Episode 132: Rebecca Valentine discusses queer hackerspaces
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What is Queerious Labs and why was it founded?
Hello
and welcome to Lucidations. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Rebecca Valentine, co-founder of Querious Labs in San Francisco. Rebecca Valentine, welcome.
Hey, how's it going?
So I billed you as the co-founder of Querious Labs, and I thought maybe we could start off by talking about what Querious Labs actually is. It's where we're recording now, so I see all kinds of querious things on the walls. But yeah, so what exactly, where exactly are we and what goes on here?
Yeah. So Quirious Labs is a queer anarcho-feminist art space, workshop, sometimes hackerspace, depending on who you're talking to. Yeah, it's just like it's a community space that's run by the community for creative technical projects, teaching, holding events, all sorts of things like that.
So you mentioned it was anarcho-feminist, and that might be a new term to some of our listeners. It sounds like it's a combination maybe of anarchism and feminism. Is that about right?
Yeah. A lot of the motivation behind Quirious Labs is a response to a very cishet masculine tech culture here in San Francisco and in the Bay Area more generally. And so a lot of us come from kind of anarchist or socialist communities. But here in the Bay Area, within the tech world, even within sort of the hacker world and the art tech, that sort of intersection of communities, there is quite a lot of masculine dominance and... Low level sexism and misogyny and these sorts of things. And, you know, if you just look at tech, broadly speaking, well, that's just saturated with it. Right. And so we created the space as a kind of response to that, where we would have an anarchist take on what this. kind of community could be like you know where an anarchist take on hackerspaces on community workshops these sorts of things which is not novel but the feminist part of it kind of is there have been other feminist hackerspaces or makerspaces like double union but they haven't really been anarchist they haven't been open and so we wanted to sort of take a bunch of the things that we loved about various places and try to build a new thing that no one had really done before
So in that context, it's anarcho-feminism, or queer anarcho-feminism specifically.
Yeah, so that's all very cool. What exactly is a hacker space?
So a hacker space is a space for hackers. But the deeper question there is, what is a hacker, ultimately?
Indeed, indeed. Is it a person that breaks into banks and steals money?
Well, no, that's a bank robber, but...
How does the show define a hacker and a hackerspace?
Uh, so a hacker is someone who, at least from my perspective, a hacker is someone who is passionate about the stuff that they do. Um, and that can be something computer related or it can be, uh, you know, knitting, it can be whatever, but typically it's someone who's passionate about it, does it because they love it and is sort of, Oftentimes doing it in a way that is not the standard way or the officially authorized way or stuff like this. So historically, hackers, the term originates from MIT and people were like hacking on model train kits. to sort of turn them into whatever they wanted the model train kits to be as opposed to the actual official thing that the kit was designed to be. Right. And so they were like literally hacking their kits to pieces and, you know, reassembling them in all sorts
of ways. So there's actually literal severing of physical things.
Yeah. And then it became like the... This is like the model train club that like half of the computer science department at MIT was in or something like this, right? Which is why there was such an overlap with computer science and programmers. And then from there, it became sort of just... The kinds of programmers that were, I don't want to say strictly speaking counterculture, but counter to the dominant culture in computers at the time, which is like, you know, the narrow ties of IBM, right? And the engineers as opposed to like the people who just want to play around with computers and explore stuff.
Yeah.
And we get into the criminal aspects of hackers because, well, when you have a bunch of really curious geeks and you present them with a complex system such as, I don't know, the phone system, they're going to do some exploration and try to understand the system and how to make it do what they want it to do.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Queerious Labs and why was it founded?
0:09–3:07
2
How does the show define a hacker and a hackerspace?
3:07–8:17
3
Why does Queerious Labs describe itself as anarcho‑feminist?
8:17–13:59
4
What historical examples illustrate the hacker mindset (MIT model‑train hacks, phone‑freaks, Kevin Mitnick)?
13:59–20:34
5
How do creative hacks like making Alexa and Siri talk to each other subvert intended uses?
20:34–28:32
6
What is the connection between anarchism, bottom‑up organization, and hacker culture?
28:32–36:56
7
How do feminism and gender‑role hacking intersect with tech culture?
36:56–44:05
8
Why do ethics, theory, and practical tech work need to be balanced in modern hacking?
44:05–45:46
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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