Guest post by Jonathan A. Gallant
I invite truly virtuous individuals to join my new organization “Electron Justice”. We are dedicated to decolonializing electricity by eliminating all the terminology of the colonialist, Eurocentric, heteronormativist old culture we must overturn.
For example, consider the coulomb, the unit of electric charge. It is named after the engineer and electrical experimenter Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, who was also a militarist and a colonialist. He served in the French army for 28 years, retiring with the rank of captain right after the French Revolution. Part of his military service was spent overseeing military construction in Martinique, a Caribbean island where black slaves labored on plantations, and which remains a French colonial possession to this day.
The family of James Watt obtained its wealth from Watt’s father’s shipping business, which was partly involved in the slave trade. Moreover, James himself was a long-time friend of the philosopher Adam Smith, the famous proponent of (gasp!) market capitalism. Alessandro Volta was an aristocrat, named a Count by Emperor Napoleon in 1810. The father of André-Marie Ampère was a counter-revolutionary who was guillotined by the Jacobin revolutionary government in 1793. No connections between Georg Simon Ohm and obvious forms of wrongthink have been discovered. However, since he died in 1854, it is certain that Ohm never filed a DEI statement, as is now routinely required for all academic candidates in Mathematics, Physics, and Electrical Engineering.
On these grounds, we call for abolition of all the electrical units—coulombs, watts, volts, amps, and ohms–named after these malefactors. Even if their association with retrograde practices and ideas is a little vague in some cases, there is no question that they are all old white men. Therefore the continued use of units named after them could discourage members of marginalized communities and female persons from following electrical pursuits, such as studying Physics, charging their cellphones, or replacing a light bulb. On the contrary, we demand that electricity be granted a new set of diverse, equitable, and inclusive units.
In order to raise consciousness about our cause of Electron Justice, we are beginning a campaign of direct actions. Until the electrical units are changed, wherever we go we will turn off the lights or blow the fuses: our motto is “No Justice, No Current”.
Comments
9 responses to “Guest post: Step up truly virtuous individuals”
Don’t forget ‘switch.’ Obviously an expression derived from Mediaeval witch hunts.
QED.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I notice you call them “malefactors”, which obviously yet perhaps (equally and oppositely, notwithstanding the problematic binary implicit in the word “opposite”) subliminally puts the letters M-A-L-E front and (or perhaps yet) figuratively centre, thereby establishing that you are, perhaps, from a certain perspective, beholden to the white colonialist patriarchal discourse that makes whales sing laments for etc etc etc.
Can I have a book contract now? More immediately, can I end the sentence?
You jest, but it’s real. From my own field (software)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8x7akv/masterslave-terminology-was-removed-from-python-programming-language
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-confronts-use-labels-master-slave/
https://www.eetimes.com/its-time-for-ieee-to-retire-master-slave/
And, you know, the hardware people are worse. They have “male” and “female” connectors. Ick!
Misses the opportunity to point out the inherent violence in the term “battery“, which also has clear links to the military industrial complex and the many sites associated with Western Colonialism named Battery This or Battery That.
@Omar
Please, not medieval. Early modern.
@Steven
I’d be happy to give up the female/male terminology. I remember many years ago having to specify to a young female employee in an electronics outlet, the sort of connectors I needed. It felt icky. I’d probably feel the same about ‘slave’ if I were in the US.
@# 6:
https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1088&context=fypapers#:~:text=The%20witch%20craze%2C%20or%20witch,as%20a%20result%20of%20their (Scroll down.)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/witchcraft/The-witch-hunts
https://www.thecollector.com/european-witch-hunting/
I was surprised. The second link has witch hunts going back to the Roman Empire.
I thank Steven for reminding us of other attempts to purify technical language. We at Electron Justice plan to adopt a new direct action tactic, suggested by our colleagues in Europe. Until the offending terminology of watts, amps, etc. is abolished, we will not only blow fuses, we will also glue ourselves to the fuseboxes.