Digital Justice in the Bay: Material Politics After the Internet

• In Event: Technology, Inequality, and Social Justice - I

Abstract

An emerging literature on “data activism” seeks to understand how civic and political groups make and regulate digital technologies for social change. However, these studies mostly draw on what activists and organizations say about their work, rather than the practices they engage in on a daily basis, producing a skewed understanding of data activism. To develop a more nuanced understanding of data activism, this paper presents selected findings of 3 months of participant observation and interviews with volunteers and staff of 11 tech-oriented civic and political groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. I demonstrate how two groups define tech-related social problems and imagine better futures (ideas), what they do about it (practices), and how these efforts and imaginaries become embedded in the technologies they build (materiality). First, I show that how organizations conceptualize the relationship between digital technologies and inequality is intimately bound up with their understandings of local institutions and infrastructures in the Bay Area, namely housing, labor, and transportation. Second, I argue volunteers’ practices are shaped by their experiences working in high-tech firms. To varying degrees, each group reproduces a Silicon Valley ethos characteristic of high-tech work, as volunteers look to improve their employability and tech skills through volunteering. This study contributes to STS research on material politics, technology, and social justice by providing empirical data on how grassroots groups, in practice, work to inscribe their values into the materiality of digital technologies. It also offers an opportunity to rethink how scholars define “data activism.”

Author

• Karina Rider, Queen's University