Cyber-Civil Rights
By Emil Guillermo

Asian Americans -- both immigrant and native-born -- seem to be well-represented in high-tech. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about the fundamental civil rights question of the new millennium: What do you think of the so-called “Digital Divide?”

The problem is which “Digital Divide” are we talking about? There are people with computers. And people without computers. There are people with broadband access. People with 9600-baud modems. And people without even a telephone. There are people working in the fast high-tech industry with stock options. And people working in the fast-food industry with no options. There are people in senior management and boards of directors of major high-tech corporations. And people on assembly lines exposed to high-tech toxins.

As technology becomes the driving force of our nation’s economy, new lines are drawn everyday. Generally, it’s poor people -- mostly people of color -- who find themselves on the wrong side of the line. Last summer, the Commerce Department found that the gap between the number of low-income whites and blacks who own computers grew between 1994 and 1998. That’s even with computers dropping in price.

To complicate matters further, there are divides even within the “good” side of the issue. “Oh, you still use AOL? I’ve got DSL.” More than techie one-up-manship, it’s become the new currency. How plugged in are you? It makes being wired more critical than ever. And if you aren’t plugged in, you don’t exist. Not even virtually. It makes the marginalized even easier to ignore. And the uber-elite become even more untouchable as they move at Internet speed.

Shouldn’t something be done to level the virtual playing field? Meritocracy is fine, but shouldn’t everyone start on an equal footing? President Clinton raised awareness of the issue in his long-ish State of the Union Address last week. It was about one-and-a-half hours long, and an even longer download on a 14.4 kbs modem; the text alone was about 62,000 bytes of pure Clinton.

Opportunity for all requires “having access to a computer and knowing how to use it,” the President said in his speech. “That means we must close the digital divide between those who have got the tools and those who don’t.”

Great. Wire up the schools. Move kids from trailers into high-tech classrooms. Get computers to the poor using federal subsidies and tax incentives for corporations that help out. Give universal access and everyone benefits. Corporations, government, individuals.

It’s the one, great, bipartisan issue for us all as we cross that high-tech bridge into the 21st Century together, right?

Wrong.

Just by mentioning it in his speech, Clinton set up what could become one of the great, political wedge issues of our next century.

Just a day before the Clinton speech, the issue popped up in the New Hampshire Republican debate. If you didn’t see it, it was actually more watchable than the 17 others that you’ve missed since the beginning of the campaign, especially on this issue.

Each candidate was asked the question: Is it an appropriate use of government funds to hand out computers and provide Internet access to those who can’t afford it? The answers were surprising. The most generous was conservative Gary Bauer -- that could be because he may not last until Super Tuesday.

Said Bauer: “Well, the facts of the matter are that rural areas of America and the inner city are being left behind. The marketplace is great but it doesn’t work perfectly. As president, I would be willing to use the bully pulpit of my office in order to try to make sure access was there. Also, tax incentives for companies, I think that’s a fair thing to do. While we’re running a surplus, it seems to me these are some useful ways to use a little bit of that money.”

The others were, let’s say, a bit less magnanimous.

“There is no need for this,” Alan Keyes said, adding that private industry was taking care of any problem. “There is no need for the government to pretend that it needs to take leadership here. I think that’s just political posturing.”

Or maybe Keyes was just pandering to small government conservatives?

Steve Forbes, the candidate who has used the Internet to his best advantage, was consistent with his free-market approach. “Government getting involved in this will just breed corruption. The way to get universal access is to let technology flourish.”

John McCain seemed more bipartisan and Clinton-like in his approach. Said McCain: “I believe that we do have a problem. There’s a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in America; There’s a lot of ways you can encourage corporations, who, in their own self-interest, would want to provide, would receive tax benefits, would receive credit, and many other ways for being involved in the schools and upgrading the quality of the equipment they have.” That’s taken from the transcript directly.

George W. Bush was less direct in his answer, and expressed a different concern. After stumbling on the terms “broadband” and “bandwidth” and ending up with a new word, “broadwidth,” Bush laid out his bottom line about government intervention in technology: “I worry about government funding and government programs that are haphazard and will be obsolete before they’re even funded.”

It is worth noting that no one, not even cyber-junkie Forbes, came out with any real passion for the subject. Instead, they were cautious. Especially on the public money part.

If government solutions are involved, will it be seen as -- heaven forbid -- welfare? If the free market isn’t the main driver, would government intervention be seen as tantamount to a PC clone of affirmative action? As just about everything transitions to some digital form, we can expect even old civil rights issues to emerge in the new cyber-age. But didn’t you think the answers to the Digital Divide question were so clear cut, so actionable, the “We are the World” issue of the new millennium? Certainly, it would be beyond partisanship, wouldn’t it? Not if politics can’t get out of the way.