Lizette Ayala

Titled The Law, my thesis is a mixture of commentary, critique, and community solutions that consider how our current Internet infrastructure functions and fails to function, disproportionately affecting people of color in the South. My thesis is manifested in the form of an ecosystem of audiovisual and written material meant to equip Black, Brown, or marginalized readers with knowledge and agency about a system that is ingrained in their lives but doesn’t always cater to their successes. This ecosystem follows my exploration of data, surveillance, and security practices over the past year and a half. Through my research, I came to the realization that — like many infrastructures — digital infrastructure is an amalgamation and by product of others. The infrastructure of racism, the infrastructure of surveillance technology, the infrastructure of academia, and the infrastructure of capitalism are just a few. Arming marginalized communities with digital agency and literacy is a preventative measure ensuring they are not further stratified or exploited in the digital realm. My collective conclusion is that digital inequalities not only reproduce social inequalities in the digital realm but also amplify them in the physical world.