MediaJustice: Technology, Power, and the Fight for Digital Equity

Hotspot is a series of articles drawn from interviews with people across the digital equity and inclusion ecosystem. For this issue, Cassie Bair sat down with Steven Renderos, Executive Director of MediaJustice, to explore how media and technology function as tools of both oppression and liberation — and why the fight to democratize them is inseparable from the fight for racial justice.

Technology Opens Up the World

Steven Renderos grew up in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles in the mid to late 1990s. His mom worked in a garment factory for minimum wage. His world, as he describes it, was the 10 square blocks around his home.

Then she bought him a computer.

According to Renderos, she probably had no real conception of what the internet was at that time. But somewhere in her decision to buy him a computer that she could barely afford was an understanding that technology mattered in a way that was hard to articulate but impossible to ignore.

"She did have an understanding that technology was a thing worth sacrificing for, a thing worth fighting for."
- Steven Renderos

The computer changed Renderos' trajectory. The internet expanded his world immensely. It made him curious. It made him bold enough to leave home for school in the Midwest, and to pursue a career driven by passion rather than paycheck. He credits that early access — and the lesson behind it — as formative to everything that followed, including his work today as Executive Director of MediaJustice, a national organization that challenges the way corporations wield control over media and technology, and organizes communities to build alternatives.

Renderos has carried the lesson he learned from his mother throughout his life, and it has fueled him in his career as an organizer working to democratize media and technology in our society.

The System Behind the Story

"When media and technology are more democratized, it allows us to advance a vision of social justice that brings greater equity and power to communities that need it."

- Steven Renderos

The core of MediaJustice's work is straightforward: a small number of large corporations have consolidated a high degree of control over the tools that we use to communicate in our society — through both traditional and online digital media. 

That consolidation, Renderos argues, deeply affects the ability of communities to tell their own stories.

At its best, the internet has been a source of connection. Renderos points to movements like Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, and movements for climate justice as examples of the internet being central to meaningful change. It creates connections between communities, linking struggles that might otherwise remain siloed. In that way, the internet has played a central role in what he calls "a bigger we."

"We've worked with trans communities who have found a safe space online to connect with other people like them. I've had people say the internet saved their life."

- Steven Renderos

For other communities, it's been a way to shine a light on injustice — taking examples of what's happening in one community and connecting it to similar things happening in others. That connective tissue, Renderos says, is what makes the internet so important to social justice work.

Access to the internet — and the ability to actually do something with it and to control it — is central to advancing social and racial justice. The question MediaJustice asks is: who gets that internet, who controls it, and who gets left out?

Since the early days of the internet, the organization has been fighting for net neutrality rules to prevent fast and slow lanes online, challenging corporate consolidation between big media companies that are also big internet service providers, and pushing to make the internet more affordable for low-income households. 

Those efforts are core to MediaJustice’s work, because it matters that everyone has access to the tools our society uses to communicate.

Barriers Facing Communities of Color

For communities of color, the barriers to meaningful internet access are compounding. Renderos named three:

1. Access

The places in America where broadband has been built out least — where service is slowest, most expensive, or simply absent — map closely onto the communities that have faced historical economic exclusion.

"The same places that dealt with the kind of redlining that limited banking infrastructure people needed to build economically robust neighborhoods and communities are also the same neighborhoods experiencing digital redlining."

- Steven Renderos

Internet service providers have made deliberate investment decisions to build their best infrastructure where they see the best return — which has meant underinvesting in Black, brown, and poor communities. The term for this is digital redlining. It follows the same geographic logic as those historically practiced by banks and other institutions of power.

2. Opportunity

Renderos points to something he calls learning under duress. Many people in under-resourced communities first encounter digital tools through necessity. You learn to navigate an online benefits portal because your Section 8 housing depends on it. You figure out a school communication platform because your child's education requires it. Learning happens in high-stakes moments and without support.

Many communities still struggle to afford having a fixed broadband connection in their homes, which means that learning often happens on a phone rather than a device suited to the task.

Renderos is careful to note that none of this reflects a lack of interest in technology. Communities of color have historically been early adopters — at the forefront of radio, television, print media, and the internet. The desire has never been the problem. The barriers are structural, not cultural.

3. The Risk of Surveillance

As technology use increases, so does the data trail it creates — and for communities of color, that data trail carries real risk. The history of government surveillance of Black and brown communities is long and well-documented. The technologies of today have added new dimensions to that history: data generated through everyday internet use can be, and has been, used for policing, immigration enforcement, and broader surveillance efforts.

"Communities of color have always been the canaries in the coal mine, on the front edge of that level of extraction and surveillance."

- Steven Renderos

This is part of why MediaJustice's vision of digital equity isn't just about getting people connected. It's about who controls the infrastructure, who owns the data, and who gets to decide how both are used.

Fight For Something

"You can't just sit with the problem. You have to give people something to fight for."

- Steven Renderos

To paraphrase Renderos: Hope is what you need to build the kind of longer-term work that truly reshapes the role that media and technology play in our society. Exposing the harms creates entry points for people to connect to the work and get involved.

From a movement-building perspective, it's really important to be able to diagnose what communities — and by association, MediaJustice — are up against. If they, as an organization, don't have clarity on what they're willing to fight for, then they can easily be dismissed.

They're experiencing this right now in some of their work organizing to challenge the build-out of data centers that are so central to large language models being pushed by companies like OpenAI and Meta, and figures like Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. The resistance to that build-out has been effective. People have actually won the slowdown of some projects in many places across the country. 

But that kind of organizing, that kind of momentum, has a shelf life. In order to really transform it into long-term, durable power that helps alter the trajectory of how technology functions in our society — they need to be equipped with a vision for what the alternative needs to look like.

Taking Action on Three Fronts

MediaJustice organizes their work across three key programs:

Research & Political Education

Talking about the harms and exposing them matters. That's why MediaJustice also produces reports. 

In 2026, they produced one on data centers in the South, looking at how data center build-out is happening in places that AI companies consider sacrifice zones, places that should just be discarded — where local costs like environmental impact and water usage are forced on residents who have little say in the matter. 

They have also created a report examining how tech oligarchs are acquiring large swaths of the media system and wielding control.

Narratives & Communication

Media Justice helps people see and articulate what they're fighting for, not just against. They build power through story and change the narrative about who should control media and technology, helping people see that these aren’t just technical issues — they’re questions of power.

Movement Building & Organizing Campaigns

Last year, MediaJustice hosted some visioning circles with people in their community to start thinking about alternatives to what the tech companies envision for them. They gave participants permission to think ahead pretty far into the future — 150 years — and to describe what that world looks like, how it functions, and technology's role. 

One goal was to start to answer that for themselves: what do we, as a society, actually want and need out of technology? That way, as they figure out what they're against now and what they're fighting for now, they can connect the dots to a long-term vision.- Steven Renderos

Fighting for the Freedom to Tell Your Own Story

On their website, MediaJustice states that they are, “Fighting for a future where we are all connected, represented and free.”

We asked Renderos what it means to be free from their perspective.

For Media Justice — being a racial justice organization — it means a world in which people of color are free to exist, free to live, and free to thrive. This inherently speaks to a world in which people of color are free from surveillance, free to own and control their own stories, and by extension, their own data, and technology.

"Freedom looks like more democratic control over the tools that shape communications in our society."

- Steven Renderos

This is true whether that's community-owned broadband networks, or community media that creates the vehicles to keep our society informed about the things happening in our communities.

For Renderos and Media Justice, that's what freedom looks like and feels like. And as an organization that sees itself as building a movement connected to other movements, it's also the freedom to pursue the visions of other movements — the climate justice movement, the movement for Black Lives, the immigrant rights movement. 

Really, it’s a world that allows those movements to advance and achieve their visions. It’s a world where media and technology are supportive of and driving those visions forward, rather than being tools wielded against communities of color.

How to Get Involved

We asked Renderos if there is anything that individuals can do to help MediaJustice accomplish their goals. They do organizing all over the country, and it's likely that there is a way to get involved in some of the fights they're involved in whether digitally, online, or in your community.

Of course, for those with the capacity, donating directly to MediaJustice puts resources on the front lines of this work.

But financial support isn't the only way in. Signing up for their newsletter is the easiest entry point — it's how people get connected to local actions, invited to national gatherings like Take Back Tech, and keep up to date on the work.

Alternative Movements are Growing

Renderos sees a growing consensus that control of vital infrastructure — what we call media and technology — being in the hands of large-scale corporations is an idea that's waning.

"There's growing opposition to the build-out of large-scale data centers all over the country, where people are stacking water board meetings, county commission meetings, and city council meetings in large droves, really pressuring our government to represent the interests of our people."
- Steven Renderos

He also sees an emerging independent media ecosystem that is trying to close the gap between misinformation, disinformation, and the news deserts created by a heavily consolidated media system. He points to a media consortium called the Movement Media Alliance that includes groups like Convergence Magazine and Truthout, dedicated to informing people about the way politics is shaping up in our society. 

There are also examples that are very hyperlocal — like the Baltimore Beat — which still produces a print newspaper every couple of weeks and hands people something they can touch and read.

"I find a lot of hope in the alternatives that people are building, because they're recognizing that ceding control over media and technology to large corporations hasn't worked for us. So let's build something else."

- Steven Renderos

MediaJustice Takes Action

On April 17-19, 2026, MediaJustice hosted Take Back Tech 3, a national gathering it co-produces with the immigrant rights organization Mijente. Close to 600 people gathered in Atlanta to talk about how to fight for the media and technology their communities actually need. For Renderos, those conversations — with people on the ground, actively building alternatives — are proof of the MediaJustice concept.

Yet, Renderos is clear-eyed about the hard years ahead. He thinks that it’s a certainty — given the conditions and the political moment that we're in. But the growth of the movement is also real.

"Every day our side gets bigger." 

- KeShaun Pearson, Director of Memphis Community Against Pollution

This statement is something that inspires Renderos every day. It's the same conviction that drove a garment factory worker in Koreatown to buy her son a computer she couldn't really afford. 

Thirty years later, her son is organizing a movement around that same belief — and the people joining that movement are proving it right.

To learn more about MediaJustice or get involved, visit their website and get on their mailing list.