[Music] go ahead jack and introduce yourself no you go first i mainly work on building feminist body of knowledge does that look like the lives we live and um like the communities we inhabit part of it that is happening through the collective that i am part of i have been part of for like maybe the last nine years since we started it uh 2013. it's called and we mainly produce a feminist literature around sexuality in arabic so my name is jack i am a feminist activist i work on the intersection o
f feminism and technology and a bunch of other things including increasingly open culture and memory i guess i am a feminist that really is very curious about how power is unfolding in all of the different areas of our lives and i am malaysian i'm based in malaysia i am my politics is very much rooted in the larger world or what is known as the google self so being here at this particular moment in an unfolding history like you know this being here in this unfolding historical epoch uh it's a ve
ry exciting thing if you are if you're an activist if you're like you know if you're a feminist because then it means you are really in the in the heart incentive of making a change in my early days of first starting to do this work when i was actually discovering how badass feminists were in relation to beijing in relation to technology in relation to taking up technology as a political issue um was one of the first few times i went to un in new york when i first joined um apc this is like many
years ago maybe like yeah in the mid to 2000s or something there was this active network uh that has been there since beijing so they they've been working in beijing and in 1995 and we're still kind of like part of the csw process all the way through like you know by night when i got to know them in their work and one of the person there was maria fernandez and maria was saying something like you know being here at this moment is kind of like being there at the time of the when the printing pre
ss was being invented and the printing press completely revolutionized who was able to access knowledge who was able to be able to know and to be able to create meaning and to be able to express reality according to their point of view in a mass way so she really made that parallel and it made such an impression on me in terms of like yeah this capacity and this power right now to be able to shape we have it so we need to like you know really be quite quite on it like quite quick and quite on it
and let's like you know be like get as many as as many of our movements into this as possible and it was a big motivation for me i'm the generation who grew up like really connected to the internet so i was following different activists on twitter and from different places and somehow uh like my activism in a way that i was becoming passionate about feminism before actually i started having roots uh in my own country uh and when i found my community of feminists who are willing to practice and
learn from intersectional feminism in egypt it eventually became a work for me and like a bastion that like sounds uh sustainable in uh in my own context i was part of the digital rights movement in egypt but the thing is like being part of like does the rights movement it was happening in a vacuum and then my feminist work was happening in another uh like separated area of my life but the day i read and like i was introduced to the feminist principles of the internet uh somehow it all made sens
e uh to me that this is like actually can be happening intersectionally and interconnected and then i realized like the importance of such movement and uh my whole understanding of tech has in a way become gender sensitive and like uh my life has started resonating was like discourses that i am inhabiting in just a rights movement when we find digital rights movement activists telling us about how to be safe online and if we choose a topic like uh expressing ourselves sexually online as women an
d like queer bodies and stuff uh they would be like oh do not express yourself do not send nudes uh but then comes the feminist uh discourse and that tells you and that educates you how to express yourself in a safe secure way and they make you manuals on how like send safe nodes and like it brings some sort of importance of how like uh we need to express ourselves and the consequences of like patriarchy it's not our fault it's his patriarchy in a way is fault and i think it is the success of th
e seniors in the movement that they utilized such a tool uh for younger generation to actually like work with stick and feminism in such way that is very resonating in the in the now one of the most uh awesome legacies that those of us working on feminist tech movements can claim to be part of this history is that uh in 1995 in beijing this is when you have to remember 1995 the internet was still a really new thing like very few people knew what an email was very few people knew how to even go o
nline access was like you know really uh even more dire than what it is today it's still not great today like almost 50 of the world still do not have access to the internet so before we think everybody is part of this revolution we are not um so it was even worse than but then even in that day there was like you know um already kind of uh um 40 strong like feminist techies who went to beijing and set up this like computer lab and basically like you know sat there and started setting up email ac
counts for people for all of the feminists with that some of them still have those email accounts until today so if you can find those people i think charlotte bunch still has an email account that was set up in beijing 1995 i think like you know you should talk to her and find out from her but a lot of like you know at least like all of our like you know all these cool ass names of people who did all these things they would like set up their internet account and even from that moment on the org
anizing was happening and feminists actually were the ones who had the vision of putting technology and icts and access to icts into a global policy agreement way before anything else like human rights uh policy document did not even looked at ict until what the hrc in 2011 i think like frank the rules hrc freedom of expression report but we were there in 1995 already putting it into the document like section j is the first document that explicitly says icts uh in terms of like from the perspect
