Innovation in Rural America
In June 2014, some friends and I won a hackathon in Brooklyn with a data visualization that used US Census data to show an organization in New Orleans where they would impact the most people with new health centers. The prize was a trip to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to talk to different community groups there and learn how we can extend our tool to help the most people. We worked for a few months, implementing new features, and drawing from larger pools of data, as well as creating a HIPAA- compliant healthcare survey to learn more about the status of the residents in the area so that the care they needed could reach them. It was a cool project to work on, that had the potential to help a lot of people, in an area that I had always been fascinated by, but never visited.
We traveled to New Orleans in September with Robert Francis Kennedy Young Leaders, to meet with the partner organization, the Alliance Institute, run by the coolest cat in town, Stephen Bradberry, ready to talk next steps for our technological solution. As soon as we got there, we started visiting satellite community organizations along the Gulf Coast, to talk to their leadership about what would best serve their locale. We learned that few people in these areas had health insurance, because it was expensive, and the registration for ACA was online. To add insult to injury, because these areas were so poor, doctors would not set up practices there. Grocery stores were also not interested in establishing in these communities, and few people had cars to access the markets farther away. This is called a food desert. When we arrived at the offices, we demonstrated what we had developed, and then talked about how the pollution in the Gulf of Mexico was impacting their health, governmental support (or lack thereof) for health coverage, and how language barrier impacted their ability to receive healthcare.
A few things quickly became apparent: there was no WiFi at the facilities, only a slow, wired connection, the organizations themselves typically had only one or two old desktops, and the idea of mobile computing had not yet taken hold of these small towns. The culture was not at all what I expected. There were pockets of immigrants that were so isolated, that they had not adopted English, by and large. The organization that worked with them is Boat People SOS in Bayou La Batre, and they described the challenges they face with trying to get their community the services that they need, through an extreme language barrier, and physical isolation.
The next day, we visited a historic Louisiana town in Houma, and a Christian community organization threw a phenomenal crab boil for us, and we talked about the challenges that their rural area faces with flooding and healthcare access. This visit was also the first time I was truly hit over the head with how serious and still prevalent segregation is in America. Black people weren’t even allowed to own property in the town until the 80’s. The 1980’s. Still electrified with the culture shock, we went to go help the mother of this locally prominent family with some computer issues she was facing. She led us to a huge brick of a desktop that was running Windows ME. The problem was that Internet Explorer 4 was no longer supported and we needed to get that updated.
The conclusion that we came to about the future development of our terrific, helpful, technological solution was that the whole thing would have to be scrapped. The internet speeds that they were dealing with were hovering around a little less than 1MBPS, and loading the tool was taking about 5 minutes at a time with about half of the data. The healthcare surveys would have to be administered on paper, door-to-door. People did not carry smartphones, as they were expensive, the service was poor, and it was not a part of the culture. Needless to say, we weren’t talking to a group of tech lovers. The infrastructure simply wasn’t there, and the communities were not demanding it any time soon.
If i had not had my nose shoved in these truths, I would not have believed them. Sitting up in my apartment in Manhattan, I would not have believed for a minute that our simple little data visualization would be too far in the future to be a viable solution.
I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Being between Boston and NYC, we got the benefits of nice technical infrastructure, and it doesn’t take too long for the big technological trends to reach us, while we don’t have our own tech community. Some of Connecticut, especially closer to NYC, is wealthy, and sits on the cutting edge. However, out in the northeastern corner of the state, where the properties come with swaths of land and many towns are more populated with dairy cows than people, we more closely resemble the technology-deprived South.
I moved back to Connecticut from NYC a year ago, and have searched far and wide for the same community of software developers, tech innovators, and TechCrunch junkies that I spent day and night with in New York. My parents do not have smartphones and are frankly disgusted with my use of mine. A couple of their friends have iPhones and learned how to take pictures, but just as many haven’t turn on the family desktop in years since their kids have gone to college. Many of the people that I meet through volunteer work, at the gym, or at social events do not have smartphones. Even many of my friends in my age group refuse to have smartphones, as they’re over-zealous in their adventuring and rip through multiple cell phones a year. Not only do many of these people not have smartphones, they don’t want them.
As a web developer, I stress a lot more about having a quick-to-load, mobile-responsive site, as 75% of web traffic is mobile now. As a product developer, I’ve learned that a whole lot of the population just isn’t on the internet at all. As of April 2017, 69.3% of Americans owned smartphones, according to Newzoo’s Global Mobile Market Report. Yes, that’s a big number, but not as big as many tech companies, developers, and designers assume. My own parents and some of my closest friends will never be regular users of anything that I develop, because they aren’t online often enough to be regular users of anything. Many of the people that I interact with most regularly will never read this or respond to it, because they don’t know it exists.
The reason that I’m concerning myself with this today is the news about Amazon acquiring Whole Foods, presumably to take their infrastructure and turn it into the fully automated grocery store that they’ve been prototyping, Amazon Go. My favorite grocery store around me is a Whole Foods, and frankly, I’m angry at the prospect that my parents won’t also be able to shop there anymore. That feels exclusionary to me. Aside from that, I hate the fact that I’ll be forced to use a system that I don’t trust. Credit card fraud is rampant, and the information is most often stolen from an online account. As a developer, I am acutely away of how many products get rushed to market without the time to fully consider the security risks. Developers who are inexperienced with implementing the best security solutions are hired because they are cheaper. Companies will not pay for products to be updated with improved security later on because it is expensive and disruptive. These are inherent problems with technology currently. There are plenty of people working to fix these issues, but it’s the biggest issue, even in large companies with the most talented developers and security experts.
I know that it sounds like I’m being resistant to change, which is strange coming from someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes technology innovation. I have had the advantage of being on the forefront of product development best practices, and understand that companies like Amazon do considerable user testing. But I also know that most tech companies don’t do their user testing in rural areas, where the people don’t use the internet enough to be contacted about it. What feels different to me about Amazon’s plan is that they are taking a business already established in rural and suburban areas, and think that they will be able to force people into adopting their new technology. I hate it when people are being forced to take on new risks because of technology. I know that it’s part of advancement, but it strikes me as ethically questionable. Call me a dinosaur.
If you want to develop products for places where people want it, that’s better than great. But don’t think that you’re going to come into a place where people don’t want it, and force it on them. I’m going to be pretty grouchy when I have to go grocery shopping for my parents for the rest of their lives because they’d sooner starve to death than figure out how to use a smartphone, and even more grouchy when my local Amazon Go doesn’t make enough revenue, shuts down, and I’m going to have to order the Truffle-flavored popcorn that I like online.
