates for diversity in open-technology cultures define the identity categories around which they rally. It is evident that they hope to deepen an association between certain categories of social identity and certain forms of technological belonging. Contemporary social studies of technology treat technology as neither wholly socially determined nor as conforming to or flowing from an internal rational logic.