Thread by @RohanIrvine

Our keynote today is @TatianaTMac joining us from Portland! Speaking about systems of systems.

#uxaustralia2020 #uxaustralia

English ivy grows all around the world — it has a lot of lore around it, a lot of meaning in scholarly writings, and was thought of as a barrier.

English Ivy was brought to the US and Australia through way of colonisation.

Like the english ivy, colonisers are an invasive species.

Invasive species thrive where there is no natural predatory. English ivy thrives, is spread easily, kills the native bird population and can grow upon itself to create ivy deserts. It can thrive atop it's dying ancestors.

When Tatiana was 10 she was asked to clear the english ivy from the backyard at the start of summer. At the end of summer her mother asked her to see what happened to the ivy. It had grown back even bigger than when she cut it.

What she found was that the ivy had grown into the bottom of the house, and that to remove the ivy, the actual problem was coming from the bottom of the house.

Tatiana is going to speak to us about Systems.

Design Systems have been around for a while and are in a resurgence. She explains using atomic design the different levels.

What we create in our design system gets fed back into the world and then comes back to us.

Tatiana will be breaking the talk into three parts.

One: Mortgage

The etymology of the word means Death Pledge.

They were initially created to buy/sell/trade enslaved people.

Slavery in the South

We often ignore the slavery of the North. We have a misconception that the civil war was about slavery. It was about state sovereignty vs federal authority - and slavery was one aspect of it.

Slavery in the North was different because there weren't plantations.

They were often sent to do administration tasks, given slightly more autonomy and were able to move a bit more freely than the south.

They would act as freelancers and hang out where they knew work would be, and the rich white people complained that it was giving them anxiety.

In 1711 enslaved people would hang out on Wall St, which was created to control them. The wealth associated with slavery was 7x the combined wealth of railroad and banks. And there were no accounting ledgers.

The history behind Wall St's connection to slavery is so opaqued that companies only apologised in 2000's for selling slave insurance.

The average CEO's make 287x the amount of the average worker.

Part Two: Productivity

It's an unhealthy obsession.

Thomas Affleck wrote cotton plantation record and account book. It created a sytematic way to track the productivity of enslaved people on the cotton field.

Timetracking
Direct reports

He also introduced

Reorganise the workers to stop unionisation
Time limits on meal time
Limiting breastfeeding

He then widened the breadth of the book to "The Farmers Record Book" so it could be adopted more.

They introduced bonuses for enslaved people — who ever picked the most cotton got a bonus, and then the new baseline was set for production.

We start to see the tools of exploitation stemming back from slavery still exist.

These tools of oppression never went away.

The plantation record account book is not so dissimilar to some of the self help books that we have today.

The actors haven't changed much and the goals remain the same.

Make rich people richer.

So how does that affect us today?

Tatiana was using a plug-in to generate faces for a design, the API when set to true it presents male, when set to false it will present female — and non-binary is null...

When Tatiana posted about this on twitter, it was chalked up to 'lazy dev work'

But intent does not map to impact.

The impact of this is that people are erased from the system.

We look at examples of this from the FB graph API with have an exclusionary system that we recreate in our products that we feed back into the exclusionary system creating a positive feedback loop.

Tatiana posts the names of 26 trans people who have been murdered in 2020.

This number is not getting lower and things aren't changing.

We have to look at the intersections. 91% of trans folks who were murdered we Black women.

Our society hates transgender and nonbinary people.

Tatiana asks, what have we done to stop the murders in our system?

Tech allows us to build hate at scale.

Tech is a horizontal, it touches every other industry.

Tech is a multiplier.

So what do we do about it?

Redwoods are a beautiful and magnificent specifies of trees. They grow up to 34m wide, 87m high and up to 2700 years old.

There is a species that can destroy them — english ivy.

It takes away the oxygen and nutrients from around the tree.

It's not parasitic, it just starved them of resources.

We need to trace back the roots of our design to identify where the problems are.

We need to trace the money back in our systems to understand where it's coming from.

The infrastructure is White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.

We have to pull it out at the roots.

We have to kill it before it kills us, cut off the sunlight to the vitriolic hate.

We have to look at our past to identify how these systems manifest today.

The things that we can't get past are the same things we can't seem to remember.

Your privilege is not our fault, it is our responsibility.

You have a responsibility to protest when systems are not working.

Our privilege shields us from some of their harms, but these systems are harmful to us all.

'If they come for me in the morning they'll come for you in the night — Angela Davis'

We need to protect our most vulnerable people.

Fascism targets the most vulnerable people because it tells us they are not worth to live.

Hate is formulaic.

Tech has created algorithmic hatred.

Redwoods join roots to protect each other from the environment.

Tatiana encourages us all to join roots

Thank you so much @TatianaTMac!!!!!

This was an incredible presentation, it's important everyone in design listens to this talk!

#uxaustralia2020

Question from Steve: Unionising in tech?

Tatiana: Unionisation is a great idea, the workers rights movements in slavery gave birth to race as a way to remove worker power. There's lots of union busting in tech, like google, ways to stop us at having collective rights.

It's critical for tech to have a strong union movement to counter the multiplier of algorithmic hatred that tech already is.

Q: When those of us who want to band together, how does a union movement fight big tech money?

A: It's a David v Goliath fight, we need to extract as much money as we can — individual purchasing decisions is one avenue.

We need more unionisation in tech.

We have a lot of collective power and wealth, and everything that we're told is that we don't.

Q: Where can we find the list of big bad companies?
A: Any corporation that has a CEO who can be a multi billionaire they're complicit with exploitation.

All companies are horrible for one reason or another.

Remind yourself that you cannot and will not fight every battle.

You need to find the places you have power in, and use that power to change.

Q: What's our network to sustain resources?
A: Hyper localised communities, what systems of injustice are you perpetuating?

Supporting businesses run by Black Indigenous people and stop feeding our time and resources into giant corporations.

Q: Where do you find your courage?
A: In looking at the intersection of where I experience oppression and the intersection of where I experience privilege and honestly once you've received as many death threats as I have it becomes easier.

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