I’ve been wanting to write this post for over a year, but lacked energy and time. Before 2023 is coming to an end, I want to close this series and share some more insights with you and hopefully provide you with a smile here and there.

For this round of interviews, four more kids around the ages of 8 to 13 were interviewed, 3 of them have a US background—these 3 interviews were done by a friend who recorded these interviews for me, thank you!

As opposed to the previous interviews, these four kids have parents who have a more technical professional background. And this seems to make a difference: even though none of these kids actually knew much better how the internet really works than the other kids that I interviewed, specifically in terms of physical infrastructures, they were much more confident in using the internet, they were able to more correctly name things they see on the internet, and they had partly radical ideas about what they would like to learn or what they would want to change about the internet!

Looking at these results, I think it’s safe to say that social reproduction is at work and that we need to improve education for kids who do not profit from this type of social and cultural wealth at home.

But let’s dive into the details.

The boy and the aliens

(I’ll be mostly transribing the interview, which was short, and which I find difficult to sum up because… some of the questions are written in a way to encourage the kids to tell a story, and this particular kid had a thing going on with aliens.)

He’s a 13 year old boy living in the US. He has his own computer, which technically belongs to his school but can be used by him freely and he can also take it home.

He’s the first kid saying he’s reading the news on the internet; he does not actually use social media, besides sometimes watching TikTok.

When asked: Imagine that aliens land and come to you and say: “We’ve heard about this internet thing you all talk about, what is it?” What do you tell them? he replied:

Well, I mean they’re aliens, so I don’t know if I wanna tell them much.

(Parents laughing in the background.)

Let’s assume they’re friendly aliens.

Well, I would say you can look anything up and play different games. And there are alien games. But mostly the enemies are aliens which you might be a little offended by. And you can get work done, if you needed to spy on humans. There’s cameras, you can film yourself, yeah. And you can text people and call people who are far away…

And what would be in a drawing that would explain the internet?

And here’s what he explains about his drawing:

First, I would draw what I see when you open a new tab, Google.

On the right side of the drawing we see something like Twitch.

I don’t wanna offend the aliens, but you can film yourself playing a game, so here is the alien and he’s playing a game.

And then you can ask questions like: How did aliens come to the Earth? And the answer will be here (below). And there’ll be different websites that you can click on.

And you can also look up “Who won the alien contest?” And that would be Usmushgagu, and that guy won the alien contest.

Do you think the information about alien intergalactic football is already on the internet?

Yeah! That’s how fast the internet is.

On the bottom of the drawing we see an iPhone and an instant messaging software.

There’s also a device called an iPhone and with it you can text your friends. So here’s the alien asking: “How was ur day?” and the friend might answer “IDK” [I don’t know].

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you’ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about?

Is there a way you don’t have to pay for any channels or subscriptions and you can get through any firewall?

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?

Well you wouldn’t have to pay for it [paywalls].

Can you describe what happens between your device and a website when you visit a website?

Well, it takes 0.025 seconds. […] It’s connecting.

Wow, that’s indeed fast! We were not able to obtain more details about what is that fast thing that’s happening exactly…

The software engineer’s kid

This kid identifies as neither boy nor girl, is 10 years old and lives in Germany. Their father works as a software engineer, or in the words of the child:

My dad knows everything.

The kid has a laptop and a mobile phone, both with parental control—they don’t think that the controlling is fair.

This kid uses the internet foremostly for listening to music and watching prank channels on Youtube but also to work with Purple Mash (a teaching platform for the computing curriculum used at their school), finding 3d printing models (that they ask their father to print with them because they did not manage to use the printer by themselves yet). Interestingly, and very differently from the non-tech-parent kids, this kid insists on using Firefox and Signal - the latter is not only used by their dad to tell them to come downstairs for dinner, but also to call their grandmother. This kid also shops online, with the help of the father who does the actual shopping for them using money that the kid earned by reading books.

If you would need to explain to an alien who has landed on Earth what the internet is, what would you tell them?

The internet is something where you search, for example, you can look for music. You can also watch videos from around the world, and you can program stuff.

Like most of the kids interviewed, this kid uses the internet mostly for media consumption, but with the difference that they also engage with technology by way of programming using Purple Mash.

In their drawing we see a Youtube prank channel on a screen, an external trackpad on the right (likely it’s not a touch screen), and headphones. Notice how there is no keyboard, or maybe it’s folded away.

If you could ask a nice and friendly dragon anything you’d like to learn about the internet, what would it be?

How do I shutdown my dad’s computer… forever?

And what is it that he would do to improve the internet for everyone?

Contrary to the kid living in the US, they think that

It takes too much time to load stuff!

I wonder if this kid experiences the internet as being slow because they use the mobile network or because their connection somehow gets throttled as a way to control media consumption, or if the German internet infrastructure is just so much worse in certain regions…

If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first?

I’d make a new Firefox app that loads the internet much faster.

The software engineer’s daughter

This girl is only 8 years old, she hates unicorns, and her dad is also a software engineer. She uses a smartphone, controlled by her parents. My impression of the interview is that at this age, kids slightly mix up the internet with the devices that they use to access the internet.

In her drawing, we see again Google - it’s clearly everywhere - and also the interfaces for calling and texting someone.

To explain what the internet is, besides the fact that one can use it for calling and listening to music, she says:

[The internet] is something that you can [use to] see someone who is far away, so that you don’t need to take time to get to them.

Now, that’s a great explanation, the internet providing the possibility for communication over a distance :)

If she could ask a friendly dragon something she always wanted to know, she’d ask how to make her phone come alive:

that it can talk to you, that it can see you, that it can smile and has eyes. It’s like a new family member, you can talk to it.

Sounds a bit like Siri, Alexa, or Furby, doesn’t it?

If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first?

She’d have the phone be able to decide over her free time, her phone time. That would make the world better, not for the kids, but certainly for the parents.

The antifascist kid

This German boy’s dad has a background in electrotechnical engineering. He’s 10 years old and he told me he’s using the internet a lot for searching things for example about his passion: the firefighters. For him, the internet is:

An invisible world. A “virtual” world. But there’s also the darknet.

He told me he always watches that German show on public TV for kids that explains stuff: Checker Tobi. (In 2014, Checker Tobi actually produced an episode about the internet, which I’d criticize for having only male characters, except for one female character: a secretary—Google, a nice and friendly woman guiding the way through the huge library that’s the internet…)

This kid was the only one interviewed who managed to actually explain something about the internet, or rather about the hypertextual structure of the web. When I asked him to draw the internet, he made a drawing of a pin board. He explained:

Many items are attached to the pin board, and on the top left corner there’s a computer, for example with Youtube and one can navigate like that between all the items, and start again from the beginning when done.

When I asked if he knew what actually happens between the device and a website he visits, he put forth the hypothesis of the existence of some kind of

Waves, internet waves - all this stuff somehow needs to be transmitted.

