Remember the worrying over “the digital divide”?
During the “concern’s” heyday, I was more than a tad skeptical, as were many others. There’s only so much hand-wringing that a balanced, working person can stand.
Now we learn that all the yammering “inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.” I’m not aware of any government programs to accomplish this, but then I don’t follow the handouts economy as closely as I could. But I do know that some charities got involved, putting computers into rural libraries and computer centers, for instance. (The Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation did a lot of this, years ago. Funny, though: I notice they didn’t supply any Macintosh computers.) And recylcing centers and garage sales made used computers — often hampered only by slightly out-of-date tech — available for pennies on the dollar.
If you want a computer in America, you can find one.
The New York Times tells us about an “unintended side effect” of all this computing power in the hands of the poor. The miserable masses, yearning to breathe free, are misusing the technology!
As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.
This is called a “growing time-wasting gap.”
Reason’s Jacob Sullum neatly mocked this: “Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure?”
Maybe it’s time to stop taking politicians — and the “experts” who plead with politicians (to gain access to tax monies) — seriously.
Seriously.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
6 replies on “Digital Divide 2.0”
Marx was informed that his class warfare revolt wouldn’t work because the workers actually thought themsleves pretty comfortable. He lashed out that they must be educated about their discomfiture.
Poor folks frequently are poor because they keep doing the things that made them poor in the first place. People reach a level where they are, if not satisfied, then at least not discontent and then stop striving to do more. The majority of folks that are wealthy are there because they were not able to be content on 40 hrs a week and could not relax. Most people that work many more hours, end up well off, but never seem to be able to shut off the need to do more.
We have a government full of busybodies that are determined to justify their own existance and their own soaking up of taxdollars by rescuing people that do not have a passion to be rescued. Time to get back to the aphorism of Franklin’s about the best way to help the poor being to make them uncomfortable in their poverty. Information, ie telling them that they are not comfortable is not going to do that.
A few years ago I visited Gallup, NM. Gallup is a poor town with many people receiving public assistance (Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, etc.). I bought groceries at WalMart, and all the people in front of me at the checkout line were using SNAP cards to pay for food. Everyone of them had a smartphone (mostly iPhones). I use a simple cellphone that cost nothing when I signed up for two years of basic service (no texting or Internet). The gap was the opposite of what the left-wingers wailed about: the lower class folks’ had the top-of-the-line phones with the expensive voice and data plans.
I think that’s the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The working poor are the ones who get really screwed, as usual, in the current unintelligent paradigm that lacks the brainpower to allocate resources intelligently. The parasite classes are doing very well in America. However, I think there is a transition coming, whereby the highly-intelligent will get better at peeling the collectivist leeches off themselves. Ultimately, the government that governs least, governs best. Ayn Rand, Henry David Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, Harry Browne, and Ron Paul –though varying degrees in the “minarchism v. anarchism” (false dichotomy) debate– all converge on that point: the end goal is self-government without initiated force.
Ultimately, the charities will get smarter, and prioritize the deserving over the undeserving. Ultimately, minds will be more important than circumstances, to more and more people. Ultimately, there will be social networks, and encrypted AGI “human helpers” that interface with each other to benefit the groups that are not the largest, but the smartest.
Long term, voluntary parallel institutions will rise up to take the place of antiquated and coercive government “services.” Long term, individuals will get more and more adept at killing or temporarily disabling people who try to steal from them, with asymmetrically powerful and highly-selective defensive technologies. (Imagine a swarm of nanobots that injects opiates into the ATF men who come to confiscate your private property in a “raid” so they fall asleep outside your door. –Noone standing behind them is in danger of catching a stray bullet, and there is no escalating “police standoff.” Nonfatal defensive tech can get highly specific and effective as it gets more intelligent and more technological. Also, it can selectively target only those guilty of initiating force, as in Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age.” If libertarians create these emerging “asymmetric” technologies, then a peaceful anarchy becomes much more likely.)
I think all these things are likely in a more enlightened future. …The key is getting from our enslaved police state to our enlightened future.
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