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Cleaner Internet—If You Can Pay

So far, most of our hand-wringing about “filter bubbles” and algorithmic
sorting has taken place in the context of partisan politics. We find it disturbing
that liberals and conservatives see such different news stories in their Twitter
feeds, or that Google results are tailored to our preferences. But we have not
fully appreciated how much of our internet experience is shaped by
socioeconomic status, and the magnitude of the tax the internet imposes on
lower-income users in the form of data-sucking devices and predatory ads.

If you’re reading this, you might be one of the lucky ones. Maybe you’re a
paying Times subscriber, or maybe you’re Facebook friends with someone
who is. Maybe, like me, you have an ad blocker installed on an Apple device
that protects your data, you manage your browser’s privacy settings carefully
and you weigh the trade-offs of putting devices like the Amazon Echo in your
home. But if that’s the case, then you’re already on one side of what looks to
be a growing divide. And we should not confuse this version of the internet for
the primary one.

What the internet once promised was nothing short of complete informational
equality, so that a child in Chennai would have access to the same knowledge
as a child in Cleveland. But today’s internet functions a lot like the physical
world, with an income-based hierarchy in which everything, from the
cleanliness of the water to the quality of the schools, is determined by how
much you can afford to pay. It’s hardly the communitarian utopia we were
promised. In its current form, in fact, it threatens to exacerbate inequality and
accelerate the centripetal forces already fragmenting our society.

Rumman Chowdhury, who leads Accenture’s responsible-A.I. practice, put it in

stark terms. “We’re not talking about the kind of car you drive,” she said.
“We’re talking about your fundamental ability to function in society—what
jobs your children will get when they grow up, what access to information
they have. Quite literally, we’re talking about how you view the world.”

Closing
This article originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine on November
12, 2019.