ive of you know social justice and access to information and so forth so it's really very much part of our like uh legacy and history i feel it's important to like look at technology and being connected in terms of how we live post coronavirus but somehow like for me it has changed the use of the word virtuality at certain moment virtual spaces uh where all we have got and uh like it was the thing like that we really relied on being connected and being organizing and being like in connection wit
h zeus like who love who we love and when i think about what needs to be challenged in is basically our knowledge of technology and imagination and reimagination of it and i think a lot of how we need to redefine things like security privacy for generations whom such words do not resonate as much as it does for some of us the way tech is being used in a way it changes every few months is not not if it is actually changing every day and i feel uh we need to ask ourselves questions like how we kee
p being relevant and how we renew our knowledge and adaptation uh of not like the present knowledge in order for the digital rights conversation to not become redundant i think what you're saying about how the pandemic has really changed almost like our spatial and existential reality right how we are in our everyday it's really brought to surface geez technology really has a really big part to play in it and you actually you know like we've been like we've been you know we've been doing this th
is feminism and tech stuff for a few years uh and it's always been a little bit difficult to convince both sides right it's always been a little bit difficult to sort of speak to feminists or women's rights activists or sexual rights sectors say actually technology is really part of the political agenda like you it's really part of the political agenda but it almost feels like it's competing with everything else and it's very difficult to see it because it is a little bit invisible it's like tal
king about um infrastructure and public infrastructure as part of your political agenda it's actually quite challenging because there's so many other like infrastructure issues um similar with like people who's working on digital rights like yeah they sort of like a little bit more open to looking at feminism and gender issues especially around gender-based violence because that's so much in your face but with the pandemic and with everything that has been happening in this period it has really
put front and center the reality like the super stark reality of what it means when you have control or have access to technology as a resource if you have access to safe and secure and sustainable technology as the resource is if you have if you are able to actually feel like you are in control of technology the technology is something that you are shaping that you are part of the agenda of shaping not something that's shaping you or being shaped by other forces and you know other more much mor
e powerful forces outside of your purview of control um then it's a very different kind of conversation so i think for feminists and for activists our entire being is really about uh i mean that's that's who we are right we basically we unpack the heck out of power in order to transform it and to disrupt it that's kind of like our reason for being and this increasingly central site of power um i think in the last year has really brought to four like actually we can't like you know we can't deny
that this is um this is something that is hard at the heart of our of our political project like it touches all aspects of our work in you know in very significant ways including how we organize including how we see ourselves including how we see each other whether or not we are able to see each other and i think that is both a little bit like oh it seems like you know it's both a little bit like okay we have to like you know really put a lot more resources and attention to this than we have bef
ore uh and at the same time also a little quite exuberant like okay the world is sort of currently being rewritten as we speak in very very significant ways [Music] i think that the internet has really challenged the hierarchy of things and power i feel like somehow like in the books that we read like from ancient days there was always like that the story of like the one leader but now i feel like online it's always like you can be a leader and that champion for two days and then things move sup
er quick and like a new face shoes uh show up shows up and like it's inspiring in a way and like it's always very stimulating i will give an example about uh how uh how the internet gave us space for us in uh in terms of organizing in egypt and i will use like something that is very recent and very fresh that is still happening during uh june uh 2020 a number of uh women tick-tockers uh they were arrested in egypt their the talks basically it was just of them having fun making content of themsel
ves dancing uh thinking but somehow for like the government there was something that like drove them uh nuts about this and they started arresting random woman users as a reaction there was a campaign that was launched to free those technicals their accusation in relation like how the states like arrested them it was for violating family values so basically like the campaign it started with habitation on uh change uh to free those tech talkers and um questioning what are those family values and
which families are we talking about in egypt is it lower middle class families or elite because it's very different in every class and like if you're christian or if you're muslim if you're living in the capital of or if you're living in like uh somewhere else in egypt one of the best things about this campaign is how it didn't have a face it was a bunch of like accounts online and the thing about the petition that somehow like it um it tells like the context in egypt and like it brings up how c
lose is a factor in this so it shows how like uh most of the woman they were arrested they come from less privileged classes in egypt and how somehow the elites who are doing very similar content they are safe in their own class in their own bubbles that was really somehow new to actually admit that class is really really a big factor in egypt i think yeah like i'm very inspired by this campaign that situation is still very challenging the woman they are still like facing consequences some of th
em like were released others are not like for example when we started in our collective trying to localize the feminist internet discourses in egypt somehow like sometimes it felt like we were talking with ourselves like uh we wanted to like um write and like translate some of like the literature from the global sounds and we started was translating the famous principles of the internet in arabic and then uh like it was a very new conversation in egypt but what happened magically that this momen
