Digital Divide--So Close And Yet So Far

To understand how infinitesimally narrow the digital divide can be, you need only enter the Emergency Housing Consortium's homeless shelter in San Jose, Calif., on a school night. Walk past the guard at the reception desk, down past the rows of slightly musty bunk beds, past the red-eyed guys slumped in front of a tiny TV screen filled with colored snow. Just as your heart starts to sag with despair for the human condition, though, stop and take a peek through the locked door on the right. The contrast couldn't be starker. You see a brilliant white computer lab with state-of-the-art PCs and a massive Ethernet hookup; rows of servers with blinking green lights and spaghetti wiring.

Class is in session, so enter quietly. Star pupil Mark Alexander, who didn't have so much as a room to sleep in until his demolition-site buddy hooked him up a few months ago, is hitting the instructor with rapid-fire questions about "the syntax to set up command encapsulation PPP" and how many "classes of LCP frames" there are. "It's not simple stuff," Alexander explains. "These are abstract concepts. You have to meditate on them."

Meditate on this as well: when Alexander's class of 15--including welfare moms and borderline homeless people--graduates this December after 10 months of intensive night classes, they will be certified network technicians, the indispensable plumbers of the New Economy, capable of commanding a salary between $40,000 and $70,000 a year. Not a bad return on the $90,000 the city of San Jose has invested in the program--and a promising source of qualified workers for Internet giant Cisco, which provides the coursework and the hardware.

Hundreds of similar Network Academies, operating in at-risk, inner-city high schools around the country will have graduated 25,000 technicians by the end of 2000. This is the first in a homeless shelter, but almost certainly not the last. "I've got a million calls," says Amy Estes, program manager at the shelter. "People are motivated by the money, but they also want to prove to the world they can do this."

Then there are times when the digital divide looks unfathomably deep. The phrase has become mired in the blurry realm of cliche, applied variously to women, the disabled, seniors, ethnic minorities, rural and inner-city populations. But the underlying threat is real. Technology has moved so fast that a new upper class--composed largely of the same white, affluent, college-educated males that made up the old upper class--has spurted ahead of the rest of society, mostly because they have the time and money necessary to acquire and understand the tools of the digital revolution.

This is not merely an apocalyptic vision. Members of this digital class are already banking and trading stocks over high-speed Internet connections and whipping out wireless Palm Pilots while others wait in sluggish teller lines with pockets full of Post-it notes. Buy online, and you generally avoid sales tax; if shopping in the real world is your only option, you pay full whack. By 2004, there will also be a digital divide between 29 million households with super-fast broadband Internet access and the online equivalent of the middle class--those who still lumber along on 56K modems. Taken all together, these tiny, day-to-day advantages potentially add up to a class gap of Dickensian proportions.

It's not as if the dangers are unrecognized. The next Congress will play host to a paper storm of some 50 bills and provisions supposedly designed to close the gap. But most deal in the abstract world of FCC regulation and tax relief for telcos. Programs with practical ends--like turning the homeless into network technicians--exist largely in the private sector. Maybe Washington is better at the high-concept stuff, but politicians run the risk of paying mere lip service to the main issues. "We'll declare victory when we get a school wired, but that's just the first step," says Robert Knowling, who was CEO of broadband Internet provider Covad until he was forced to resign last month for missing the company's financial projections. "It's just putting on a uniform and arriving at the game. Then you've got to show people how to play the game."

Until his ouster, Knowling was one of the few African-American CEOs in Silicon Valley. Born in cotton-picking poverty in rural Missouri, he has often voiced discomfort over sitting in tech-firm boardrooms surrounded by photographs of white men. And he's not one to pull punches. After listening to a litany of feel-good rhetoric at a digital-divide round-table discussion with Bill Clinton last April, Knowling stood up and predicted that the President and his guests would leave the room all pumped up--and by the following Friday forget everything they'd talked about.

While Knowling regrets his burst of candor--"I wish I'd just shut up during that meeting"--he notes that his brand of painful honesty seems to be catching. "Five years ago, you didn't have so many people in this industry caring about this issue." One of them happens to be the consummate affluent, white, educated male, Bill Gates. At another digital-divide conference last month, he practically exploded over grandiose talk of wiring the Third World. "Does anybody have any idea what it's like to live on $1 a day?" asked the world's richest man. "There are things people need at that level other than technology." As Brecht wrote, food comes before morality. Gates' $25 billion charitable foundation is lavishing more money on immunization than on Internet access.