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???