Community over Profit

This week, I watched the lecture with Nodin Cutfeet, and it shifted how I think about why we even bother learning tech in the first place.

Nodin works with Indigenous youth in Northern communities, and they pointed out something obvious that most of us miss. The standard “Silicon Valley” pitch doesn’t work for everyone. We’re usually told to learn to code so we can become the next Mark Zuckerberg and get rich, but Nodin found that their students didn’t care about that “career-oriented” path. Instead, they were motivated by community building and self-expression. They wanted to learn these skills to be “valuable and interesting community members” or to show an elder they were smart.

This connects back to my own project with Excel. While I’ve been focused on my own personal goals, Nodin’s talk reminds me that “digital literacy” is actually about sovereignty. They talked about how Indigenous knowledge is often harvested by AI bots like ChatGPT, which then “mushes” different cultures together without any real context. Whether it’s AI or a habit-tracking app, these large institutions are essentially trying to “predict our behaviours before we do them” just to nudge us into a purchase.

Nodin’s goal is to “claw our data back”. It’s the same reason I’m glad I’m building my own habit tracker instead of just using the convenient subscription option while a company manipulates my data in the background. Real digital literacy is realizing that you don’t have to follow the path these platforms set for you; you can build your own tools that actually serve your community instead of just a corporate bottom line.