Thinking of a Master Plan: Data Citizenship/Ownership as a Portal to an Unfettered Black Universal Basic Income

• Pages: 1343-1360
• Date: 01 June 2024
• Published date: 01 June 2024
• Author: Philip Butler
• Subject Matter: Derecho Civil

Thinking of a Master Plan: Data Citizenship/

Ownership as a Portal to an Unfettered Black

Universal Basic Income

PHILIP BUTLER* TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1343

I. A BLACK TECHNOSPHERE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1347

II. EVIDENCE OF BLACK POSTHUMANISM IN THE STORY . . . . . . . . . . . 1352

III. DAOS, OWNERSHIP, AND CITIZENSHIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1354

INTRODUCTION

If you are old enough to remember the song that inspired the title of this

Essay,

1

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,

2

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 itera-

tion 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

* Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artif‌icial Intelligence Systems, Iliff School

of Theology. © 2024, Philip Butler.

1. ERIC B. & RAKIM, Paid in Full, on PAID IN FULL (4th & B’way 1987).

2. 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.

1343

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 under-

stood 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 suprema-

cist, cis-hetero protonormativity.

3

Nevertheless, in the vein of Aime

´ Ce

´saire

4

and

Sylvia Wynter,

5

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.

6

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 imag-

ine Black futures.

Regardless of where anyone lands on the spectrums of Blackness and African-

ness, 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,

3. 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).

4. See generally Aime

´ Ce

´saire, Discourse on Colonialism, in DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM 29 (Joan

Pinkham trans., 2000).

5. 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.

6. 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.

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