What he’d like to learn:

How to get into the darknet? How do you become a Whitehat? I’ve heard these words on the internet, the internet makes me clever.

And what would he change on the internet if he could?

I want that right wing extreme stuff is not accessible anymore, or at least, that it rains turds (“Kackwürste”) whenever people watch such stuff. Or that people are always told: ‘This video is scum.’

I suspect that his father has been talking with him about these things, and maybe these are also subjects he heard about when listening to punk music (he told me he does), or browsing Youtube.

Future projects

To me this has been pretty insightful. I might share some more internet drawings by adults in the future, which I think are also really interesting, as they show very different things depending on the age of the person.

I’ve been using the information gathered to work on a children’s book… which I hope to be able to share with you next year.

In this post, I talk about unpaid work in F/LOSS, taking on the example of hackathons, and why, in my opinion, the expectation of volunteer work is hurting diversity.

Disclaimer: I don’t have all the answers, only some ideas and questions.

Previous findings

In 2006, the Flosspols survey searched to explain the “role of gender in free/libre/open source software (F/LOSS) communities because an earlier [study] revealed a significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software” (which is also a low number).

Their key findings were, to name just a few:

• that “F/LOSS rewards the producing code rather than the producing software. It thereby puts most emphasis on a particular skill set. Other activities such as interface design or documentation are understood as less ‘technical’ and therefore less prestigious.”
• “The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is ‘theirs’, are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.”

We also know from the 2016 Debian survey, published in 2021, that a majority of Debian contributors are employed, rather than being contractors, and rather than being students. Also, 95.5% of respondents to that study were men between the ages of 30 and 49, highly educated, with the largest groups coming from Germany, France, USA, and the UK. The study found that only 20% of the respondents were being paid to work on Debian. Half of these 20% estimate that the amount of work on Debian they are being paid for corresponds to less than 20% of the work they do there. On the other side, there are 14% of those who are being paid for Debian work who declared that 80-100% of the work they do in Debian is remunerated.

So, if a majority of people is not paid, why do they work on F/LOSS? Or: What are the incentives of free software?

In 2021, Louis-Philippe Véronneau aka Pollo, who is not only a Debian Developer but also an economist, published his thesis What are the incentive structures of free software (The actual thesis was written in French).

One very interesting finding Pollo pointed out is this one:

Indeed, while we have proven that there is a strong and significative correlation between the income and the participation in a free/libre software project, it is not possible for us to pronounce ourselves about the causality of this link.

In the French original text:

En effet, si nous avons prouvé qu’il existe une corrélation forte et significative entre le salaire et la participation à un projet libre, il ne nous est pas possible de nous prononcer sur la causalité de ce lien.

Said differently, it is certain that there is a relationship between income and F/LOSS contribution, but it’s unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software.

I would like to scratch this question a bit further, mostly relying on my own observations, experiences, and discussions with F/LOSS contributors.

Volunteer work is unpaid work

We often hear of hackathons, hack weeks, or hackfests. I’ve been at some such events myself, Tails organized one, the IETF regularly organizes hackathons, and last week (June 2022!) I saw an invitation for a hack week with the Torproject. This type of event generally last several days. While the people who organize these events are being paid by the organizations they work for, participants on the other hand are generally joining on a volunteer basis.

Who can we expect to show up at this type of event under these circumstances as participants?

To answer this question, I collected some ideas:

• people who have an employer sponsoring their work
• people who have a funder/grant sponsoring their work
• people who have a high income and can take time off easily (in that regard, remember the Gender Pay Gap, women often earn less for the same work than men)
• people who rely on family wealth (living off an inheritance, living on rights payments from a famous grandparent - I’m not making these situations up, there are actual people in such financially favorable situations…)
• people who “don’t need much money” because they don’t have to pay rent or pay low rent (besides house owners that category includes people who live in squats or have social welfare paying for their rent, people who live with parents or caretakers)
• people who don’t need to do care work (for children, elderly family members, pets. Remember that most care work is still done by women.)
• students who have financial support or are in a situation in which they do not yet need to generate a lot of income
• people who otherwise have free time at their disposal

So, who, in your opinion, fits these unwritten requirements?

Looking at this list, it’s pretty clear to me why we’d mostly find white men from the Global North, generally with higher education in hackathons and F/LOSS development. (“Great, they’re a culture fit!”)

Yes, there will also always be some people of marginalized groups who will attend such events—because they expect to network, to find an internship, to find a better job in the future, or to add their participation to their curriculum. To me, this rings a bunch of alarm bells.

Low diversity in F/LOSS projects—a mirror of the distribution of wealth

I believe that the lack of diversity in F/LOSS is first of all a mirror of the distribution of wealth on a larger level. And by “wealth” I’m referring to financial wealth as much as to social wealth in the sense of Bourdieu: Families of highly educated parents socially reproducing privilege by allowing their kids to attend better schools, supporting and guiding them in their choices of study and work, providing them with relations to internships acting as springboards into well paid jobs and so on.

That said, we should ask ourselves as well:

Do F/LOSS projects exacerbate existing lines of oppression by relying on unpaid work?

Let’s look again at the causality question of Pollo’s research (in my words):

It is unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software.

Maybe we need to imagine this cause-effect relationship over time: as a student, without children and lots of free time, hopefully some money from the state or the family, people can spend time on F/LOSS, collect experience, earn recognition - and later find a well-paid job and make unpaid F/LOSS contributions into a hobby, cementing their status in the community, while at the same time generating a sense of well-being from working on the common good.

This is a quite common scenario. As the Flosspols study revealed however, boys often get their own computer at the age of 14, while girls get one only at the age of 20. (These numbers might be slightly different now, and possibly many people don’t own an actual laptop or desktop computer anymore, instead they own mobile devices which are not exactly inciting them to look behind the surface, take apart, learn, appropriate technology.) In any case, the above scenario does not allow for people who join F/LOSS later in life, eg. changing careers, to find their place.

I believe that F/LOSS projects cannot expect to have more women, people of color, people from working class backgrounds, people from outside of Germany, France, USA, UK, Australia, and Canada on board as long as volunteer work is the status quo and waged labour an earned privilege.

Wait, are you criticizing all these wonderful people who sacrifice their free time to work towards common good?

No, that’s definitely not my intention, I’m glad that F/LOSS exists, and the F/LOSS ecosystem has always represented a small utopia to me that is worth cherishing and nurturing. However, I think we still need to talk more about the lack of diversity, and investigate it further.

Paid internships are one key to countering lines of oppression

Lots of projects, even Outreachy and GSoC, require one contribution to F/LOSS to be made prior to be able to apply for a paid internship. I do well understand the incentive of this, but it’s quite a high entry barrier.

In 2014/2015 I was able to have 3 months of work on Debian paid for via an Outreachy internship. I was extremely grateful for that opportunity because without this paid internship I would never have found the time to engage with the Debian and F/LOSS ecosystem in depth simply because I would have had to work on my usual day job; I have rent to pay, and a health insurance which is really not cheap. These programs are key because they help counter existing lines of oppression at a strategic point: they buy someone’s time by providing them a small income. Back then, the internship was paid 5,500USD gross for 3 months, meaning after taxes and paying social/health insurance, I was left with roughly 1100€ per month, really not much money for living decently in Western Europe, but enough to get started.

