Yes, I am K swell. I'm joining you from sunny, extremely warm, Phoenix Arizona. And this talk is a feminist outlook on digital transformation and I am watching the chat. So if you wanna pop things in there, I will be watching it.OK, let's jump right in because we only have 20 minutes. Uh First, I think it is helpful if we agree on both a definition of feminist and a definition of digital transformation. So we'll start with feminist. Um This is the definition that I am going to use throughout this talk. So, um I am combining two definitions, one from Bell Hooks and the other one from uh Celia V Har Oil. And I don't know if you're familiar with either one of those um that they're both scholarly people who think about these sorts of things. So the first part is feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist, exploitation and oppression. And the second part is feminism is a movement to establish political, social and economic equality and create a world where all people flourish. So that's the part that is going to be really important to this talk. Uh We, we can think about a world where all people flourish.

So we're not thinking about a world where just uh women and other marginalized genders are equal to men. It's where all people, regardless of who you are are able to flourish. So that's my definition of feminism that I'm go with here. Uh My definition of digital transformation is basically that now we're at this place where we can uh construct and maintain relationships in digital place. So we kind of taking that away from uh being constrained by physical proximity. And now we can construct these relationships in digital place.

Well, like we're doing right now, all of us here are gathered today, right to uh form some new relationships or whatever the case may be. Uh Yes. And that of course, is like was not previously possible based on our technical capability, right? So now we have the ability to do more things, we can move data, we can flow data in a way that is necessary to support relationships. Uh And we can had, you know, we can exchange information and data in real time, which is also necessary for a relationship. So we've begun to migrate from a purely transactional type stance and in uh business and technology. And now we can move to a relationship. You dance. So again, what is digital transformation? Well, that's where we can construct these relationships and we have these different possibilities because we are constructing them in digital place rather than physical place, so you can have relationships with people and organizations and whatever else that aren't located physically near to you.

And this is doing a really interesting thing um in in a transactional based way of operating value comes from scarcity, right? But now, uh as we see these networks and platforms emerge in digital place, we can see that value can also uh come from things being shared, right? So in digital place, value comes from things being shared. And in uh physically extractive economy, things value comes from scarcity. This thing has value because there's not that much of it. I don't, the chat is disabled now, I'm not sure why, but I would be asking you to pop in the chat. Uh Do you know what is significant about this number? 21 million? Some people will recognize that as being like the the maximum number of Bitcoins, right? Uh So what's really interesting for me right now is that we are finding ways to programmatically enact scarcity in a digital space that does not inherently have that scarcity, right? Like there is no reason that the number of Bitcoin should be limited aside from the fact that Bitcoin is like terrible. Uh But there's no reason it should be limited. There's no reason it's that we are programmatically now enacting scarcity in a space where it doesn't exist.

And so that's the first thing that I would really like to challenge uh as we think about how we can move towards a world where all people flourish. We have to let go of scarcity being the only way that things have value. We cannot just reenact that in a space where it doesn't even exist. Uh But it is natural that we're doing that, right? Because people who have been historically, very well served by a system, they are going to want to reproduce that system that has served them quite well, right? So if we have a system, we have a method of exchanging value uh and deriving value that has worked out really well for some people, then even though we're radically changing the paradigm or changing what is possible, it is very natural all for that. Those folks who want to preserve that system that has given them power and agency, right? So we really need to be careful and ask ourselves, does this constraint actually exist in a digital space or is it something that we are implementing so that we can perpetuate existing power structures? All right. Next one, has anyone heard this before?

Uh If you're not the customer, you're the product, I'm sure lots of you have heard that before, right? And people say this when they're talking about the free services that we get online, right? Like Facebook? Well, if you're not paying for Facebook, then you are the product.

Unfortunately, my friends, in many cases, it is actually much worse than that, right? Uh So now that we do have this ability where we can collect a lot of data, it's really cheap to store. We can move data around in ways that we've never been able to before we can uh compute and we can compute in real time, we can figure things out. Right. Uh So now what we've seen is the rise of this idea of surveillance capitalism. So that's where basically all of your behavior online is captured and treated as a raw material or raw input to be translated into um these ways that companies have of influencing your behavior and uh changing your whole worldview based on what you're exposed to. Um Yes. So now we have gone from, yes, certainly there was a period where if you weren't paying for the thing, then you probably were the product. But now it's gotten worse where our behavior. So we know it's been all over the news, right? There's the Facebook sentiment uh issue where they were trying to affect the way that people feel their actual emotions and the emotions that they were expressing. Uh So that is a great example of surveillance capitalism and behavioral surplus. So our behaviors are treated as the raw commodities that are then transformed into something that will then act on us and influence us to act in a certain way or make certain decisions.

Uh So unfortunately, if you're not the customer, there's also a good chance at this point that you are not the product, right? You are actually the the commodity inputs, your behavior is being captured, it's being transformed in some sort of model that will then act back on you and on people that you interact with in order to change the way that you behave and the way that you feel. Uh And I highly recommend the work of Shoshana Zuboff if you're interested in learning more about that. Uh but it it's not super awesome, right? Like that is another very extractive approach. So we have this opportunity where we can create where we can uh kind of shed some of the scarcity. And instead, we are adopting this really approach where even your behaviors are extracted from you transformed and then act on you again. Again, we can understand why this is happening, right? Uh So there are lots of people, there's a whole system of power that came into being because that system was really good at extracting, right? Extracting from the physical earth that we live in, right? Extracting raw goods, extracting the maximum potential from each individual human like scientific management, right? We wanna maximize how much this person can work and how productive they are in those hours. Uh So it's really natural that we enter into this digital paradigm.

