(audience applause)
So this is an extraordinarily
personal talk,
it's one that I first gave at PerfMatters
where Tim and I met in
person and I realized
that Tim and I are the most hilarious duo
because he's quite a bit taller than me,
I don't know you've noticed that.
But to give a personal talk like this,
many of you probably have no idea who I am
and so to tell you a
little bit about myself
to contextualize why this
talk is important to me,
hopefully that will help to
make it important to you.
So I want to tell you about myself
through the context of the
careers that I've tried
to hold and hold,
but I still am kind of trying I guess,
When I studied in high school
I wanted to be a journalist,
specifically a foreign correspondent like
Christiane Amanpour and I
wanted to travel the world
and do reporting and so I immersed myself
in newspaper stuff and
went to journalism camp
which is so nerdy to admit.
And I really deep dove
into newspaper stuff
and wrote a lot of pieces.
I thought journalism
was such a cool industry
to be in because it's one
where you can write a story
about the manhole covers in the street
or you could write a story about Watergate
and it has such immense power.
Part of that power that is also used
is that journalists can also write a story
that can villainize a 12
year black boy who's murdered
and that same journalist can
turn around and write a story
in Rolling Stone that humanizes
a white supremacist boy,
so I felt that there was a
lot of power in this career.
And I like many of our
favorite politicians,
I'm very power hungry I guess.
But journalism didn't
really pan out for me,
I graduated into what is now known
as the 2008 American Recession,
so journalism wasn't a
very good career option
at that point and a little website,
you may have heard of
it, called Twitter.com
was launched relatively
closed to when I graduated
and many people saw that
as the potential death
of print journalism, that this
idea of micro blogging news
would become the most prolific thing
and in many ways it has
but I do still see the occasional
newspaper here and there.
So I graduated without
really any job prospects,
I had to rely on a skill
that I learned from a very young age.
At 10, I went to school
with my dad basically,
my parents owned a pre-press business
which many of you don't
know what that is probably,
but pre-press is a step where
large format photographs
were taken of print designs
and then printed onto big metal plates
and those metal plates
were then given to the printing press
and that's something that
my parents specialized in
and that's what their business held,
but desktop publishing tools
became prolific very quickly
around when I was 10.
So tools like PageMaker, Quark Express,
which now modern processors
are things like Adobe InDesign,
those tools took over that
step and made it seamless
that people were delivering digital files
so my dad had to go back
to school to learn that
which meant that my mom worked three jobs
and was sending my dad back to school
and then me, being by myself.
I think Americans are
quite a bit different
than Europeans and especially the Dutch.
I saw at the airport while
I was waiting for my ride,
a child that was riding on
his parents' rolling suitcase
and he's taking a running
start and then jumped on it
and then slid a good
couple of hundred yards
it felt like, and then he face planted
and I laughed because
I'm a horrible person
and then after I laughed
I looked at his parents
to see what they were
doing, they looked over
and then continued having
their conversation.
And I just thought that
that was such a cool
thing to observe.
But anyway, I digress, back to my story,
my parents did not leave me home alone,
'cause that's I think
illegal in the United States
to leave your 10 year old
home alone for more than a couple of hours
or at all.
So I went to school with
my dad and on a gumdrop Mac
I learned things like Quark Express,
Photoshop before layers,
destructive Photoshop
for those who remember
that, terrifying time
and I just gained these design skills
and I used them for such good.
I built Backstreet Boys websites
and I once was the holder
of a NSYNC web ring
and then I also sold
Leonardo DiCaprio calendars
to all my friends 'cause
that's when Titanic came out.
So I've always been entrepreneurial,
so when I graduated I
took those skills back on
and basically emailed
every single person I knew
in my database and wrote
them a custom email saying,
"How can I provide a service to you?
"Design of anything from
a website with a CMS
"for a single origin coffee roaster
"to a poster for a belly
dancer to a press kit
"for a modern jazz musician,"
any job, I took every
single job that I could
and have a really weird
portfolio as a result.
But in 2017, I had been
working at an agency
for about five years and I
had helped to grow the team
from two designers, of which I was one,
to a cross disciplinary
team of 26 designers,
developers, content
strategists and writers
and I realized that I was
working this 60, 70 hour weeks
and for what purpose?
I was helping big brands
like Nike and Taco Bell
to sell more shoes and
tacos, I helping Jeff Bezos
to become richer, I don't
think he needs my help.
And so I decided instead to do
what any rational person would
and I did a hard reset on my life.
You're supposed to laugh then, come on.
(audience laughs)
Okay, thank you.
So a hard reset on my life
and I packed everything
up into storage, broke
up with my boyfriend,
quit my job and then
backpacked around Europe
to remind myself how
much better socialism is
and after a few months of doing that
it got very cold so I went home.
But what I realized in doing that
that the reason why I was so burnt out
making Jeff Bezos more money
as his little Santa's elf
is that I didn't have a
purpose for what I was doing.
