How Technology is Reinventing Inequality in the Digital Era
- Adi Roy
- Sep 28
- 10 min read
Late last year, when speaking to my contact in Gaza, I listened to firsthand accounts of the relentless bombardment and ongoing genocide. We had to closely coordinate our communications because internet connectivity was severely limited and often unavailable. My contact, Mo, had to wait for safe moments to walk to areas with sporadic internet availability, all while taking cover in a shelter in Rafah to avoid Israeli missile strikes.
I remember an instance where Mo had to climb to a slight elevation to access a few bars of network. This makes one realise how something as basic as internet access restricts the ability of entire communities to share their lived realities and experiences, silencing them in the face of atrocities, injustice, violence, and deprivation. In a vacuum such as this, dominant narratives, often those of the oppressor, take over alongside incalculable levels of propaganda and organised campaigns. The humanity and struggles of those silenced are then diminished to mere statistics and infographics, or disregarded entirely, without the chance for them to express their experiences, which feeds the cycle of exclusion and marginalisation.
Within today's digital sphere, intangible borders create divisions, replicating and often amplifying, real-world inequalities, hierarchies, and discriminatory practices. Algorithms come to dictate visibility, while global hegemons dictate the algorithms. Colonising forces of tech giants create a pervasive force that enshrines a new, empowered form of bias and amplified bigotry hidden behind millions of lines of code.
Technology itself is not neutral. Constructed on datasets carrying the weight of human prejudice, racism, colonial hierarchies, gender bias, and structural inequalities embed themselves into everyday spaces. When these flawed foundations are filtered through systems owned and governed by monopolies and oligarchs, the result is not innovation for liberation but amplification of harm. What emerges are tools that not only mirror existing injustice, but scale it across borders obscured under the guise of progress and efficiency.
These dynamics seep into the very environments we inhabit. Digital technologies have fundamentally changed how we see and use spaces. Today, it’s no longer abstract or just about the physical, but the layers of information that exist on top of our geographies. These digital surfaces actively shape our experiences and influence how we move through spaces, and essentially, how we understand them. An example of this is Google Maps. Today, such applications dictate more than directions to shape how one experiences a space, one that is rated by individuals detached from its context, either made more prominent or hidden from searches and rendered inaccessible. Algorithms, here, reimpose existing inequalities and hierarchies.
In conversation with Damni Kain, Gates Scholar and PhD. candidate at the University of Cambridge, an observation emerges from their research: low-income regions with denser localities and poor infrastructure that carry longer, more complex names often receive limited coverage. On the other hand, affluent areas with shorter names enjoy comprehensive representation. This discrepancy reflects not only socio-economic disparities but also the historical legacies of caste and class-based urban planning.
‘In Delhi, India, for example, affluent neighbourhoods predominantly inhabited by upper-caste communities boast superior infrastructure while also enjoying better digital connectivity. In contrast, marginalised communities, relegated to the peripheries of the city, face digital exclusion that is compounded by socio-economic deprivation and caste discrimination. The digital mapping of urban spaces thus becomes a reflection of societal power dynamics, where the digital divide comes to mirror the broader patterns of inequality,’ according to Kain.
Further, in John D. Sutter’s exploration of Google Street View’s coverage of Lake Providence in Louisiana for CNN, a disparity in visibility between the “rich side” compared to the “poor side” of the town is prominent. One can easily find and access the wealthy parts of the town, boasting better infrastructure, compared to the hardly mapped poorer side, further marginalising them.
What such observations highlight is that the digital layer of our cities and spaces goes beyond simply documenting space, but rather actively reshapes it. The maps we use, the visibility they grant, and the silences they produce all contribute to how communities are recognised—or erased. In this way, the flow of data becomes inseparable from the flow of life in urban geographies, producing a hybrid space where the material and the digital constantly interact. Here, perception itself is mediated by what the digital world chooses to reveal, blurring the lines between physical landscapes and their algorithmic representations.
The shift from physical mediums of information to digital systems has witnessed a concentration of control by hegemonic powers which has led to the aggregation and commodification of data like networks, geospatial and biometric data, and clickstreams. Such control and dominance further the exclusion of marginalised realities and the creation of new forms of indivisibility, such as the erasure of informal settlements from digital maps, which denies residents recognition and access to essential services. This digital divide, as Amlan Lahiri explains, is not merely a technological issue but a deeply sociological phenomenon that sustains and magnifies existing inequalities across socio-economic, geographic, and cultural axes.