By the way, to my knowledge, 4 women who did an Outreachy internship subsequently became Debian Developers. 3 other female Debian Developers are or were part of Outreachy on the organizer side. I think this shows that this program is a success that we don’t celebrate enough!

Some types of work are never being paid

Besides free work at hacking events, let me also underline that a lot of work in F/LOSS is not considered “payable work” (yes, that’s an oxymoron!). Which F/LOSS project for example, has ever paid translators a decent fee? Which project has ever considered that doing the social glue work, often done by women in the projects, is work that should be paid for? Which F/LOSS projects pay the people who do their Debian packaging rather than relying on yet another already well-paid white man who can afford doing this work for free all the while holding up how great the F/LOSS ecosystem is? And how many people on opensourcedesign jobs are looking to get their logo or website done for free? (Isn’t that heart icon appealing to your altruistic empathy?)

In my experience even F/LOSS projects which are trying to “do the right thing” by paying everyone the same amount of money per hour run into issues — when it turns out that not all hours are equal and that some types of work do not qualify for remuneration at all or that the rules for the clocking of work are not universally applied in the same way by everyone.

Not every interaction should have a monetary value, but…

Some of you want to keep working without being paid, because that feels a bit like communism within capitalism, it makes you feel good to contribute to the greater good while not having the system determine your value over money. I hear you. I’ve been there (and sometimes still am). But as long as we live in this system, even though we didn’t choose to and maybe even despise it - communism is not about working for free, it’s about getting paid equally and adequately.

We may not think about it while under the age of 40 or 45, but working without adequate financial compensation, even half of the time, will ultimately result in not being able to care for oneself when sick, when old. And while this may not be an issue for people who inherit wealth, or have an otherwise safe economical background, eg. an academic salary, it is a huge problem and barrier for many people coming out of the working or service classes.

(Oh and please, don’t repeat the neoliberal lie that everyone can achieve whatever they aim for, if they just tried hard enough. French research shows that (in France) one has only 30% chance to become a “class defector”, and change social class upwards. “But I managed to get out and move up, so everyone can!” - well, if you believe that I’m afraid you might be experiencing survivor bias.)

Not all bodies are equally able

We should also be aware that not all of us can work with the same amount of energy either. There is yet another category of people who are excluded by the expectation of volunteer work, either because the waged labour they do already eats all of their energy, or because their bodies are not disposed to do that much work, for example because of mental health issues - such as depression-, or because of physical disabilities.

When organizing events relying on volunteer work…

…please think about these things. Yes, you can tell people that they should ask their employer to pay them for attending a hackathon - but, as I’ve hopefully shown, that would not do it for many people, especially newcomers. Instead, you could propose a fund to make it possible that people who would not normally attend can attend. DebConf is a good example for having done this for many years.

Conclusively…

I would like to urge free software projects that have a budget and directly pay some people from it to map where they rely on volunteer work and how this hurts diversity in their project. How do you or your project exacerbate pre-existing lines of oppression by granting or not granting monetary value to certain types of work? What is it that you take for granted?

As always, I’m curious about your feedback!

Worth a read

These ideas are far from being new. Ashe Dryden’s well-researched post The ethics of unpaid labor and the OSS community dates back to 2013 and is as important as it was ten years ago.

I received some feedback on the first part of interviews about the internet with children that I’d like to share publicly here. Thank you! Your thoughts and experiences are important to me!

In the first interview round there was this French girl.

Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children.

To this bit, one person reacted saying that they first laughed when reading her proposal, but then felt extremely touched by it.

Another person reacted to the same bit of text:

That’s just brilliant. We spend so much time worrying about how the internet will affect children while overlooking how it has already affected us as parents. It actively harms our relationship with our children (keeping us distracted from their amazing life) and sets a bad example for them.

Too often, when we worry about children, we should look at our own behavior first. Until about that age (9-10+) at least, they are such a direct reflection of us that it’s frightening…

Yet another person reacted to the fact that many of the interviewees in the first round seemed to believe that the internet is immaterial, located somewhere in the air, while being at the same time omnipresent:

It reminds me of one time – about a dozen years ago, when i was still working closely with one of the city high schools – where i’d just had a terrible series of days, dealing with hardware failure, crappy service followthrough by the school’s ISP, and overheating in the server closet, and had basically stayed overnight at the school and just managed to get things back to mostly-functional before kids and teachers started showing up again.

That afternoon, i’d been asked by the teacher of a dystopian fiction class to join them for a discussion of Feed, which they’d just finished reading. i had read it the week before, and came to class prepared for their questions. (the book is about a near-future where kids have cybernetic implants and their society is basically on a runaway communications overload; not a bad Y[oung]A[dult] novel, really!)

The kids all knew me from around the school, but the teacher introduced my appearance in class as “one of the most Internet-connected people” and they wanted to ask me about whether i really thought the internet would “do this kind of thing” to our culture, which i think was the frame that the teacher had prepped them with. I asked them whether they thought the book was really about the Internet, or whether it was about mobile phones. Totally threw off the teacher’s lesson plans, i think, but we had a good discussion.

At one point, one of the kids asked me “if there was some kind of crazy disaster and all the humans died out, would the internet just keep running? what would happen on it if we were all gone?”

all of my labor – even that grueling week – was invisible to him! The internet was an immaterial thing, or if not immaterial, a force of nature, a thing that you accounted for the way you accounted for the weather, or traffic jams. It didn’t occur to him, even having just read a book that asked questions about what hyperconnectivity does to a culture (including grappling with issues of disparate access, effective discrimination based on who has the latest hardware, etc), it didn’t occur to him that this shit all works to the extent that it does because people make it go.

I felt lost trying to explain it to him, because where i wanted to get to with the class discussion was about how we might decide collectively to make it go somewhere else – that our contributions to it, and our labor to perpetuate it (or not) might actually help shape the future that the network helps us slide into. but he didn’t even see that human decisions or labor played a role it in at all, let alone a potentially directive role. We were really starting at square zero, which wasn’t his fault. Or the fault of his classmates that matter – but maybe a little bit of fault on the teacher, who i thought should have been emphasizing this more – but even the teacher clearly thought of the internet as a thing being done to us not as something we might actually drive one way or another. And she’s not even wrong – most people don’t have much control, just like most people can’t control the weather, even as our weather changes based on aggregate human activity.

I was quite impressed by seeing the internet perceived as a force of nature, so we continued this discussion a bit:

that whole story happened before we started talking about “the cloud”, but “the cloud” really reinforces this idea, i think. not that anyone actually thinks that “the cloud” is a literal cloud, but language shapes minds in subtle ways.

(Bold emphasis in the texts are mine.)