t of like how like when women felt it like so close to them uh that we are being affected by our online activities it completely like resonated that the the contents that we're trying to create and like trying to localize it eventually like really made sense here and we had the words to like actually understand what is happening to us in our own language and i think somehow like um that this is like the effort of like the feminist center no internet movement it has paid off uh for us and the eff
ort effortlessly resonated in egypt because we had the perfect moment to understand listening to do you speak it really also makes me think this question of how it's changed organizing and how we build power initially i think okay so it's really shifted how we organize in like very specific ways i think the two that you mentioned which is absolutely key and absolutely true is in terms of the visibility of our issues so never before has it been uh quite as possible for us to render the breadth an
d plethora of our issues as visible as it is right now in terms of our ability to be able to not only have the mode of expression and broadcasting but also the capacity to be able to amplify each other's realities and situations or calls for action not always in uncomplicated ways but the possibility is definitely there and that we are able to really be um much more visible in terms of the discrimination or the disparity or the issues that we are facing uh all over the world so that's that's tha
t's one and the second one is definitely in terms of uh what you were saying around tactics and strategies so that's really shifted how we think about organizing for change i mean like when i started doing advocacy work a lot of it was focused around like you know let's do law reform let's do legal reform and legal advocacy because that was seen as the most important domain of change where you could affect the greatest amount of possibility of transformation to the greatest amount of people um f
rom a movement perspective and now we're like yes legal reform is there but it's by no means the only place where we put all of our energy and all of our strategizing we also definitely see for example um shifting discourse and shifting kind of uh culture and behavior as a very key part of it like what is tolerated and what is actually not tolerated and out of the norm has been a big part of this of uh of uh the work of actually younger feminist movements many of whom do a lot of their activism
online and then the other is really like you know uh this notion of space like yes of course what beijing provided the power of beijing was uh precisely that right like looking at women's rights movement and organizing as something that is global that it is a global issue that we are all facing uh the gender is uh you know it's one of those factors that uh that is uh the axis of discrimination that applies regardless of where you're from which country and so forth um and and i guess in in this p
articular digital age um this notion of trans feminism or like you know sort of transnational trans local transversal trans all forms of uh transition like you know all forms of transgressiveness um has become has really infused and into our sense of who we are and what we are doing so it's it's like you know uh when sal was talking about the tick tock case i was definitely also there really very invested and really trying to find out okay what else can we do how else can we do taking the lead f
rom like activists that we know um just trying to look like being able to also know in real time what was happening because people are following certain people who are also sharing to the broader movement for solidarity action we need your attention here please like you know la la la so that kind of like political kinship is is uh it's very different in that sense it's not about something that's very far away that only some privileged feminists can get to maybe because i'm pretty sure beijing wa
s not accessible to everybody and then very importantly is uh really shifting who we understand as uh key actors in the movement you know how the movement is organized where leadership is cited and how how is it um uh yeah how is it organized where leadership is like that and what is this notion of community uh and i think for the you know most of our uh our assumption or understanding is shifting a little bit more of late but most of it is still sort of located in this understanding that okay u
h the main drivers of movements and organizing is in the form of an institution in the form of an ngo um of course ngos and non-governmental organizations have done a lot in many places to really push the envelope and this is the way in which you are able to do sustainable work right you have to be recognizable and legible to the to the state machinery in order to be able to to get access to funding and so on and so forth uh but that has been both uh our power our success as well as the way in w
hich many different forces are trying to weaken the movement but at the same time that's no longer the only uh channel there's a lot more many many different ways of organizing this informal that has a very different sense of time even like sustainability like you know what is the what is the period of movement must you stay for 20 years or is it is it good if you're like you know you're organizing for 10 years and that's kind of the moment and then you're you're making the biggest impact on peo
ple's change and then it shifts and then it adapts and it becomes something else so it's like the evolutionary pace of organizing and relationship is also quite different and i think it's because the infrastructure of internet allows for these kinds of like coming together and doing and connecting and relating and organizing and i think that's a really hopeful space to be in uh but we need to also learn how to like maybe speak in multiple languages and figure out how to be how do we create this
kind of soft spaces in between for us to be able to come together [Music] with accountability it's really like somehow like reading about uh previous uh things uh we have got a lot to learn from uh like 10 years is work but i still feel like how we hold uh governments and like internet providers accountable it is something that like we are still somehow um like figuring out we have certain tools to do with it but uh but every day like i started feeling somehow and i don't know if this is it soun