And so that's when I
realized that at my core
I'm also an activist.
So we looked back through
my career in journalism
taught me to seek stories,
stories that are of small things
like manhole covers from
people that are often ignored.
And being a designer taught
me that the solutions
that we seek are only
as good as our framing
of the problem and activism taught me that
unless we explicitly seek justice for all
we only ever end up with justice for some.
And if we can catenate this into a string
we have seeking solutions for justice
and that is what I do now.
My name is Tatiana Mac, I
use she and they pronouns
and I'm here to speak to
you about how privilege
defines performance.
When I give this talk at other places
where they don't understand
what performance is
and they think performance
is performance art
and they expect me to do a dance,
I reframe this talk as how
privilege defines perspective.
So before you get into my
mentions and tell me about
how there's not enough
performance in here,
I think that you've gotten
a lot of performance today
so hopefully I can give
you some perspective.
So to appeal to this
audience I wrote you all
a plugin and like most plugins
this is beta release
we're still testing it
on ourselves and on each other.
And before you install
anything you have to agree
to some terms and conditions and GDPR
and the terms and conditions of this talk
are quite simple.
It's that I recognize that this talk
is going to make many of
you very uncomfortable
and that's okay.
Comfort is how we grow, or
discomfort is how we grow rather
and I don't ask you to do
anything with that discomfort
I just ask you to sit with it.
So you don't need to make it go away,
you don't need to change yourself,
you don't need to do anything,
I'm just asking you to
sit with that discomfort.
Because I guarantee you
that that discomfort
will be temporary, you'll
go on with your lives,
maybe you'll be like, "Urgh
this chick gave this talk,
"whatever," and you'll
move on with your lives
and that discomfort is
something that you might
have the privilege of having go away.
Many of us, many of us in the audience,
I shouldn't say many of us,
some of us in the audience
live with permanent discomfort.
So with that said when
you think about privilege
I think there's some faces
that we might think of,
this is Regina George from Mean Girls,
movie that I reference a lot.
Maybe we think of Jordan
Belfort, played by
Leonardo DiCaprio, if you'd
like to buy a calendar
go ahead and send me a DM.
Or Moira Rose from Schitt's Creek,
if you haven't seen that show, hilarious,
I don't know if it's available
on Netflix in Europe,
so hopefully it is.
But privilege isn't just
reserved for fiction,
it's also very apparent in real people
like Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kim,
this is one of the many
Trumpster fires that we have
in my home country.
And also our boy, Marky, Mark,
who likes to store passwords
in plain text files
and also I don't know
if you can tell or not,
if that's a deep fake or real,
I don't think he can either.
So when we look at privilege
it's not so binary,
it's not just, we often say
that person's privileged,
right, as if it's a binary thing,
but really when we look at
the definition of privilege,
it's a special right,
advantage, or immunity
granted to only a
particular person or group.
And when we look at
privilege through the lens
of the ways that we define people,
I picked eight, I
recognize these are not all
the ways in which define
people, thank you for the people
who pointed that out to me,
I picked eight because it
fits a 16 by nine ratio well,
so that's the reason.
But the ways in which we
define people commonly
for UX personas, for example,
are things like race,
class, gender, religion, physical ability,
orientation, nationality
and mental ability.
And there some defaults
that I use for this,
to be white, wealthy,
a cis male, protestant,
able-bodied, hetero,
American, and neurotypical,
those are the default settings,
in tech in particular.
And when I first gave
this talk at PerfMatters,
just in April, which is so bizarre to me
that it was not that long ago, I included
the Implicit Association Test.
For those of you who
don't know what that is,
it was a test created by
two Harvard professors
about testing whether
we have implicit bias.
The way that they did this was
that they set two binaries,
when it's done digitally it's two buttons,
and you are to associate the
buttons with white and good
on one side, or black and bad on the other
and then things were
rapidly sent your way.
So a picture of a black
person or a white person,
or concepts like love,
okay good, murder, bad.
And what they were seeking to show
is that when white and
good are associated,
people would answer them
much more accurately
and quickly but when they were switched,
and white was paired with bad,
and black was paired with good,
people were slowed down.
And great, so that helps to prove
that we have an implicit
bias, but then what?
And the book that they
wrote about it called,
"Blind Spot," which is
a severely ableist title
is what I quoted in my talk
and I realized after my friend
and colleague, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
told me that this is bad setup,
I shouldn't be setting
up my talk this way,
because yes, we all have implicit bias,
we can't help it, we're
creatures of nature,
biases help us to survive.
Biases also distract from
true anti-racist work
and they distract from
the ability to fix bias,
overt or not overt, the harm that we do
is what we need to focus on.
We need to stop focusing on this idea of
oh well are you biased, are you not?
How do we fix bias?
No we need to do active anti-racist work
so all of this is distraction.
The article that's linked
in the slide is excellent,
it's very long and it is dense,
but basically Chanda
goes through and dissects
why this argument is so flawed,
why we need to stop focusing on bias.
