The Correction

Somewhere there’s a girl sitting at a desk past midnight, a playlist running through headphones, a code editor open, and something assembling itself on screen out of nothing. She probably doesn’t know yet that the world considers what she’s doing unusual. That’s exactly the right moment—before she finds out.

Fiona Krakenbürger is a Berlin-based hacker, journalist, and designer who works to make sure more girls reach that moment and stay in it. She advocates for open network culture and pushes back against the stubborn assumption that computers are fundamentally male territory. In an interview for Deutschlandradio Kultur, she talked to journalist Katrin Heise about false assumptions, about what technical confidence actually looks like, and about why coding has become as essential as any second language—maybe more so.

What draws me to people like Fiona is the specificity. She doesn’t just argue that tech should be more inclusive; she codes, she organizes, she shows up. Being the evidence matters more than making the argument.

The idea that programming is inherently male has always baffled me. The early history of computing runs through women—Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, the ENIAC programmers. The bias came later, manufactured and then maintained through decades of cultural messaging. What Fiona is doing isn’t radical outreach. It’s a correction to something that got broken on purpose.

The future belongs to whoever builds it. She’s making sure that’s not just half the population.