I don’t think a lot of your assumptions here are valid. I’d be curious to see some citations if you have them, and it would also be nice to see some clarification of your terms:
“Here’s the catch: technology makes its creators rich, but treats its users the same.”
I don’t know how you are defining users vs creators here. From my perspective, a lot of technology “creators” are actually monetizing the work of other people without any regard for who has made what.
A good example is your illustration. Where did it come from? The baby in the picture is almost certainly this one:
https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/baby-with-ipad.jpg
I am sure the other picture is also one copied from google images.
I don’t know if you ran them through the filter to make them look like charcoal drawings or if someone else did.
There isn’t any kind of attribution or statement about the image at all. But that’s what you are using to market your article here.
So are you a creator? A user? Who made money off that picture? Who deserves to make money off that picture?
Technology made it possible for a photographer to snap a picture of both children and put them on the internet.
My experience and your experience of their lives is exploitative: I don’t know if that baby or the crouching child are even still alive. They have been made into things, accessories to advertise your content.
“And while Mark Zuckerberg’s bank account contains 10,000,000 times more money than the average Indian’s, his Facebook account works more or less identically.”
No, it doesn’t.
When an “average Indian” uses Facebook, the entire US media doesn’t write articles talking about how his blog post might mean.
“Quick and cheap distribution goes both ways — it creates financial inequality and experience equality. You can’t pay for a better Facebook experience.”
Yes, actually, you can:
“If this technology will ever exist for the richest, one day the poorest will have access to it. Technology gets cheaper and quicker to distribute over time.”
This is often expressed as an article of faith.
But it ignores a fundamental trend that is actually pretty disturbing: one of the biggest reasons technology seems cheaper and quicker to distribute is because none of it belongs to the user.
So how do you define technology here? An iphone is still pretty expensive. A computer is still pretty expensive. In fact, it seems pretty weird that over this piece you have only talked about what are now apps as your example: Facebook and Uber.
10 years ago, Facebook was a website, now it is an app because the distribution model became phones rather than laptops. So when you say “technology gets cheaper and quicker to distribute over time” and your examples are facebook and uber, what technology do you mean, exactly?
It’s not phones. It’s not cars. Uber does not exist in a world that doesn’t already have phones and cars. There is no new technology: just a mass of people who wanted to be taxi drivers without the benefits of unionizing. So they work for Uber and Uber relies on pre-existing technology for its business to exist. The only thing the app does is function as a portal, connecting users to drivers, also using pre-existing tech like GPS and credit cards.
You are describing access to data as “technology”. That brings me back to what I said earlier:
“From my perspective, a lot of technology “creators” are actually monetizing the work of other people without any regard for who has made what.”
The examples you are giving for how technology spreads and grants access to experience are inherently exploitative. They exacerbate inequality. Facebook already has tiered systems that keep industry users safe from regular people. It has not been a democratizing network that equalized users experiences.
Facebook and Uber are exacerbating poverty.
“We will all have equal access to experiences, whether or not the experiences we choose are equal.”
Please investigate whether or not this is true, instead of simply asserting that it is:
