#feminism and technology

[jadeannbyrne]

Honey, Come Quick! Jade Ann Byrne Just Mapped Out Humanity’s Roadmap for Everyone: A Visionary Feminist Future (2024 and Beyond)

The Evolution of Feminism: From Pre-Feminism to Wave 6 Feminism Before Feminism (Pre-Feminism Era) From the earliest civilizations, women have often found themselves bound by societal expectations, with their roles largely restricted to the home and subservience to men. Across different cultures and time periods, patriarchal systems were entrenched, and women were seen primarily as property or…

[caitlinjohns77]

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

So, in Brazilian feminism and technology news, the Chamber of Deputies has approved a bill that criminalizes the creation and sharing of nude images and videos created by artificial intelligence.

The text, authored by deputy Erika Kokay (Workers' Party) and reported by deputy Luisa Canziani (Social Democratic Party), sets a penalty of 1 to 4 years in prison, in addition to a fine, for anyone who creates or disseminates “montages or modifications that aim to include a person in a nude scene or sexual act, including the use of artificial intelligence in video, audio or photography."

The bill now heads to the Senate.

(x)

[australianwomensnews]

Evidence of a powerful link between smartphones, social media and depression, anxiety and self-harm among teenagers, especially girls, is growing, with new Australian research naming 2012 as the year that ushered in a mental health crisis.

The study of longitudinal data found there is a strong correlation between when an individual was born, how old they were when Instagram and Snapchat came into their lives, and self-reported mental health distress and social isolation.

“Young women born since the late 1990s report much lower levels of mental health than earlier generations and compared to their male counterparts,” the analysis from independent think tank e61 says.

“This generation has lived their teenage years when photo- and video-sharing social media platforms became popular in Australia.

“We also find that lower mental health is highly correlated to self-reported feelings of social isolation as measured through friendship connections.”

The analysis was submitted as evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into mental health and social media and whether age limits should be imposed on young people being able to access such platforms, among other things.

The analysis shows that self-reported scores on young women’s mental health declined from 73 per cent to 62 per cent between 2011 and 2022, while for young men it fell from 74.5 per cent to 67.5 per cent.

“Youth mental health was stable but then began falling sharply after 2012,” said Gianni La Cava, e61 research director.

Women aged 15 to 24 are the heaviest users of social media. Nearly 90 per cent of them use social media every day, or most days, compared with 62 per cent of women aged over 25.

There has also been a corresponding decline in friendships and feelings of isolation.

The e61 analysis notes some experts argue that social media can be a source of good for some young people, and mental health responses are individualised.

It also notes that there have been vast reductions in the stigmatisation of mental health issues among young people, which means that more may be comfortable in reporting it.

However, e61 says this “would not explain a sudden drop since the 2010s”.

In South Australia, former High Court judge Robert French was tasked in May with examining the legal consequences of banning children under the age of 14 from having social media accounts. The model would also require teenagers aged 14 and 15 have parental consent to access social media platforms.

In March, the US state of Florida legislated to ban social media accounts for children under 14, while Texas has legislated to require parental consent before allowing a user under the age of 18 to open an account. Spain also bans children under 14 from accessing a social network.

A growing body of evidence is linking social media and mental health. A survey by mental health service ReachOut this year found that 60 per cent of parents said they were concerned about their child’s use of social media and 55 per cent agreed that social media had a significant impact on their child’s wellbeing.

A US study found that adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes.

Support services:

Lifeline on 13 11 14

Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636

Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800

[rabiaticism]

It's interesting to see that artificial intelligence has only become a scary concept to people (especially men) upon realizing that they could be targetted, while there is a digital war on women going on that enables anyone in their vicinity to create degrading media of them despite their personal and legal efforts to prevent it from happening. The first idea that came to men's minds was to abuse this technology and invade women's privacy in order to mute their voices and bully them out of public discourse but it wasn't considered a dystopian tool of evil until it became a real fear to men.

[unichrome]

I remember attending those "girls in technology" programs and they just felt very alienating. You visited several places involving tech and they were all guys talking like you had no idea what anything is. No women in sight except receptionists/cleaners.

The program that intended me to join the tech industry just further hammered home that I don't belong there.

The best "girls in tech" was me working my way in by myself and gaining the self-esteem and confidence to not only not give a shit, but also thinking the men don't know shit more than I did, and are in most cases hired because they're men who feels entitled to a position in IT because they man and man logical.

I don't know how many incompetent men I've met in my career path that think they are a gift from the IT gods.

My tip for the girls/women reading this is gain the self-esteem enough to ignore what men are doing and wants us to be. Find your own path based on your skill. I can guarantee that an incompetent male will take many job positions but as your skill grow and as the men fail (often upwards) sooner or later the employer don't have any choice other than hiring you.

And then it's your time to shine. I almost immediately became the top malware analyst they had as I sharpened my skills every day while the men thought they did a good enough job because they were hired after all.

Then they'll ask you how you're so good at it, and that's worth the struggle you went through.

So don't give up on your dream blah blah basically ignore men, ignore their strategies for getting hired, you know what to do and you know how to get better. Find other women and encourage each other ok? You can do this! 💕

[haggishlyhagging]

When it is asserted in Germany that in vitro fertilization and similar technologies are all about helping infertile women, German feminists impatiently brush that claim aside. They are irritated at any suggestion that they ought to take such a claim seriously. It is, they say, a "Deckmantel," which means "cloak," "disguise." In conversations with them, one hears occasional references to the political naivete of Americans who accept such a "Deckmantel" at face value.

