Equality in the Digital Age
In which I look at the role technology and human history plays in how we're creating a more equal future for humanity.
The world right now is, well, a hot mess. Economic woes, growing class divides between the rich and increasingly poorer. Wars and conflicts higher than they have been. Populism and democracies becoming increasingly fragile. Human rights battles across a wide swathe of society. But perhaps this is a sign of something better coming along?
Much of this current turbulence is a result of our ability to communicate unlike ever before in our history thanks to digital technologies like the internet and mobile devices. Throughout history, as we evolved information technologies, civil unrest and significant social change has followed. Though such changes can be messy, often violent and tumultuous, societies have always come out better.
A growing narrative around the world today, across many societies, is the desire for greater equality. Economically, racially, sexuality, religiously, politically. We’ve been here before, we will likely be here again. It is cyclical, but it is not linear.
In the overarching history of humanity, we have preferred more egalitarian societies and as a species, we have progressed. There is no guarantee that we will progress this time, we may regress, but then progress, should we survive as a species.
Information technologies play the role of enabling us to tell stories. Telling stories is how we agree on and shape our varied realities. It does not mean that the stories told are necessarily true. Both the far-right and the far-left dally with mis/disinformation to shape a narrative that may start with a truth, but end with a fantasy. This does not make those stories any less harmful. Quite the opposite.
Social media, mobile devices and the internet have also enabled minority voices to be heard and social movements to gain momentum that would have been much harder and slower to grow at such speed. From #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Such social movements are important to sociocultural progress.
Humans have long played with various forms of societies and ways of living. There is no single way of being human. The narrative that we evolved on some nice continuous linear path from foraging to agrarian to today is increasingly being debunked in anthropology and sociology. A seminal book on this is “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
We know now that humans built urban centres and lived in cosmopolitan societies well before agriculture arrived, which we often thought didn’t happen until we started planting veggies. Human societies have been far more diverse than we used to think and have played with many types of social organisation. We continue to do so today.
Keep in mind that much of the narrative about how humans evolved in the world is driven by Western Colonialism with a capitalist lens. The stories we have been told are those who have held much power over the world, economically and militarily. The internet has enabled other countries, cultures and societies to counter that narrative.
This countering of Western European thinking, along with massive migrations as a result of climate change and conflict, add new pressures on this system. As capitalism has shifted from delivering a social good to serving shareholders, the internet has enabled a much larger swathe of society to expose its failings and thus we see the growing distrust and anger at the current form of capitalism.
Great promises too, were made from the giant technology corporations and techno-elites. Self-driving cars, cryptocurrency that would equalize the distribution of wealth, a paperless world, flying cars. It’s not that these won’t happen, it’s just that we’ve been told they’re just about to happen. Then they don’t. Over time, societies become disillusioned when what was promised, never arrives.
When all of these things come together, social pressures grow. In the past, they have only resulted in world wars twice. But after these wars, societal progress was an upward trajectory for the better. One wonders, with great apprehension, if such a global conflict would be necessary, perhaps inevitable, to take the next step in progress?
Towards an Egalitarian Future
There is no scientific evidence that men are better than women. Such proclamations are ideological, not factual. There is no scientific evidence that skin colour means one race is better than another. Racism is a social construct created by those in power as a means of control and manipulation. As geneticist Adam Rutherford points out, a white person is more likely to share closer genetics with a black person as a white or black person with another white or black person.
We know too that homosexuality has existed across many societies for thousands of years. Indigenous North Americans and Australian aborigines have held the idea of being two spirited for thousands of years. Rousseau’s idea of human rights came from the Mi’kmaki and Algonkian First Peoples. In Celtic societies, women were considered equal to men in all aspects of society. We know too now, that women hunted in pre-history societies as much as men. Gender identities have also been around for thousands of years.
Opposition to gender identity, homosexuality, women’s rights and race is purely ideological and often religious, not based on any reality or science. The upside of the internet and the technologies resting upon it, are enabling the facts and realities to be told.
Those that oppose these truths are using the same information technologies to counter these truths, but they in fact, are in the minority. They just scream rather loudly. History however, shows they are not on the winning side. Rarely have humans preferred the path of increasing hierarchy, specialization and centralization.
A challenge today, versus our past, is that there are a lot more of us on this mud ball. We’ve created the concept of nations that cover the world and societal rules about who can and cannot live or move somewhere.
While the internet has no borders and information flows freely, physical humans can’t. This sets us up for increased societal violence and warfare. We used to just pick up and move somewhere else in the past. We can no longer do that.
Stories are how we organise as social groups. We prefer working together than not. We know it helps us survive. We prefer egalitarian societies. While change is afoot and it will be messy and at times incredibly painful, there is more to hope for than not.