So going back to this grid,
I didn't pick these at random
and what I want you to imagine is that
this is not random, okay
great, good job, Tatiana,
but instead, this is systematized.
But what if I told you
that the system behind this
is the white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy.
Now you might be wondering, okay,
you're in America, racism
is much more of a problem
there than it is here.
And I would profer that
on the global scale
with globalization is the way that it is,
there is overt racism
everywhere in the world.
Places where it's white
dominant are affected by racism,
it might manifest itself
in different ways,
culturally of course,
but it exists everywhere.
This term, white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy,
comes from an excellent writer
and really prolific human, Bell Hook,
she's a black feminist author
that I wish more people
would read.
The reason she came up with this term
was that when she was
interviewed about the harm
that she's experienced,
people would try to extricate
whether it was because she was black,
or because she was a woman.
And what she told them
is that all these systems
of oppression, white supremacy, sexism,
racism that stems from all of that,
all those systems are intersectional
and that's where the term
intersectional comes from,
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined that term,
another black feminist I
wish more people would read.
So when I gave you these default settings,
the reason these are the default settings
is because that's who
holds the most power.
In America this is who colonized America
and who raped and murdered
many indigenous people
so that they could found a new country.
Those default settings are
ingrained into our society
and so when we look at these settings
you might be thinking
that a lot of those boxes
are boxes that you yourself tick
and you might be feeling
defensive, that's natural.
And you might be thinking,
"I'm not privileged."
And I have a little secret for you,
and that secret is that
we all are, including me.
So now we're ready to
install our privilege plugin.
There's only 39 431 dependencies,
the first one being to
confront your privilege.
So I think to help take
off a little of the tension
in the room, I'll talk about my privilege.
So when we look at these
boxes, these are things
that I squarely fit into.
I'm relatively wealthy,
I have a $3000 computer
that only partially works
and has a shitty keyboard.
I'm able-bodied, I'm American,
which is guess is a privilege,
and I'm relatively neurotypical.
And when we assemble those together,
we have this list of terms,
but we hate being labeled in
such binary ways ourselves
and so let's add some new ones to this.
I'm able-bodied but I'm petite,
which means that I'm at
a distinct disadvantage
when I play basketball with
Tim and I still kick his butt.
I'm American but I'm a first
generation Asian-American
which means that any time
I get into a ride share
I have to have the
conversation with the driver
that's where you from?
I'm from Portland, but
where you really from?
Portland, I was born at
that hospital right there
that we're driving by.
No, you know what I mean,
where you really from?
What flavor are you?
That's my favorite.
And while I'm wealthy, moderately so,
not Jeff Bezos wealthy,
but I was raised poor,
my parents immigrated to America
and they didn't have very
much money when they did so.
So they created all of
the wealth for themselves
and thus for me.
And while I'm neurotypical,
I also experience suicidal
ideation and depression
and so these terms are
somewhat restrictive
that we only fit into these boxes,
but there's nuance to it.
And not only that just
because I'm not white
or a cis-male or hetero Protestant
doesn't mean I don't
benefit from those things.
My proximity to whiteness, that
I'm relatively light skinned
and Asian-American instead of say,
a black American, I have a
lot of relative privilege
as a result.
And while I'm not a cis male,
I don't believe in the gender binary,
I present in a way that
is not antithetical
to who I am.
When someone says,
"Ma'am," sure it annoys me,
but it doesn't hurt me
as badly as somebody
who doesn't identity, or
doesn't present in a way
that aligns with who they are.
And while I'm not hetero or Protestant
I don't wear any religious head covering
that immediately reveals to you,
what my religion might be.
And here's a plot twist for you,
privilege alone is harmless,
there's nothing wrong with privilege,
we all have privileges
Privilege is kind of like
the character from Mean Girls
I told you, it's like
homework that people should do
if they watch my talks,
it's like Gretchen Wieners.
To give you a little
context for Mean Girls,
it is a movie written by Tina Fey
and it is about Lindsay
Lohan's character, Cady,
she moves to a new high school,
and there's a group of girls, plastics,
and they're the most
popular girls in the school,
and she's trying to just fit in and get by
in high school.
So Gretchen Wieners is kind
of the ditziest character
and so she's a really good
representation of privilege.
But, and it's a big but, she has a friend,
Regina George, who represents power.
And that's the thing is that privilege
is what gains us our power.
So when we look at this block here,
what that represents and
what I didn't tell you
is that it's something that we stand on.
So the block is something that we all have
but it's different for everyone.
So here's your average dude in tech
and there's me, he has
more relative privilege
and he's on a higher block than I am.
And what I didn't tell you
about this grid earlier
is that it's not so much
a grid or just a grid,
it's also a wall and so when
we have our privilege box,
that's what gives us
the leg up on this wall.
The thing about privilege
is that it doesn't dictate
how hard we work or how far we go,
you can be the most
privileged person in the world
and you can still work supremely hard
and you can still have
had a lot of grievances
and a lot of pain in your life,
I'm not trying to take that away.
