19 posts tagged with "pasifika"

Talofa reader,

I know it's been some time between posts, but thanks for making the move with me from Substack to Beehiiv.

Talofa reader,

The "digital divide" is a term I've been hearing since I first got into community work with my charity back in 2017. Back then, researchers from the '90s had this simple way of looking at it - you either had computers and internet, or you didn't. Pretty straightforward stuff: get people devices, hook them up to the internet, problem solved. The lack of Pasifika representation in IT was wrapped up in this whole narrative.

But here's the thing - the research has come a long way since then. JAN A. G. M. Van Dijk's 2020 book "The Digital Divide" shows it's way more complex than just having a device and internet connection. Just because you've got the hardware doesn't mean you're actually participating in the digital economy in any meaningful way.

I didn’t really buy the whole "just get them devices" thinking. I knew it was an important step, for sure, but in my experience that device never made the techie.

So, after working in this space for a few years, something started nagging at me.

The real challenge facing Pasifika wasn't what everyone thought it was. And I knew this because it was exactly what had helped me succeed in tech myself.

But something wasn't adding up.

Talofa reader,

I had some thoughts recently on this topic, and after a live stream and discord discussion, wanted to note things down.

Talofa reader,

A few weeks ago, I made the relatively easy decision to wind down The Pasifika Tech Network.

"Failed project" may be a harsh way to put it, but I think there's value in calling something what it is, so you can better understand how not to do it again in future.

This is a project that failed.

Ok, but what did it fail to do? And why?

To understand that, we have to go back to the beginning and look at why it was created in the first place; what its intended goal was; and the reasons it wasn't able to live up to this.

Talofa reader,

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to get invited to attend ‘Ngā Tohu Matihiko | Celebrating Māori Excellence in Digital and Technology’ Awards at the Due Drop Centre, in Manukau.

The event was really well run1. The layout, design, and production quality in the lighting, sound, and visuals were on par with some of the best events I’ve been to, including the NZ Music Awards, Rhythm & Vines main stages, NZ Homegrown, and shows at Vector Arena2.

All, I imagine, on a budget much lower than those events.

This, in my opinion, is the true sign of excellence—making the most of what you have. This has been a feature of the Māori people as I’ve known them my whole life. Don’t let the news channels and newspapers' anti-Māori propaganda fool you into believing the usual rubbish about any brown community. Once you actually look into and experience people for yourself, you’ll quickly see the truth.

Māori are rich in history, culture, empathy, and humanity for everyone in NZ and around the world. Yes, they’re “people”, and people are complex. You’ll have those who aren’t happy about one issue or disagree on outcomes and decisions about other things.

This is called the human condition and is not unique to Māori or their community. All human communities will have their positives and their negatives—or “room for improvements”.

I’m often surprised, as an adult, that this has to be stated so often, so loudly, and so widely. I knew this as a kid; everything had “pros and cons”, “ups and downs”, “swings and roundabouts”. It was so obvious as a kid that life and everything in it was “yin and yang”. So why, as adults, has it become so complicated?

Why is it suddenly not a “spectrum” and it’s all black and white?

Sure, Israel and the genocidal Zionists have murdered 16,000 Palestinian children. Something like that is clearly black and white to me, as in capital ‘W’, wrong.

But I digress. Why am I recounting my experience at the Māori Tech Awards?

I guess, mainly to document and share my thoughts as a Pasifika person living in NZ, watching a Māori event.

Talofa reader,

I often tell the story of what first got me into thinking about tech, so for this edition, I thought I’d dive deep into what made it such a life-changing point in my life.

Without a doubt, it was getting "hacked" by a high school friend over ICQ late one night while chatting.

That opened my eyes to what was possible with a little knowledge and skill with tech.

From then on, I was hooked.

I couldn’t wait to get my course costs from my university loan to buy my own, very first computer, an Acer laptop.

Real hackers run Linux, so I installed RedHat 5.2—no dual boot, just deleted Windows.

Linux straight, no chaser.

For the next, what seemed like ‘always’, I would battle it out with device drivers, getting my sound card to work, getting my video card to work, learning how to configure, compile and install my own kernels to ensure things worked.

My obsession with getting really good at wielding the power of computing, networking, and programming drove me to learn anything and everything from the hardware up through all 7 OSI layers.

I can’t even hazard a guess at how many hours all up I spent on learning, breaking, and fixing computers, how many all-nighters, weekends, and public holidays I spent just hacking on things.

I thought I just wanted to be a 31337 hax0r, and that was my obsession…

But it wasn’t until I came across a piece of writing, iconic in hacking culture, that I realised hacking was more than computer tricks for me…

That piece of writing was the hacker's manifesto.

TheHackers Manifesto1is a short essay written Lloyd Blankenship aka"The Mentor"of the infamous hacker group"Legion of Doom".

It featured in Issue 7, of equally infamous Hacker Magazine “Phrack” in 1986, and has been cited in popular culture, like the movie Hackers, The Social Network and in Edward Snowden’s autobiography.

You can read it yourself, but it’s the perspective of a smart kid, misunderstood and dismissed by his teachers, bored and unchallenged at school, who finds a world that challenges and teaches him, whereinformation is free.

Sure- if you're familiar with the manifesto- you might think it's cheesy, a bit cringe, “of it’s time” etc.

