Much has been written about the growing gap between rich and poor.  Usually this refers to the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us — the gap between the upper class and the middle and lower classes, to use the clunky three-class taxonomy.

Sometimes technology is described as a way to bridge that gap.  Certainly many things that were once the privilege of the few have become more common. Televisions, home computers, cellphones — today every middle class citizen has one, but not long ago, these were extravagances that very few could afford.  As Christophe Lambert put it, “La pauvreté d’aujourd’hui aurait fait le confort d’hier” — today’s hardship would be yesterday’s luxury.  The vast majority of us have never had it so good.

There’s a darker side to technology’s social effects, though.  While new technologies have a democratising effect on the spread of information (both in providing access to it, and allowing people to distribute it widely) this effect stops short of the people who have no access to the system — people on the other side of  the “digital divide.”  And even those who are part of a technological system can still have it work against them.  This essay is a look at a three examples of how technology serves to undermine the poor, rather than acting as a social leveller.

By “social leveller” I mean a technology that has aided people with social mobility, whether in terms of class and income, or merely in terms of improving quality of life, specifically through providing access to information.  I will ignore the differences between countries and focus only on the differences between the situations of members of the same society, starting with the most obvious example and working my way to the most subtle.

The Internet, almost from day one, has acted as a great social leveller, providing millions access to information that they would otherwise never have access to.  This extends down the economic ladder (people who can’t afford to attend universities suddenly have access to the same catalogues as people who can) and across geography (bringing information to areas — usually remote and / or less wealthy areas — where traditional media couldn’t deliver it).  The fact that most of us now have access to all this information is a good thing.

The problem arises from the fact that as this technology spreads, it becomes entrenched; the more we rely on it, the more access to this technology becomes taken for granted, cutting people who have no access out of the loop.  To give just one example of how this can act as a filtering mechanism against the already disenfranchised, consider that most job postings appear only online, and many companies require job submissions in the form of Email.  If you have a home computer with Internet access, this is a great convenience.  If you don’t, it becomes virtually impossible to find or get a job and improve your situation.

There is the mitigating factor of the public library system, which has, fortunately, made it a priority to provide free Internet access to everyone.  But that alone is not enough; there is the question of how to create and submit a glossy resume in .pdf form, especially while working at a public workstation.  There’s the question of what happens when the employer contacts an applicant — is it possible to provide a quick response when relying on free Internet that may not be convenient to access?

There’s also the question of what happens when there is no  free Internet access.  I could hardly believe my eyes when I read that Philadelphia planned to shutter its free library system, computer classes and presumably free Internet access to be cancelled until further notice (this doomsday scenario was eventually averted).  This type of thing primarily affects the poor; the middle class and wealthy will go on as usual, but the poor will have no way of accessing job postings, Email, or even computer literacy programs.  Without them, they are effectively shut out of the job market.

It’s not just job hunters that are expected to have Internet access (and suffer when they don’t): imagine being a student in a state where textbooks have been recalled, since the Internet has apparently made them redundant.  Now imagine you have no home computer, or you have one home computer you share with 3 or more siblings.  What are these students supposed to do, with no textbooks to work from during their homework hours?  Fail?  Surely they will not have the same advantage when it comes to their education as middle class students and up enjoy.

It’s for this reason that New York has made it a priority to provide their homeless with Internet access: they see this access as a necessary tool for survival.  Some people would no doubt balk at the sight of a homeless person with a laptop, but the alternative is even worse.  Not only would the homeless lose access to information that could help them improve their situation, they would also be unable to advocate to improve their position.  Take away their Internet and you take away their ability to engage in civil dialogue — something that should never be taken as a luxury.   For this reason, some argue that Internet access is a basic human right.

The cellphone is one of those luxuries that was upgraded (downgraded?) to a necessity in a matter of months.  Today, a cellphone is as indispensable as a regular telephone was a couple of decades ago, if only for the convenience it offers.  While perhaps not as crucial to survival as Internet access, it nonetheless is capable of filtering the information that reaches the wealthy versus the not-so-wealthy.

The smartphone heightens the disparity.  By combining portability with select information-processing applications, smartphones are able to filter information in time and space, providing an additional advantage to the already advantaged.