And the question becomes well, how can we use this to extract even more? And my question and I I hope the question that we all can ask is how can we use this paradigm to generate even more right to imagine what could be um rather than just reenact what has been. And I think the way that we need to do that uh is to actually go and find the who are underserved by the historical system or by the current system. So there's this idea that this is uh we have a group of people that are not really involved in creating the dominant narrative. And the example that lots of people use for this is postpartum depression. So there, there is not a dominant narrative about motherhood that includes postpartum depression. The dominant narrative is that you have a baby. Uh and you love that baby and you're just blissful and everything is awesome. And so there are a lot of mothers out there who experience that postpartum depression and think I'm a bad mom rather than I am experiencing postpartum depression. This is a thing that happens to lots of moms. So that's an example of hermeneutic injustice.

And we have a lot of people that are humanely marginalized in the current system, but that's where the information lives, right? So if we want to imagine a system that is more generative than we need to go out to the margins, and we need to talk to the people who are currently underserved by the system. And we need to find out the ways in which they are underserved. However, that's an extremely difficult task, right? Because the folks who have been marginalized by the current system are not participating in, in generating the narrative resources that we have to describe our lives. And so it's not like you can just go to someone who has been underserved by the current system and say, hey, how's that system under serving you? Because both you as the person asking and the the person who has been marginalized will be trying to describe uh that, that thing, then how the person has been underserved with a completely inadequate set of tools, right? You will have the tools of the dominant narratives to try to describe a non dominant experience. So it's, it sounds super easy. OK.

If I want to figure out how the system is going to be disrupted, then I just need to go talk to people who are underserved by the system, but it's actually extremely difficult uh because the narrative resources to describe that literally do not exist. So you have to come up with a way, right? Then to tell that story of how the current system is broken. And you know, there's lots of good examples of how this is happening right now. Uh So I guess my second to last thing that I want to leave you with uh is this, so there was the physiologist Mary Parker Fet, um you know, in the early 19 hundreds ish. Uh so basically around the same time as Frederick Winslow Taylor, if you're familiar with his work, but that's scientific management. And Taylor is uh so she said that there are actually different types of power that you might encounter in the workplace. And the one that we are very familiar with is power over. So this is where I get power by kind of building my little empire of people and by making sure that each one of them is working their time, putting in their 40 hours, working around the clock and they're maximally productive.

Each one of them the whole time that they're at work because I'm, I'm, I'm basically like sucking power from people and situations, right? I'm extracting power. So that's the type of power that we're really familiar with. But there are other types of power. So there is power with, right? So that's kind of the power that we have when we engage together. So that's like collective action. Uh And we are seeing a lot of that right now, right? We are seeing uh people that work for large technology companies exercising their power with by organizing into unions or attempting to organize into unions. So that's an example of power with and then there is power two and that's basically that I have the power to achieve some outcome.

Uh So you could, you could derive your power from uh being able to extract as much as possible or you could exercise power too, which is that I can create something new and awesome. And different and I'm oriented towards that outcome. Um Yes. So those are the types of power that we might, we might find in the workplace. What I am really interested in is uh where can we find opportunities for Power with? And Power Two? And some of you might be familiar with um like extreme programming or something like that, right? But I am really interested in things like ensemble working, which I think is a great example of power with that. We're not really concerned about each individual person, not always being hands on keyboard. Uh But we're interested in maximizing what we can all do together. So that's really interesting for me and I'm, I'm interested in ways that we can increasingly do that uh in, in the digital era.

So, um my last point here is that I hope that we can start thinking about what is possible uh As far as like creating a generative space, generative products, generative services and even regenerative where we are restoring some of the damage that we have done to our physical environment and our social bonds.

And I think that we, if we really want to achieve those things that we have to think about generative and regenerative ways of working in addition to generative and regenerative products and services. So I think we have to address both what we create, create and the ways in which we create it because I don't think it's possible to create something that is truly generative or regenerative in a way that is extractive. Yes. So that is my feminist take on digital transformation and kind of how we're getting there. Uh And we have three minutes and the chat is back open. If anyone has a question I can't hear or see any of you. So you have to put in the chat. I will stay here for the remaining two minutes if anyone has a question, otherwise you can feel free to find me online. Um OK. Ensemble working. Yeah. So what that looks like? That's where you have all of the contributors. So that's like the uh developers and DB A S or testers or whatever else, the product person, the manager, whomever, right? All sitting together and you're all looking at the same screen and you are coding or whatever else altogether. Um There's a really interesting youtube channel about this called the Mom Mentality Show. I, I think I could put that in the chat. Um But they talk about like lots of different ways of approaching this and using this for different types of uh working. It's on youtube.

Um Yeah. Also you just Google it Ensemble working or mob programming. OK. Feel free. Uh My email is just Cats Hotel at gmail.com or you can find me on Twitter or linkedin and just Cats Hotel everywhere slash cats. Hotel. Cool. I think that is time. So I hope you enjoy all the rest of your talks today and throughout the rest of the conference and have a good one.