But I can’t deny the sentiment of"The Mentor"vibed somewhere deep in me.

Why?

Good question.

The manifesto sounded like it was written by a palagi kid, from the U.S., I’m going to go out on a limb here and say probably from a decent home (one that had a computer at least).

So what did we have in common?2

Talofa reader,

I was actually working on another piece about how AI and it’s practical implications in the ‘hood, but got stuck having to hand wave off a concept of how I live in two different worlds at the same time, all the time.

I figured it would just be easier to write this one first, and then I can refer back to it anytime I have to run scenarios that require the reader to “get where I’m coming from”, essentially.

Let’s begin.

ShareIn my reality, I've always known I live in two worlds simultaneously.

The non-brown world, the one I experience with everyone else who's white basically.

Let’s call this world, “tech world”.

And the "brown" world, the one where, y'know, I'm a brown Pasifika guy.

We can call this “home world”.

Talofa reader,

I’m often asked by young people wanting to get into tech, "I want to break into tech, what would you recommend I do?"

They ask about Cloud, CyberSecurity, and whether DevOps is the way to go.

Over the years, I find I'm doing two things over and over again:

1. repeating myself in terms of certs and skills I’d recommend,

2. and not providing information that, in my opinion, would be more valuable than certs and skills recommendations.

What’s more important than what certs and skills?

Understanding the corporate game.

The certs and skills you need for roles—that information is all out there on the internet.

What newbies don’t tend to get a heads-up on is the environment they will need to navigate through in order to “have a career”.

A lot of people don't understand the corporate game.

Pasifika, more so, because most of our parents didn't come up this way, so weren't in a position to pass on any knowledge. This perpetuates the trend of very few people from my community venturing out past sports and music careers into the tech world, and so the cycle of limited career and future-proof opportunities continues.

For the few Pasifika that do make it into the tech space, we’re out there individually fending for ourselves. If we’re lucky, we may come across a colleague willing to impart their wisdom of the corporate game to help us out.

Otherwise, we’re destined to learn those lessons the hard way.

I’ve learned a good number of lessons in my two decades working in tech, both nationally and internationally, as a contractor and an employee, in the office and as a fully remote engineer.

I did all that as a Pasifika person (can’t really change that, to be honest), so the lessons I learned, I’d say, are fairly unique in the tech context.

In this week's newsletter, I wanted to share those lessons, all in one place, so I don’t have to keep repeating myself—or at the very least, I know I have these receipts.

Some of it might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but rest assured, I mean every word.

Walk with me now...

Talofa Reader,

I was listening to a podcast once, and the guest was explaining why there aren't as many "geniuses" and prodigies around now as there were in, say, Mozart's days.

The explanation was that historically, aristocracies often had exclusive access to the best education and intellectual resources. Children of aristocrats were frequently tutored by leading scholars, artists, and thinkers.

I sat on this and thought about my experiences growing up, my environment, my schools, my circle of friends, and my parents' friends. I looked at who was successful and who didn't quite come out on top.

Which led me to the following hypothesis:

The single factor, which paradoxically accounts for both the challenges and successes experienced by Pasifika, in my opinion, can be summed up in one central theme—

The limits to this access came in many forms:

environments that were hostile to learning things that would advance, and not hinder, us; whether that was at home, learning we needed to "play our role", or at school, where we were treated like we were too dumb to understand anything academically.

Teachers who weren't skilled in getting through to Pasifika kids; admittedly, were already hard-up against it, given theteaching industry's a bit shit(pay, class sizes etc), and then the Island kids are coming to school from stressed environments, hungry, wrong uniforms, etc.

If we got to school at all...

It wasn’t usually the best schools.

No offence to the teachers that made it to the schools I went to, but the rich schools got the best teachers, right?

Statistically, your parents either didn't finish school or can't really help you with your English and maths homework, and hiring a tutor is only what kids in the movies did.

So, poor communities, with poor schools, and poor teachers don't lead to a rich, knowledgeable learning outcome1.

Talofa reader,

PSA for all Pasifika: Stop Falling For AI, Crypto, NFTs and Blockchain Marketing.

New tech has always brought the promise of a better life, a better "me", a better world, etc.

So, it's definitely enticing.

Who doesn't want to only work 20 minutes a week and have an automated email campaign, “drop shipping” business automation AI, make them 48 million dollars a week in "passive income"?

But when you'reinthe tech game, you learn to be cynical,especiallyif you haveanyexperience building practical, real-world solutions with the so-called second-coming programming language, or API, or cloud service.

Because when the rubber meets the road, and you meet the rubber, it's usually not as shiny as the tech marketing makes it out to be.

We know this from experience (plus, it's our area of interest, so we tend to stay informed).

This is all fun and games for geeks and tech nerds alike; we'll give each other sh!t for our taste in Operating Systems or hardware (iPhone vs. Android will never die), and so the fun is pretty harmless.

Where it starts getting (dare I say it) "dangerous" is when the tech we're either frothing over or memeing gets out into the normal world, and those folks take it seriously.

It's like they're not in on the joke.

And the jokes stops being funny when the grifters

start influencing people who don't know any better about that tech - not usually in their best interests.

And it stops being funny altogether when folks in the industry, touted as "tech leaders", who look like us, end up being the people leading us astray.