Thanks :) I’m happy and touched that these interviews prompted your wonderful reactions, and I hope that there’ll be more to come on this topic. I’m working on it!

Read the next post in the series Part 4

I promised a follow up to my post about interviews about how children conceptualize the internet. Here it is.

The internet, it’s that thing that acts up all the time, right?

As said in my first post, I abandoned the idea to interview children younger than 9 years because it seems they are not necessarily aware that they are using the internet. But it turns out that some do have heard about the internet. My friend Anna, who has 9 younger siblings, tried to win some of her brothers and sisters for an interview with me. At the dinner table, this turned into a discussion and she sent me an incredibly funny video where two of her brothers and sisters, aged 5 and 6, discuss with her about the internet. I won’t share the video for privacy reasons — besides, the kids speak in the wondrous dialect of Vorarlberg, a region in western Austria, close to the border with Liechtenstein.

Here’s a transcription of the dinner table discussion:

• Anna: what is the internet?
• both children: (shouting as if it was a game of who gets it first) photo! mobile! device! camera!
• Anna: But one can have a camera without the internet…
• M.: Internet is the mobile phone charger! Mobile phone full!
• J.: Internet is… internet is…
• M.: I know! Internet is where you can charge something, the mobile phone and…
• Anna: You mean electricity?
• M.: Yeah, that is the internet, electricity!
• Anna: (laughs), Yes, the internet works a bit similarly, true.
• J.: It’s the electricity of the house!
• Anna: The electricity of the house…

(everyone is talking at the same time now.)

• Anna: And what’s WiFi?
• M.: WiFi it’s the TV!
• Anna (laughs)
• M.: WiFi is there so it doesn’t act up!
• Anna (laughs harder)
• J. (repeats what M. just said): WiFi is there so it doesn’t act up!
• Anna: So that what doesn’t act up?
• M.: (moves her finger wildly drawing a small circle in the air) So that it doesn’t spin!
• Anna: Ah?
• M.: When one wants to watch something on Youtube, well then… that the thing doesn’t spin like that!
• Anna: Ahhh! so when you use Youtube, you need the internet, right?
• J.: Yes, so that one can watch things.

I really like how the kids associate the internet with a thing that works all the time, except for when it doesn’t work. Then they notice: “The internet is acting up!” Probably, when that happens, parents or older siblings say: “the internet is acting up” or “let me check why the internet acts up again” and maybe they get up from the sofa, switch a home router on and off again, which creates this association with electricity.

(Just for the sake of clarity for fellow multilingualist readers, the kids used the German word “spinnen”, which I translated to “acting up”. In French that would be “déconner”.)

WiFi for everyone!

I interviewed another of Anna’s siblings, a 10 year old boy. He told me that he does not really use the internet by himself yet, and does not own any internet capable device. He watches when older family members look up stuff on Google, or put on a video on Youtube, Netflix, or Amazon — he knew all these brand names though. In the living room, there’s Alexa, he told me, and he uses the internet by asking Alexa to play music.

Then I say: Alexa, play this song!

Interestingly, he knew that, in order to listen to a CD, the internet was not needed.

When asked how a drawing would look like that explains the internet, he drew a scheme of the living room at home, with the TV, Alexa, and some kind of WiFi dongle, maybe a repeater. (Unfortunately I did not manage to get his drawing.)

If he could ask a wise and friendly dragon one thing about the internet that he always wanted to know, he would ask “How much internet can one have and what are all the things one can do with the internet?”

If he could change the internet for the better for everyone, he would build a gigantic building which would provide the entire world with WiFi. ☺

Cut out the stupid stuff from the internet

His slightly older sister does own a laptop and a smartphone. She uses the internet to watch movies, or series, to talk with her friends, or to listen to music.

When asked how she would explain the internet to an alien, she said that

one can do a lot of things on the internet, but on the internet there can be stupid things, but also good things, one can learn stuff on the internet, for example how to do crochet.

Most importantly, she noticed that

one needs the internet nowadays.

Her drawing shows how she uses the internet: calls using WhatsApp, watching movies online, and a laptop with open windows on the screen.

She would ask the dragon that can explain one thing she always wanted to know about the internet:

What is the internet? How does it work at all? How does it function?

What she would change has to do with her earlier remark about stupid things:

I would make it so that there are less stupid things. It would be good to use the internet for better things, but not for useless things, that one doesn’t actually need.

When I asked her what she meant by “stupid things”, she replied:

Useless videos where one talks about nonsense. And one can also google stupid things, for example “how long will i be alive?” and stuff like that.

Patterns

From the interviews I made until now, there seems to be a cut between then age where kids don’t own a device and use the internet to watch movies, series or listen to music and the age where they start owning a device and then they start talking to their friends, and create accounts on social media. This seems to happen roughly at ages 9-10.

I’m still surprised at the amount of ideas that kids have, when asked what they would change on the internet if they could. I’m sure there’s more if one goes looking for it.

Thanks

Thanks to my friends who made all these interviews possible either by allowing me to meet their children, or their younger siblings: Anna, Christa, Aline, Cindy, and Martina.

Read the next post in the series Part 3

I wanted to understand how kids between 10 and 18 conceive the internet. Surely, we have seen a generation that we call “digital natives” grow up with the internet. Now, there is a younger generation who grows up with pervasive technology, such as smartphones, smart watches, virtual assistants and so on. And only a few of them have parents who work in IT or engineering…

Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial

With their search engine website design, Google has put in place an extremely simple and straightforward user interface. Since then, designers and psychologists have worked on making user interfaces more and more intuitive to use. The buzzwords are “usability” and “user experience design”. Besides this optimization of visual interfaces, haptic interfaces have evolved as well, specifically on smartphones and tablets where hand gestures have replaced more clumsy external haptic interfaces such as a mouse. And beyond interfaces, the devices themselves have become smaller and slicker. While in our generation many people have experienced opening a computer tower or a laptop to replace parts, with the side effect of seeing the parts the device is physically composed of, the new generation of end user devices makes this close to impossible, essentially transforming these devices into black boxes, and further contributing to the idea that the internet they are being used to access with would be something entirely intangible.

What do kids in 2022 really know about the internet?

So, what do kids of that generation really know about the internet, beyond purely using services they do not control? In order to find out, I decided to interview children between 10 and 18.

I conducted 5 interviews with kids aged 9, 10, 12, 15 and 17, two boys and three girls. Two live in rural Germany, one in a German urban area, and two live in the French capital.

I wrote the questions in a way to stimulate the interviewees to tell me a story each time. I also told them that the interview is not a test and that there are no wrong answers.

Except for the 9 year old, all interviewees possessed both, their own smartphone and their own laptop. All of them used the internet mostly for chatting, entertainment (video and music streaming, online games), social media (TikTok, Instagram, Youtube), and instant messaging.

Let me introduce you to their concepts of the internet. That was my first story telling question to them:

If aliens had landed on Earth and would ask you what the internet is, what would you explain to them?

