Bootstrap

Enmeshed in our computational age is an ideology of control, individualism and domination that is fundamentally intertwined with the euro-American ideals of gender. That is to say, the western dynamic of gender as both a controlled subjectivity and a vector of domination in-and-of-itself mutually reinforces an equivalent dynamic of technology. These operations are linked through the construction of a chain of control, wherein each aspect of an object-action is ordered such that it implies and requires control of the other object-action of an individual subject/machine. Furthermore, both of these ideologies reinforce the hierarchy of individual as an atomic subject of the corporation/state, with only incidental (rather than deep/constitutive) interactions allowed between subjugated individuals. It is no coincidence that there are several trans people working at organizations fighting for technological freedom: in order to unwind gender’s controlled and controlling nature, we must do the same for technology.

But I get ahead of myself. In order to understand the connections between technology and gender, I need to begin from the middle-out and explain both independently.

In late September, 2019, axi0mX, a pseudonymous technology researcher announced on twitter that they had found a flaw in the BootROM system of every iPhone and iPad released between 2011 and 2018.1 Unlike other software found on the iPhone, the BootROM is permanently patterned into the silicone on which the iPhone operates, meaning that the vulnerability cannot be fixed (or “patched”) during a software upgrade. Such a flaw had not been found on any Apple phone or tablet released since 2010.2 The BootROM bug, dubbed Checkm8, created a vulnerability which can be exploited to gain control of the first step in starting up, or ‘booting’ an iPhone.

The term booting, most often used in the context of “rebooting” a device, has a fascinating etymological history. Beginning in the 1950’s, early computer designers and programmers faced a conundrum in computation as they had designed it: how to input the instructions necessary to make a computer start accepting instructions.3 The designers, enmeshed as they were in the institutions and ideals of a victorious America turned to America’s myth of rugged individualism to create a metaphor for this catch-22: they needed a way, they said, to make a computer “pull itself up by its own bootstraps.” Thus, a “bootstrap” became a piece of code or a device which could initiate all other functions in a computer. The term was eventually transformed into a verb meaning “to start up a computer” and then was shortened into the term “to boot.” I contend that it is consequential that the term, along with the rest of the computational world, both with their origins in federal contractors of the military-industrial complex first became available the public at around the same time that Ronald Reagan was using “bootstraps” as a rhetorical prop to reaffirm the links between America, Whiteness and Individualism.4 The culture of computation is fundamentally bound up in the culture and administration of the American empire.

The lawyers of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SLRP), a trans legal aid organization based out of New York City, have a great deal of experience with the administrative machinations of the American Empire. In his 2009 book “Normal Life,” Dean Spade the founder of the SLRP, documents the ways in which trans people (as well as other LGBTQ folks who are not white, cis and upper-middle class) are harmed when administrative systems, from the US Environmental Protection Agency to State Departments of health “invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer” when they classify people in the course of their ‘normal’ operations.5

Spade suggests that demands for recognition and inclusion as articulated though antidiscrimination and hate crime laws obscure the real ways in which administrative systems recursively fail to recognize queer and trans individuals, families and communities. He catalogs how many states require a full vagino- or phalloplasty in order to change the gender marker on one’s identification, but most do not cover these expensive procedures under Medicaid or require that they be covered by private insurers.6 It is noteworthy that resolving one of these issues does not lead to the resolution of the other, despite their apparently linked nature: many trans and enby people don’t want bottom surgery but still need our identity documents changed, and others would still need surgery even if it were not required for documentation. Through the violence of refusal, the state limits the ways we can choose to use and transform our bodies. Each link in the chain secures the next but also enacts violence on its own.

As computers grew in complexity, the bootstrap eventually became the boot-chain. In this schema, the initiating code runs another, slightly more complex piece of code, which then runs several more pieces of more complex code, which all do the same and so forth until all the process which are required to do all we demand of a modern computer are initiated and running. The particular sequence of the boot-chain is historically contingent, built upon accretions of modern operating systems first designed in the 1970s. Notably, wireless networking and interconnectivity functions are among the last systems to be started.7 The particulars of the boot-chain are an underexplored venue for social critique, not because they are not the most efficient way to operate computers as they are conceived to function, but because they provide fascinating insight into those conceptions, how they are established and how they change over time. On the iPhone (and, increasingly, on Macs), Apple has gone beyond the linear, individual, hierarchal boot system to explicitly and forcibly limit the functions of the device.

