The Blue Pill Doesn't Work Here
This essay is part of a thread on AI, data sovereignty, and Pasifika in technology. See the Pacific AI & Data Sovereignty hub for the full collection. Related: Technology Is Political, The Inevitability of AI.
Talofa reader,
I had an encounter the other week, with a smart, very capable young Pasifika person on my Discord who said they're not political because they're "either not interested in it or ... too busy living life and having fun to do anything about it".
And I went, "ooh, that's quite the take", and we went back and forth a few times, but ultimately we just parked it. I had to sit with it for a little while after, to figure out why that encounter really rubbed me the wrong way.
This isn't about this young Pasifika person, not at all. Everyone's free to their opinions and to live their own lives, 100%. So, given that, why did this irk me so much?
Where it crosses the intersections of ethnicity and culture, that's where I see it more personally.
Maybe years of experience as a Pasifika person in society in general, but in these tech spaces probably the most.
There is no neutral position when it comes to politics, in any sense, with respect to issues that can and will affect us as Pasifika, and opting out of that is also a position. I'm not saying everyone has to be an activist, but if I don't know where you stand on, for example Palestine, free healthcare, or Universal Basic Income — it's not the end of the world, but it means I can't trust you beyond the banter and chit-chat.
Them: but that's all I want this Discord for?
Me: that's not what I built this Discord for.
What This Space Is Really For
That's the other thing that gets me about this encounter. It emphasises what we're trying to build here. Some people think it's just a space for Pasifika techies and geeks to hang out.
And it is that, very superficially by the literal characteristics of the members of the server — Pasifika people working or who identify as geeks and techies.
People like us don't have many spaces like this to gather, if any. So this is one of those spaces by that definition.
But that's not the definition of the spaces I'm trying to build.
For me, I can't set the bar that low.
The intersection for the types of spaces I myself want to be part of, and actively building: is the "Pasifika tech professional or geek, who deals with the political reality of being Pasifika in a world that is built on capitalism, white supremacy and oppression of the global south."
Sure, that's not a light undertaking having to consider all that, but I tried the compromised approach last time I built such a network and it was a huge personal burden for myself that ultimately failed because that's not what was in my heart of hearts to build.
I've asked myself before, "maybe I'm asking too much from one space?", but truth be told, I created this space to find more people like me — not just Samoan, but Pasifika, politically conscious and forthright. And that's a space I want to protect too, so that Pasifika can have a stance and not be seen to be "woke" or "too much", that they can find like-minded technical people who also see the political ramifications of the tech, the companies and society at large.
There's plenty of "builder" communities out there, just look up meetup.com and go somewhere that's safe from politics.
But I know you won't do that, because even the most apolitical Pasifika I know, inevitably, without fail, run head first into these topics that remain a reality for us... usually in the way they're treated, an incident that happens at work, on their commute, on TV and in the cities they live in…
And then want a space, or group to share this experience with, who understands it.
Without fail.
Tech Is Going to Politic All Over Us
And the thing with tech is, you can opt out into your corner of what you build, but tech is going to politic all over us and our communities, whether we're interested or not.
Oranga Tamariki wanted to assign risk scores to newborns. The algorithm gets trained on historical data — data that already says Māori children are three and a half times more likely to be reported, nearly six times more likely to end up in state care. The system doesn't correct for that history. It encodes and automates it. Two-thirds of young people in state care are Māori, and someone's algorithm is going to learn from that dataset and just perpetuate that bullshit.
MSD rolled out facial recognition for benefit verification before they'd even tested it for racial bias — surprise, surprise. Their own internal report flagged that if the algorithm was biased, Māori and Pasifika clients — who make up a disproportionate share of MSD's client base — could be referred for fraud investigations based on a system that wasn't built with their faces in mind. Meanwhile NZ Police trialled Clearview AI, a system that scraped billions of images off social media, and Foodstuffs scanned over 225 million faces across their supermarkets — with the Privacy Commissioner noting the tech hadn't been trained on New Zealand's population and couldn't guarantee it wouldn't hit Māori and Pasifika harder.
These aren't abstract examples.
These are systems being built right now, today, that directly affect our communities. And the people building them are not wondering whether they should care about politics. They already have a position. It's baked into the product.
The Blue Pill Doesn't Work Here
And look, I get it. There's an appeal to the apolitical position. ==It's the blue pill.== You don't have to think about it, you just build, you go home, you live your life. And honestly? Who can blame anyone for wanting that. The world is exhausting and the reality is grim and sometimes you just want to write code and clock off.
But here's the thing — Neo got offered a choice between two realities. Pasifika people don't get that choice. You can swallow the blue pill all you want, but the algorithm still profiles your family at WINZ. The facial recognition still can't tell your aunty apart from someone on a watchlist. Tonga still goes dark for 38 days when a volcanic eruption severs the undersea cable and nobody in our communities controls the repair timeline.
The delusion isn't that you've escaped the politics. It's that you think the politics has escaped you.
That's the actual cost of being apolitical as a Pasifika person in tech. Not that you're missing out on some enlightened awakening. It's that you're operating on a false premise. You think opting out protects you.
It doesn't.
It just means when the thing lands, you don't see it for what it is. Your cousin gets flagged for a fraud investigation off the back of a biased algorithm and you go "that's crazy, how did that happen?" The facial recognition at your local Countdown can't match your face properly and you think it's a glitch. Your GP's office starts using a system that was trained on data that already says your community is higher risk for everything, and you just... accept the diagnosis without question.
Political consciousness isn't about being an activist. It's about being awake when these things show up in your life. Knowing what they are. Knowing they weren't accidents. Knowing they were designed with a set of assumptions that weren't made with you in mind. The apolitical position doesn't spare you from any of that. It just means you won't recognise it when it walks through your door.
Just Stay Awake
I'm not asking everyone to be an activist.
I'm not asking you to march, or post, or pick a fight every day. I'm asking you to stay awake. That's it. When the system shows up at your door — at WINZ, at the GP, at the supermarket, at your kid's school — I'm asking you to see it for what it is. Not a glitch. Not just how things work. A decision someone made, built on assumptions they didn't run past you.
You can take the blue pill if you want. But it doesn't change what's coming. It just changes whether you stand "10 toes down" against it, or we leave you to the side with your head in the sand about it.
Thanks for reading,
Ron.