The majority of respondents agreed in their replies that the internet is intangible – while still being a place where one “can do anything” and “everything”.

Before I tell you more about their detailed answers to the above question, let me show you how they visualize “their” internet.

If you had to make a drawing to explain to a person what the internet is, how would this drawing look like?

Each interviewee had some minutes to come up with a drawing. As you will see, that drawing corresponds to what the kids would want an alien to know about the internet and how they are using the internet themselves.

Movies, series, videos

The youngest respondent, a 9 year old girl, drew a screen with lots of people around it and the words “film, series, network, video”, as well as a “play” icon. She said that she mostly uses the internet to watch movies. She was the only one who used a shared tablet and smartphone that belonged to her family, not to herself. And she would explain the net like this to an alien:

"Internet is a… er… one cannot touch it… it‘s an, er… [I propose the word ‚idea‘], yes it‘s an idea. Many people use it not necessarily to watch things, but also to read things or do other stuff."

User interface elements

A 10 year old boy represented the internet by recalling user interface elements he sees every day in his drawing: a magnifying glass (search engine), a play icon (video streaming), speech bubbles (instant messaging). He would explain the internet like this to an alien:

"You can use the internet to learn things or get information, listen to music, watch movies, and chat with friends. You can do nearly anything with it."

Another planet

A 12 year old girl imagines the internet like a second, intangible, planet where Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Ebay, or H&M are continents that one enters into.

"And on [the] Ebay [continent] there‘s a country for clothes, and ,trousers‘, for example, would be a federal state in that country."

Something that was unique about this interview was that she told me she had an email address but she never writes emails. She only has an email account to receive confirmation emails, for example when doing online shopping, or when registering to a service and needing to confirm one‘s address. This is interesting because it‘s an anti-spam measure that might become outdated with a generation that uses email less or not at all.

Home network

A 15 year old boy knew that his family‘s devices are connected to a home router (Freebox is a router from the French ISP Free) but lacked an imagination of the rest of the internet‘s functioning. When I asked him about what would be behind the router, on the other side, he said what‘s behind is like a black hole to him. However, he was the only interviewee who did actually draw cables, wifi waves, a router, and the local network. His drawing is even extremely precise, it just lacks the cable connecting the router to the rest of the internet.

Satellite internet

A 17 year old girl would explain the internet to an alien as follows:

"The internet goes around the entire globe. One is networked with everyone else on Earth. One can find everything. But one cannot touch the internet. It‘s like a parallel world. With a device one can look into the internet. With search engines, one can find anything in the world, one can phone around the world, and write messages. [The internet] is a gigantic thing."

This interviewee stated as the only one that the internet is huge. And while she also is the only one who drew the internet as actually having some kind of physical extension beyond her own home, she seems to believe that internet connectivity is based on satellite technology and wireless communication.

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you’ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about?

A 10 year old boy said he‘d like to know “how big are the servers behind all of this”. That‘s the only interview in which the word “server” came up.

A 12 year old girl said “I would ask how to earn money with the internet. I always wanted to know how this works, and where the money comes from.” I love the last part of her question!

The 15 year old boy for whom everything behind the home router is out of his event horizon would ask “How is it possible to be connected like we are? How does the internet work scientifically?”

A 17 year old girl said she‘d like “to learn how the darknet works, what hidden things are there? Is it possible to get spied on via the internet? Would it be technically possible to influence devices in a way that one can listen to secret or telecommanded devices?”

Lastly, I wanted to learn about what they find annoying, or problematic about the internet.

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?

Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children.

Three of the interviewees agreed that they see way too many advertisements and two of them would like ads to disappear entirely from the web. The other one said that she doesn‘t want to see ads, but that ads are fine if she can at least click them away.

The 15 year old boy had different ambitions. He told me he would change:

"the age of access to the internet. More and more younger people access the internet ; especially with TikTok there is a recommendation algorithm that can influcence young people a lot. And influencing young people should be avoided but the internet does it too much. And that can be negative. If you don‘t yet have a critical spirit, and you watch certain videos you cannot yet moderate your stance. It can influence you a lot. There are so many things that have become indispensable and that happen on the internet and we have become dependent. What happens if one day it doesn‘t work anymore? If we connect more and more things to the net, that‘s not a good thing."

The internet - Oh, that’s what you mean!

On a sidenote, my first interview tentative was with an 8 year old girl from my family. I asked her if she uses the internet and she denied, so I abandoned interviewing her. Some days later, while talking to her, she proposed to look something up on Google, using her smartphone. I said: “Oh, so you are using the internet!” She replied: “Oh, that‘s what you‘re talking about?”

I think she knows the word “Google” and she knows that she can search for information with this Google thing. But it appeared that she doesn‘t know that the Google search engine is located somewhere else on internet and not on her smartphone. I concluded that for her, using the services on the smartphone is as “natural” as switching on a light in the house: we also don’t think about where the electricity comes from when we do that.

What can we learn from these few interviews?

Unsurprisingly, social media, streaming, entertainment, and instant messaging are the main activities kids undertake on the internet. They are completely at the mercy of advertisements in apps and on websites, not knowing how to get rid of them. They interact on a daily basis with algorithms that are unregulated and known to perpetuate discrimination and to create filter bubbles, without necessarily being aware of it. The kids I interviewed act as mere service users and seem to be mostly confined to specific apps or websites.

All of them perceived the internet as being something intangible. Only the older interviewees perceived that there must be some kind of physical expansion to it: the 17 year old girl by drawing a network of satellites around the globe, the 15 year old boy by drawing the local network in his home.

Read the next post in the series Part 2

Anger workshop

Based on my readings about the subject and a mediation training, I created a first workshop about dealing with one’s own anger for the feminist hackers assembly in 2020. Many women who attended said they recognized themselves in what I was talking about. I created the exercises in the workshop with the goal of getting participants to share and self-reflect in small groups. I’m not giving out solutions, instead proposals on how to deal with anger come from the participants themselves. (I added the last two content pages to the file after the workshop.) This is why this workshop is always different, depending on the group and what they want to share. The first time I did this workshop was a huge success and so I created an improved version for the assembly of 2021.

→ Angry womxn* workshop

The act of saying NO

We often say yes, despite wanting to say no, out of a sense of duty, or because we learned that we should always be nice and helpful, and that our own needs are best served last. Many people don’t really know how to say no. Sarah Cooper, a former Google employee herself, makes fun of this in her fabulous book “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings” (highly recommended read!):

That’s why a discussion space about saying NO did not seem out of place at the feminist hackers assembly :) I based my workshop on the original, created by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and distributed through their holistic security training manual.

I like this workshop because sharing happens in a small groups and has an immediately felt effect. Several people reported that the exercises allowed them to identify the exact moment when they had said yes to something despite really having wanted to say no. The exercises from the workshop can easily be done with a friend or trusted person, and they can even be done alone by writing them down, although the effect in writing might be less pronounced.

