Elm Town 90 – Wonder: Contorting yourself with Ari Schlesinger

Ari Schlesinger illuminates a unique path of social responsibility carved through the tech world, using feminism as a guide while bearing attacks, criticism, and contortion. That trail led Ari to ask how programming languages shape society and, eventually, to research Elm—the compiler, error messages, and community.

Thanks to our sponsor, Logistically. Email: elmtown@logisticallyinc.com.

Music by Jesse Moore.
Edited by Toni Cañete.

Recording date: 2025.06.06

Guest

• Ari Schlesinger

Show notes [00:00:25] Sponsored by Logistically [00:02:27] Introduction (for real)

• University of Georgia
• Socially Responsible Tech Lab
• "A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design", co-authored with Felienne Hermans
• Addressing Computing's Discrimination Problem: A Framework for Anti-Discriminatory Computing by Ari Schlesinger
• Elm Town 88 – Wonder: Unconscious bias with Felienne Hermans

[00:04:57] Origin story

• FemTechNet
• Alex Juhasz
• Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

[00:14:33] Why Did School Suck? [00:20:41] A little thing called Y Combinator and 4chan happened

• HASTAC (Cathy Davidson)
• "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway

[00:30:43] Anti-discriminatory framework

• "Good intentions are not enough: how informatics interventions can worsen inequality" by Tiffany C. Veinot, Hannah Mitchell, and Jessica S. Ancker
• Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy

[00:43:00] Language shapes reality

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

[00:49:22] Glaciology

• "Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research" by Mark Carey, M. Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jaclyn Rushing

[00:58:11] Relation of Ari's research to Elm

• Strange Loop
• Papers We Love Conf
• "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2018
• Propaganda by Edward Bernays
• The Last Whole Earth Catalog

[01:04:32] Elm error messages [01:20:36] Slackbot / Feminism

• bell hooks - Feminism is for Everybody

[01:29:22] Why study Elm?

• "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki at Strange Loop 2023

[01:32:14] Contorting yourself

• "When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway" by Nicholas Gane in Theory, Culture & Society
• The Good Place
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

[01:43:00] Picks Ari's picks

• Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict by William Ury
• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (TV series)
• Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
• Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman
• TechnoFeminism by Judy Wajcman
• ACM TechBrief: Advancing Accessibility in the Digital World
• PBS / Sesame Street
• Taskmaster
• The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Jared's picks

• "Queer Theory for Lichens" (archive) by David Griffiths
  • https://jayjinsing.github.io/files/QueerTheoryLichens.pdf (PDF)
• Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
• The Rehearsal on Max by Nathan Fielder
• Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich