It was (and still is) the revolutionary invention that let an unbelievable volume of information reach a great many people. In time, perhaps, the only thing in human history we will be able to compare it with in importance is the printing press. The internet made it possible for anyone to say whatever they had to say and for it to have a chance of echoing far and wide. It let anyone watch lectures from the most prestigious universities for free and learn within seconds what was happening in every corner of the world.
And, of course, like every step that revolutionary in history, it came at a price. Along came fake news, online aggression, the filter bubble. And one more problem, rarely talked about, which essentially calls everything achieved into question. Slowly, imperceptibly and (I hope I'm wrong) irreversibly, the web has turned into a factory of inequality. The inequalities keep multiplying and deepening, opening cracks that grow like fault lines so fast that one day they could swallow entire foundations of society.
Tripping over a Black Hole
Ayn Rand's admirers are surely smiling: how lovely it is to have inequality, that's how the best stand out, the strong, the most deserving. Since we all started out equal at the dawn of the internet, anyone who has fought their way to the front now deserves their position.
Not so, and it is not a good thing at all. Because as technology enters more and more areas of life, the skill of using it will become decisive for how successful you can be in life, too. That gives rise to a whole series of problems: generational, geographic, economic.
Let's start with the Bulgarian reality, using the freely available data of the National Statistical Institute. In 2006, they say, 13.5 percent of Bulgarians went online at least once a week; by 2020 the figure had reached 69.2 percent. Yes, the number is high, everyone uses the net these days, and the remainder comes from the oldest people and from minorities.
4–0 to the Stronger
Even so, doesn't this create problems? What do things look like if we compare access to the web across different groups?
Between the sexes the gap is relatively small. In every year the surveys were conducted, men come out about 2 percent ahead.
On every other key demographic indicator the statistics track, a wide hole opens up. In 2020 the result looks like this:
Regions of Bulgaria
Southwest : Northwest
80.0% : 60.4%
Education
University graduates : People with primary education or less
93.8% : 41.7%
Age
16–24 : 65–74
91.5% : 23.8%
Employment status
Students : Unemployed
98.1% : 57.2%
The stratification is visible at every point. Not even half of the people who never finished high school have internet access. Barely 1/4 of the over-65 group does.
Our country has always been at the top of the EU's inequality statistics. One can argue about whether certain groups' lack of internet access is a consequence or a separate process. However you look at it, though, it is one more reason the social scissors stay inhumanely wide open.
Why should it bother us that grannies from the Northwest and the unemployed don't go on Facebook?
God Is High, the Net Is Far
That's not the problem. Internet access today is not a luxury or entertainment, but a necessity. Professions that don't require at least basic technological literacy are almost extinct. And what about the way we get our information? Slowly but unmistakably, every channel for spreading information, including the most important news, is moving online. People without internet access are left on the sidelines of the stream.
Luckily (from this point of view only), e-government in Bulgaria is still a myth, but once it becomes an unavoidable necessity, many people from already vulnerable groups will turn into outsiders.
And what about the suddenly arrived era of remote learning and remote work? How can the poorest children study when they have never seen a computer, let alone had the chance to join lessons from home? In a year and a half, nobody ever thought to look for a good enough solution to this problem.
Software, Equality, Fraternity
Let's look beyond Bulgarian reality. The same trends exist on a global scale. Entire continents that were already lagging behind suffer from digital inequality.
In 2020, 94.6 percent of the inhabitants of North America had internet access, compared with 39.3 percent of those in Africa.
In parts of the world, generations keep growing up with no contact with technology, and technology is precisely their greatest chance of escaping the curse of poverty. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the incredible technological progress has done hardly anything to make sure, for instance, that there are fewer hungry children in the most destitute parts of the planet.
Labor and Capital
Generational inequality, at least for now, is also a universal problem. On top of that, unlike in Bulgaria, there is the gender gap. In 2019, 55 percent of men worldwide had internet access, compared with 48 percent of women.
In the English-speaking academic world, “digital inequality” is a term describing precisely the gulf between people with sufficiently usable internet access and everyone else. In my view, though, there are other angles too.
Let's turn to an even more important aspect. The inequality between the “powerful” and everyone else on the web. It already affects every single one of us, without exception.
Online monopolies are an entirely new paradigm of inequality, one we prefer not to acknowledge. It's simply convenient for us that way. This inequality is built far more insidiously, under the cover of apparent care for people, for satisfying their wishes and needs.
The statistics show unmistakably that the pandemic period affected different groups of people (once they were called classes) quite differently.
After a year and a half of pandemic, the rich have grown richer. Take the United States: in May, President Biden told Congress that 20 million Americans had lost their jobs because of the new situation. Meanwhile, 650 billionaires living in the same country increased their combined wealth by more than $1.2 trillion, to a total of $4.6 trillion. That is 35 percent growth during COVID alone.
Pokémon
What does the internet have to do with it—aren't these natural economic processes? Yes, but predetermined and driven by the digital world. Clearly, a huge share of the billionaires own businesses directly tied to information technology; you only need to look at the top of the table.
In the last years of the previous millennium, the internet looked like a lot of fun, as anyone will confirm who was lucky enough to open the proto-web pages of the day with a modem over their grandmother's phone line—which was a duplex, shared with the neighbors, to boot.
