Thinking of a Master Plan: Data Citizenship/Ownership as a Portal to an Unfettered Black Universal Basic Income
If you are old enough to remember the song that inspired the title of this Essay, Footnote #1 content: ERIC B. & RAKIM, Paid in Full, on PAID IN FULL (4th & B’way 1987). then you might already be vibing out to its potential. In Afrofuturistic fashion, I intend to lean into the song’s line as a means to explore the topics of data citizenship, Footnote #2 content: Data citizenship can be thought of in terms of a type of data activism where people take responsibility and intentional concern about the use, application, and capitalization of their data. It is also a form of data literacy whereby people understand where their data is going and what it is doing once produced. I am adding to this conversation a term that arose from a conversation with Michael Hemenway, that data citizenship is the data footprint left behind by people’s digital behavior. Data citizenship is the specter of people’s presence online and the accountability/ownership for the use of their data. In this way, data citizenship and data ownership are inseparable. See Marı´a Soledad Segura & Silvio Waisbord, Between Data Capitalism and Data Citizenship, 20 TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA 412, 413 (2019); Elinor Carmi, Simeon J. Yates, Eleanor Lockley & Alicja Pawluczuk, Data Citizenship: Rethinking Data Literacy in the Age of Disinformation, Misinformation, and Malinformation, INTERNET POL’Y REV., May 2020, at 1, 10; Federico Caprotti & Dong Liu, Emerging Platform Urbanism in China: Reconfigurations of Data, Citizenship and Materialities, TECH. FORECASTING & SOC. CHANGE, Feb. 2020, at 1, 1. data ownership, and universal basic income as it pertains to Black people. Thinking of a master plan is a nod to systematic and intentional approaches to materializing realities in the present timeline. In this case, I am referring to the dimensions of Blackness in/and the United States as timeline(s) all their own. Although these interdimensional, intersectional contexts could extend to people on the African continent and every other Afro-diasporic iteration around the globe, the current lack of cohesive thinking concerning data and its legislation makes the ability to speak broadly more difficult (although one could imagine what it means for people to participate transactionally with U.S. economic structures while outside the United States). Still, I intend to provide this exploration through a Black posthumanist lens that is not only antihuman but is the foundational framework responsible for Black transhuman or Black techno-social ways of being in and with the world.
I offer that Black posthumanism is antihumanistic due to the ways humanity has presented itself as anti-Black throughout the current historical arc. Black posthumanism not only speaks to Black people engaging in self-determinism, i.e. living and defining themselves on their own terms outside of anti-Black spaces, it also acknowledges that in doing so Black people are pushing against the very foundation of perceptually navigated sociopolitical realities—as they are understood in Euro-descending spaces. To talk about Black people engaging in techno-social self-determinism at once signifies the proliferation of Black futures while simultaneously preparing for anti-Blackness in the form of white supremacist, cis-hetero protonormativity. Footnote #3 content: Think of protonormativity as normative frameworks, ideologies, and ways of life that stem from a particular prototype. In this case, that prototypical framing is white, cis-hetero maleness. See PHILIP BUTLER, BLACK TRANSHUMAN LIBERATION THEOLOGY: TECHNOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY 27 (2020). Nevertheless, in the vein of Aime´ Ce´saire Footnote #4 content: See generally Aime´ Ce´saire, Discourse on Colonialism, in DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM 29 (Joan Pinkham trans., 2000). and Sylvia Wynter, Footnote #5 content: See generally Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument, CR, Fall 2003, at 257. one of the primary conjectures of Black posthumanism is that the human is deployed as a technology of white supremacy. It is used to create pro-tective boundaries between recipients of humanity and everything else through a stratified sociopolitical hierarchy. Stratification technologies are grounded in valu-ations, whether it be Aquinas’s Chain of Being or the concept of speciesism. Footnote #6 content: See generally Poe Johnson, Racial Technologies in the Time of Black Cyborgnetic Consciousness, in THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO BIOLOGY IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE 368 (Charissa N. Terranova & Meredith Tromble eds., 2017); Oludamini Ogunnaike, From Heathen to Sub-Human: A Genealogy of the Influence of the Decline of Religion on the Rise of Modern Racism, OPEN THEOLOGY, Jan. 2016, at 785. The closer one is to a proposed pinnacle or center, the higher one is valued. Since this Essay is intentional in its work to center Blackness (Black people and Black ways of life), it is therefore antihuman in the sense that humanity has shown itself to have no room for Blackness. Humanity does not help to protect Black people in the ways that it should. If it did, then Black people would not find themselves in a time-loop where they have been left to fend for their survival against the “humans” for over 400 years. As a technology, humanity serves as a virtual cover (a type of social augmentation of reality) carrying with it the undergirding sense that no one is human, not even white people. So, Black posthumanism becomes the lens through which this Essay is written. Further, it is the praxis through which I imagine Black futures.
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