Prior to our first “open” meeting, I (Gabriella Garcia) began reaching out to people who might be interested in a working group centering sex worker voices at institutional tech schools. Here are four questions I proposed to them as prompts for conversation:
In starting a cross-institutional thinking/action group re: sex work + tech, aiming to make this a crucial conversation in the academic tech space:
How can we make technologists think of their complicitness in tech that harms sex workers (such as carceral tech, gentrification of the web/content moderation, surveillance/privacy) and encourage tech allyship with sex workers and other sexual minorities, rather than putting all the onus on sex workers to protect themselves?
How do we create a culture where this is a critical ethics question for technologists that involves everything from privacy, to autonomy, to migration & mobility, to abolition?
To "higher" Maslow's needs like questioning the boundaries of what is considered acceptable art/creativity, and who gets to express themselves?
Can we interrupt the “echo chambering” caused by a lack of diversity in the technological design space, that leaves culture-wide assumptions unchecked, and damages marginalized individuals as a result of those assumptions going unrecognized?