The New School + #SXSW: Maya Wiley Urges Digital Sanctuary to Close Technological Chasm
This story was originally published on New_S.
The next census will be taken in 2020, and for the first time ever, most Americans will be counted online.
Millions of people will be asked to register their age, sex, race, religion, income, and place of residence, among other self-identifying information, over the Internet. While going online is cost-effective, there are barriers to making it work: many Americans — roughly 20 percent of the population — don’t have broadband Internet access at home. Some of these Americans may be able to use smartphones to fill out their information. Others are supposed to receive mail forms. But those alternatives are far from foolproof.
Left uncounted, millions of people — especially low-income people of color, the most likely group with no Internet access — stand to lose out on electoral power for federal congressional seats and state and local representation, and federal funding for health care, housing, education, and more.
“If nothing is done to fix this situation, people of color, rural communities, Native communities — people who tend to be more digitally disconnected and vulnerable from a privacy standpoint — will be deeply undercounted in the census,” says Wiley, echoing arguments she made in a recent Daily News op-ed. She added that New York City lost $41 billion in health care and school funding because of undercounting in the last census.
Wiley, a nationally recognized digital equity advocate, shared her critical perspective in a talk, Race and Digital Sanctuary in 2018 America, and a panel co-hosted by The City of New York and Mastercard, Making Cities Inclusive, Equitable, and Sustainable at #SXSW.
Wiley discussed the census in the broader context of what she calls a “technological chasm.” She raised awareness of issues of Internet privacy, data collection, surveillance, and broadband access and how they disproportionately affect marginalized populations. She called for creating “digital sanctuary,” including protection from tactics like predictive policing, use of smart city technologies for surveillance, and tracking of location services and social media activity to identify immigrants.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for engagement in disrupting inequality, particularly racialized poverty created by policy decisions that ignore or exacerbate that poverty,” Wiley says. “Unfairness is not inevitable and equity is achievable.”
Perhaps no other issue is as urgent as the census — what Wiley calls “a pillar of our democracy.” Funding cuts pushed by the Trump Administration mean “less testing and review to make sure people understand and respond to the census,” Wiley says. What’s more, the Trump administration has stoked fears by pushing to include a question about citizenship status.
“The Department of Justice wants to add this question when people already have a deep distrust of government,” Wiley adds. “For cities with large immigrant populations, this is an enormous issue.”
Confronting digital inequity means creating digital sanctuary, Wiley says. To illustrate that this is achievable, Wiley points to Detroit Community Technology Project’s Equitable Internet Initiative, an effort to ensure that more Detroit residents have the ability to leverage digital technologies for social and economic development. She urged building digital infrastructure to reflect “hyperlocal concerns so that it works for communities,” and to reverse FCC policies rolling back privacy protection. Wiley herself has taken action, launching The New School’s Digital Equity Lab, an initiative that aims to identify and address injustices that persist and evolve as technology transforms our cultural, social, and political systems.
While technology is often used in nefarious ways, it doesn’t have to be, Wiley says. During Making Cities Inclusive, Equitable, and Sustainable, she stressed the need to “think about technology not only in a way that works for governments and businesses but also for the people.”
“We need to recognize the real human implications for people’s daily lived experience,” she says. “There isn’t a problem intrinsically with technology — it’s how it’s used. How do we use technology as a problem-solving tool that can better our communities?”