I'm just trying to say
that privilege determines
where we start.
And the thing with privilege is
we're standing on a block, we don't often
look down at our feet
to see what's under us,
our privileges are invisible to us
until someone, on a stage,
is yelling to us about it
for 45 minutes.
And there's this diagram that
I borrowed from The New Yorker
and it was done in that
ugly New Yorker style
which is really not fitting my vibes
so I redrew it with Pac-Man
and what it says on here
is that the dot says,
"The world is unjust,"
and Pac-Man says, "Well
there is some justice,"
and then Pinky's like,
"What are you talking about,
"the world is just."
We're going to analyze this a little.
Here's the difference,
is the dot can't move
and Pac-Man and Pinky can.
And that's the thing is that the dot,
what gets generated as
the dot or as Pac-Man
or as Pinky is random, just like us,
it was by random selection
that I was born in Portland
as a first generation Asian American,
that's a randomized thing
that I did not help,
just like you didn't
help where you were born.
But the thing is the system that grants us
the power associated with
our privilege is not random.
And when we look at this diagram,
we're looking towards the privilege,
we see that privilege is
heading in a specific direction,
that's a vector.
And most days we're not looking at that,
most days were looking
towards our oppression,
the ways in which we are
disadvantaged within life
and the reason for that
is that we look for the
ways in which the system
benefited us, our privileges,
we don't look towards, excuse me,
the ways in which the system
benefits us though our privilege,
instead we look towards the
ways in which the system
disadvantaged us, that's
what we're doing most days,
and the reason for that is capitalism.
Capitalism wants to tell us,
"Hey, scarcity is a thing,"
capitalism scares us with scarcity,
and there's a reason for that,
because the harder we work,
the more money we make
for the system.
And so capitalism just
tells us to work harder,
get over it, get over
whatever social justice shit
you're talking about, just work harder,
I hear that a lot on social media.
So I want to reframe this for you all
in a way that might resonate
if you're still not convinced
which is that Lyft earlier this year,
IPO'd at a cool 24.3 billion dollars,
U.S dollars.
This guy, Logan Green, is now valuated at
a also cool, 760 million dollars,
and like if I were on
Tinder before he IPO'd,
he only had like 360 million dollars
so totally would've swiped left on him,
but now that he's 760
million, I totally would swipe
right on him.
Just kidding.
And the average Lyft driver,
which by the way isn't, I
Googled average Lyft driver,
this is what came up, I've
never seen a Lyft driver
like this, so let me know if you do.
They make an average of,
according to a MIT study,
$3.30 per hour and if we multiply that out
times working eight hour
days at five days a week,
at 52 weeks a year, so
counting for no vacation,
no benefits, not taxes removed,
that's about $7000 in a year.
So if we look at his picture
I think we have to
admit that we don't earn
everything we receive.
Logan Green didn't work
140 000 times harder
than the average Lyft driver
or 80 to 90 thousand times
more than you or I, I just don't buy that.
And that might make us uncomfortable,
especially if we have a bit more money,
you might be mad right
now or you might be sad
or you might be feeling awkward.
And the reason for that
is because we really
like to peddle this idea of meritocracy,
that's at the core of tech.
And meritocracy is this
idea that things like goods
or power, wealth, they should
be based just on pure talent,
effort, achievement, rather
than things like sexuality
or gender or race, all the
things in my block effectively,
and here's a thing with meritocracy
that not very many people know.
Meritocracy came from a book,
written by Michael Young,
and the book was a about
the London school system,
so it was about the ways
in which the London schooling system
was feeling,
that book is a satire.
So basically this homey wrote a book
that was the equivalent
of an Onion article.
I don't know if you've
ever read the comments
on the Onion's tweets when
they tweet their articles,
a lot of people think the Onion's real
and that's what happened with meritocracy
is that it's a satirical concept.
He made up this concept about
the London schooling system
and wrote this satirical book
and then people took this idea,
of meritocracy, which is at
the core of the book seriously
and I remember reading
something about Michael Young
on his death bed and he was like,
"Fuck, that is my one regret."
So invite you here to this funeral,
the death of meritocracy.
When we kill something
or when something dies,
we might experience
some grief like denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance,
so let's walk through those.
Denial might look like I
work hard for everything,
sure, I'm sure you do.
Anger, slavery wasn't my fault.
Bargaining, why not a Men's Month?
Depression, I hate my privilege.
To acceptance, where I hope we all land
which is that privilege isn't my fault
but it is my responsibility.
And as the great James Baldman,
a tremendously fabulous writer
that I wish also more people would read,
"Nothing can be changed
until it is faced."
And that's what we're doing today.
So we recognize that privilege and power
play a key role but that's
not the complete picture,
there's two other high schoolers,
played by Lindsay Lohan on your left
and Amanda Seyfried and they represent
bias and ignorance.
