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This same sort of let-them-eat-laptop logic has framed the terms of the digital
divide debate. Closing the access and skills gap in digital technology, some contend, will
help eradicate wider economic and social disparities. But such arguments may actually
work against the goal of eliminating such inequalities by overlooking the structural
inequities that constitute another digital divide—that within the digital workforce. After
all, access to and skill in computers is meaningless without secure, full-time, living wage
jobs for the trained and wired. Furthermore, computers are part of the machinery of
today’s industrial capitalist production, and as such, they hold about as much liberatory
potential as earlier machines like the lathe or spinning jenny –probably less, since
computers continually deskill work.
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So, imagining computer technology and the high-
tech sector as vehicles for social mobility infuses them with a power they do not have.
This move, consequently, helps justify and obscure the increasingly harsh economic
realities workers are being asked to endure. Now that the “safety net” of the dole has
been removed for millions of workers, the stakes of this divide are higher than ever.
Thus, the digital divide is more important than ever. But the only way we can
unleash the democratizing potential of digital divide research and activism is to focus on
wider socio-economic disparities that the digital divide --as currently constructed--
metonymizes. Doing so involves turning a critical eye on the debate as a discourse,
analyzing the divide in the digital labor force --as it is constitutive of the wider gap in
new economy wealth-- and considering the concerns of its workers. This paper
constitutes such an endeavor. First, I briefly sketch the ways in which the debate
imagines computers as a means to economic and social empowerment and consequently
promotes what I call “let-them-eat-laptop logic.” Analysis then turns to the other divide:
Convention