The Duality of Living in Privilege and being Pasifika

Exploring What It Means to See the World Through Two Different Realities.

Talofa reader,

I was actually working on another piece about how AI and it’s practical implications in the ‘hood, but got stuck having to hand wave off a concept of how I live in two different worlds at the same time, all the time.

I figured it would just be easier to write this one first, and then I can refer back to it anytime I have to run scenarios that require the reader to “get where I’m coming from”, essentially.

Let’s begin.

In my reality, I've always known I live in two worlds simultaneously.

The non-brown world, the one I experience with everyone else who's white basically.

Let’s call this world, “tech world”.

And the "brown" world, the one where, y'know, I'm a brown Pasifika guy.

We can call this “home world”.

The Pasifika Multi-Verse

There’s a lot of things I take for granted in my tech world.

I generally think all of us in this world, can see the world in roughly the same way, and where we don’t, we’re savvy enough to connect a few dots and come to a shared conclusion.

I’m often caught by surprise about how far off the mark that assumption is.

For example, RNZ did a piece about my Pasifika kids code club, where I mention there's not many Pasifika in tech.

The office where I was contracting at the time, formed a queue the next day to shake my hand, and almost every single one exclaim "oh yea, now that you mention it I don't think I've ever seen a Pacific Islander contracting around here".

I was a bit gobsmacked, to be honest.

I thought, if I can see the lack of colour around the office, day in and day out for years and years- how did you all miss that?

It's because we live in the same country, but we don't live in the same world.

I'll explain.

There’s this random show I used to watch late at night on tv (yes, in the before times where Netflix wasn’t a thing) called "Fringe".

I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with it, but it's brilliant and has Pacey from Dawson's Creek on it and he's great. Anyway, it's about parallel universes and how there's a version of us in each universe, some folks cross between these worlds, and all sorts of weirdness happens¹.

The reason this comes to mind is that in the show, every time a person from Universe 1 is in a different universe, they do their best to behave as if they were from that universe but often get caught out doing or saying something that makes sense to their real self, and appearing pretty bizarre to the folks witnessing it.

Not in as grandiose a way as this, but this is what the world is like for me.

I know how to act and behave so I can fit into the white western world, but there’s a bunch of stuff that’s not that natural to me.

I think most multi-cultural people probably feel like this, but I want to go a step further and scale this out to what it looks like when one persons lived experience, maps out to a whole community’s reality.

Epiphany at a Tech Summit

In 2016, I was contracting as a DevOps Engineer, building some things for an Insurance Company.

AWS Summit was in Auckland that year, and I thought I'd go along.

It was the same year I started a code club for Pasifika kids in the local primary school. Kids that came from homes with either a single computer, or no computer at all.

I go along to the AWS Summit, the first time I'd ever been to something like this and I was quite impressed.

Lots of stalls, freebies, and marketing paraphernalia all over the floor, every talk I went to had amazing presentations with technology doing amazing things.

As the day wore on, and I'd collected enough swag to fill half my backpack, I remember looking around the building I was in, multiple rooms going, people everywhere, I looked out for another Pasifika person, none in here, let me try outside going between buildings, nope none there either- hey there's a guy with a Maori tattoo, we do the eyebrow raise at each other and keep it moving.

No Pasifika outside.

Let's go to the main cloud (this was down at the wharf cloud event buildings), lots of people, no Pasifika anywhere except event staff.

Oh, this reminded me of another, obviously repressed, memory of the AWS Summit, which I’ll leave in the footnotes².

Anyway, repressed micro-aggressive memory aside, my point is this:

I was standing there at an AWS Summit, hearing about all this amazing technology and the free credits and tiers available. These offers were for folks who, like me, had a lot of disposable income and could afford it already.

And yet, the people I thought could benefit most from the knowledge, information, technology, and systems discussed at these events were Pasifika – and they weren't there.

This isn't a call-out of AWS or the event organisers. I don't have the energy for that. It felt like I was standing at the crossroads of two different dimensions, foreseeing what this disparity would mean for the future.

It reminded me of a scene from Terminator, where the time traveller notices signs in the past that predict disaster in the future- okay, maybe not that dramatic, but you get where my head was at.

What struck me was how what I envisioned in 2016, "in my mind's eye," turned out to be the reality I’d run into years later.

A Future Divided

In 2020, I was contacted and met up with someone working at Auckland Council, an initiative that was trying to deliver an online platform for the Pasifika community.

The problem was they didn't have anyone technical to advise them, and who understood also the culture and space they worked in.

The vendor they had gone with, in my opinion, had done a poor job of “requirements gathering”. They were delivering a complex, custom-made online platform with all the bells and whistles. This was for customer that didn't really understand what problem they were trying to solve.

Further to this, the customer didn't have the skillsets or resources to operate and maintain the project going forward.