And that's the thing is that privilege
is what gains us our power
but ignorance is what hides our bias.
And so next step, and still
got 43 231 dependencies,
God, we're not on airplane Wi-Fi
like the last time we were on NPM,
we need to admit our bias.
So we look at this, this
is what our focus is,
and how does that manifest
in tech you might be asking,
you've been talking about
privilege and quoting some people
I've never heard of, what about tech?
All right here you go my friends,
this is the chart from
the Majestic Million.
For those of you who don't know,
that is a study that was
run earlier this year
by the Web Standards, WCAG,
and they run some of
these on accessibility
and oversee the standards
and these are the results
of the one million most popular sites.
The most common mistakes
made for accessibility
are things like low
contrast, missing alt text,
empty links, missing form
labels, missing document language
and empty buttons.
Now I'm not going to stand up here and say
that accessibility is
easy because it's not,
but relatively speaking, these six areas
that are the most common,
are very simple to fix
compared to a lot of
other accessibility lows.
And these are things that can be fixed
by a lot of people, things
like missing alt text,
especially are things
that can be generated on the user side.
So these are not things
that are overly technical
is my point and the
reason that that happens
is the same reason why Dominoes
asked the Supreme Court
to shut down a lawsuit
requiring their website
to be accessible to vision impaired people
and people who use screen readers.
And the reason is because
we center the able-body
and neurotypical experiences in our work.
This is your average gender drop down,
I imagine many of you work for companies
that have a gender dropdown
and I hope you remember this.
I fill out a lot of forms
and I noticed one day
after years of not noticing
that male is always listed first,
I'm curious why, is it
the number of characters?
Or is it because God made Adam
first and then he made Eve
so it's like a Biblical
nod, is that why it is?
And then I also looked at the Dutch census
and it's interesting, the
Dutch census from 2011,
the breakdown shows on
the graph on the left,
is the average age of
men in the Netherlands,
that's graph, 3.2.3 and
then this is followed
by 3.2.4 and this is a
pattern that is prolific.
Men are listed first almost always
and it's very rare that
we include gender options
beyond the binary such as non-binary,
usually it's just listed as other.
And this also manifested itself in a tool
in Framer, so this is a Framer,
I was doing a design
that had a lot of faces
and many of you can see but
I'll describe it for those
who might not be able to see this.
I was trying to figure out
when I did a whole array of faces,
there was like 60 faces in front of me,
they were all masculine presenting,
probably men staring back at me.
I was like, this is so weird,
I know that tech is really
shitty at this stuff,
and so this is a mistake
that I'm not surprised by
but I was like, I wonder
if there's any way
that I can change it and
then I open up the settings
and then I saw that the
gender, when listed as true,
was male and when it was
listed as false it was female.
So I learned that day that
my gender is in fact false.
(audience laughs)
And the reason for things like that
are because we center
the cis male experience.
Now this one, this is a video of the
soap dispenser, I don't
know if it will play,
it won't play.
So it's the soap dispenser
at Facebook offices
and you may have seen
this, it dispenses soap
to the light skinned hand
and does not to the dark skinned hand.
Oh now it plays, there you go,
it works, great, white
people can be sanitary,
oh and if you have a dark skinned hard
you don't get to be sanitary, okay.
No, how do I get to the next slide?
(audience laughs)
I'm stuck on a racist loop.
Help.
All right and then my
friend, Jacky Alcine,
which is one of the
coolest names of all time,
tweeted this a while back,
Google Photos, y'all fucked up.
My friend's not a gorilla.
So this is the automated
algorithm that Google
thought would be really
helpful to identify
that things that are skyscrapers,
airplanes, bikes, cars,
and oh, look, his friend is a gorilla.
Self driving cars are more likely to hit
black pedestrians than white ones,
as if we need more things
to murder black people
in this world.
And this is my favorite one because it is
dear to my heart.
So it's a camera that tries to tell you
when someone blinked,
Joz Wang is not blinking.
And then to things like when
you Google successful CEOs,
this is what comes up.
And the reason for all of
these things is because
we center the white experience,
you're starting to see a pattern.
Now within performance, when
we're doing our testing,
this is a screenshot
from Firefox dev tools
and Chrome dev tools, you'll notice
that there things listed
like Galaxy, iPhones,
Microsoft Lumia, Nexus, Pixel, iPhones,
kind of the standard phones
that are quite common,
but not around the world.
I was in Nairobi and
Lagos earlier this year
speaking at Concatenate,
amazing conference
and most people around me had phones
like Huawei's and One's and phones
that you might have never have heard of,
Tecno, those are the phones that are most
used in the world.
If you look at global population,
the phones that are used
in India for example,
surpass by and large all the phones
that we center in our testing.
And all those phones I should add
are what are considered low end devices,
so they're phones that are anywhere
between 100 to 300 dollars,
they're perfectly excellent smart phones.
What we typically use and
center in those testing tools
like iPhones and Pixels
are thousands of dollars,
those are considered high end devices.