Then, almost imperceptibly, slightly cooler pages appeared. Google became the standard search engine for information, something many projects before it had failed to become. A kid from Harvard built himself a local network to chat with fellow students and swap photos. Then, in a mere 2–3 years, nearly every internet user ended up in his further developed “little project,” called Facebook.
Another famous online figure tells how in 1995 he received his first online order from Bulgaria. The customer chose to pay in cash, which at the time meant two hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside a floppy disk. He also sent a separate message saying “The money is in the floppy disk,” counting on our customs officers not knowing English. Yes, the money reached its destination, and the story, told by Jeff Bezos about Amazon's early years, is rather amusing.
A Mountain out of a Facebook
It was romantic. And yet this year Facebook simply decided, just like that, to cut off the American president's access to its platforms. Meanwhile, the product of the other nice guy, Amazon, long ago wiped out a huge share of bookstores in the US and the English-speaking world by undercutting prices, offering serious discounts and a selection that traditional booksellers can't possibly match.
Supposedly everyone has a right to a place under the online sun, yet before we knew it, enormous players were born that have monopolized almost everything. And the disproportions keep growing. On the Forbes billionaires list, the tech nerds have permanently kicked the more mundane stock speculators out of the top spots.
Somewhere along the road to today's wonderful digital new world, the media fell victim too, as they tried to live through their digital transformation and find a place online. Using the old funding model: advertisers pay to find their place next to meaningful content. Whether there is enough meaningful content online today is a big question.
All Users Are Equal
What's interesting here is what happened to advertising. The big players, the likes of those just mentioned, very quickly and irreversibly imposed their model, in which they receive the money for every form of advertising and they alone have the right to distribute it.
Until they monopolize the truth. Until, behind opaque algorithms of their own, they pick our news for us, holding in their hands the mechanism that decides what may be said and spread. With all the paradox of, for example, automatically deleting for a whole year any opinion that the coronavirus had an artificial origin, before suddenly deciding that this is actually quite likely.
And the online media, without even noticing, found themselves taking part in an impossible battle.
To Each According to His Hardware
Think about how quickly Google and Facebook arrived and became household words. How they grew into huge corporations that by many measures are bigger than powerful states. And free of any geographic monopoly, at that. If that's not inequality…
Let's not forget something else: today information is far more valuable than money. Not in its old form, but as personalized statistics. You surely remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the access to vast troves of personal data.
GDPR supposedly arrived, but whether it has ultimately managed to become more than an annoying little pop-up we close straight away on yet another site… is rather doubtful.
The fact is that, “in their desire to make our lives better and easier,” companies like those mentioned collect a huge, huge amount of information about every one of us. Formally, we can control it; formally, it cannot be used without our consent, but… the first simply doesn't happen, because we don't think about it, and as for whether the second holds true, you be the judge.
Inequality? No, Equality!
The fact is that the digital transformation has created enormous transnational monopolies that look unshakable. And it has gradually shaped a narrow elite of superstar billionaires who grow richer and richer while everyone else… scrolls the feed.
Without exaggeration, this could be dangerous for every form of democracy, consciously or not. Just as Facebook's leaders today can tune their algorithms entirely as they see fit, tomorrow the same will happen with all kinds of technology. Jeff Bezos and Larry Page, for instance, are the biggest backers of several startups working on molecular technologies meant to drastically extend human life. If the results come through… can we really be sure that every person on Earth will be able to enjoy them for free?
Facebook talks about the metaverse as the virtual future of the internet. Is there any reason to feel reassured there? Hardly.
Are we not living in a kind of digital Middle Ages, disguised as a democracy never seen before?
Freedom, Siri, Lies at the Tip of the Enter Key!
Digital inequality has far too many manifestations, which differ in nature and in the ways they might be overcome. As far as the companies are concerned, some researchers believe this peculiar new evolutionary process will reach its next step. And much faster, too, as is typical of everything happening in digital times.
Perhaps states will restore the balance—that is the example of China, which deals easily with digital megacorporations by simply blocking them on its territory. Not long ago, Xi Jinping announced a new program to eliminate inequality in terms of economic indicators. All the huge Chinese companies, and they are all firms directly linked to the digital world, will “voluntarily-compulsorily” part with a large share of their profits.
That hardly applies to other parts of the world. The Chinese have shown a rather different approach to the coronavirus as well, every statistic screams it, but the culture is simply different. Besides, redistributing money is by no means the whole story here.
The optimistic scenario says the audience will manage to deal with the monstrous inequalities on its own. Naturally, the generators of different, meaningful, intelligent content will break through via a new generation of startups on the web. Somehow the monopolies will be dismantled, and we will get fed up with the comforts of information bubbles. It sounds incredible, and it's hard to find an analogy in other fields and periods of history, but the internet is different enough—who knows.
Either way, life online has proved lightning-fast and dynamic, creating unexpected opportunities and problems. No less interesting times lie ahead. All we can do is hope that the convenience of technology hasn't permanently dulled the immanent human striving for an equal start, for justice, for empathy. Otherwise we'll have to pin our hopes on artificial intelligence…
This piece was published in InGlobo magazine
Last updated: November 5, 2021
