We have been told that a “digital divide” exists between people who possess and benefit from tech and those that don’t. It’s real, but it’s not the real divide we should talk about.
Digital technologies have already divided all of us, without exception and in ways that we have been told were inevitable and are now irrevocable.
The fundamental aspect of digital technology is that it’s binary, so even the most complex outputs are defined by a series of 1s and 0s. Converting analog experience into binary code is what lets you interact with your tech devices and allows them to interact with you (and with everyone else).
That conversion changes what it converts by pushing what it captures into discrete buckets of data, defined by the binary decision of whether or not something is in or out. LLM AI chatbots operate according to the same principle, roughly speaking.
Capturing and using data is an exercise in dividing, segmenting and, by design, excluding.
I’m fascinated by the ways scientific ideas and inventions reach beyond their immediate applications and influence how we think about ourselves and one another.
Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy supported our belief that humans were the most important things in the universe. The discovery of electricity changed how we thought about what made us alive. The Manhattan Project became an overused metaphor for research projects.
When I think about the influence of digital tech, I can see at least three effects:
First, every thought, every idea we think or share has a corollary, usually cast as an opposite. Dialogues are binary and it has changed the very way we comprehend our world, let alone what we can agree to do with it.
And it turns out that we human beings are pretty awful at assessing the relative merits of opposing views and even worse at finding common ground. Our digital divide means that we usually fall into one bucket or the other; we’re either a 1 or a 0 on any given topic.
Thereby, our convictions have been encouraged and protected at the expense of our public discourse and personal humanity. It’s a funny thing when everyone can be righton everything.
Their personalized buckets say so.
Second, if a point isn’t or can’t be reduced to a 1 or 0, it doesn’t exist, so all of the attributes of personal and social morals get lost in the analog-to-digital conversion.
The world used to operate on a host of unspoken givens and assumptions. Oaths were binding because people were expected to keep their word. The spirit of a law was as important as the letter, which meant that people followed what laws meant and not just what they dictated.
Before Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and became the godfather of laissez-faire capitalism, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he posited all of the principles of behavior that he assumed everyone shared and on which the “invisible hand” of his economics relied.
Now, if something isn’t specifically defined in 1s and 0s, it’s allowed…until the courts or an angry mob determine otherwise. Civility itself was an analog proposition, existing in unmentioned and unenforced givens that have yet to be replaced by meeting or collaborating online.
Third, the digital divide allows for the creation of external versions of ourselves that can be surveilled, analyzed, and managed.
As more and more of our actions are facilitated with digital tools, those behaviors become fodder for models of who we are. Big data analyses of them can be highly reliable, in part because they often result in suggestions and incentives for shopping, political views, travel, etc.
Our actions speak louder than our words, and our external selves can literally tell our internal selves what to do.
There are any number of benefits we’ve realized from incorporating digital technologies into our lives, and the good ‘ol days were not necessarily and certainly not consistently good.
But are the tools we’ve gotten truly better or just a different version of not so good that just benefits different people selling and using them?
Maybe the real digital divide isn’t solvable by getting digital tech into more peoples’ lives but rather discussion what it’s already doing to all of us.
Funny that we have never had a coherent or sustained public conversation about that.
Well, it’s not actually funny.
[This essay appeared originally at You And Your Machine]