→ The act of saying NO workshop

Mapping capacities and desires

Based on discussions with a friend, whose company uses SWOT analysis (strengths—weaknesses—opportunities—threats) to regularly check in with their employees, and to allow employees to check in with themselves, I created a similar tool for myself which I thought would be nice to share with others. It’s a very simple self-reflection that can help map out what works well, what doesn’t work so well and where one wants to go in the future. I find it important to not use this tool narrow-mindedly only regarding work skills and expertise. Instead, I think it’s useful to also include soft skills, hobbies, non-work capacities and whatever else comes to mind in order to create a truer map.

Fun fact: During the assembly, a bunch of participants reported that they found it hard to distinguish between things they don’t like doing and things they don’t know how to do.

→ Mapping capacities and desires

Known issues

One important feedback point I got is that people felt the time for the exercises in all three workshops could have been longer. In case you want to try out these workshops, you might want to take this into account.

Anger is a feeling that is mostly taboo in our society. People tend to think that anger and rage are the same thing and reject anger. We are taught to suppress it. But: “The suppression of anger can cause a lot of trouble, giving rise to virulent progeny such as malice, passive aggression, hostility, rage, sabotage, hate, blame, guilt, controlling behavior, shame, self-blame, and self-destruction.” (Quoted from: Anne Katherine, “Where to draw the line”).

When we talk about anger, we need to distinguish between acting out anger, and feeling anger. In general, when you hear me talking about anger, I’m talking about the feeling named anger in English.

Anger is a normal feeling with a super power: it gives us the energy to change a situation that we consider to be unsustainable. We can express the feeling of anger verbally by saying for example: “That thing makes me really angry”, “I can’t talk right now, I am very angry about what I just heard”.

Let’s also note that there may be other feelings lying below anger, such as sadness, frustration, grief, fear, etc.

This is a page from the wonderful “Making Comics” by Scott McCloud. (Yes, emotions are complex! See some more of Scott McCloud’s pages about emotion in comics)

Bottling up feelings

Most of the time, people don’t get angry suddenly, even though it might seem like that from the outside. Instead, they’ve been bottling up feelings for a while, and at some point, a small trigger is enough to make the bottle overflow. The reasons for bottling up feelings can be as diverse as people:

• Low self-esteem: not thinking one has the right and the capacity to express unpleasant feelings
• Not knowing how to express unpleasant feelings. For example not having learnt to say: “I am not comfortable, I’ll leave now, I’ll get back to you once I know what’s going on / if this is about me / if I feel like it.”
• Not trusting one’s own feelings, specifically common in people who have been victims of gaslighting
• Repressing emotions, specifically anger, sometimes to the point of not being able to feel one’s own feelings anymore
• Not being able to express disagreement and instead applying the fawn response: trying to please the other in order to avoid further conflict. See: Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
• Not being able to express boundaries: “stop”, “this is enough”, “I don’t accept this”, etc.
• Not being in a situation or a space in which feelings can be expressed freely, for example a workplace or a hierarchical situation where this might be disadvantageous

These are just some examples I can come up with in 3 minutes, the list is non exhaustive.

When someone’s bottle overflows, their peers can be confused and not know how to react to what they perceive as a sudden outburst — while what they are seeing might just be the other person’s first time tentative of saying “no” or “stop”. Oftentimes, the responsibility for the situation is then put on the shoulders of the person who supposedly “exploded”: they have been behaving differently than usual or not within the expectations, right?

Well, it’s not that simple. Conflicts are relational. The other party might have ignored signs, requests, feelings, and needs of the angry person for a while. Maybe the relationship has been deteriorating since some time? Maybe there was a power imbalance, that has never been revisited, updated, questioned? Or maybe their bottle is being filled by something else in their life and getting too small to contain all the drops of suppressed emotions. People change, and relationships change. We cannot assume that because a person has accepted something for months or years, that they always will. I think that anger can be a sign of such change or need thereof.

A message has four sides… and that creates misunderstandings

Friedemann Schulz von Thun has created a theory, the four-sides model, that establishes four facets of a message:

• Fact: What is the message about?
• Self-disclosure: What does the speaker reveal about herself (with or without intention)?
• Relation: What is the speaker’s relationship towards the receiver of the message?
• Appeal: What does the speaker want to obtain?

Let me adapt Schulz von Thun’s example to a situation that happened to me once: I came to a friend’s house and I smelled some unknown thing when I entered the apartment. I asked: “what’s that smell?” I actually never bake, so I don’t know anything about whatever it is people put into cakes. I wanted to say: I don’t know what that smell is, tell me what it is? She replied: “You never like anything I do, my furniture gets criticized, my cake’s not right, and you criticize me all the time.” We ended up in such a big misunderstanding that I left her house 5 minutes after I arrived.

With Schulz von Thun’s model we can understand what happened here:

The speaker’s question “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” has four sides:

1. Factual: There is a smell.
2. Self-disclosure: I don’t know what it is.
3. Relational: You know what it is.
4. Appeal: Tell me what it is!

The receiver can hear the question with 4 different ears:

1. Factual part: There is a smell.
2. Self-disclosure: I don’t like the smell.
3. Relationship: You’re not good at baking cake.
4. Appeal: Don’t bake cake anymore.

At this point, the receiver will probably reply: “Bake the cake yourself next time!”

Behind the message

Sometimes, we hear more strongly with one ear than with the other ears. For example, some people hear more on the relational side and they will always hear “You’re not good at …”. Other people hear more on the appeal side and will always try to guess into a message what the other person wants or expects of them. People on the autistic spectrum often hear better with the factual ear, and do not understand the other layers of the message.

Form and contents of a message

Getting back to anger, I think that it’s often not the contents — i.e. the factual facet — of a message that triggers our bottle to overflow, but the (perceived) intention of the speaker, i.e. the appeal facet.

For example, a speaker might have an intention to silence us by using gaslighting, or tone policing. Or a speaker wants to explicitly hurt us because that’s how they learnt to deal with their own feelings of hurt.

The actual relation between speaker and receiver also seems to play a role in how anger can get triggered, when we hear with the relational ear. There are many nonverbal underlying layers to our communication:

• The position of both speaker and receiver to each other: are they equals or is there any kind of power imbalance between them? A power imbalance can be a (perceived) dependency: For example, one person in a friendship has a kid and the other one regularly helps them so that the parent has some time to advance their work or career: this can create a feeling of not being good enough by oneself and having to rely on others. Or there is indeed a dependency in which the speaker is a team lead and the receiver a subordinate.
• The needs of each person: a need to solve problems quickly for one person might conflict with the need to be involved in decision making of the other person. (See Taibi Kahler’s drivers)
• The inner beliefs of each person: in childhood we might have constructed the inner belief: “You’re okay, I’m not okay”, or “Nobody cares about what I want”, or “I have to be nice (friendly, hardworking, strong, etc.) all the time otherwise nobody loves me” - as some examples.

