This highly rambly post is inspired by Jamais Cascio's much tighter one at Open The Future, where he contemplates a Futurist's role as a civilizational therapist.
I realized that what he talks about reflects the same concept of sense-making that's important to me as well. I am using it here to describe the underlying reason why I find the changing conceptualization of wealth to be so critical to solving many challenges, local and global, including addressing the issue of the Digital Divide.
At the most fundamental level, money's a medium of exchange. Beyond that, it's frequently used as power: if you have a lot of money, you can buy things. It's not the only way to have power, but it's one way, and since money's fungible it's pretty effective for a lot of things.
The confusion occurs when people attach value judgment to money.
The confusion occurs when people attach value judgment to money: "You're good because you have money. That must mean {set of character attributes}." Yes, money often provides a clue to an individual's industriousness, and persistent wealth has to do with frugality and appropriate risk-taking; but that's not the only personal variable money reflects.
Salary isn't about social worth, it's about market demand for those skills, which of course has a lot to do with prior educational capacity and the correct or incorrect forecasting of specific needs for skills and attributes. People must value risks and return differently based on their environment. The heterogeneity of society complicates things because risks are harder to assess when contextual clues are easily misinterpreted. Earnings have to do with structural issues like mobility. They have to do with the inability to know what people are going to need to know in the future, and the inability to instantly teach newly discovered things to a vast number of people, immediately.
However, it's easy to assume these risks don't exist, or that any given person should've done something to manage these risks.
Shiller argues very effectively against that in his The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century. There are a whole bunch o' unmanaged risks just hanging out there waiting to trip people up, and the conceptualizations of risk mitigation he suggests are eye-opening.
In my opinion, to create access and opportunity as people want to do in order to bridge the Digital Divide, "equality" isn't the issue, and neither is fairness, really - the world isn't fair. Justice is an occasional thing. The problem is judgmentalism.
So, returning to the question of free technology: In the US, we have a social system built upon the concept that everyone has access to wealth. Simply examining the risks that individuals face, and how they provide an un-level playing field, it's clear that this assumption is utterly false.
In fact, in the US, our system ends up creating pockets of people who are, for all intents and purposes, reviled. They're given inadequate services, and they're thrown in jail as quickly and permanently as possible when they make choices against the social rules (that have abandoned them in any case). That's not justice, that's judgment.
In our attempt to reframe these situations, we look for an infrastructure that will correct the access issue, but overlook the attitudes the continue to cause marginalization. (I recently referred to Dr. Suess' Star-Bellied Sneetches to describe the behaviors.) Everyone is familiar with the concept of being misunderstood, particularly when pleading one's case about why, exactly, Mom's Favorite Decorative Object is broken. If you felt perpetually marginalized, would you be confident that conveying your narrative would advance your cause? Or do you think that it might make things worse?
While giving access is necessary, it's just not anywhere near sufficient.
In other words, while the socially entrepreneurial work is a key first step, to imagine that charity is a waste of time and money is to ignore that human beings consistently turn to each other for help. To give to people who have less (and have access to less) without any intention of receiving something in return is the hardwired way that people provide uplift. When I play a smiling game with a toddler in the supermarket line, I'm not thinking "wow, that child will be in the labor force some day!" I'm responding to an instinct -- and I want to stress that word -- to help that baby develop fully.
For some reason, our instinct to help people develop eventually bifurcates into this us/them state (winners/losers; good workers/dreamers; educated/ignorant) and allows us to abandon people who don't live up to our sometimes ill-conceived standards - standards that work against our own overarching social goals.
I find this impulse to be a destructive thing. I think it needs to be addressed while handing out the very advertisement-laden cell phones that are intended to bridge the Digital Divide.
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