The reason for that is because we center
the American experience, I know it's weird
to be in the Netherlands and to say
that we center the American experience
but you have to remember
that Silicon Valley,
the real place not the TV show,
that is where the hub of so much happens
and so I see this being emulated
even in places like Nigeria,
where they really idolize
the work that we're doing in America.
And when we look at this, at some point,
a designer, developer,
casted some sort of range,
they decided what an
appropriate skin tone was
or what was sufficient
contrast for their website,
and they determined some sort of device,
money range and they might
have done that intentionally
or unintentionally but it doesn't matter
because the impact is still the same.
And they missed part of the picture
that the ranges that they
cast were insufficient
for the testing that they did.
The reason for that is that we
have a very narrow world view
and in fact, I would say
that we deny this objectivity
of our world view.
And we really like to hide behind math
and your girl's a math
major and I love this tweet
by Ryan Saveedra, he says,
socialist representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
claims that algorithms,
which are driven by math, are racist.
I would like Ryan Saveedra to take a look
at the way in which we cast these ranges
so we might see things as being usable
or unusable, we might
set an appropriate range
for things like my apartment door,
I can't trigger the door of my apartment,
I wish Tim could just walk
around with me all the time.
But it's set at some of
appropriate range for me
to actually get to leave my apartment.
Or in performance, we might determine
what is an appropriate
load time for somebody
but that's going to be
different around the world,
especially in places like Lagos
where people are relying on data instead
of on Wi-Fi.
And we might determine
an appropriate range
for someone to walk.
We might decide that a mile is close by
or 10 miles might be close
by depending on who we are,
and we abstract these terms sometimes
to being more generalized
words like hard and easy,
tall and short, fast and
slow and near and far.
And the problem with
this is that they too,
these terms are centered
in the neurotypical,
able-bodied and wealthy experiences.
I wish that there was a
book that Ryan Saveedra
and many of us in tech
would read actually,
two books, which are,
"Algorithms of Oppression,"
and, "Technically Wrong," these two books
do an excellent job of showing
how things like algorithms
are extremely laden with our bias
and with our center of perspectives.
And that's the thing, is that we in tech
have the privilege of
defining what the viewport is.
And what we include in the viewport
is the grid I showed you,
the default settings of that
grid are what we center,
I center those experiences even though
I'm not squarely within them.
And when we look at this graph,
we need to remember that
this is all relative
and we need to contextualize
our absolutes with the relative
and to do that we need
to lessen our ignorance.
Still at 43 231 dependencies
for anyone who's counting.
So when we look at this graph
what we need to recognize
is the term I really hate and
that you might hate as well
that you hear from
clients say which is that,
"This is what's above the fold."
Oh my god, I hate it so much,
but we need to be aware
that we're always focused
above the fold, we're
focused on the viewport
that defines our lives and
so in order to fix this
what we need to do is have a curiosity
and to scroll past our own viewport,
we need to consume things
that do not center our experiences.
Little story here is that I don't know
for those who have seen this movie,
it's a short by Pixar,
it was the precursor
to Incredibles 2 and
Bao, I wont' spoil it,
but Bao is a movie about a mother and son
who make dumplings together.
And I was watching this is the theater
and I was crying hysterically.
For those of you who have seen Up,
that's probably the only other Pixar movie
that also made me cry
as much as this movie.
But this movie was really the first time,
I think I was in my late 20s,
where I saw the depiction
of something that resonated
with my relationship
with my own mother.
20 some years old.
And then around me, mostly white folks,
'cause that's what I have in Portland,
they were laughing and they were like,
"That was such a weird movie,
what was that even about?"
They said, and this is an
ableist word that I hate,
but they said it was stupid.
And to hear other people
experiencing something
that just emotionally struck at my core
and to hear them say that it was stupid
was a really really
really sad moment for me.
And I think that what I wish
I had known to say to them
at that moment is to
understand that not everything
is made for your understanding.
I grew up for 29 years, only
seeing Disney princesses
that didn't look like me.
You've got a blonde
one, you got a red head,
you got a brunette and
then it wasn't until Mulan,
who's Chinese, that
didn't resonate with me,
that I had a Disney princess,
I don't know if she's even
classified as a princess,
but a Disney princess that looked like me.
And we throw around the term empathy a lot
in this industry, especially
within the design community,
we talk about empathy all the time,
how empathy for your users.
And I have a word for
empathy, empathy is a scam,
I don't buy it.
The reason is because when
we look at the definition
of empathy, it is the
capacity to understand
or to feel what another
person is experiencing
from within their frame
of reference, that is,
the capacity to place oneself
in another's position.
I don't think that someone
in that movie theater
watching that movie could understand,
fundamentally, how I was feeling,
I just don't think that's possible.
And more importantly,
whether or not it's possible,
empathy seeks to validate
someone else's lived experience
by centering your own.
You're basically saying,
if I can feel that, then it's valid,
if I can't feel it, then it's not valid.