So, suppose person A offers to help person B, and what person B hears instead is their overprotective mother instead of their friend. Person A might be surprised to see B overreact or disappear for a while to get back their feelings of autonomy and integrity as an adult.

Or person C expresses she’d “like to handle problem X like this” while person D might well not hear this as a proposal to handle a problem, but as a decision made without involving her. Which might propel D back to her childhood in which she could also not take decisions autonomously. Then D might react like she would react as a child, slamming a door, shout, run away, freeze, or fawn.

Communication is complex!

So, whenever we hear a message, not only do we hear the message with four ears, but also, we hear it with our position, our needs, and our inner beliefs. And sometimes, our bottle is already full, and then it overflows.

At that point, I find it important that both sides reflect on the situation and stay in contact. Using empathy and compassion, we can try to better understand what’s going on, where we might have hurt the other person, for example, or what was being misunderstood. Did we hear only one side of the message? Do our respective strategies conflict with each other?

If we cannot hear each other anymore or always hear only one side of the message, we can try to do a mediation. Obviously, if at that point one side does not actually want to solve the problem, or thinks it’s not their problem, then there’s not much we can do, and mediation would not help.

The examples above might sound familiar to you. I chose them because I’ve seen them happen around me often, and I understand them as shared patterns. While all beings on this planets are unique, we share a common humanity, for example through such patterns and common experiences.

Everyone knows those messages that have “URGENT” in capital letters in the email subject. It might be that some of them really are urgent. Others are the written signs of someone having a hard time properly planning their own work and passing their delays on to someone who comes later in the creation or production chain. And others again come from people who are overworked and try to delegate some of their tasks to a friendly soul who is likely to help.

How emergencies create more emergencies

In the past, my first reflex when I received an urgent request was to start rushing into solutions. This happened partly out of empathy, partly because I like to be challenged into solving problems, and I’m fairly good at that. This has proven to be unsustainable, and here is why.

Emergencies create unplanned work

The first issue is that emergencies create a lot of unplanned work. Which in turn means not getting other, scheduled, things done. This can create a backlog, end up in working late, or working on weekends.

Emergencies can create a permanent state of exception

Unplanned work can also create a lot of frustration, out of the feeling of not getting the things done that one planned to do. We might even get a feeling of being nonautonomous (in German I would say fremdbestimmt, which roughly translates to “being directed by others”).

On the long term, this can generate unsustainable situations: higher work loads, and burnout. When working in a team of several people, A might have to take over the work of B because B has not enough capacities. Then A gets overloaded in turn, and C and D have to take over A’s work. Suddenly the team is stuck in a permanent state of exception. This state of exception will produce more backlog. The team might start to deprioritize social issues over getting technical things done. They might not be able to recruit new people anymore because they have no capacity left to onboard newcomers.

One emergency can result in a variety of emergencies for many people

The second issue produced by urgent requests is that if I cannot solve the initial emergency by myself, I might try to involve colleagues, other people who are skilled in the area, or people who work in another relevant organization to help with this. Suddenly, the initial emergency has become my emergency as well as the emergency of a whole bunch of other people.

A sidenote about working with friends

This might be less of an issue in a classical work setup than in a situation in which a bunch of freelancers work together, or in setups in which work and friendships are intertwined. This is a problem, because the boundaries between friend and worker role, and the expectations that go along with these roles, can get easily confused. If a colleague asks me to help with task X, I might say no; if a friend asks, I might be less likely to say no.

What I learnt about handling emergencies

I came up with some guidelines that help me to better handle emergencies.

Plan for unplanned work

It doesn’t matter and it doesn’t help to distinguish if urgent requests are legitimate or if they come from people who have not done their homework on time.

What matters is to make one’s weekly todo list sustainable. After reading Making work visible by Domenica de Grandis, I understood the need to add free slots for unplanned work into one’s weekly schedule. Slots for unplanned work can take up to 25% of the total work time!

Take time to make plans

Now that there are some free slots to handle emergencies, one can take some time to think when an urgent request comes in. A German saying proposes to wait and have some tea (“abwarten und Tee trinken”). I think this is actually really good advice, and works for any non-obvious problem. Sit down and let the situation sink in. Have a tea, take a shower, go for a walk. It’s never that urgent. Really, never. If possible, one can talk about the issue with another person, rubberduck style. Then one can make a plan on how to address the emergency properly, it could be that the solution is easier than at first thought.

Affirming boundaries: Saying no

Is the emergency that I’m asked to solve really my problem? Or is someone trying to involve me because they know I’m likely to help? Take a deep breath and think about it. No? It’s not my job, not my role? I have no time for this right now? I don’t want to do it? Maybe I’m not even paid for it? A colleague is pushing my boundaries to get some task on their own todo list done? Then I might want to say no. I can’t help with this. or I can help you in two weeks. I don’t need to give a reason. No. is a sentence. And: Saying no doesn’t make me an arse.

Affirming boundaries: Clearly defining one’s role

Clearly defining one’s role is something that is often overlooked. In many discussions I have with friends it appears that this is a major cause of overwork and underpayment. Lots of people are skilled, intelligent, and curious, and easily get challenged into putting on their super hero dress. But they’re certainly not the only person that can help—even if an urgent request makes them think that at first.

To clearly define our role, we need to make clear which part of the job is our work, and which part needs to be done by other people. We should stop trying to accomodate people and their requests to the detriment of our own sanity. You’re a language interpreter and are being asked to mediate a bi-lingual conflict between the people you are interpreting for? It’s not your job. You’re the graphic designer for a poster, but the text you’ve been given is not good enough? Send back a recommendation to change the text; don’t do these changes yourself: it’s not your job. But you can and want to do this yourself and it would make your client’s life easier? Then ask them to get paid for the extra time, and make sure to renegotiate your deadline!

Affirming boundaries: Defining expectations

Along with our role, we need to define expectations: in which timeframe am I willing to do the job? Under which contract, which agreement, which conditions? For which payment?

People who work in a salary office job generally do have a work contract in which their role and the expectations that come with this role are clearly defined. Nevertheless, I hear from friends that their superiors regularly try to make them do tasks that are not part of their role definition. So, here too, role and expectations sometimes need to be renegotiated, and the boundaries of these roles need to be clearly affirmed.

Random conclusive thoughts

If you’ve read until here, you might have experienced similar things.

Or, on the contrary, maybe you’re already good at communicating your boundaries and people around you have learnt to respect them? Congratulations.

In any case, for improving one’s own approach to such requests, it can be useful to find out which inner dynamics are at play when we interact with other people. Additionally, it can be useful to understand the differences between Asker and Guesser culture:

when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation.

Askers should also be aware that there might be Guessers in their team. It can help to define clear guidelines about making requests (when do I expect an answer, under which budget/contract/responsibility does the request fall, what other task can be put aside to handle the urgent task?) Last, but not least, Making work visible has a lot of other proposals on how to visibilize and then deal with unplanned work.

