Rising Up Against AI and Big Tech’s Injustices

FEATURING KEVIN DE LIBAN - Our nation and our world are overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, you’ll hear conversations with changemakers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week on Rising Up for Justice, I’m joined by Kevin De Liban, Founder and President of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit using legal advocacy, education, and organizing to fight alongside low-income people left behind by AI. Previously a legal aid attorney for more than 12 years in Arkansas, he defeated that state's use of an algorithm that cut Medicaid home-based care for thousands of disabled people.  

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Given that this is such a new front in the impact on people's lives, the tool that's being wielded by those with power, I imagine your organization is not very old. Tell me about Tectonic Justice, when you established it, and why. 

Kevin De Liban: Yes, you're absolutely right. We just launched in November of 2024, so a bit over a year and a half now. And this came after my life as a legal aid attorney, where I encountered the use of these technologies to really limit and hurt the life chances of low-income folks, which were my clients in the communities I most care about. 

And so what happened there in Arkansas is I had to fight this in various contexts. One, you mentioned the use of it in Medicaid home care benefits, and then in other kinds of public benefits, and then in other areas of life, like in housing and employment and schooling, and saw that, oh, my gosh, this technology's coming for us. No societal resources are being devoted to fighting it from the ground level up, and we're all woefully underprepared for all of this mass suffering that is happening and is about to intensify. 

And so Tectonic Justice was really born of those experiences of fighting on the ground and recognizing that what ecosystem exists around AI wasn't set up to really both fight the immediate harms as well as build long-term power around these issues so that we could win systemic changes so that nobody has to suffer in the first place.