Digital Divide

From the Industry Standard, April 24, 2000

It's a terrible thing to peer into the chasm of the digital divide. On one side there is "us," a corps of Starbucks-powered global citizens consulting our Palm Pilots for a rendezvous with destiny. On the other side we see "them," digital have-nots tragically separated from the great American feast of prosperity only by a lack of Internet access.

It's seems a matter of social justice that we close this gap. By now, after all, it's common wisdom that children without computers grow up to face severely limited prospects. "Computer literacy" is already essential for success, and people without Internet access are hopelessly handicapped in the race for tomorrow.

What kind of pathetic jobs are open to such unfortunates? President of the United States appears to be one of the few positions available. Bill Clinton, who was in Silicon Valley last week to sanctify the efforts of high tech companies to give more computers to the poor, acknowledged during his visit that he doesn't know anything about the damned things himself. He doesn't use e-mail, either.

Thanks in part to President Clinton's recent visit, as well as the Luddite frolickings of globalization opponents in Washington last week, the so-called digital divide is much with us of late. Merely glancing into its awesome depths has had vertiginous effects on politicians, commentators and activists.

It's all a great puzzle. Is there anyone out there who really believes that the only thing standing between welfare mothers and affluence is an e-mail account? Or that the educational attainment of students at the bottom of the heap can be significantly improved by slapping computers onto their desks?

No, this digital divide stuff isn't much about helping the downtrodden. What's really at work here is an odd combination of envy, guilt and sloth. To fully understand it, we first need a history lesson.

About five minutes ago, the World Wide Web sprang into being. A couple of minutes later, a great many youngsters got rich by starting Internet companies. Only seconds after that, jealousy set in. These darn dot.com zillionaires must be driving up real estate prices and widening income inequality. In some urban neighborhoods, they seemed determined to pay willing sellers outlandish sums for residences they would then fix up and pay taxes on. This pernicious process was known as "gentrification," and was almost as pernicious as "white flight," which most of them were too young even to know about.

Dot.com envy is especially strong, in my anecdotal experience, among those of us who decided not to pursue conventional careers in business, law, medicine or other lucrative fields. We seem to feel that if one is to make a lot of money one ought at the very least to be miserable doing so. One should be required to devote oneself to the manufacture and study of grommets, the intricacies of convertible subordinated debentures, that sort of thing. The task should involve much ass-kissing and a lot of uncomfortable dress-up clothes--who knows, maybe even selling. At parties, you would be abashed by the meaninglessness of your daily pursuits; perhaps they were even socially destructive.

To get rich, in other words, you had make yourself really, really miserable. All of a sudden, though, all that changed. Now you could get rich by working for a couple of years in what amounted to a giant playpen, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, hanging out with a bunch of hipsters "changing the world." You were in the business of the moment, the sexiest thing going. Wherever you went was the hot new neighborhood. Coffee houses blossomed like halos around your operations. You appear to be as far as it is humanly possible to get from the Organization Man.

To those of us in the chattering classes, forced to labor for tenure, jobs as senior editor, a paperback edition for our latest unnoticed book, the whole thing seems criminal, an affront to our misunderstanding of our Puritan forebears (who thought doing well was a sign of divine grace and would have concluded that the dot.com whizkids were God's favorites). Worse yet, we have to live in close proximity to these HTML whelps, and even use the Internet in our work. New York and San Francisco used to be our kind of towns--gnarly, tradition-bound and rent-controlled. Now they're all about Silicon, and we sneeringly call ourselves "content-providers."

It's especially galling that, thanks in part to these selfsame geeks, the United States is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Our economy is so strong that it's pulled millions of poor people and immigrants out of poverty and kept the global economy afloat as well by generating the purchasing power to buy what other countries produce. Surely a people as benighted as my fellow opinion-makers regard Americans as being can't deserve such good fortune.

Here's where the "digital divide" comes in. By positing this gulf and demanding that high-tech companies make amends, we get to feel better about ourselves without actually having to do anything. At the same time, we exact a sort of tribute from those whose success we despise. Basically, we've set about selling them indulgences: give away some computers (the marginal cost of which makes them about as expensive for the donors as potato chips) and we might let you continue drinking latte all over the place. You might even get to keep importing foreign programmers, too.

There's sloth here as well. After all, the social problems that remain in this blessed country are difficult. Fixing the schools, for instance, is hard. President Clinton, like so many parents, used the system of vouchers known as cash to send his daughter to private school rather than the festering public institutions available in the District of Columbia. Much easier, then, to pledge all our might to closing the minutes-old digital divide. If we can't teach kids reading, writing and arithmetic, we can at least dump computers on them.

Unfortunately, what separates the rich from the poor in this country isn't a computer, it's an education. Imagine for a minute that the President visits a low-income school and says, "I believe reading is the key to your future. All my life I've read a great deal, and look where it got me. In order to promote reading, I've enlisted the publishing industry to donate books. Students who have trouble reading will get individual tutors, paid for by Uncle Sam. And we're sending notes home to your parents asking them to turn off the TV and instead read and discuss books with you. We'd especially like it if they'd stay married and spent some time with you to make sure you weren't always smoking dope and having sex."

"At the same time," the president continues, "I know that it's hard to focus on books when life is a constant struggle. Some of my advisors wanted me to bring in computers, but I thought a system of universal health insurance would be a better idea. We're also launching a big new push on gun control to make your neighborhood safer, and we're sharply increasing the earned income tax credit for the working poor, so that holding a job is really worthwhile no matter how lowly."

Ominously enough, the gyrations of Nasdaq last week suggested that the problem of dot.com envy might go away of its own accord. Tech stock valuations bounced back, sure, but let's not ignore the message. Dot.com wealth may be here today and gone tomorrow—just like the digital divide.

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