I find it useful to first disentangle what code reviews are good for, how we do them, why we do them that way, and how we can potentially improve processes.

What are code reviews good for?

Code review and peer review are great methods for cooperation aiming at:

• Ensuring that the code works as intended
• Ensuring that the task was fully accomplished and no detail left out
• Ensuring that no security issues have been introduced
• Making sure the code fits the practices of the team and is understandable and maintainable by others
• Sharing insights, transferring knowledge between code author and code reviewer
• Helping the code author to learn to write better code

Looking at this list, the last point seems to be more like a nice side effect of all the other points. :)

How do code reviews happen in our communities?

It seems to be a common assumption that code reviews are—and have to be—picky and perfectionist. To me, this does not actually seem to be a necessity to accomplish the above mentioned goals. We might want to work with precision—a quality which is different from perfection. Perfection can hardly be a goal: perfection does not exist.

Perfectionist dynamics can lead to failing to call something "good enough" or "done". Sometimes, a disproportionate amount of time is invested in writing (several) code reviews for minor issues. In some cases, strong perfectionist dynamics of a reviewer can create a feeling of never being good enough along with a loss of self esteem for otherwise skilled code authors.

When do we cross the line?

When going from cooperation, precision, and learning to write better code, to nitpicking, we are crossing a line: nitpicking means to pedantically search for others' faults. For example, I once got one of my Git commits at work criticized merely for its commit message that was said to be "ugly" because I "use[d] the same word twice" in it.

When we are nitpicking, we might not give feedback in an appreciative, cooperative way, we become fault finders instead. From there it's a short way to operating on the level of blame.

Are you nitpicking to help or are you nitpicking to prove something? Motivations matter.

How can we improve code reviewing?

When we did something wrong, we can do better next time. When we are told that we are wrong, the underlying assumption is that we cannot change (See Brené Brown, The difference between blame and shame). We can learn to go beyond blame.

Negative feedback rarely leads to improvement if the environment in which it happens lacks general appreciation and confirmation. We can learn to give helpful feedback. It might be harder to create an appreciative environment in which negative feedback is a possibility for growth. One can think of it like of a relationship: in a healthy relationship we can tell each other when something does not work and work it out—because we regularly experience that we respect, value, and support each other.

To be able to work precisely, we need guidelines, tools, and time. It's not possible to work with precision if we are in a hurry, burnt out, or working under a permanent state of exception. The same is true for receiving picky feedback.

On DebConf's IRC channel, after our talk, marvil07 said: On picky code reviews, something that I find useful is automation on code reviews; i.e. when a bot is stating a list of indentation/style errors it feels less personal, and also saves time to humans to provide more insightful changes. Indeed, we can set up routines that do automatic fault checking (linting). We can set up coding guidelines. We can define what we call "done" or "good enough".

We can negotiate with each other how we would like code to be reviewed. For example, one could agree that a particularly perfectionist reviewer should point out only functional faults. They can spare their time and refrain from writing lengthy reviews about minor esthetic issues that have never made it into a guideline. If necessary, author and reviewer can talk about what can be improved on the long term during a retrospective. Or, on the contrary, one could explicitly ask for a particularly detailed review including all sorts of esthetic issues to learn the best practices of a team applied to one's own code.

In summary: let's not lose sight of what code reviews are good for, let's have a clear definition of "done", let's not confuse precision with perfection, let's create appreciative work environments, and negotiate with each other how reviews are made.

I'm sure you will come up with more ideas. Please do not hesitate to share them!

Update 12/2020: I highly recommend this talk (in French) by Kim Lai Trinh: Autocritique de la revue de code (bienveillante). He makes the point that code reviews are a social interaction and as such carry privileges across. He changes his expectations for code review from getting "quality code" to "Make sure everyone in the team contributes, gets gratitude (reconnaissance) out of their contribution, and gains more autonomy".

In school, we read the philologist diary of Victor Klemperer about the changes in the German language during the Third Reich, LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, a book which makes it clear that the use of language is political, creates realities, and has reverse repercussions on concepts of an entire society. Language was one of the tools that supported Nazism in insiduously pervading all parts of society.

Language shapes our concepts of society

Around the same time, a friend of mine proposed to read Egalia's daughters by Gerd Brantenberg, a book in which gendered words were reversed: so that human becomes huwim, for example. This book made me take notice of gendered concepts that often go unnoticed.

Language shapes the way we think and feel

I spent a large part of my adult life in France, which confronted me with the realization that a language provides its speakers with certain concepts. If a concept does not exist in a language, people cannot easily feel or imagine this concept either.

Back then (roughly 20 years ago), even though I was aware of gender inequality, I hated using gender neutral language because in German and French it felt unnatural, and, or so I thought, we were all alike. One day, at a party, we played a game that consisted in guessing people's professions by asking them Yes/No questions. Turns out that we were unable to guess that the woman we were talking with was a doctor, because we could simply not imagine this profession for a young woman. In French, docteur is male and almost nobody would use the word doctoresse, ou femme docteur.

Unimaginable are also the concepts of words in German that have no equivalent in French or vice versa:

• Sehnsucht composed of longing (sich sehnen) and obsession (Sucht). In English, this word is translated as longing. In French it is translated as nostalgie (nostalgia), but nostalgia is directed towards the past, while Sehnsucht in German can be used to designate a longing for people, places, food, even feelings, and can be used in all temporal directions. There are other approximate translations to French, for example aspiration.
• Das Unheimliche is a German word and an essay by Sigmund Freud from 1919. The translation of the title had been subject to a lot of debate, before the text was published in French under the name "L'inquiétante étrangeté", something that would translate to English as worrisome unfamiliarity. In English, there is a word for unheimlich, which is uncanny, however canny does not transport the German concept of heimlich which is related to home, familiarity, and secrecy.
• Dépaysement. This French word is a negation of feeling home like in one's country (pays): it describes the, generally positively connoted, feelings one experiences when changing habits, or environment.

Or, to make all this a bit less serious, Italian has the word gattara (female) or gattaro (male), which one could translate to English roughly as cat person, most often designating old women who feed stray cats.

But really, the way language shapes our concepts and ideas goes much further, as well explained by Lera Boroditsky in a talk in which she explains how language influences concepts of space, time, and blame, among other things.

Building new models

This quote by Buckminster Fuller is pinned on the wall over my desk:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

A change in language is such a new model: it can make oppression and inequalities visible. Words do not only describe our world, they are a vehicle of ideas, and utopias. Analyzing and criticizing our use of language means paving the way for ideas and concepts of inclusion, equality, and unity.

You might be guessing at where am I getting at with this… Right: I am in favor of acknowledging past mistakes, and replacing oppressive metaphors in computing. As noted in the IETF draft about Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language, by Niels Ten Oever and Mallory Knodel, the metaphors "master/slave" and "blacklist/whitelist" associate "white with good and black with evil [which] is known as the 'bad is black effect'", all the while being technically inaccurate.

I acknowledge that this will take time. There is a lot of work to do.