Digital Technology and Inequality New

This course introduces students to the key debates, controversies, and inequities posed by tech industries in the 21st-century. Our lessons begin by locating the forms of techno-utopianism that began the century, as the internet demonstrated the capacity to break down old media systems and empower grassroots activism. Over the course, this narrative about technology is complicated by tracking how this “digital sublime,” what Vincent Mosco termed a set of myths about computers and cyberspace, conceals the deleterious effects of tech industries on society in the ensuing decades. Where new digital platforms promised economic agency, students learn how apps like Uber and DoorDash fit into a history of flexible labor that shifts the costs of employment onto workers as one response to the Great Recession; where Airbnb promised to disrupt the hotel industry, its effects caused a new housing bubble that skyrocketed the cost of rents and amplified the conditions of homelessness in metropolitan centers and colonial territories. 

Course material takes a primarily global perspective to challenge students to recognize the everyday effects of digital technology and inequities on their lives in what some have termed a new Gilded Age. Lessons also include a focus on global dimensions of tech from the rise of crypto-blockchains increasing environmental waste or the transnational arrangements of labor from gold farming in China for roleplaying video games to content moderation centers in the Philippines. 

In the final week of the course, students consider how new media has shaped the conditions of information spread online and its potential effects on democratic systems, as the algorithmic transformations of culture produce new scientific regimes of racism, radicalized misogynistic digital communities, and lethal forms of disinformation. To end, students consider how we might regulate or solve for the harmful effects of new media technologies in ways that advance a new digital understanding of the public interest.