Ask Lemmy

I think so, yes. It sounds like your stance is similar to my own. My reasoning is that the internet is so ubiquitous in countries like my own, and for all its ills, I am so glad that I was born in a time where my voracious appetite for learning can put me in contact with an abundance of free learning resources and people who are just like me.

Acknowledging the internet as a basic human right would require addressing the severely uneven distribution of its access; I can't ignore the fact that I'm only able to access all this cool stuff because I live in a country that colonised and oppressed a significant chunk of the world. It's no wonder that it's becoming harder to find worthwhile knowledge and community online when the internet and all the technology that supports it is borne of historic injustices. If we want the internet to do something besides serve the interests of capital, we need to address the structural inequalities regarding its access. It's fucked up that there are so many places in the global South that only have access to internet because companies like Meta went in pretending to be charitable, so they could create and capture a new chunk of the market. Apparently in Brazil, it's not abnormal for official government communication to use WhatsApp. Sometimes it makes me feel hopeless for the future

However, I am bolstered by reflecting on the history of other technologies. I was reading recently about how the printing press disrupted society, by giving far more regular people the opportunity to access written ideas, as well as share their own thoughts with the world. This was not a straightforwardly positive thing. There were (and indeed, still are) many privileged people who were of the sentiment that regular people having wider access to the written word was harmful to society, and to those regular people. Whilst I vehemently disagree with the classist sentiment they espoused, I do see some of their point — someone having the ability to read something doesn't necessarily mean they have the skills to understand it. Widespread misinterpretation and misinformation were side effects of the printing press, and it reminds me of some of the harms of the internet that we're experiencing today.

I've read a lot of scholarly works on the question of "what the fuck should we do about all this online misinformation?", and it seems that we don't really have an answer to that right now. It's too late to close Pandora's box now though, so we'll have to figure that out. I think that working towards equitable access to the internet is an important step towards collectively solving that problem, because the internet is something that affects everyone nowadays — even those who can't access it themselves.