Consider the following applications: a bar-code scanner application that can identify a product in a store, then search the Internet for competitor’s prices and direct you to other stores in the area where the same item can be obtained more cheaply.  A great idea, surely, but one that ensures the wealthy pay less for their goods than the poor.

Similar to that is the coupon-generator that issues promotional codes — sometimes automatically — by indentifying a user’s location.  Hungry?  An online search of restaurants in your neighbourhood might turn up a coupon at a nearby diner.  A person without a smartphone will be stuck paying full price — assuming they ever find a place to eat.

Sometimes it’s merely a matter of interpretation.  Perhaps you’ve seen a billboard like the one at right.  This QR code is easily scanned with a smart phone, which converts the binary matrix into text — in this case, a URL.  If you have a phone that can read these codes, you have access to the information encoded therein.  If not, tough luck.

This may seem trivial, but don’t think of it as a way of providing information to a select few consumers; think of it as a way of providing a select few consumers to the people who have created the codes — a way of filtering people.  Entire strata of industry and commerce become inaccessible to people without QR readers, and as a result, the top consumers are skimmed off, in order to be provided further benefits.  All these functions are not unlike the Amex “black card;” the richer you are, the more benefits and privileges you’re offered.

This disparity in access to information leads directly to an opportunity gap.  How significant those opportunities are may be as subjective as the justice of a meritocratic system.  With Internet accessibility, it’s an issue of withholding information from a specific group of people.  With smartphones, it’s an issue of providing specific information only to a select few.  In either case, information is filtered and streamed along socioeconomic strata.

This brings us to economic profiling.  Economic discrimination at its most obvious can mean deliberately denying people jobs, housing, access to education, healthcare, even the right to vote — often a proxy for religious or racial discrimination.  The less obvious discrimination resulting from economic profiling can be almost invisible, and is usually unintentional.

We’ve looked at two systemic problems that give rise to economic profiling.  Through limiting the access of information to certain people, whether it is those people who have Internet access or those people who have smartphones, you can exclude certain individuals from employment or housing opportunities, or you can target the wealthy for patronage.

Oscar Handy wrote of the “panoptic sort,” the use of surveillance to target different products to different groups, sometimes excluding certain groups entirely.  David Lyon takes it beyond the sphere of corporate marketing, to the ways in which database surveillance actually sorts us, categorises us, and to some extent makes us the people we are: “Our life-chances are continually checked or enabled and our choices are channeled using various means of surveillance.  The so-called digital divide is not merely a matter of access to information.  Information itself can be the means for making divisions.”

The fulcra of database surveillance technology’s  people-filtering mechanism are its ability to a) collect information about individuals, b) categorise and sort this information, c) provide remote access to the information, and d) find meaningful matches.  Note that in terms of matching, whether it relates to — as Clive Norris cites — confirming identity, granting or denying access, or determining the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a given behaviour, the distinction is binary.  These determinations are made by computers programmed with algorithms, so their classifications are crude and their filters even cruder.

Consider the point of going to a shopping mall.  The point of going to the mall depends on your perspective.  From the perspective of someone who needs a new skirt, the point is to get some shopping done.  From the perspective of the mall’s proprietors, the point is to make money.  But from the perspective of a bored teen, the point is to kill a few hours before dinner.  In a traditional agora, loitering was permitted — as a public space, who would there be to grant or withhold permission? — but through the erosion of public space, every area is privately operated now, and suddenly the label applied to loitering begins to take on a meaning with concrete consequences.

Hand in hand with the attachment of private interests to public behaviours is the proliferation of video and audio surveillance.  The idea of surveillance is a social one, even if it’s accomplished technologically, and for that reason surveillance is inextricable from many of the activities we do daily.  It’s not just about policing our actions; consider the smart card that provides access to your office building or parking garage.  Whether or not it physically opens doors is an empirical question, but whether or not it validates one’s presence a given area is a social question, one that depends on our concept of public versus private space, and what behaviours are considered acceptable to the people who have attached private interests to that common space.  The goal of surveillance technology is usually conceived in terms of its intention — to monitor people’s movements and actions — but rarely in terms of its intent.  What is the ultimate goal of this monitoring?