So instead let's replace
empathy with trust,
trust people when they say
that something is racist,
trust people when they
say something is sexist
and trust your user's lived experiences
over your own presumptions.
So if someone tells you that something
feels fast or slow, trust that.
And stop gaslighting
people's lived experiences
just because they're not your own.
Because again, we might
not be able to understand
how someone is feeling, but
don't gaslight them for it,
don't tell them, well that's not true,
are you sure about that?
That's gaslighting, stop it.
I love this quote from
Angela Davis she says,
"If they come for in the morning,
"they will come for you in the night."
And I think that what is happening,
I wrote earlier this year
an article for A List Apart,
called, Canary, I always
cannery, Canary In A Coal Mine,
and that's how I feel all the time,
that in tech, I'm screaming
about these issues
and it's like what I've become known for
which I'm partially resentful for
because I think I'm a decent
designer and developer as well,
but these issues plague
me every single day,
and they plague users and
people that look like me.
And the thing is I'm a
canary in a coal mine
because I'm saying it
first, I'm telling you
I can't breathe anymore, you're all miners
and you might be able to
hold a bit more oxygen,
but at some point it's going
to start impacting your lives.
Case in point, global climate crisis,
indigenous people have
been screaming about
the global climate crisis forever
and we ignored them, we
didn't listen to them
and now it's starting to impact
people in wealthy countries.
So what we have to do to fix
this is to share our power
because nothing about us without us,
that is a saying we say
a lot in accessibility
and what we mean by
that is that we need to
include people in building these tools.
So, "Diversity is being
invited to the party,
"inclusion is being asked to dance,"
what a lovely quote by Verna Meyers,
the VP of Inclusion at Netflix.
But I borrow Verna's words and add to it
that justice is letting
someone else throw the party.
I don't know how many
conferences I've been to
where all I see staring back at me
at white, wealthy, cis
males, who may or may not
be Protestant, able
bodied, hetero Americans,
who are neurotypical, that's
who's building the tools,
I just ask for those
people, get off the stage,
you've had your time, so
many of them are speaking
at the same conferences year after year,
set it for someone else, use
your privilege to step aside
and to tell a new narrative,
let someone have their Bao,
you've had your Cinderella,
you've had your Snow White,
you've had so many of
your narratives centered,
let someone else tell a story for once.
And hand over the keys and
power of our tech tools
and of our companies to
disabled, trans, immigrant,
Muslim, Black, Indigenous,
non-binary people,
and women of color.
And in doing so we need
to help each other,
we need to learn to lift as we climb.
And you might be wondering,
"Well, aren't you just
setting up a new grid,
"if we center everything
like the black, poor,
"Muslim, queer,
neurodiverse, non-American,
"disabled perspective,
does that fix things?"
And the answer is no
it doesn't fix things,
letting them throw the party,
I would be a lot more
fun party first of all,
but re-centering these
narratives isn't enough
and instead what we need to
do is we need to tear down
the wall together.
So I tell all the Chads,
which is I'm sorry,
I'll go back to this slide,
I call a lot of white dudes
in Texas Chads and then I realize
that is a perfect initialism which is
a Caucasian, hetero, abled, dude,
so you're welcome for that.
So all you CHADs might
be staring back at me
right now wondering how do I go ahead
and tear down this wall?
What we have to do is we have to commit
to doing this in every single action.
Look at your dropdown menus,
look at every action that you're taking
and understand how it
might be harming people.
With everything we do,
with every poll request,
with every comment we make,
with every gaslighting moment
that we have, we're
contributing to reinforcing
these biases in the world.
So I just ask for you all to just commit
and to do so relentlessly.
Thank you.
(applause)
- I really like the way
that you're positioning
or discussing privileges.
- Look at my feet.
- Yeah, it's fair.
- I look like a child.
- That's where the basketball
thing again kicks in.
- Yeah, still beat you.
- I like the way that
you're framing the privilege
thing as a spectrum so I
think that's just coming at it
from obviously some people
are at one of that spectrum,
that's I think one of the hardest things
to come to terms with.
And from the empathy perspective as well.
I find that interesting as well
because we're taught a lot,
I've said it before, you've
got to empathize with users,
I'm constantly talking about
testing on networks or devices
for that sort of perspective.
Is it that it's completely useless
or is that that there's an extreme limit
to what empathy can provide?
- Yeah, I think that we can
not only replace empathy
with trust, but we can replace
empathy with compassion.
I'm not saying be a dick, but instead,
I think that empathy, I just don't know
what it really accomplishes,
what does empathy
accomplish, in your opinion?
- Oh boy, cute, I didn't prep for this.
I think for me, what I would
hope for it to accomplish
is to be able to make some of
those things a little bit more
aware.
That's where I guess
where I was coming from
with the question in terms of
the limitations of empathy.
I would hope that I would
see empathy as the goal
of empathy to make it so that
it opens my eyes to things
that maybe I have not seen before.
