In today’s world in which analogue and digital lives are ever more intertwined, the fight for just and sustainable societies must be fought and won both in the analogue and the digital spheres. A new eco-social contract must be designed for digital societies, too.
The early days of the Internet and digital technologies were filled with high hopes: The Internet was imagined as a free and equal digital sphere, and new technologies promised to be cleaner, more energy efficient and more sustainable than previous technological shifts. What happened to those hopes?
In 2022 in the US city of Detroit, a person of colour was arrested on the lawn outside his house in front of his wife and daughters and had to spend the night in jail. Later, he turned out to be innocent. This injustice was not the result of human error, but a facial recognition software that wrongly identified him as a thief and alerted the police to his whereabouts. After centuries of struggle for the recognition of Black bodies as human bodies, the faces of people of colour are still much more likely to be misidentified by so-called artificial intelligence (AI).
Similarly, struggles for the bodily integrity of women and the recognition of the existence of domestic violence and abuse have made strides, yet technology-aided and facilitated forms of gender-based violence remain largely unrecognized, and the potential of new technologies to be used for unlawful surveillance and abuse remains.
So far, despite increasing awareness of the risks associated with AI development and of psychological violence exerted through social media, many of the same exclusions that beset the analogue world remain hardwired into our digital world.
An exclusive and exclusionary digital sphere
Today’s digital sphere is dominated by just a handful global corporations: Alphabet, the parent company of Google, accounts for 85 percent of online searches worldwide; Microsoft, whose operating system “Windows” is used on over 70 percent of personal computers; the social media giant Meta (Facebook, Instagram and others) with 3.6 billion active global users; and Amazon, which, while most famous for online retail, is also the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services.
These companies, together with a few others, have significant influence over what people who use digital technologies read, which news articles and advertisements they see, and what they buy. Through their power to shape digital spaces, they influence perceptions of what is available, tolerable and desirable.
And the use of this power is biased. In the initial development of such technologies, the interests and needs of marginalized groups characterized by (overlapping) vulnerabilities and identities mostly remained an afterthought. For example, as Mar Hicks summarizes, “when Twitter or Facebook is accused of doing something that hurts women, it is seen as a niche concern. Women do not stand in for “people” in general in the eyes of technology behemoths.” Had, for example, the development of social networks put women and ethnic minority groups, their needs and vulnerabilities front and centre, surely a different kind of network with another set of rules and complaint and accountability mechanisms could have emerged.
Worse still, the effects of digital exclusion extend far beyond the digital sphere. Think, for example, of the minority group of the Rohingya in Myanmar who have sued Meta for not having done enough to remove hate speech from Facebook. The widely shared comments and posts have fueled local violence and contributed to millions of people—many of whom did not even know about online hate speech, or were entirely offline—losing their homes, their safety and even their lives, according to a recent report by Amnesty International.
Unequal access to the digital sphere is also the cause of many exclusions. In high-income countries, 91 percent of the population uses the Internet, according to the Global Connectivity Report 2022. Many daily interactions, such as banking, buying a public transport ticket, accessing schooling or learning opportunities, and clocking in at work, are based on or mediated by digital technologies. Meanwhile, the lives of those living in the global South are also being shaped by digital technologies, albeit by its absence. In low-income countries today, only 22 percent of the population uses the Internet. Access is structured along economic, generational, urban-rural and educational lines where the economically advantaged, the young, the urban, the better educated and men are more likely to use the Internet and related technologies. The often highly unequal access to devices as well as connectivity services, both globally and domestically, has created huge inequalities for children from lower income families during lockdown and homeschooling, with devastating consequences that will reverberate long into the future.
Furthermore, while one third of the world’s population still does not have reliable access to the Internet, new technologies are mostly being developed for economically advantaged users in the global North, widening the digital gap even further, to the detriment of the already marginalized.
What kind of digital revolution do we need?
The “digital revolution” has meant drastic change in terms of replacing previous technologies, but it has not led to shifts in power. On the contrary, what we have seen is a further concentration of economic power within the digital sphere, which has propelled the (mostly male) founders and owners of big tech companies to the top of the global wealth statistics in just a few years. It has also fueled economic inequalities beyond the tech sector. For example, the particular way in which digitalization and automation were implemented in many advanced economies has contributed to rising economic inequality in those countries. Rather than introducing automation and digitalization to augment the work of humans, it has instead replaced the work with new technologies leading to a decline in so called “low-skilled jobs.” This has been accompanied by a drop in labour income in the sectors most affected by automation and digitalization, meaning less money for wages and more for the owners of capital.
More broken dreams: Exploitation of natural resources for digitalization
Another promise of digitalization has been that it would lower the need for transport and material resource inputs and thereby reduce overall energy consumption and emissions. Yet, this dream too remains unfulfilled, and it will as long as the development of new technologies is not specifically geared toward sustainability, low and clean energy use, and the overall reduction of resource use. The Internet itself is estimated to be responsible for 4 percent of global CO2 emissions, stemming from cloud services and other infrastructure powered to a large extent by fossil fuels.
The environmental footprint of current technological and digital development trends remains an afterthought. Hardware is not durable and meant to be replaced quickly by new fashionable gadgets. However, ideas for long-lasting, efficient and open designs exist. Technologies with low energy use fueled by renewable energy sources are often more accessible for people living in remote areas with restricted access to energy grids and can help bridge the current digital divide.
An eco-social contract for sustainable, digital and just societies
In a world in which digital and analogue lives are so intertwined, to arrive at an eco-social contract—one that is fit for sustainable, digital and just societies—movements, organizations, unions, activists, researchers and policy makers concerned about ecological or social issues must join hands with younger digital movements to fight side by side.
Adequate principles of technological development and governance geared toward equity, sufficiency and regenerative designs are needed. A new eco-social contract for the digital sphere should entail a vision for social networks and digital technologies that are in the interest of the common good, not the lucky few, working for not against those who have been pushed to the margins of society. Finally, nurturing and repairing natural ecosystems must be a key feature of future technological development if we are to achieve truly just and sustainable societies.
This article reflects the views of the author(s) and does not necessarily represent those of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.
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