ds like a bit of um i don't know like being stuck in in in the way i'm approaching this but or like being somehow tired and disappointed in how things unfold in a way or another uh but sometimes i think of how we are obsessed with holding such bodies accountable and we forget about building things of our own and like uh re-imagining how the world supposed actually to function because i feel like uh when i sit down like for example like with people like jack where like most of us live in very dif
ferent contexts and like we are always like somehow surrounded with like amazing people doing amazing work in their own communities in different contexts i feel so inspired that somehow i forget about the world that we're living in and that has the capacity to fuel me with like hope and imagination to actually do the work that i do i'm not underestimating at all holding such bodies accountable but i'm saying that like as a person right now i'm really invested as much as i try to hold government'
s accountable by like the work that we do and like documentation and like raising awareness i also want to invest very much in how we are keeping the hope alive and like our imagination of how we actually want to live and like to practice like those crazy ideas of like the very flowery dreamy imagination of like communities and uh like how we live collectively and like uh dissolve with like the whole individuality like um ways of thinking and i honestly like i think somehow like living through a
panademic i feel like as a person like i learned it a lot about being less of an individual and like thinking collectively because i genuinely think how like there's no way out of this until like we just really think collectively of how we approach things yeah i love what you're saying about that actually and i also wonder why like once that question comes up like you get you know it's like you see the importance of it like of course the accountability and the book of accountability is super im
portant and that we have seen right like basically to think about accountability around stuff that's happening online is never simple because there's like cross-border there's all of these different actors involved there's all these different stakeholder groups and this process is negotiated and it's belong and we're always saying the same things like make sure that civil society is part of the conversation the civil society is equally at the table that we're not nowhere there being taken as lik
e you know part of a critical stakeholder et cetera et cetera but that isn't quite the question or that isn't quite necessarily like that's maybe not the response that is important and i really like what sally is saying about like actually can we also like uh be in spaces that doesn't take up all of the oxygen and all of the energy but it's in our own imaginative space right in spaces where we can imagine a different system a different way of governance a different way of being i think the probl
em with both governments and the private sector when you talk about the internet is the problem of the concentration of power like all of the power is concentrated on these particular bodies everything that needs to happen has to go through these particular bodies in order to think through accountability which is kind of ironic because like the metaphor for the internet is network distributed and decentralized and federated power so how is it that we are still in this space where we are still cr
eating monopolies um where we are still sustaining monopolies and where we are still unable to allow ourselves to imagine beyond and one monopoly of being you know off of governance of being of of accountability of creating things and taking care of things like why does it have to be in this particular system uh and i think that maybe is why it is quite so exhausting um to think about oh let's talk about online gender-based violence and what can the government do and what can the private sector
do and i'm like actually you know what sick and tired of having to constantly be talking to people like facebook and twitter about violence that happens in their spaces also sick and tired that like it seems like it's like why is it so difficult for us to also be able to have multiplicity of spaces um because even our imagination is being colonized as though like you know this is the only way and i'm like wow no it's not it really is not like uh like you know there's more than one ways to click
a mouse [Music] the emphasis on access is uh is critical because as we said earlier like you know this last year has really demonstrated the cost of not having access to connectivity and this cost is beyond education employment and ability to get your uh to get access to health information and services and so forth is actually beyond that it's also your ability to be able to connect to somebody else at a at a human level right because how many like we've been in different varying stages of lockd
own for more than 400 days that's insane for a species that is social it's a lot so that's why i guess like you know access has gotten like renewed uh attention and renewed further because it's a big thing it's like you know we need to be able to think about this uh in the in the collective way to see actually how is it possible that we've had internet since like late 90s mid 90s early 2000s and that there is still almost 50 percent of the world that is not connected so that's that's a global di
sparity that's that's massive and glaring so that that discussion is happening because access requires the collaboration and cooperation of many different actors at a large scale because it's about laying down infrastructure it's about trying to figure out how is this sustainable it's about being able to ensure communities are part of the conversation because it's also about territories it's also about trying to understand which is the best kind of technology to introduce and so forth and all of
this has to happen also through the perspective of government [Music] it's like you can't talk about all of these things unless you're also having processes in place that allows for all of these different kinds of stakeholders to be having this conversation around access to be having this conversation about who's resourcing it you know what sorts of resources will be able to get uh different kinds of uh prioritization and different kinds of participation and why this versus that like why are we
wanting to send up i don't know how many satellites up into the earth because it's completely unregulated right now and like you know it's one white boot stream and i'm like what why how is this then like i'm problematically just being rolled up because somebody can afford it um and that's the best solution and that's where i think having governance processes and governance mechanism can play a really important role because that's almost what governance is supposed to do it's supposed to be abl
