Abstract

Excerpted From: Philip Butler, Thinking of a Master Plan: Data Citizenship/ownership as a Portal to an Unfettered Black Universal Basic Income, 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1343 (June, 2024) (56 Footnotes) (Full Document)

If you are old enough to remember the song that inspired the title of this Essay, 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, 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. Nevertheless, in the vein of Aimé Césaire and Sylvia Wynter, 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 protective boundaries between recipients of humanity and everything else through a stratified sociopolitical hierarchy. Stratification technologies are grounded in valuations, whether it be Aquinas's Chain of Being or the concept of speciesism. 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.

Regardless of where anyone lands on the spectrums of Blackness and Africanness, the goal of this Essay should be clearly understood. It is meant to imagine and explore three things: (1) data ownership; (2) data citizenship; and (3) a relevant use of web3/blockchain technology for the express purpose of minting tokens, tracking web activity, and maintaining ledgers that map the origins, trajectory, and destinations of content created on devices across various internet(s). This particular trifecta would be considered an iteration of a data dividend. In an ideal sense this system would help to establish sites of entry for content while not only monitoring the reach of content but also the breadth of data as it moves throughout the data market. It is important to note the difference between content and data. For me, content becomes biometrics, videos, posts, or anything uploaded to social sites. Yet for a more formal definition, I will turn to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by Savvy Shares, LLC that states that social media content “means ... graphics, photographs, images, audio, video, logos, and other multimedia and text included there in.” Additionally, Capterra, a software placement company that helps organizations determine the best software for their business needs, includes “anything that fans create and share with their friends through private channels--texts, emails, or even in-person conversations. Social content is often referred to as UGC (user-generated content) or owned and earned media.” It is important to note that these definitions cover public arenas (via social sites), private and semi-private spaces (via text or email), and spaces in between (where private and semi-private messages occur on public domains, such as WhatsApp or Instagram Direct Messenger).

These definitions allow us to see that content creation is an intentional act provided by people on devices for the communication of something for other people to experience or for the archiving of their own ideas on various types of platforms. Conversely, personal data can be conceived as any remnant or evidence of a person's presence on a device, platform, or site. This would then include sensitive information, such as medical records and financial history. Essentially, it can be anything identifiably tied to a person. The European Union (EU) Commission, which is responsible for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), uses very specific language around personhood, emphasizing that this data be attached to “natural persons.” Now, we may not be entirely sure what a natural person is, but of note is the EU's definition of a natural person. That definition is part of a larger conversation around sentience, especially since the United Kingdom made it a point to recognize animals as possessors of sentient life in the Animal Welfare Act of 2022. I mention the distinction between content and data as all content is data, but not all data is content. This becomes integral to the framework within this Essay as each will play a significant role in the unfolding of what is meant by a data-oriented framework that takes seriously the role both data and content play in the formation of a data dividend system whose potential could be utilized to open economic ecosystems that benefit Black people more broadly. To put it plainly, this Essay will wrestle with how Black people might build systems that allow for their own regulation and monetization of Black data as it is traded on the data market.

The technology suite required to pull all of these concepts together does not readily exist at present. So what follows is a conceptual blueprint of what might be necessary for the formation of this type of Black data technosphere (technosphere meaning digital ecosystem or environment). As such, this Essay will wrestle with questions like how can Black people track, leverage, and engage in discussions that speak to the right to ownership, privacy/exclusion, and citizenship when referencing their data? Further, this becomes an opportunity to imagine ways Black data could be used to benefit Black people via a type of universal basic income (UBI) or universal basic assets (UBAs). In this case, these Black UBIs (BUBIs) or Black UBAs (BUBAs) are not intended to be dispersed by government agencies. Instead, BUBIs and BUBAs would be part of a technology that independently monitors and regulates the capitalization of aggregated Black data. In order to get at the heart of what I am attempting to imagine, in Part I, I will work to reverse engineer this idea via a narrative depiction of a Black technosphere I am describing. In Part II, I will outline some of what might be necessary for the work toward the world described in the story. In Part III, the components I will focus on are data ownership, data citizenship, and web3 technology. Together, each plays a special role that when combined helps to fuel working together toward BUBIs, BUBAs, or both.

[. . .]

Block chain technologies are often “thought of in relation to [upholding a type of] truth because their distributed consensus algorithms produce an immutable”--an admittedly questionable concept--“and publicly accessible history of events.” Since blockchain creates a type of value through the sale and ownership of goods exchanged (in this case it is data), it also resets what constitutes as real through the decentralized ledger hosted on individual devices. Herein lies the significance of choosing blockchain over other digital options: The decentralization of data storage and upkeep not only further plays into the notion of a digital communal economy; it also provides a level of transparency needed in order to see the multi-pronged trajectories of data once it enters the digital ether. Still, blockchain technologies possess the ability to extend data colonialism. Blockchain colonialism builds upon the foundation of data colonialism by “introducing novel governance systems that are embedded even more intrinsically in the logics of economic exchange, making possible further alienation from the nature and life at hand.” It prepares pre-excavated territories of life for continuously expanding value extraction--a form of “digital frontierism.”

But what if we took these colonial technologies and flipped them on their heads? Where instead of technologies of extraction they were to become funnels that siphon away from the colonial apparatus? And in an anti-colonial stance would Black people then demarcate the boundaries of their data and its movement across markets? What if we utilized DOAs via NFT protocols to “terraform a myriad tiny worlds[] and smuggle out lively and strange cultural forms into more consensual realities in the world at large”? It is here that I offer there is a future whose cosmogony starts with an intentional grouping of Black people who see the value of compiling their personal data for a world that is all their own. And that would require more thinking of a master plan ...

Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems, Iliff School of Theology. © 2024, Philip Butler.