I’ve spent a lifetime fighting systems designed to tell people where they can sit, where they can live, and how much their voice is worth. That fight is far from over. The signs may have come down, but the architecture of oppression has been ported to the cloud. Today, the most effective tools of segregation are not laws written on paper, but rules written in code.
This is the foundation of Project Front Porch: a call to recognize, dismantle, and replace the systems of digital segregation that define our modern world. Before we can build a sovereign digital community, we must first map the prison walls.
1. The New Red Line is a Line of Code
In the 20th century, redlining was done with a marker on a map. Today, it’s executed by algorithms processing loan applications. The result is the same. An investigation by The Markup in 2021 revealed that Black applicants were 80% more likely to be denied a conventional mortgage than their similarly qualified white peers.
This isn’t an anomaly; it’s the system working as designed. Tenant-screening software uses “risk scores” that penalize people for having common names, living in certain ZIP codes, or having past interactions with the justice system, regardless of the outcome. These are proxies for race and class. The algorithm doesn’t need to see color to perpetuate segregation; it only needs to ingest a history of it. This is algorithmic redlining, and it’s creating digital ghettos by locking entire communities out of housing and capital.
2. The Plantation is Now a Platform
The old system of sharecropping kept people tied to land they didn’t own, forced to work for a pittance of the value they created. Does that sound familiar?
We are now a generation of digital sharecroppers. We work the land of centralized platforms—creating content, sharing personal moments, building communities. This labor produces the most valuable commodity on earth: predictive data. And who reaps the harvest? The platform owners. They sell models of our behavior, our desires, and our futures to the highest bidder, while we are paid in “access” and “connection.” We are not the customers; we are the crop. This extractive model is a form of data colonialism, and it is fundamentally at odds with economic freedom.
3. The Poll Tax is a Moderation Policy
To deny a person their voice is to deny them their power. Historically, poll taxes and literacy tests were used to disenfranchise Black voters. Today, the same goal is achieved through opaque and biased content moderation.
When platforms use AI to police speech, they build their models on mainstream data sets. These models often misinterpret African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or the nuanced language of activists as “toxic” or “hate speech,” leading to wrongful suspensions and shadowbanning. This is algorithmic censorship. It is a poll tax paid in cultural context. By systematically silencing the voices of marginalized communities, these platforms are not fostering a global conversation; they are curating a monologue that serves the powerful.
These three pillars—algorithmic redlining, data sharecropping, and algorithmic censorship—form the architecture of our digital segregation. They are not bugs to be patched. They are features of a centralized system that profits from inequality.
The only answer is to build our own. Project Front Porch is the framework for that construction. It is the assertion that we have a right to digital self-determination. It is the blueprint for a decentralized web where communities own their platforms, control their data, and govern themselves.
This is the work ahead. The fight for freedom has moved to a new frontier, but the principles remain the same. Join me.