Yet these exclusions extend far beyond questions of mapping or spatial visibility. At the most basic level, they touch on whether an individual can access the internet at all. For many, systemic poverty and infrastructural and political neglect create barriers so fundamental that participation in the digital sphere is foreclosed from the outset. In such conditions, the issue is not only that one’s neighbourhood is left uncharted on a map, but that one’s very presence is denied recognition within the systems that increasingly govern daily life. Connectivity becomes a privilege rather than a right, and entire populations are rendered peripheral, pushed to the edges of a digital order that determines who is seen, who is heard, and who is forgotten.
According to Ellen J. Helsper in Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of Social Disadvantage and the Information Society, barriers to digital inclusion are deeply tied to social exclusion. This particularly includes economic challenges such as the high costs of devices, broadband, and maintaining access, which are compounded by unequal infrastructure distribution in disadvantaged areas. Social barriers reflect the absence of supportive networks, especially leaving marginalised individuals with fewer opportunities to learn or share resources. Personal barriers, as Helsper adds, include factors like a lack of digital skills and limited training opportunities, often intersecting with economic and social disadvantages, further excluding individuals from digital engagement.
The unequal spread of digital infrastructure mirrors how cities are built and policed, and you can see it in everyday errands. Metro systems expect app-based tickets or smart card taps. Housing and welfare applications have gone digital by default. Parking meters, cafés, and even public toilets take only QR or contactless options and rarely anything else. If you have a fast phone, available data, and stable IDs and addresses, you glide through. If you don’t, you’re pushed into longer lines, higher fees, or locked out entirely.
The idea of space as a social product, as Henri Lefebvre conceptualises, speaks to how it is created through the interaction of lived spatial practices, perceived spatial arrangements, and conceived abstract representations. Shaw and Graham extend this framework to the digital age, arguing that abstract space, which was once dominated by planners and architects, is now increasingly mediated by digital information, as platforms, data infrastructures, and algorithms structure how space is represented and accessed. They have thus come to shape how spaces are imagined, navigated, and experienced, blurring the boundaries between physical environments and their virtual overlays.
For instance, through predictive policing dashboards that chart ‘risk zones,’ real-estate platforms that algorithmically valorise some neighbourhoods over others, or ride-hailing apps that redraw urban mobility by determining pickup and drop-off boundaries. The production of space, therefore, can no longer be understood solely in material or architectural terms but must also account for the increasingly pervasive influence of digital technologies that are actively structuring social relations and spatial imaginaries.
The urban environment is deeply layered and increasingly hybrid, where several factors come to shape how individuals perceive and navigate cities and spaces, often influenced by smartphone apps and social networks. These platforms mediate our relationship to the city by filtering what we see, prioritising certain routes or locations, and embedding commercial logics into spatial experience.
As mentioned, restaurants, shops, and landmarks appear not as neutral points on a map but as algorithmically curated destinations, foregrounded or obscured according to ranking systems, reviews, and advertising. The digital city, in this sense, becomes a reimagined terrain and not merely a representation of physical space, where perception, mobility, and social interaction are being continuously reorganised by data-driven infrastructures. The map then becomes less a passive mirror of urban reality and more a dynamic instrument that shapes how urban life is lived, remembered, and imagined.
However, when discussing these platforms, their power is not just limited to individual navigation. The same processes that filter and structure urban experience also operate at the global level, determining how entire regions are represented. Here, spatial and linguistic inequalities in digital geographies come to embody systemic asymmetries in global visibility and recognition. Platforms such as Wikipedia and Google Maps, while ostensibly offering universal coverage, frequently reveal stark imbalances shaped by historical, economic, and linguistic hegemonies.
As Graham and Dittus discuss, the disproportionate density of digital content in Europe and North America, when contrasted with the sparse representations of densely populated regions like South Asia and Africa, illustrates how digital infrastructures not only mirror but also reinforce existing geopolitical hierarchies. In effect, the production of digital space both redraws the contours of everyday urban life and reproduces longstanding global inequities.
This disparity signals a deeper bias in the production and consumption of digital knowledge. The prominence of European languages such as English, French, and Spanish on these platforms epitomise linguistic privilege while widely spoken languages like Hindi and Bengali remain critically underrepresented, limiting accessibility for millions (Graham and Dittus 2022). What further compounds this linguistic disparity is the reality that even multilingual platforms often offer content that is concentrated in dominant global languages.
