Restoring Technology as an Engine of Opportunity

Abstract

This chapter uses what we have learned about technology and inequality to find new opportunities for reducing inequality in a more digital world. Our key strategy is to focus on the ways financial value is created by the digital technology sector, and the specific ways that value is captured. Digitally mediated markets are a new and growing phenomenon, and new digital business models have created valuable products and services through their unprecedented abilities to experiment, amass unique data, and deploy to huge populations, offering new ways to capture and concentrate that value on a seemingly unprecedented scale. Inequality can be addressed through the remedies proposed by the technological and institutional context schools , but we think these will be incomplete without paying attention to the business models being used to deploy these technologies. Specific technological mediation choices, or the mobilization of stakeholders that technologies depend on, may be part of the strategy, but these issues in the end always return to the question of how to invent alternative business models that will share the value captured more evenly. Whatever path we choose, the wealth shifts associated with digital technology are too large to ignore if we want to seriously reverse increasing inequality and create more widespread opportunity.