(upbeat music)
(applause)
- I'm really enjoying this evening.
And I really appreciate that,
I was just saying to Ash that we
have all these times to take breaks
and all these considerations to feel
included like David was talking about.
Usually at conferences I feel a little bit
more pressure to be sort of extroverted
and network and that kind of thing,
but this really comfortable situation has
helped me sort of be more my quiet self,
so I'm really appreciating
that about this evening.
I want to talk a little bit about
sort of a new research project that I'm
embarking on so please excuse me if
some of my thoughts are
not well formed yet.
What I was trying to look at is sort of
the aspects of legacies of colonialism
and imperialism in tech and start-ups.
Completely new topic for me,
so thanks for bearing with me!
I am not a native New Yorker,
but I've been in New York for
more than a decade.
Originally I'm from the Baltimore area
of Filipino ancestry,
and for several years going back,
maybe four years or so,
I've been working with the lower East Side
Girl's Club and this is one of my
first workshops there where we were doing
wearable computing,
we're making little light up LED pillows.
And so I wanted to sort of contextualize
my thinking about diversity starting
here at the girl's club,
and with some of the experiments that
I was doing on my own here in Brooklyn.
Most of what I do is very screen based,
but in recent years I've been getting
a little bit more into hardware,
hobby computing,
and this was around the same time that
MAKE Magazine the maker of movement
started to sort of come up.
And it's really great
to see the intersection
of screen based folks in tech with
hardware based folks in tech with
designers with crafters,
that kind of thing.
So it's been very gratifying to see.
And actually this project right here,
which was a prototype for a bike helmet
that had turn signals that were activated
by motion as opposed to buttons or
opposed to something
that was on your bike.
A lot of my bike accessories get stolen,
so I was experimenting with putting them
on my head.
That brought me to MIT Media Lab
for a couple years from 2011 to 2013,
and it was a very different setting than
the Lower East Girl's Club.
And so there's this sort of
smooth cathedral aspect to it,
that maybe some of you might...
Well, this car I think is a
great example of it.
It's a really beautiful small
autonomous vehicle that has sort of that
smooth cathedral-like aspect to it.
And so I remember the director of
the media lab Joi Ito,
he was hired the same year that
my co-hort came to the media lab,
and he said something along the lines that
he thought that he could never work there
because of that sort of smooth,
cathedral-like aspect to it,
and so it's interesting to sort of be
a representative of that space for awhile,
which is thought of as a media cathedral,
and then be inside the space and witness
a lot of micro-aggression.
We've talked a lot about the ways that
discrimination is more sophisticated now.
When I googled micro-aggressions
yesterday I saw,
and maybe you've seen some of these too,
all these different phrases
that different kinds
of folks from different kinds of groups
were writing and holding up as an example.
So one phrase that I
heard a lot myself is,
"Where are you from?
No, where are you REALLY from?"
And also "What are you?"
And it's interesting
because I've observed that
not only from groups outside my own,
but also from groups that want to sort of
claim me as their own.
So for instance when I have done research
in Indonesia or the Philippines
I am asked that question,
and it's just trying to situate
who you are and where you are,
so it's not always necessarily
a malicious thing.
One thing that I
experienced at the media lab
that I did not expect to experience
because it is supposed to be such
an interdisciplinary place,
especially in the context of
an engineering school is the follow-up
to those micro-aggressions,
those things that make
questions micro-aggressions.
So for instance asking these questions
like "What are you?",
and then if you take offense at it,
using humor to exclude you.
"You can't take a joke?
That's supposed to be funny."
Sort of implying that
you don't have the same
level of slick, intelligent humor.
That was something that I did not
expect to see there.
And one thing that I did also notice was
that there was this very strong divide,
and since then that has made me become
more interested in seeing that in
more technical communities.
That was something I wasn't exposed to
so much before,
this strong gender divide.
And so one thing I appreciate
about this event tonight,
and one reason I was attracted
to this event tonight,
was I think that it was helpful to sort of
contextualize that gender divide
in a larger context of diversity,
because there are a lot of issues
that all of us experience together,
but feel separate about it sometimes,
and in my experience in
becoming very involved
in the Diversity Committee
at the Media Lab,
it helped to be able to
talk about discrimination
not just from the perspective of females
or the perspective of Asians or blacks
or folks with handicaps
or any of those individual perspectives
but sort of thinking about them together
sometimes helped us to feel less isolated
from a dominant group.
So that was a nutshell of my experience
in the bubble of the Media Lab.
My actual work there,
my technical work,
was expanding on that
bike helmet actually.
And so it's interesting because
coming of the Media Lab,
coming back here to New York,
there was a program that started
when I finished my time
to support start-ups,
and it's called the E14 fund.
Kind of based on the response to
this bike helmet one,
and an article in Wired UK,
which will come back in
my talk later actually,
around this bike helmet which uses
an EEG sensor to
visualize your brain state
as you're riding your bike.
I sort of segued back here to Brooklyn.
But first kind of going through the final
hallways of the smooth
Cathedral of the media lab.
It's been interesting
to sort of participate
in start-up culture through my time
at the media lab and think about
how to translate some of the lessons
I learned about diversity
in start-up culture.
So how to translate the benefits that
a lot of start-ups give to folks
like these ladies, these women.
This was a conference about women
and entrepreneurship again through the
Lower East Side Girl's Club that
I participated in.
And there wasn't a whole lot of
technology involved.
I think there was a lot of interest
from the girls but not necessarily
a whole lot of discussion of resources.
So that's why it's great to hear about
organizations like Code Liberation
and see all these new resources
for girls and women that are popping up
just in the past couple years or so.