It makes it a little
bit more apparent to me
when something, that I have
biases standing out to me,
that I'm doing something
that was invisible biases
you were talking about.
But recognizing that yes,
no matter how much empathy
I develop I will never fully
understand what it means
to be in that different situation
or to have a different
perspective entirely.
- Yeah and I think what you just described
is a really great trait
which I would instead
reframe as curiosity.
That what you're describing
is that we need to be curious
about things that we might not understand
and we might not experience
and we need to have a curiosity
that our knowledge is
intrinsically limited,
we've only lived so much time.
And I think beyond that, that
when we address that curiosity
by learning, that there's just some things
we don't understand,
like I do not understand what it's like
to be a developer in Lagos
who relies on using data,
who is on a phone that
can't load a website
that shipping in a gig of java script,
I don't understand what that feels like.
And what I've observed
is that we have this,
someone a while back tweeted
something about like,
"Oh my gosh, look at
these Nigerian developers,
"I saw one carry these
bags, his hands were worn,
"and he was smiling, he
was happy to carry it
"for kilometers at a time,"
and it's like that is us projecting
onto them what suffering
looks like or projecting,
a lot of people, especially
in the performance land,
I focus on that fast and slow,
because fast and slow is so relative.
Sure, when I'm on airplane Wi-Fi
and I'm sipping on my free drink like,
"Oh the internet's so slow,
"poor people must be so sad about this,"
maybe that's me being empathetic,
but then what?
I only care about it
because it affects me,
I don't know, I'm not sold.
- That makes sense.
And this is not a question but
I want to give you a chance--
- It's more of a statement.
- Yeah, it's more of a statement,
I'm going with that one.
I want to give you a chance
to plug the Self Define thing
because that feels extremely
relevant for this particular
conversation.
- So I'm building a dictionary,
which is no small task and the reason
I'm building a dictionary
is because when I speak out
about a lot of these issues online,
you'll notice that I have a
fixation with definitions,
I think I included four
definitions in my talk.
People will quote me the
dictionary definition
of racism a lot.
And the dictionary definition according
to Merriam-Webster is something like,
racism is any sort of
discrimination against
any grouping of race.
Well that's ignoring privilege and power
and all these things that again,
people of color have been
saying for a long time.
And I just don't think
dictionaries evolve quickly enough
to address things in the positive
like our ever growing
understanding of gender fluidity
and all the terms that came with that.
Or understanding of just
the terms that define us.
So the dictionary's called
Self Define for that reason
is that I'm hoping to
give a place for people
to define these new terms
that they're coming up with
as we continue to evolve
and I want to build a few things,
future plans are to create an API
so that you can plug this
dictionary into any of your tools
to have access to all the definitions,
I'd like to build a Twitter
bot and a Slack bot.
So in the same ways something
like Threader App works,
you can say @threader_app,
please unroll this thread for me
and it does that and then
they steal your content
and sell ads on it.
The dictionary, you can
say, "Hey @selfdefinebot,
"define racism," and it will
generate that with the bot.
And what the intent of that
is to lessen the amount
of emotional labor placed
on minoritized people
in particular, to do a
lot of this education.
Sometimes it feels like my job,
in addition to having a
normal, scope of work,
is to educate people, and
so I want to build something
that can help take off
that burden of education.
And then lastly, the thing
I'm most excited about
is to be able to have, many
of you might be familiar
with the website, Pronoun.is,
if you're not you should look it up,
but basically what it does is it helps to
say, pronoun.is/she, they
and it tells you what the pronouns are
and then it teaches when
you click on that link
how to use the pronouns.
I would like to do something similar
where on the dictionary
it will say something like
selfdefine.me/asianamerican plus pan,
and I could put that on my
profile and then someone
can immediately understand,
they might be like,
what does it mean to be pansexual?
They can click on that, and now they know
what terms that I want to use for myself.
Like with the disability community
a lot of folks might prefer to be called
a person will disabilities
or they might prefer
to be called disabled,
that dictionary will
help people to just do
a lot less emotional labor
so that they can get back
to their lives.
I don't enjoy talking about this stuff,
it's not fun for me, I sorta had fun
when I was making fun at Tim,
but beyond that, that's not
45 minutes of fun for me,
that's 45 minutes of
emotional labor and work
and I'm probably going
to crawl in the corner,
backstage into the fetal position
and enjoy the conference from back there.
So yeah, please look up my dictionary,
I'm really excited about
it and it's open source
so if you have contributions
like someone contributed,
they have obsessive compulsive disorder
and they were really sick
of people using that term
to mean anal retentive or particular.
So really I would love
for more contributors,
so if you could contribute
your time or code or writing,
I would really invite
that and appreciate it.
- And I know that this is an
incredibly emotional journey
and stuff like that which
is why I'm so very grateful
that you're willing to do it.
Really appreciate it, it
was extremely powerful,
extremely important so thank you.
- Thank you Tim.
(audience applause)
