This is the first in a three-part series about my struggles with technology and human connection.
My main fear came from knowing that everything is connected, and pushing the wrong button could cause an unintended consequence I would not be able to undo. My other fear was knowing that nothing I did would be private; all my mistakes would be recorded, no matter how many times I pressed delete. I believed the number of times I hit delete would be recorded. Sitting in front of this powerful and evolving mechanism was as intimidating as standing on a ledge over the entirety of everything.
In 1991, I received my G.E.D. at Manson Youth Institution (MYI) in Cheshire, Connecticut while I was facing some serious time as a seventeen-year-old. I was motivated to get it by the pretrial judge overseeing my case. The judge said he could see that I was “a very smart young man,” and that he wanted me in school before I was sentenced. It was a personal request: “Can you do that?” He was giving me an opportunity. To my seventeen-year-old, traumatized mind, it was as if he’d stopped the official proceedings, because he saw something of value in me. For a split second it was a profound affirmation.
Envision a seventeen-year-old, young black impoverished child standing at about 135 lbs. of pure heartache in a courtroom that, to me, felt like a colosseum. I was there alone. No parent, no guardian, no relatives. It was a closed courtroom. A woman from the Department of Children and Family Services had been appointed my guardian. I’d never met her. The only thing she ever said was, “Present, your honor,” when the judge asked if I had a guardian with me.
None of that mattered in that moment. What mattered was that he saw something of value in me. He saw me, my brilliance. I’d actually never believed I was smart, even though people told me so my whole childhood. I always thought: if I’m so smart, why is everything so hard for me? But that day, I decided I would prove it. Thanks to this benevolent judge.
Back in my cell at MYI, I was excited. I had an ace up my sleeve; the judge would show leniency once he saw I’d gotten into school. I loved school; it had always been a refuge to me, and then it wasn't. A month or two after that day in the courtroom, I earned my G.E.D.
Back before the clairvoyant judge, I was ready. I imagined a minimal sentence. I imagined going home with my “guardian lady” from the state and having my new life once he saw how I’d proven him right. He’d only asked me to go to school; I’d gone above and beyond. I got my G.E.D and was tutoring other kids.
He barely looked at me. It happened so fast I didn’t even register that it was over. I wondered if he even knew what I’d accomplished in that short span. He sentenced me to 12 years, suspended after 8 years. I was furious with myself for believing this man had the capacity to see me, or to care.
I stayed involved with school anyway. At that time, there was one computer in the class at a desk. I didn’t know it did anything more than enable one to type and print spreadsheets. The school at Manson Youth Institution was literally a trailer in the middle of the compound, about the size of two mobile homes. Then an announcement came: we were getting a computer lab. The prison would start offering a “computer class.” Another trailer went up in the center of the compound to house it. I was offered the opportunity to work as a tutor in the “computer lab.”
I was born and raised in the analog era. I was incarcerated during most of the digital one.
It was RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan who alerted me to the new digital era. The year was 1992. I was nineteen, two years into my sentence. The incarceration was a reprieve from a childhood of neglect and every impoverished hardship you can imagine. I was a sixteen-year-old child when my mother passed. I was devastated. Robbed! Cheated! Alone! I’d already spent years feeling that way, but her death cemented those feelings into my being. The world was against me. The death of my mother solidified my disconnect. When I heard the Wu-Tang Clan say, “Life as shorty shouldn’t be so rough,” I felt like someone was finally articulating what I was going through.
Over the next year or so of listening to the Wu, I kept hearing RZA refer to himself as Bobby Digital. He’d “dis” anyone still using analog technology. I was intrigued. He was letting the world know we were in a new era now. The world was changing. I had no clue what he meant. I had no point of reference. I figured he was just talking about beat machines. I never got a real experience of the digital revolution — the internet came through, and I was cut off from the world, physically and figuratively, right as it happened.
By 1995, the internet was starting to buzz. I start seeing www. in all of the publications I was reading. I was scheduled to be released that year, I was twenty-two, with no plan, after being locked up since I was sixteen. The truth is, I’d gone in so soon after my mother’s passing that I was just starting to mourn her when the sentence began. In prison, I suppressed that grief. I had no connections in the world to assist me in adjusting and dealing with all the emotions I was experiencing. I had nothing, and that was weighing on me heavily. I had just served 5 years. Now 22 years old and sleeping on my sister's living room couch. I had no real work-related skills other than washing dishes and cooking on a flat grill, something I learned to do in prison. All that time spent in the prison school system didn't really assist me much. I walked out knowing less about a real computer than I did about a typewriter.
When I came into contact with a computer outside of prison, I was lost. I avoided computers as long as I could. Convincing myself that I did not need to learn computers because I was in the streets. What good would computer knowledge do me? I thought that was for other people from another life. My life was about survival; food, clothes, and shelter. I had no clue that the world was turning into a place where it is virtually impossible to acquire any of those things without some computer skills….