Original to:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/addiewagenknecht/2018/03/05/how-claire-evans-is-writing-women-back-into-the-internet/
How Claire Evans Is Writing Women Back Into The Internet
Claire L. Evans is the author of the new book: Broad Band The Untold
Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. Claire recently caught up with
me to discuss Broad Band using email, Skype dates and various document
sharing platforms while across the world from each other, with five time
zones in between. Her book comes out at a time when #metoo and net
neutrality are major topics in the internet conscious and women's roles
are being redefined and rewritten.
Can you tell me about your new book Broad Band? How did it change your
point of view on how history is documented and how we should approach
the narrative of the future differently?
The easy thing is to say that Broad Band is a feminist history of the
Internet. That’s what I’ve been telling people. Maybe it’s more accurate
to say that it’s a history of the Internet told through women’s stories:
boots-on-the-ground accounts of where the women were, how they were
feeling and working, at specific, formative moments in Internet history.
It emphasizes users and those who design for use, while many popular
tech histories tend to zero in on the box. I’ve always been fascinated
with what happens after hardware hits the market; it’s what we do with
it that counts.
What inspired you to write this book specifically?
I see it as the confluence of a few factors. I cut my teeth as a writer
on message boards on the early Web, and published volumes online in the
height of the blog era; for me, writing has rarely if ever been separate
from online writing, but I had reached a point, having grown up online,
of disconnect with the medium. I think we’re all grappling with the ways
in which the Internet is changing faster than we can register. As a kind
of balm, I started writing “secret history” pieces for Motherboard about
female-identified Internet arcana: cyberfeminist artists, lost CD-ROM
games. At a certain point it just felt like an inevitability to take the
full plunge.
You met many of these women in person, was there a commonality among the
early pioneers of the internet in terms of how they got into the tech
sector, their personalities or upbringing that manifested their
trajectories?
My process for identifying subjects for this book was to first identify
the major sea changes—the birth of programming, the earliest attempts to
network computers—and then to play detective, poking around, looking for
women’s names. What I found, again and again, was that the women tended
to concentrate at the beginnings of things, in those moments where the
lack of precedent a new technology affords allowed them to carve their
own place, rather than be beholden to institutional requirements or the
existing standards of a field. Another way of saying this is that many
of the women profiled in the book did some of their best work while
nobody was looking—for their own reasons, to serve their own
communities, or for the sheer love of the technology.
What does your creative process look like, do you have any rituals or
favorite things to do before you start?
Like a lot of writers, I imagine, there’s a lot of hand-wringing and
procrastinating and staring hopelessly at an empty text document. I try
to read something before I start working, just to remind myself what’s
possible. I write best in the morning; I write better if I’ve meditated.
A moderate amount of sativa can help in a pinch. When I get burned out,
I switch my working method; I’ll go on a long drive and dictate my
thoughts into my phone, or pivot to writing longhand.
How as the shift in cultural and social climate since the election
affected your work?
I started writing Broad Band before the election. There are some
subjects in the book that I spoke to before, during, and afterwards, and
although the tone of our conversations definitely evolved over that
time, I tried to stay the course. Ultimately what I tried to create with
this book is a sacred place: it centers women’s experiences, it
highlights the more subtle, beautiful contributions made by people at
the margins and at the protean beginnings of these important
technologies. I didn’t want to let in the scrum. I wanted us to have
something nice that wasn’t necessarily in a position of retreat,
resistance, or reaction to external factors. That’s not to say I don’t
get into the darkness at all—just that my priority was to hold up the
light.
Do you have any key collaborators and people who have shaped your
personal aesthetic?
My partner, Jona Bechtolt, is a huge part of my ability to get anything
done. He and I have been collaborating for over ten years; we play
together in a band, YACHT, and we founded an app together, 5 Every Day.
He’s very fastidious and design-oriented, I lean towards big-picture
concepts and culture; he can work in intense bursts, and I’m better on
the longer-term follow through. He’s rhythm and I’m lyrics. I wasn’t
even done with the book before he was obsessing about all kinds of
minutiae on my behalf. I’m the type of person to easily spiral inwards,
so I need a counterweight.
What is your relationship with beauty and fashion like?
The beauty industry I have a hard time with—my favorite comedian, Kate
Berlant, used to do this great bit in her stand-up about how it’s okay
to shoplift from Sephora because makeup is a tool of patriarchal
oppression, and although I’m so terrified of shoplifting, that sentiment
resonates with me. Maybe it’s just because my face resists makeup. I
can’t even put on mascara without somehow getting it all over my cheeks.
That being said, I love skincare. I travel a lot so I’m always trying to
retain moisture. I always have a tube of Embryolisse Lait Creme, which
is the best moisturizer, a bottle of Mixa Bébé, a French cleansing milk
my mom always used when I was growing up—it’s so hypoallergenic you can
literally squirt an entire pump into your eyes without anything untoward
happening—Shiseido Urban Environment sunscreen and Milk Makeup Sunshine
Skin Tint, which as close as I get to foundation. Sometimes I do Korean
sheet masks on the plane, much to the horror of people traveling with
me. The older I get the more minimal my palette is, fashion-wise. I’m
obsessed with buying vintage suits on eBay, because I love a uniform,
and I like to dress how I imagine a lady tech millionaire might have
dressed in the dotcom era: a sharp ‘90s Armani suit or some Pleats
Please, a white t-shirt, Nikes.
How do you deal with failure in your work?
Honestly? Badly. I’m an only child and a Scorpio. I lope around silently
wounded. I know that highly successful people—according to the jargon of
business types and motivational speakers, anyway—crave failure, because
it helps bring them closer to the truth, but I’ll take indifference over
failure any day. I like to do my own thing, in the hopes that eventually
someday it will all make sense in the rear view, as a body of work.
I noticed in many of your Instagram videos and stories, as well in your
music, you speak French. How did you learn the language and how has it
impacted your ability to live in a global community?
French is my first language! I grew up in Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, a
village north of Paris, and emigrated to the United States when I was
nine. In my family, we move between English and French when it’s
convenient, and I really believe it’s allowed me to appreciate the
nuances between worlds: no language has a full grasp on reality, and
part of the fun of being bilingual is having access to an extra set of
idioms and words for concepts that might be lacking in another language.
I know you spend a lot of time on planes en route to various different
cities and countries. Do you have any places you always go whenever
you’re in Portland, LA or say the South of France?
I like familiarity when I’m traveling—being a “regular” somewhere, even
if it’s only in my mind. Small shops and galleries run by friends give
me that feeling: Tusk in Chicago, Stand up Comedy and IAMTHAT in
Portland, Otherwild and Virgil Normal in Los Angeles, Freda in New
Orleans, the Marfa Book Company in Marfa. From touring in a band for
such a long time, I’ve also been to, like, nearly every vegetarian
restaurant in the continental United States.
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