Something that got me started on
thinking about a longer lens,
a more historical context to these issues,
was seeing a movie at the beginning
of the summer,
a French movie called Violette.
Has anyone seen that movie?
Oh, great!
It was a biopic about a writer named
Violette Leduc who was a close colleague
and possible lover it was implied
of the writer Simone de Beauvoir.
A seminal writer in the feminist movement,
in the existential movement.
And I was really intrigued
by how these two women
had a kind of
entrepreneurial relationship,
so it was sort of like Simone de Beauvoir
was acting as a VC and Violetta Leduc was
sort of a start-up,
her work was sort of
the basis of a start-up.
I couch it that way,
of course it's not discussed
in that way in the movie,
but basically Simone de Beauvoir becomes
a patron of Violetta Leduc,
and I was really intrigued
by that relationship
and intrigued by the fact that these were
two women that actually lived,
and two women that were in a very
male dominated society
and were thinking of -
were integrated into that society as well.
So that led me down the pathway of
a number of these books
that are cornerstones
of women's studies programs and
political science programs,
and because I didn't study women's studies
or political science or American studies
they're all new too me.
They might not be so new to you.
But this was my summer reading.
And so right now what I'm trying to do is
in the context of all these books that
kind of came around at the same time,
post colonial cultural revolution,
that sort of context,
think about the issues
that plague us here today
in terms of tech in the 21st Century.
This is something you might have seen,
the series of diversity
in our big company reports
from Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook,
LinkedIn, Twitter, E-bay, more.
I really love this
interactive from USA Today
because one you can see
the visualization of
diversity breakdown from
all these companies,
and then finally on the right hand side
you see the racial breakdown and
white people are represented
as the darkest brown.
I just thought that
was really interesting.
Just to make it look like there's
a lot of representation of color.
I have no idea why,
I just thought that was really funny.
But something that came up in conversation
with my partner Chris who has influenced
this talk a lot was,
particularly when Google published
their diversity report,
a lot of news reports were saying
"Diversity here is terrible,
but we're recognizing that.
We're going to make strides."
And really it was all focused on hiring.
But something else that
I've been witnessing
as an issue as far as
diversity is concerned
is how these companies which in many cases
get very big and so then have a
venture investment arm,
the diversity in hiring
may be bad at companies,
but the diversity in investment
is often even worse.
This is one of the few discussions of that
that I could find,
an investor of color
sort of calling that out.
There are a lot of people
launching start-ups
for many different kinds of minorities,
but I think the notion
of the glass ceiling
definitely applies,
and the whole notion of micro-aggressions
and the thousand cuts
and that kind of thing.
So getting back to Wired UK,
it's also just interesting to think about
the complicit roles that we play.
I was fortunate enough
to be in this publication
through the media lab,
but at the same time the same person
who published that
magazine wrote an article
called "Want to be an
Internet billionaire?
Move to Africa".
That and a few articles about that
that came out around this
topic at the same time
were called out by Ars Technica.
I'm quoting:
"Many people saw these
articles as a return
to colonial resource
extraction propaganda,
but this time the resource was not
bauxite or diamonds it was them."
As a person sort of between two worlds,
I'm from several different minorities but
at the same time I do have a lot of
different kinds of privilege,
I've been privileged enough to do
a lot of travel and see a lot of
different kinds of innovation communities,
and thinking about OK
I participated in this
publication that at the same time is
making these comments,
it's just sort of a head
scratcher right now.
But one thing on the topic of
international start-up settings,
one thing that I'm starting
to explore a little bit
is a comparative study
of start-up settings
in the global South.
So where my family is from in Asia,
I have a friend who I
interviewed at length
who was involved in the
Chilean start-up scene,
and he was talking about how you have
legacies of colonialism inside companies
in terms of hiring,
in terms of venture investment,
but you also see the legacy in
cities and countries as well.
And so what my friend
was talking about was
how for instance in the
Chilean start-up scene
there's this entrepreneurship
or incubator tourism.
You travel the world in incubators
and a success in an
incubator here in the US
is getting venture investment.
Success in an incubator in Chile is
moving on to an incubator in a more
economically developed country,
so moving on to an incubator say in
San Francisco or here in New York.
Which I thought was quite interesting.
It's just been sort of
interesting to think about
the changing model of
cultural imperialism,
which used to be or still is these
very big companies like KFC or Mickey D's
are now becoming more
and more tech companies
like Amazon.
Recently when I was visiting family and
presenting some work in Manilla,
a new friend asked me
"Are you on Facebook?"
And I said, "No."
And she said, "That's a shame,
because here in the Philippines if you say
computer a lot of people
will think Facebook.
So you not being on Facebook is sort of --
you're not going to be able to
connect with a lot of people."
Here in the Philippines and just again
thinking about the lack of diversity in
a lot of these companies,
it's sad and it's frustrating to me
to think that these technologies
that are being wielded by all kinds of
underrepresented groups as users
are not being at this point developed
by these underrepresented groups.
So that's something that I hope to
somehow see change in the future,
and I think this conference is definitely
a step toward that.
So this is kind of a non-sequitur,
but in some of the research for this talk
this was the first thing that came up.
There are little toys
called Micro Aggression
by the WWE World Wrestling Entertainment.
And you can see that they're a bunch
of little wrestlers who are micro
and they're aggressive.
So just seeing that,
this is a way we can take back
the term micro aggression.
On that note here's my contact info.
Here's a fun little shot of the
technology that I worked on with
another person of color,
and I'm really proud of that.
So...thank you.
(applause)
(eletronic music)
