Hannah Nicklin

Your Death in the Future

We are currently 6 days into the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence. This activism aims to raise awareness and mobilise action against all forms of violence against women (VAW).

There is an excellent campaign being run as part of this called ‘Take Back the Tech‘ – which is all about empowering women online, looking at safety, privacy, tech literacy, and using online tools to promote activism that opposes VAW.

I am very passionate about us recovering both the history of women in tech, and in women participating the building as well as the consuming of the new worlds we’re building.

I have written an article for the forthcoming issue of Subtext magazine on what I term the ‘Digital Ceiling’. To paraphrase a section from that:

A large part of the history of feminist struggle has been the fight for participation in the public sphere; for the vote, for a say in politics, economic rights, for a voice, and worth in the public arena. Web 2.0 and new online tools are creating a new public space – in such a fast moving medium, we cannot afford to be left behind. Women have also been erased from a male authored history; The first computer programming language was named Ada, after the founder of modern computing; Ada Lovelace. Women played a key role in code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, in 1942 the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic computer) was programmed by six women, and Grace Hopper led the development of one of the first modern programming languages, COBOL. Women are the majority of online users, and consumers of tech. But we are disgustingly under-represented in the tech industries, and that needs to change.

(The rest of that article can be read in the Autumn/Winter issue of Subtext, (coming soon)). Tech is also proving to be an invaluable activist tool, from trafigura, to the Iran election, the online world is uncovering and proliferating activists’ content like never before. We need to be in this.

Why else am I writing this blog? Because these 16 days of action are also about VAW. VAW is an incontrovertible fact, I’m not going to offer further evidence on that, but I do have a reading of the first draft of a play this Thursday, a piece called Eismas, as part of the ‘Littlepalooza!‘ festival, at the Crypt Gallery near St. Pancras:

Image reproduced with permission from Scary Little Girl Productions

“Feel the quick of the modern city fall away as you descend into the crypts below St Pancras Parish Church.  Discover some of the best new writers of contemporary gothic in this evening festival among the ancient graves and catacombs.  Music, theatre and story telling combine to make this a thrilling presentation of young blood amongst the oldest of bones.”

Eismas is a play about the violence done by monetising human beings. My Littlepalooza! piece is a half hour rehearsed reading from the second act and is being billed as:

A startling piece of spec-fic theatre, that imagines a future Europe in which a single child policy has shocking repercussions on the female population.

The piece will be read at 6.15pm and tickets to see it are only £3. Please do come and support both the Littlepalooza! festival (click the link for the full evening price, and other days’ events) and my piece in development. I would love any feedback on the play, and the massive twist that you may or may not gather from the first half hour. If you need more persuading, here’s a monologue from it – don’t worry there are no spoilers (read by me though, the actress has a much better accent!)

It would be brilliant to see people at the event on Thursday (though don’t look out for red hair any more, it’s much darker now!) and if you do make it, please come and chat to me after the reading, I’d love to hear what you think (good or bad) before I go into a massive redraft over Christmas.

And finally, do click below for more info and actions on Take Back the Tech:

Pass it on.

It’s Not Working

Image shared via a creative commons license by adewale_oshineye on Flickr

Today I am leafing through the barely penetrable Digital Economy Bill, and I am thinking. I am thinking that we are not being heard. For all of the petitions that we sign, the words we pour into blogs and articles, the posturing we do on twitter and facebook, how much are we – the online tech-literate – how much are we simply talking to ourselves?

It’s been almost a month since I sent my Open Letter to Peter Mandelson. I have had no reply. No acknowledgement. No engagement.

The Digital Economy Bill is not about a digital economy, it is about how an analogue one can cling to profit within it.

This is the creative industry versus the distribution industries. The online world is a hive of creativity, of emerging technology, of passion and code, of distribution of information and means, it is a place to be valued beyond money. It is also a dangerous place to operate if it is control that you want, that you need. This is an amazing and incomprehensible thing for government.

