I work for a nonprofit that does digital inclusion work in Portland and we have a backlog of like 400 applications we can't fill and are literally just hustling computers out the door as quickly as we can get them, so the idea of making kids COMPETE for this horrifies me https://twitter.com/KHONnews/status/1358186473254776834

the majority of my work for Free Geek this year is going to be writing grants to be able to give away free computers to people living below the poverty line

we prioritize kids with no housing or whose home situation is unstable to get first crack at laptops whenever we have them

the first time I ever cried at this job was when the digital inclusion manager sent me her spreadsheet of the requests we haven't been able to fill yet, which contained the text of the email they sent in pleading for help

i had to take the rest of the day off

it just broke me

anyway if you want to support an org doing their absolute best to get free technology to everyone who needs it, please consider supporting Free Geek, whose mission is to divert e-waste from landfills by refurbishing it to put back into the community
https://give.freegeek.org/ 

We used to run a program where volunteers could earn a free computer after 24 hours of service, but since COVID we can't have volunteers in the building, which means a lot of low-income adults who were doing this for the free computer had no way to get one

so we started a new free technology program for adults (the existing one was only for K-12 students) and in its first month it got like 500 applications

this does not even get INTO the digital inclusion crisis of who has actual access to internet, or how bad things are in rural communities, or the cataclysmic structural racism embedded in the digital divide in America

this is one of those things that, during normal times, most people middle-class and above don't necessarily think about every day, but as with so many facets of our society, COVID has turned it into a full-blown emergency

someone send that article to a billionaire and have them just BUY a laptop for all of those kids instead of forcing them to perform for clicks and pitting them against each other

make zuckerberg do it as a tiny gesture of atonement for destroying millions of acres of hawaii tbh

social media-based grant programs where funding decisions are made based on clicks are, by their very nature, designed to prioritized highly digitally-connected and tech-savvy populations over people without access to technology - such as the aforementioned unhoused youth https://twitter.com/thatsballin/status/1358772754330357760

anyone who has done time in an internet fandom during poll season knows the only beneficiary of online contests is web companies selling clicks to advertisers

like. it’s ten laptops. how many rich white people with third homes in Hawaii could just BUY that nonprofit ten laptops

The problem isn’t this one tiny nonprofit for whom this may be the only way to get laptops to these ten kids

it’s like, where is your school district here? why didn’t we have a comprehensive nationwide rollout as soon as schools went online? why isn’t internet a public utility?

The problems are SYSTEMIC, and these kids shouldn’t have to become the face of a social media campaign just to fight for their one shot at accessing basic social services they should have received a YEAR ago