This scenario is not unique in the Pasifika community.

This was the first of many scenarios like this I would learn about. Through this project and many more community-based Pasifika groups were trying to keep up with it all. They really had no access to expertise to guide and educate them on "the other world".

This is more than simple "haves" and "have-nots" stories; this is what you see when you roll "have not" out and build a community out of it.

In 2022, I'm dropping off second-hand laptops to families in South Auckland, some in the "red zone" during Covid lockdowns.

These families have three kids all in school, but they share one computer that the mother uses for work. As a result, they all use it sparingly.

The year, again, is 2022³.

After doing this, I go home to my powerful desktop machines. I have two to three laptops connected to various devices, storage servers, and media servers. There's a server cabinet with 1U rack servers for my home lab. Disks and hardware are strewn across the workshop tables in the basement, alongside boxes of old hardware, wires, and components.

I used the word "sparingly" earlier to contrast it with my own experience with technology—the luxury of playing with it, opening it, breaking it, and experimenting.

It's a bit heartbreaking that they don't get to experience the magic of technology in the way I did.

I live in, and see two different worlds, in real time.

The other world is advancing exponentially with data, insights, and "speed to market" sprint cycles for products and services. These are tested with automation and platforms that allow a small development team to form like Voltron, wielding the power of Cloud and DevOps to make a significant impact on the market.

In this world, it's a battle of titans as companies compete.

Giants like Amazon and Microsoft go at each other, vying for global market share, while startups and venture capital-backed companies like Uber contend with other Silicon Valley entities.

This is just ordinary life in this world.

There are no signs of damp, mouldy, overcrowded houses, or kids dropping out of high school to help pay the rent.

As Don Cheadle famously said, "There's layers to this shit," and it's those layers, observed at the AWS Summit 2016, that surprise me.

They're evident at the levels of Auckland Council and other local government bodies.

It makes me wonder, were my colleagues at the contracting company and I all sleepwalking this whole time? Did we miss the development of Pasifika Technology Leaders?

What’s The Answer?

I don't know what the answer is.

We could engage in a generic conversation about education, opportunities, and the wealthy aiding the less fortunate, ad nauseam.

But, to be honest, I'm sick of those discussions.

They’re often more about alleviating guilt than about taking real, substantive actions that “move the needle”.

So, let's just park those, yea?

Conclusion

I don’t think the goal of this piece (or any of my pieces for that matter) was to arrive at any kind of conclusion about this phenomenon.

Just a perspective of two worlds, through the eyes of a Pasifika Technology "journeyman".

It's why I can see and understand the corporate tech industry game, with its organizational politics, salaries, and annual leave balances. Your manager might chase you to take leave, claiming it's for your health, but in reality, that accrued leave is a liability on the company's balance sheet.

It's why when I hear "why don't they just get a job" or "they just need to do x, y, z," I understand that people in the tech world have zero idea what it's like growing up in the other world.

Put in the same environment and dealt the same cards, you might not be so confident it was "all going to work out" in the end.

It's also why I understand when my community hesitates to go solo in a work environment that gives them "please don't rob me" vibes or "are you sure you understand this?" energy in the office.

I try not to judge either side.

Everyone's got stuff to deal with, but it's hard because I am both sides.

I say "burn it all down" ironically at times because I can see how unfair it is, and I'm down with destroying it to build a more equitable world for everyone.

I'm also the guy working a corporate job, stacking financial assets as best I can so the "real world" can't kick me and my family to the curb.

It's a complicated existence at times, personally speaking.

I know that both worlds can co-exist, learn, and support each other because I've been able to connect, geek out, and laugh with my tech world side.

And I can go home, back to my roots and the warm embrace of my culture and identity, all in the space of a day.

"Sometimes the world we have is not the world we want. But we have our hearts and our imaginations to make the best of it." - Olivia Dunham, Fringe.

What do you think? Keen to hear any thoughts on this.

Thanks for reading, see you in the next one.

ia manuia,

Ron.

1. I know I don't have to go into the supernatural to make my point, we have billionaires and the royal family as examples of people who live in totally separate worlds from ourselves, but going supernatural just makes it easy to make an abstraction of the ideas and concepts without getting too triggered and asking important questions like "do we really need billionaires?!".

2. AWS Summit Story: I remember walking around, checking out each stall and getting swag. But I noticed that most stalls would let me just stand there, ignoring me until I made the first move.

One or two stalls sure I could brush off, sure, but it got to a point where I thought maybe I was wearing something offensive on my t-shirt or something.

I’m used to being looked at like “are you sure you know what you’re talking about?” in an office setting, it’s entirely different trip when it’s a tech convention, I’m wearing a lanyard, and getting ignored at a lot of the stalls.

3. Yes, I understand that poor people exist; you'll get the point I'm trying to make later on.