German feminists have known all along that the stakes in this issue are high. They are particularly sensitive to the ways in which these technologies can and are beginning to be used to manufacture human beings to specifications and, in the process, to reduce women to breeders or, less elegantly, to raw material for a new manufacturing process.

Unlike U.S. feminists, they organized as a movement on the issue and began spreading their critique beyond the feminist movement.

That the stakes are indeed high became dramatically evident in December 1987.

The German equivalent of the FBI (the 'Bundeskriminalamt") staged thirty-three simultaneous raids, many of them against feminists, throughout the Federal Republic of Germany, December 18 at 4:30 p.m. A total of 430 heavily armed police burst into the workplaces of activists. Fifteen to thirty in a group, the police swept into homes in Cologne, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf. In Essen, Duisburg, Bochum, and Hamburg, the raids were directed overwhelmingly against feminist critics of genetic and reproductive technology, according to Prozessgruppe Hamburg, a watchdog group.

The targeted critics have written and spoken on such issues as in vitro fertilization, amniocentesis, sex predetermination, and genetic engineering. They have actively opposed surrogate motherhood. Many worked together in a massive coalition to stop Noel Keane's attempt to open a branch of his U.S. surrogate business, United Family International, in Frankfurt. (Keane's New York firm arranged the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogate contract.) Their campaign to stop the sale of U.S. women to European men for breeding purposes ended successfully January 6, 1988 when a West German court ordered Keane's business closed, three months after it had opened.

Grounds for the police raids? In many cases, the women were not given any. But the next day, newspapers reported that the police conducted the searches to ascertain whether any of the individuals were members of a terrorist organization. They were specifically looking for a group called Revolutionaren Zellen and its feminist wing, Rota Zora.

The police were operating under Paragraph 129a of the terrorist act, "Support or Membership in a Terrorist Organization."

The women raided were forced to undress. All "non-changeable marks" on their bodies—scars, moles, etc. —were noted down in police records. The women were fingerprinted.

Two well-known and widely respected women were arrested: Ulla Penselin, active in two groups in Hamburg, Women Against Genetic Engineering and another group critiquing population control policies; and Ingrid Strobl, a journalist for eight years with the national feminist magazine, Emma. Strobl is accused of buying a clock used in a bombing attack against Lufthansa offices in Cologne to protest the exploitation of Third World women in the sex-tourism industry. Both women were charged under the terrorist act, Paragraph 129a. Strobl remains in prison while Penselin has since been released.

In the nationwide raids, police confiscated materials from an archive on genetic and reproductive technology established by women in Essen and from private homes and apartments. They seized drafts of the women's speeches, material prepared for seminars, names and addresses of those attending seminars, published work, videos, tapes of radio programs, scientific articles, postcards, brochures and private address books.

The police raids appear to be an attempt to stop the widespread antigenetic technology movement in Germany by linking legal organizations with more militant ones, Maria Mies, author of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and professor of sociology at the Fachhochschule in Cologne, told me in a telephone interview from her home.

"No concrete accusation or crime was being investigated," she pointed out. "This means that women doing 'Aufklarungsarbeit,' that is, researching reproductive or genetic engineering or talking about it or giving seminars, are already doing enough to provide a pretext for the attorney general to launch such a police action."

Mies, an organizer of the world's first massive feminist conference against reproductive and genetic technology in Bonn in 1985, said of the police action: "We think it is an effort to criminalize and intimidate the whole protest movement of women against reproductive and genetic engineering and frighten others away from participating in order to prevent the movement from spreading even more widely."

Mies added: "We are planning another conference against reproductive and genetic engineering just to demonstrate that we are continuing our work."

-Gena Corea, “The New Reproductive Technologies” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[a-study-in-darkness]

Does anyone else just stop and think for a second about how much farther along we could be as a society if women's and BIPOC ideas and creations weren't limited and/or destroyed throughout history and even today? Because I do. It haunts me.

[kafkasapartment]

Lady Florence Norman, a suffragette, rode a motor-scooter to work in London in 1916. The scooter, a gift from her husband, was likely a gasoline-powered Everready, an early mass-produced model. (The initial reports that it was electric and an Autoped are not correct.)

[disease]

Bra Cam wearable interactive art installation (sousveillance art) that reverses the ‘male gaze’ of surveillance by resituating a pair of surveillance cameras as two wearable wireless webcams. | 2001

[bfpnola]

what’s been happening in Congo, please share!

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Young Brazilian Innovator Develops Chip to Aid Women Victims of Violence

The device can be hidden in a watch or any other accessory and notifies trustworthy people

In the past, Nice was a female victim of domestic violence. Today, Nice is the name of a chip with artificial intelligence to protect women from violence.

Attached to a watch, pendant, or any other accessory, the device, when activated with a touch, sends warnings to people the victim trusts.

The chip’s story began during the pandemic. Amid the explosion of domestic violence, Mateus de Lima Diniz, then 20 years old, launched an app, Todas Por Uma (All for One), with which women, by waving their cell phones, could send requests for help.

Continue reading.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

For the record, some people in the thread say they got different results.

[radfem-polls]

How interested are you in technology?

1. Complete tech head.

2. I keep up to date!

3. It's just a tool.

4. Meh I have to use it for work/school.

5. Hate it.

Love ur blog as always 💚

Thank you so much for the love 💚

[troythecatfish]

[the-great-bonkings]

'Computers and technology are a male career-'

Oh ***k off, Ada Lovelace, a woman, was the first computer programmer and Hedy Lamarr, also a woman, invented WiFi.

They are the reason that we computers the way they are even exist. Learn your goddamn history.