Tech zine by Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Sareeta Amrute

Citation is a way of showing who you are and where you’re going. It sounds simple, but it goes wrong all the time. People, even feminist scholars of color, get caught up in lineage and in originality. We want to put ourselves in good company, but when we think about that company, we think about those thinkers that others have already designated as important: (mostly) famous white men. We want people to know we’ve got something to say, so we conveniently forget all the others who co-created our ideas: (mostly) black and brown women and people who don’t have formal credentials (like the people we interview).

This problem of lineage (the wrong kind) and originality (acting AS IF we stand alone) is compounded in tech worlds. Tech makes problems seem novel, which has the effect of erasing entire fields that are dedicated to understanding how technologies function in the real world, against real histories, and from the point of view of marginalized voices. And tech is still dominated by white men who sit in the center of things. But even if it no longer was, there will always be the problem of marginalization of someone’s knowledge. Sometimes, even we believe that white people invented technology.

So, why cite at all given these problems?

We use this zine to begin to address these questions.

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