In 2020, the lockdowns and restrictions enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic drew economies across the world to a standstill. Consequently, governments sought alternative ways to operate the economy and society. One of the major solutions to the lack of human interaction we envisioned was to go online or work with digital tools. Remote work that relied on digital tools made sense in a policy environment wherein schools, businesses, trade, universities, and much else besides was susceptible to a shift to a non-face-to-face model. Yet that shift worsened the great digital divide.
Even before the pandemic, the standard conception of the digital divide pointed to inequalities stemming from accessibility to digital technologies. That standard conception is far too narrow. The digital divide’s scope extends farther and deeper than analyses that implicate surface-level solutions like those developed by different governments, as in the case of Finland, to try to address the issue.
In 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the Digital Divide “a matter of life and death”. We view the divide as a deciding factor whether or not kids will go to school, and whether women have jobs, and whether countries can build sustainable economies.
The Digital Divide wreaks inequalities at the distribution’s low end and its high end alike. At the low end, for example, children in poor countries have not gone to school for almost two years, whereas in countries with robust digital infrastructures, the pandemic’s effects have been all-but-invisible. At the high end, countries in the Global North that recognize the new digital future promised by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain technology, and the Internet of Things (IOT) are investing unprecedented sums of money in developing their digital infrastructure. For example, the United States has a 2.3 trillion dollar Infrastructure Plan. Korea’s New Deal entails both a Digital New Deal and a Green New Deal, with investments totaling 220 trillion won for both. Europe has a NextGenerationEU plan worth 2.018 trillion euros, and countries such as Singapore, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, and France are focusing on investing as much as they can to improve digital infrastructure in their respective countries.
The divide between countries in the Global North and Global South will most likely widen as those in the Global South are unable to develop digital infrastructure rapidly. Even the practice of investment in digital infrastructures occasions unequal effects. For instance, India’s Digital India Mission promises a 1 trillion dollar digital economy by 2025, but this commitment lags far behind the level of investment occurring in countries in the Global North. Despite digital technology’s global rise, about 3.7 billion people lack internet access, according to a United Nations report from 2021. The lack of digital connectivity is especially severe in the UN’s designated “Least Developed Countries,” where more than 80% of the population is still offline. In comparison, the percentage of people who are not linked in developed and developing countries is 13 percent and 53 percent, respectively.
Across countries, the experience of the past two years prompts a question about whether a viable economy can even run on the shaky stilts of an under-resourced digital infrastructure. What we are witnessing is that those countries that are ahead socio-economically are increasing their investments to make their economies even more competitive. Just as there is now a global consensus around climate change, there is an urgent need to have a global consensus to address the growing great digital divide and the case of digital inequity. Evidently, the problem extends to one of the most pressing moral issues today, between the digital haves and digital have-nots.
What’s at stake is not merely a digital divide. Rather, it is digital inequity. We should act accordingly.
