The Assumed Wealth Of the Social Web Participants

I've finished Distributed Blackness earlier today and I was left with more questions than answers; though not too wide of a gap. I'll eventually synthesize my thoughts into a review (of sorts) of the book. I do believe it's the kind of material that those in the social Web sphere need to critically digest as they continue to build "commons" meant to communicate with more and more people — it's clear, even without reading that book, who and where these places tend to be build for and at. As I read the book, it could only go as far as the "observed" social Web, that is, the contents of the collectable parts of social networks that researchers can freely access. There's a bit of an irk I have to the idea of one's casual (or not) content on the Web being made into data points — be it for research or profit. However, thanks to the nature of surveillance baked into technoculture, this isn't something we can easily avoid.

Switching to continue Haiti: State Against Nation, a read I keep putting up and down due to the glee of the unravelling of Haitian history, the need to read the footnotes for more expansions and to grasp the historical contexts of countries and policies at the time, has me thinking of present-day Haiti. The division among the Haitian people across class hasn't changed since its formation — for many reasons you'd find that class division amongst Black people in the United States (and Canada and England) still exist: colorism, generational wealth kept in conservative fashions (if possible) and good ol' state sponsored disenfranchisement. Things like this contribute greatly to the kind of people who do end up being able to be online: although, as mentioned in citations in Distributed Blackness, this has begun (but not have been removed) to melt away due to the introduction of mobile computing. It's ironic that a means of computing that requires more labor, resources and capital allocation; higher than that of plantation labor, has managed to pull folks from those same regions (if not similar) into the prized "digital public square". Some twisted way to get the fruits of one's labor, I suppose.

I have to stop and note that, somehow, if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn't pass for another twenty years; or even ten, the digital landscape that we see today would have been dramatically different. I do believe that the (scantily enforced, due to the need for supplemental acts to give it teeth) protections the act provided is a part of the reason why we have video game cartridges and the Bash shell.

When I was on BlueSky, Boris Mann mentioned to me in a conversation chain that included a mention of the global South and their computing capacity. Having immediate family who lives in said place, the concept of connectivity in those places aren't foreign to me. It's pretty incredible to see it develop and immediately be demolished (indirectly by forces in the same countries that they're developed in). This inability to capture these perspectives, these voices — adding into the language barrier of those who aren't blessed with the curiosity of accurate captions — creates a whole level of people who are rendered invisible; even if their presences can be seen online, if ever. I think about this a lot and the way that this also makes things like digital sharecropping more apparent. This is not a concern of protocol developers, it seems, since the technology and compromises made rely on deifying the same barriers of access that we see today. Recent developments are more about throwing a rope near the walled garden, instead of aiming to bulldoze the damned thing down — reliance on a 430-person US-based NGO to determine who and where can get a domain name - the human-grade portal to the Web, is one primary example. The cost of connectivity is dramatically higher for my family who rely on a single company aiming to do what Google did with the Internet with telecommunications in the Caribbean & the owners don't even live in the countries that they service. Sounds like Dole's and Nestle's origin story — but for the Internet. Doesn't help that the investors in this company, outside of Denis, are United States insurance companies.

I think a lot about how connectivity works, in theory, in places like Cuba; a country who's so feared by the United States in developing an socioeconomic order that China's made more concrete, that the failed embargo system still impacts how folks can access the rest of the world, namely United States-based services. Despite the United States delaying the deployment of a undersea cable and fear of the Internet being good to Cuban economic development, connectivity still grows, at a low 30% of the population. If Cuban Internet technology was capable of growing independent of the United States^[1] , how would have things like domain names work? IP address allocation? How do you build something that works independently of a central authority (like the Internet and most social networks currently rely on)?

Answering that question is more useful than pushing three-generation old phones in peoples' hands. It'd allow for local development versus the charity-colonial angle we see developing today. I'm still wrestling through this idea with a series of books but one thing remains consistently clear: the trajectory of the fabled open social Web keeps repeating the same colonial undertones as the conception of telecommunications itself from the 1700s. And even with the growth of the libidinal economy online, we still observe only a sliver of what could be demonstrated online for a plethora of reasons who have a common tendril: the need to see everyone, all the time.