Vulnerable People and Places Blog

  Tech companies are making money without selling you anything. If they aren't selling you anything and they are making money, they must be selling someone something. How else are they earning cash? They are selling you. More specifically, they are selling your attention. You've probably heard the phrase time is money. Your time and attention are a valuable commodity. You go to work and get paid, sometimes hourly or by salary. Mainly, money is closely related to time.  If you are using a free online service, consider that your actions and attention may be sold for profit. Recently, this has become more widely known. People don't really care that much. I frequently hear "they already have all my data." To be fair, it's true. They already have a profile on you.  Time as a commodity is not as easy to quantify as a physical product like toilet paper or a car. What makes it quantifiable is the massive amounts of data collected from your usage of these platforms. Th...

  Shaping Oregon’s digital landscape starts with community voices at the table- bringing facts, real engineering, and local values to the conversation If you’ve spent any time in local activist spaces or scrolling through Oregon community feeds lately, you’ve probably seen the alarming headlines. The narrative is everywhere: massive, shadowy data centers are moving into our state, sucking our grid dry, and aggressively gulping down millions of gallons of our precious municipal drinking water while leaving local communities with nothing but the bill. It sounds like a classic, dystopian corporate-takeover story. And if those were the actual facts, we should absolutely be out in the streets protesting. But if we’re genuinely committed to truth, digital equity, and real environmental accountability, we have to look past the slick graphics on our screens and talk about actual engineering. Because the real "true cost" of the data center debate isn't a resource crisis- it’s the...