The New York Times publishes a powerful text with a key message: digital consumption is a sign of poverty. We say the digital economy, but we mean the economy of services for the poor.
You are poor if your doctor advises you on the Internet, and not in a personal meeting.
Poor if your kids are learning online and not from offline teachers.
Poor if you shop online instead of in a nice store in the city center.
For the poor, there is a gigantic online sex market in which Third World residents sell erotic fantasies to poor citizens of the First World who are able to spend an extra ten dollars on it.
The fact that the wealthy prefer old-fashioned tutors, personal trainers, and chefs over Coursera or smart phone delivery is no secret. But the author of the article, Nelly Bowlers, goes further and claims that there is a "luxuryization" of human relations.
If you still receive services from living people or have the opportunity to communicate with them, then most likely you are a representative of a new elite, the prestigious consumption of which is the rejection of digital services in favor of offline ones.
The poor buy iPhones on credit, the rich abandon smartphones. The poor try to make their children know how to use computers, the rich offer their heirs private schools, where learning is based on communication between people. The life spent in front of the screen is now a sign of your failure in life.
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At this point, Bowlers strays into the rather controversial claims that growing up with gadgets harms the cognitive development of children, and claims that numerous unscrupulous psychologists are on the side of IT corporations in this discussion.
But when she describes a 68-year-old retiree living on a living wage, whose main interlocutor is a cat named Sox drawn on a tablet, the text is generally perceived as extremely convincing. The drawn cat for looking after the elderly was invented by a 31-year-old businessman whose startup employees work from the Philippines.
If a computer program tells you that you are dying, it means that you are dying like a poor man in the digital economy.