Critically, as a result, these inequalities extend beyond spatial and linguistic boundaries to epistemic injustices, as Graham and Dittus highlight. The choices of what is mapped, how it is described, and whose narratives dominate all come to reinforce historical power dynamics. This unequal representation shapes users' perceptions, influencing both global understandings as well as local identities. For instance, territories like Occupied Palestinian Territories are often represented differently across digital platforms, with borders redrawn or labels altered according to political pressures, thereby privileging certain state narratives over others, influencing both global understandings and ultimately determining whose knowledge counts in the production of digital space.
What emerges across these layered exclusions is that digital infrastructures cannot be treated as peripheral or secondary to the material conditions of inequality as they are also constitutive of them. When connectivity determines the capacity to narrate one’s own existence, when mapping systems dictate whether a community is recognised, findable or forgotten, and when linguistic hierarchies decide whose knowledge counts, the digital ceases to be a neutral medium. It becomes an active terrain of struggle, where power is inscribed in code, visibility is rationed by algorithms, and absence itself becomes a form of violence. To understand digital systems, then, is to interrogate the architectures of silence they produce, and the political economies that enable these silences
Recognising this dynamic is not simply a matter of critique but of responsibility. To leave these inequalities unchallenged is to accept the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in twenty-first century form, hidden behind the façade of innovation and efficiency. Scholarship, activism, and policy must begin from the premise that digital inclusion is a deeply political endeavour, a struggle over who is rendered legible, whose histories are preserved, and whose futures are foreclosed. In reframing digital infrastructures as sites of justice rather than inevitability, we look to fighting for equality and open the possibility of imagining technologies that do not amplify marginalisation but instead recognise, protect, and reflect the multiplicity of human presence in both physical and digital space.
Edited by Thenthamizh SS
Adi Roy (he/him) is the co-founder of Political Pandora, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief and Head of Design. He is a student at the University of Oxford, focusing on the social impact of technology, technology policy, and AI ethics.
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References:
Kain, Damni, and University of Cambridge. Centre of South Asian Studies, degree granting institution. Caste in Gig Economy: Exploring the Spatiotemporality of Work in India (2023). Print.
Graham, Mark, and Martin Dittus. Geographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality. Pluto Press, 2022.
Helsper, Ellen J. Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of Social Disadvantage and the Information Society. Department for Communities and Local Government, 2008.
Kamath, Anant. “‘untouchable’ cellphones? old caste exclusions and new digital divides in peri-urban Bangalore.” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, 29 May 2018, pp. 375–394, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1479192.
Lahiri, Amlan. “Sociological implications of the digital divide: Exploring Access to Information and social inequality in the age of Artificial Intelligence and automation.” RESEARCH REVIEW International Journal of Multidisciplinary, vol. 9, no. 1, 16 Jan. 2024, pp. 156–167, https://doi.org/10.31305/rrijm.2024.v09.n01.019.
Shanmugavelan, Murali. “Caste-hate speech and Digital Media Politics.” Journal of Digital Media & Policy, vol. 13, no. 1, 22 Nov. 2022, pp. 41–55, https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00089_1.
Shaw, Joe, and Mark Graham. “An informational right to the city? code, content, control, and the urbanization of information.” Antipode, vol. 49, no. 4, 2 Feb. 2017, pp. 907–927, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12312.
Sutter, John D. “Income Inequality and Google Maps.” CNN, Cable News Network, 7 Nov. 2013, edition.cnn.com/2013/11/07/opinion/sutter-google-maps-income-inequality. Accessed 20 September 2025.
Keywords: Digital Divide In Urban Spaces, Algorithmic Bias And Inequality, Impact Of Technology On Marginalised Communities, Internet Access As A Human Right, Digital Exclusion And Social Justice, Technology And Colonial Legacies, Inequality In Digital Infrastructure, Mapping Bias In Google Maps, Algorithmic Governance And Surveillance, Representation Of Marginalised Voices Online, Digital Justice And Inclusion, Structural Inequality In Digital Spaces, Global Digital Hegemony, Socio-Economic Barriers To Internet Access, Epistemic Injustice In Digital Platforms, Linguistic Inequality In Online Spaces, Predictive Policing And Urban Inequality, Digital Infrastructures And Power Dynamics, Hybrid Urban And Digital Spaces, Data Colonialism In The Digital Age, Exclusion From Digital Services, Political Economy Of Digital Technology, Inequality In Geospatial Data, Role Of Algorithms In Shaping Society, Technology And Human Rights