The 20^th century creative economic model has operated on a basis of scarcity – of distribution, of controlling numbers and controlling access, and this was all orchestrated via the grand narrative of fame. As web 2.0 musician Steve Lawson puts it:

I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star. The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity. Whereas the reality of high-dollar touring, promotional duties, photoshoots etc. is phenomenally dull. That’s why the rock ‘n’ roll myths were created – to cover the tedium that is the day to day reality of most touring musicians. The number that ever made millions from it is so small as to not really be statistically relevant when discussing what’s best for ‘music’ – they just had an enormous media footprint. Source

We are, for the most part, not calling for some creative chaotic utopia where the creative industries are either funded, or amateur, and we should not be losing artists because they are not ‘jack of all trades’ people – because they can’t design, market, distribute, and create. But we should be encouraging open and collaborative processes. It is in those spaces that you learn, and that you can plug your skills gaps with the expertise of others. It is in online spaces that you have direct access to your fans, your audience, your participants. That you can remove the necessity to market, or reform what marketing is.

You cannot legislate material that can be translated into information. You can, however, market experience, physical possessions, skill in a studio, the binding of a book. People like to touch. They like to breathe the heat of lights and smoke at gigs, they like the run their fingers over the cover of a book. I do not believe that the online world opposes that.

Continue reading…

Reclaiming the Night

This is just a quick post to give you a feeling for the RTN march this Saturday – you can find all of the interviews, images and video I took over at this Posterous. It was a really brilliant, strong, and empowering event. Sadly, however, we were reminded how very necessary the march was at the same time as someone was sexually assaulted whilst actually on the march.

Keep fighting.

Reclaim the Night

Image shared via a creative commons license by Open Democracy on Flickr.

I am going to preface this post with a defence. Why? Because this is how I have to have these conversations now. I am going to be attending the Reclaim the Night march on the 21^st of November. Reclaim the Night is a march against male violence with its roots in the 70s feminist movement.

A recent survey by the young women’s magazine More in 2005 found that 95% of women don’t feel safe on the streets at night, and 65% don’t even feel safe during the day. 73% worry about being raped and almost half say they sometimes don’t want to go out because they fear for their own safety.

In every sphere of life we negotiate the threat or reality of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. We cannot claim equal citizenship while this threat restricts our lives as it does. We demand the right to use public space without fear. We demand this right as a civil liberty, we demand this as a human right. Source

I understand that the second I say male violence, men reading this will have bristled. I profusely refute the idea that men are somehow innately violent, or unable to control their sexual desires. Rather I believe a culture that continually objectifies women, portrays them as sex objects, as things to be won and lost, and male sexual desire as something un-responsible and uncontainable, men will be taught that they are owed sex, and that women are to be bought and sold. They will be taught that with money, comes power, and power is the currency that males/female relationships are built on, transactional in essence, men must get their due.

Nearly a quarter of 14-year-olds [girls] have been forced to have sex or do something sexual against their will, and one in four 16-year-olds [girls] have been hit or hurt in some way by someone they were dating Source

Male violence against women is an inconvertible fact. Reclaim the Night marches against it. It is firstly an all (identifying) female march, and then followed by a rally with speakers and musicians (men are welcome to the rally), bringing together women, women’s organisations and unions, speaking out against male violence and reclaiming the spaces from which we are told we are not safe, not permitted, that we must be protected from.

How about we remove the need for protection?

Reclaim the Night stands up and says that women are never to blame for male violence, we battle against rape apologists who claim that women’s drinking, flirting, manner of dressing, or sexual proclivities mean they deserves it. We fight against rape myths that say one kind of sexual contact must lead to another, that say that women want it, that not saying no is the same as yes, and that women falsely report disproportionately to other crimes (“the allegations of rape that are false are exactly the same as that of any other crime i.e. 6 – 8%“ Source )

Continue reading…