TechnoKings rule, but at what cost?

Some 4.66 billion people in the world are active internet users, according to Statistica - that's almost 60 per cent of the globe's population. Of these people, 92 per cent access it using a mobile device.

Yet just over two billion young people across the world lack the stable internet access they need to learn online. Yet Covid-19 has revealed once-and-for-all the importance of blended learning to the future of education.

Access to digital technology is now one of the biggest opportunity gaps in the world. Yes, groups like Facebook and Google have made noises about taking the internet to poorer regions. But one wonders how much of this is motivated by altruism and how much by potential corporate gain. For these and other companies, more data means more money and power.

The new social strata are also decided by relative levels of technophilia. Young and middle-aged people are often well equipped to handle digital tools. Through much of the world, though, elderly people struggle with digital techs. In 2019, virtually all British adults aged 16 to 44 years used the internet. But that compares with just 47 per cent of adults aged 75 years and over. (Office for National Statistics).

In more than a few cases, digital tools fill older people with fear - including the fear of being cut off from family and friends if they don't engage. These generations learned entirely different ways to communicate and conduct their commerce.

BigTech products are also opening class divisions based on access to skilled labour jobs. Germany arguably leads the world in the promotion of Industry 4.0, in which smart factories are maintained and products are created by AI-driven machines.

A few years ago, German sociologists noted the emergence of new underclasses in their society.

Highly skilled workers were sitting at home, watching many hours of daytime television and consuming more than their fair share of alcohol. They were listless, expressing no interest in retraining. These were among the first victims of today's speedy transition to automation.

BigTech is also promoting inequality in the area of taxation. "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society," wrote Frédéric Bastiat, "over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

BigTech's behaviour when it comes to tax equates, in some cases, to corporate plunder. To justify it, company chiefs talk about nation-states becoming anachronisms, in the face of today's more enlightened globalist approach.

In 2020, the Jeff Bezos behemoth, Amazon, profited more than any other BigTech group from an online shopping boom linked to the pandemic. Its UK profits rose by more than a third and it increased its revenues by £13.7 billion. Yet it paid just three per cent more in tax.

Over the past decade, much has been written about similarly low taxes paid by Facebook, especially in regions where it generates massive profits. Some leading BigTech outfits have repeatedly proven that they want to have their cake and eat it, too.