Last summer, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several other tech luminaries announced the creation of Internet.org, an initiative that aims to deliver the Internet to billions of people in the developing world. It would increase access to opportunity, its founders argued–and, implicitly, a fairer future.
But the simple link between social connectivity and justice could be a flawed one, according to a recent analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Where Internet access is often touted as a human right, the structure of the Internet itself may actually lend itself to perpetuating inequality.
In January, three MIT data scientists published a paper in Nature Scientific Reports that aimed to determine the relative levels of meritocracy in societies, based on the structure of their social networks. To do this, the researchers sorted the social media world into two types of people: Content creators (a.k.a. “rockstars”) and content curators, or middlemen.
The authors were interested in finding the moment where a meritocratic society, one which pays people primarily for the work they produce, shifts into a topocratic society, one in which middlemen are paid more than the creators, simply because of their position in social networks.
“If everyone has more [connections], the system is going to be meritocratic–the guys who contribute more are going to get paid more. With less connections, what’s going to matter most is how connected they are,” says César Hidalgo, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab. For example, he says, if there is a network of 1 million people, if each person is connected to 1,000 others, you’ve reached the meritocracy threshold.
The MIT analysis didn’t look at the Internet connectivity specifically. Still, at first, the paper seems like an argument for increasing Internet access. Bring on the connectivity to push us into a new, radical era of fairness augmented by technology. But if we’re applying the analysis to the Internet, Hidalgo also raises an important caveat to consider.
Says Hidalgo: “When you have relatively small systems in which people are able to know each other well–whether it’s a team of people working together in a professional or academic setting–those systems are going to be much more meritocratic, because if everybody knows each other, it implies that there’s a correct way of assigning payoff to each one of the people’s contributions. But when that system becomes large, eventually that information becomes dominated by hubs, and the hubs can get a highly disproportionate amount of the total share of income, based only on their position.”