Filtering is an attempt to sort people by type, geographically sometimes, but usually economically.  Lyon describes a macro-scale sifting mechanism Compusearch uses whereby neighbourhoods are classified into 16 types or “clusters” along a set of demographic modalities (affluence, age, employment, number of children, ethnic diversity, etc.), and then, “using such clusters in conjunction with postal codes … marketers sift and sort populations according to their spending patterns, then treat different clusters accordingly.  Groups likely to be valuable to marketers get special attention, special deals, and efficient after-sales services, while others, not among the creamed-off categories, must make do with less information and inferior service.”  Sound familiar?  In this case, it’s not technology in the hands of the end-user that privileges him.  It’s technology in the hands of marketers, and the people who benefit (or not) are totally passive, at least in terms of their involvement in targeting the system.  One needs only to be oneself for technology to provide him with a different informational experience.  Your value as a customer — and your customer experience — is determined before you even begin to browse.

Your experience as a consumer is perhaps insignificant compared with your experience as a citizen (assuming the distinction still exists): imagine the same information in the hands of police, or worse yet, political pollsters.  Recall that during the previous US election cycle, TV advertising was concentrated only in a handful of swing states; states that went reliably red or blue were simply omitted from the conversation.  In the hands of even less scrupulous people, we saw dirty campaign tricks like the flyers (falsely) warning  that voters with outstanding warrants would be arrested at the polls, intimidating segments of the population that skewed Democratic and potentially keeping them from voting.  These fraudsters used polling information together with geodemographic information to construct a strategy designed to target certain types of voters in strategic areas.  This was not done algorithmically, but as an example of what demographically targeted information can do, it’s as blatant an example of abuse as you’re likely to find.

The stated goal of the US intelligences offices is “total information awareness” — a networked system which would monitor all movement, purchases and actions, as well as monitoring phone calls with text-to-speech and developing facial recognition software  — with the goal of preventing threats to national security.  The potential combination of different databases — which would cross-reference information to create ever more detailed sketches of us as individuals and as groups — is quite possibly already upon us.  Wired.com reported today that a government program collected data from hotels, car rental agencies and even department stores, and has already used this information to target domestic offenders.  Even this cross-section of data portrays only a fraction of what your credit card company and bank already know about your habits.

The obvious abuse this would lend itself to (the creation of an Orwellian totalitarian state, of course) perhaps overshadows the ways in which surveillance already shapes our experiences.  It’s less shocking or horrifying, but much more present.  To provide one more example: in Canada and the US, there are laws preventing the sale of information about consumer habits to a third party without first stripping away identifying indicators (like your name and address, for example), pairing consumer data with generic demographic data like date of birth and zip code.  This belies the fact that “stripped” generic data is quite often enough to identify an individual — but that’s besides the point.  The nightmare scenario — seeing your name with a list of movies you’ve rented broadcast on the evening news — is one that will never happen.

A much more plausible scenario, and one less horrifying but still not great, is that as information is collected about your spending habits and your place within demographic strata, marketers will simply stop caring about you.  Advertisers will realise you aren’t interested in their ads, and will stop creating advertising to appeal to you.  The content will follow suit; nobody will make movies you want to see or TV you want to watch.  The type of cars you’re likely to buy or clothes you’re likely to wear will never go on sale.  You will fall into a consumer ghetto.  It’s not that they don’t want your money, it’s just that getting it isn’t worth the effort.  Marketing and surfing demographic trends requires compiling individuals into groups.  If you’re not in a group, or you’re in a disfavoured group, it’s as if you don’t exist at all.

None of these forms of disenfranchisement is life-or-death, but they’re all, to varying degrees, life-altering.  We fancy ourselves an egalitarian society, a meritocratic society, where perhaps wealth isn’t evenly distributed, but opportunity usually is, and information certainly is.  Information is the single greatest source of self-enfranchisement; it is how the poor lift themselves out of poverty, and that forms the very basis of the American dream.

If access to information isn’t equal — if it is, in fact, carefully manipulated to maximise consumer effects — it compounds and reinforces biases and trends already in play.  We can compensate only if we are aware of the problem.  The complication is that the entire phenomenon is nearly invisible.