Checkm8, the aforementioned BootROM bug was particularly exciting for the people who want to modify the software on their iPhones because the way the Apple has used the boot-chain concept to limit the device. When an iOS device first powers up, the BootROM, which is the bootstrap, runs the first few instructions, checks the next piece of code that is to be run for a signature from Apple, affirming that the code has not been modified in any way. If it finds that the code does not have a signature or has been modified, it will not allow the iPhone to boot. The next process to run does the same thing, but also checks backwards. If either the code which launched it, or the code which it is to launch have been modified from the way Apple “intended,” it will fail. Checkm8 was exciting because if a user can control the BootROM, then creating a boot-chain which will start up a modified version of iOS, allowing users to run apps disallowed by apple is a relatively trivial (though still not easy).8 Apple claims that this “SecureBoot” system is a security measure, but, in reality it mainly serves to limit the software the end user can run on their device. This is comparable to the way administrative systems often make claims about security, while primarily acting to harm trans, undocumented and otherwise marginalized people.

The REAL ID act was passed in the wake of 9/11 and mandated that state-issued ID’s fulfill a certain set of requirements in order to be accepted at Airports, courthouses and federal buildings.9 Among the mandates are that before issuing an ID, state must verify immigrant authorization status and match the name of and social security number of the applicant, and the ID document must include a gender marker.10 Security is thus linked to greater administrative control of bodies. Spade documents how the SLRP worked with immigrant groups to resist the implementation of Real ID’s in New York State. This grassroots resistance has been met with mixed success. The ‘final’ implementation of Real ID’s requirements at airports and federal buildings has been pushed back over a decade at this point, but almost all states are now compliant, and the DHS insists Real ID will be fully required by October 2020.11 Even then, many states still issue non-compliant ID’s, including, in some cases, for undocumented residents.12

There is one final program that may be the most direct result of the SLRP’s and Immigrant’s Rights campaign: the IDNYC Card. In 2015, New York City began issuing a new, municipal, ID card: the NYC ID.13 This card can be issued to anybody who resides in New York City and is usable for interactions with the police and other city departments. It is available regardless of immigration or housing status, and there is a long list of documents which can be mixed and matched to prove identity and residency in order to receive a Photo ID.14 Furthermore, the city’s approach to documenting is remarkably inclusive:

When applying for your IDNYC card, you may choose which ever gender option is most comfortable and accurate for you. You may select to designate your gender as “Female”, “Male”, “X” to designate a gender that is neither male nor female, or “Not Designated” to leave this field blank. You may change or remove a gender designation on your IDNYC card, at no cost to you, the cardholder. You do not need to submit any proof of your gender identity when selecting, changing, or removing your gender designation.15

Normal Life suggests critics should be ambivalent about the NYC ID Program. On the one hand, SLRP, the organization Spade founded suggests it is a targeted legal change which makes the lives of the most marginalized easier.16 At the same time, it has been used by other state actors to identify, target and further marginalize immigrants.17 Furthermore, these ID’s are an expansion of state bureaucracy, so we must ask if they “expand key systems of control,” in a way that might be use to effect further violence in the end.18 It is, after all just one more ID for one’s wallet, one more ID one needs to gather documentation for.

And thus, we return to the bootstrap and the chain of control: how does one become recognized by the state and prove one’s identity? With an ID, of course. How does one get an ID? Well, first you have to prove your identity. Most people begin (“bootstrap”) with a birth certificate, signed off on by a trusted, fixed authority (the doctor in the hospital), but, like iOS, each step verifies the next, as well as the body that the identification is acting on. For each new document one wishes to receive, agents of the state are present, each bound by sets of rules, norms and expectations. From the assignment of gender on the birth certificate, to DMV officials threatening to refuse driver’s licenses to undocumented people,19 to the shifting standards for changing one’s gender on a passport, chains of organizations and chains of software are used to control what we (meaning humans and our devices) may do, how we may act, who we can interact with and how. This techno-gendered frontier is a powerful system of control. It is, and will be, a major site of contestation as the era of late-stage capitalism becomes a battleground for the future of humans, our bodies and our machines.