26 Jan
2015
26 Jan
'15
6:14 p.m.
http://open-oakland.cartodb.com/viz/1d8f9768-d7b9-11e3-b620-0e73339ffa50/pu…
Look at this map that same person just sent me of broadband penetration in
the east bay! It's shameful!
You know what's in the those areas? xfinity wifi. Fuck those people. You
want to talk about white supremacy and wholesale wealth transfer start
there - they got clearance to run detroit and sf and oakland. Their data
rates is literally like what it is to make a phone call to jail/prison.
I'm not even kidding. This reminds me of where I came from in New Mexico
where the corporations would cut corrupt contracts and vendor lock the
whole goddamn population into eternal poverty.
Listen, I've been in around all the hackerspaces for the past 5 years and
interviewed folks at noisebridge, at sudo, lol, and I've worked with kiddos
from the schools. Forget about some kids in bushwick -- *this story is
*our* story*. It's the elderly grandma hackers living on fixed income and
marginalized and has to spend 2 hours on the bus to get to noisebridge,
it's the transitional hacker who is learning tech skills but is bouncing
from place to place but is hustling and is making it through the omni and
learning to code off of stolen laptops, it's the young brother and sister
who has undocumented parents and no internet at home but is a brilliant at
3d crafting and has to sneak play time at libraries. I'm not making this
shit up, you all know these folks up close and personally, I just removed
their names. The saviorism comes in when the article portrays that kid
trying to learn how to code as an exceptional person -- I know from
experience that the kid not an exception, he is the rule.
Shit is not going to change on the federal level or state level. We need a
uprising in oakland. And we have to bring it. I watched these muni wifi
deals collapse and eventually devolve into cronyism. Libby Schaff is going
to take our money and spend it on surveillance and busted ass savior
programs and condos for folks who run companies like xfinity. We can have
municipal wifi that works for everyone -- wouldn't it be nice to have data
that our old folks could access???
I don't have all the answers, but collective we do, and we have to find
ways to warehouse and make memes and lift awareness and boycott do this for
the public interest in a radical way. We have to make sure the CIO and
CTO under Ed Lee and Libby are either doing the people's work or driven the
fuck out of office.
The same shit goes for vendor lock with libraries -- I've been talking to
all of you all. We have a lot of work to do!!!
Fuck incarceral poverty. All of us are colonized, even those of us with
shiny startup jobs. Let's make 2015 the year of go big or go home.
.......
I know this is a bit of a rant, but I need to get it out there and the
coffee is going through my veins today.
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Adria Richards <
adria.richards(a)butyoureagirl.com> wrote:
Agree that the "White Savior Complex" and
paternalistic allyism can be
harmful in not building skills, a sense of empowerment and to trust your
gut.
On Monday, January 26, 2015, Praveen Sinha <dmhomee(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Also, I just wanted to say specifically that I do
find saviorism
problematic. That said, I've noticed that network access is critical for
all sorts of folks that come in to our hackerspaces for a lot of reasons.
I sincerely believe that connectivity is a human right as fundamental as
water, and we have companies like xfinity that have captured what should be
a public good D-: I'd really like a broader conversation in our grassroots
communities to shape bay area policy.
Additionally, someone sent me this link to groups like this in Detroit
http://detroitdjc.org/?page_id=9 We are deluged with tech here in the
bay area, but our visions for access have yet to be defined often times...
On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 8:19 PM, Praveen Sinha <dmhomee(a)gmail.com> wrote:
--
Thanks,
Adria
https://medium.com/@GRardB/techs-high-barrier-to-entry-for-the-underprivile…
There's some problematic stuff with the article, but I think it does a
good job in highlighting broadband/wireless disparities and the critical
role that open wifi and projects like mesh could do to pick up the slack
where the municipal governments are totally failing...
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