e to make sure that all of the different interests and all of the different stakeholders are be able to be part of that conversation and to think through the implications of this to the population at large including those who are already discriminated already marginalized already excluded on whose backs some of these solutions are being pushed forward right but they are not part of the conversation so governance as as process mechanism and structure is is in an ideal situation one that can facil
itate this that can allow this to take place from the beginning before things get rolled out that also is able to put things into the conversation as policy agendas privacy security um you know bodily autonomy dignity environmental sustainability all of these things as part of the conversation around access that access does not stand alone by thinking of what intergenerational approaches mean it has changed drastically to a better uh thing to a more mature way than i was like when i was like a b
aby feminist uh like a baby feminist me like i feel like i was so arrogant like very ready to attack everything that is old everything that is traditional and uh not an appreciation of actually like the efforts of the older in the movement and uh until actually like along the process of doing the work experiencing like really big difficulties that like it started to give me like a reality of how things are and of how it was heard for like older people and how it is still heard and that created l
ike for me an introduction of like certain words of how i approach this and i feel like one of them is kindness and i feel like uh there's like a drastic need of how we need to be kind uh like as younger like to older and like the other way around i feel like uh such a space like it needs less judgment uh more understanding uh less individuality more compassion uh and openness to learn from the seniors wisdom and like openness also to learn from like zyangar is freshness and passion and right no
w i feel like uh as like i'm closer to my 30s i am in between like learning really from like the the thin years in the movement and also ready like being introduced to things that somehow like uh i was a young one day but i'm no longer like the youngest and in the place and like that like that gives me the space somehow to position myself and to reflect on like all of that was uh was more understanding yeah i'm a little bit like the sandwiches i think so when the kind of concept of intergenerati
onality became became like you know much more prevalent in terms of an intentional thing that we need to work on ultimately the the question is about the issue is power no and power sediments and i think power sediments especially in institutions and in institutional location so because i work on internet technology and feminist technology like feminist internet as a movement it's an emerging movement so the institutions and the histories like you know the beijing history and so forth is somethi
ng that's still being written and i've had like i come from the violent skins women movement and have had very uh unhealthy damaging self-cannibalistic dynamics in the movement because we have to exist in this state of scarcity as though there can only be three organizations and so there's only space for five you know women's rights activists in the media and as though this like so then everyone's kind of like i don't know like eating ourselves and eating each other because of this scarcity whic
h i think we are starting to recognize that this is terrible and also untrue and really trying to introduce a different kind of dynamics into our space and also kind of being much better at both naming and recognizing and celebrating the people who have really contributed to the work that you know that we are continuing um and i think that is really important like just being able to to remember and see the act of remembering and naming and recognizing as a political act because so often our hist
ory is always written without us so we have to be better at writing our own history and then also to be much more conscious about not replicating institutions that we inherit because we have to survive but be a little bit more daring to create different kinds of institutions and that takes an ecosystem approach right because we have to take a whole ecosystem to to change things because it's everything you know everything sort of speaks to each other so that's kind of like yeah so that's that's o
ne of the one of the things that we are also really i feel like that that's that's shifting the work of intergenerational activism it has also matured a little bit right like it's no longer new it's kind of maybe i don't know at least at least five years if not longer which means that we also learned things along the way not to do like let's not assume who is going to hold an intergenerational space because who whole space is also a little bit it's also like this this like you know the negotiati
on of power but rather to understand that it's kind of like we're always we are always re-enacting and negotiating different kinds of powers and it's always like you know generation is one of it uh but there's also like a bunch of other things so this has never been more clear in in kind of what's been happening in some of the manifestations of me too ultimately it's also about this clash right of understanding actually what is the violation and where do you seek justice for violation what does
that justice look like and that it's not always going to look like in the form of like you know this form of very formal kind of policy or check and balance or just you know this kind that this tradition that that may not be it but but that again we're kind of having this this moment of contestation and rupture and i think at these particular moments it's really really really so important for us to to figure out what kinds of spaces and structures and mechanisms do we want to make in this moment
to also hold this that everybody is able to be part of this but nobody is able to own it in that sense right like we need to come here but not own it but then like recognize that we all have something to to to put into this because we're making something new like it doesn't exist yet we're making it uh and so how do you make it together and it's it's hard uh but i think it's it's gonna be so important for us to be strong in that sense to grow uh because we have to be strong and to grow because
you know patriarchy sucks break it you
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