Will the digital age bring equality?

Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens
INEQUALITY.COM
Power, poverty and the digital divide
341pp. Oneworld. £16.99.
978 1 85168 450 2

One of the most striking observations made in Inequality.com is that “nowadays, almost certainly for the first time, we have a society with more writers than readers”. The second phase of internet development, in which content is increasingly produced by users, has facilitated this change. But Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens reject tired characterizations of information and communication technology (ICT) as an essentially democratizing set of phenomena. They demonstrate that the distribution of the power to create and store information online has not been been matched by reduced inequality in the world at large. While we are now producing annually a quantity of digital information that equates to the sum of words “spoken by human beings in the entire history of humanity”, the vast majority is banal, personal trivia. And as the West uploads holiday snaps, downloads music, and surfs pornography, political relationships between citizen, State and business are subtly but fundamentally changed.

The authors argue that digital inequality does not refer merely to access or distribution. It should also connote the loss of basic liberties (chief among them the right to privacy) which we regularly endure in order to enjoy accelerated social and commercial interactions. The universality of mobile phones provides governments and corporate interests with the potential to track our movements, interpret our actions and anticipate our desires. In a clever reading of Marshall McLuhan, the authors suggest that his famous term the “global village” should be read less as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of far-flung places than as a forecast of the 360-degree surveillance, much of it prurient, that a digitally contracted world renders possible.

In this implicitly Marxist analysis, the various confectionery forms that ICT takes are merely the bread and circuses that unaccountable spheres of global governance dole out to the depoliticized consumers whom they rule. As O’Hara and Stevens point out, ICANN, an American (non-profit) private-sector corporation, retains the all-powerful remit of regulating web addresses, despite calls to transfer this responsibility to the United Nations, and this structural empire is mirrored by Google’s sway over online content. The authors quote Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the utility of any network is equal to the square of its number of users. A corollary of the law is, of course, an exponential growth in user dependence on that network.

Against this backdrop of concerns, the authors consider ICT’s more positive political potential. Contemporary Western ideas of privacy are a relatively recent, post-Enlightenment construct, grown through individualism, industrialism and, for Romantics at least, the disintegration of an older, more cohesive society. The internet, O’Hara and Stevens suggest, is at least a political space in which an enhanced form of popular deliberative democracy might be possible. In the most hopeful scenario, it is a forum in which an actively engaged citizenry might reap the benefits of streamlined public services, hold the government of the day to account and take part in edifying debate born of mutually enlightening differences. However, O’Hara and Stevens note that the current state of the online world (as is obvious to any chat room observer) often “exacerbates the fissiparous tendencies within society”, because views are propounded without recourse to the structures that bind democratic forums. The most extreme voices, therefore, often become the loudest. The authors flirt with the suggestion that some form of statist regulation could drag up online political debate from this cacophony, but typically fall short of proposing concrete measures.

The role of ICT in world development proves to be equally uncertain territory. O’Hara and Stevens tread gingerly around the suggestion that money for food parcels could be better spent granting access to technologies that would provide more sustainable solutions to poverty, but refuse to either support fully or dismiss the idea. They invoke John Rawls to provide an answer of sorts to their quandary through his theory of “primary social goods”, which the “basic structure” of society should make available to its citizens. As they note, global supranational institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank now constitute a “global basic structure”. If ICT development is essential to any nation wishing to participate in the global markets, which these institutions insist represent the route from poverty, then it is the responsibility of such institutions to ensure a level of universal access. In attempting to determine exactly what such a basic level of access would look like, the authors suggest a further political theory of “Prioritarianism” – the notion that access should be based on need, rather than the relative gap between best and worst off. Once again, however, they do not suggest how the needy may either be catered for or prioritized.

Inequality.com constitutes a worthy attempt to apply the conceptual rigour of political philosophy to ICT, but the two areas too often refuse to meld, and the gap between the authors’ respective specializations is glaring: O’Hara is a lecturer in computer science, Stevens a senior researcher in political theory, and the chapters tend to veer between these two intellectual spheres. While illuminating diversions and anecdotes abound, consistent argument is in short supply; and Kieron O’Hara and David Stevens expend too much effort in attempting to redraw opaque (and still emerging) digital landscapes with abstract theoretical tools. Like the internet itself, this work is rich in content, but lacking direction or editorial clarity. As the authors suggest, it falls to both governments and citizens to seek answers from these open-ended questions, and to determine whether egalitarianism or inequality will come to define the digital age.

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Jon Garvie is a freelance writer living in London.