Written by: Robert Brennan Hart
THERE IS A WOMAN at the Vancouver Public Library’s central branch, fourth floor, Tuesday afternoon. She arrives twenty minutes before the computers become available, clutching a folder of documents – employment insurance forms, rental assistance applications, correspondence from her son’s school about accessing the online learning portal.
She waits. When her turn comes, she has forty-five minutes before the system logs her out automatically, before she must surrender the terminal to the next person in an endless queue of digital supplicants.
She is not unique. Across the country, millions navigate this same algorithmic gauntlet: applying for jobs that exist only as online postings, accessing government services that have migrated entirely to digital platforms, completing coursework that assumes universal device ownership, managing healthcare through patient portals that presume reliable connectivity.
The infrastructure of contemporary life has quietly digitized while we continue to treat digital access as individual luxury rather than collective necessity. This is not merely inconvenient. Somewhere in the migration from physical to digital, from paper to portal, costs that institutions once bore have been transferred to individuals least capable of absorbing them.
We have built a society that requires digital participation while treating that requirement as personal responsibility rather than public infrastructure. The cruelty lies in its invisibility; in how thoroughly we have naturalized exclusion as individual failure rather than systemic design.
The Cost-Shifting Apparatus
Consider the elegant efficiency of “going paperless.” A bank eliminates its statement printing and mailing costs, several dollars per customer monthly, and congratulates itself on environmental consciousness. A government agency closes physical offices and redirects citizens to online portals, reducing real estate and staffing expenses. A university moves all course materials to learning management systems, eliminating printing costs and physical distribution.
Each institution saves money. Each institution claims sustainability. Each institution transfers costs to individuals who must now provide their own devices, connectivity, technical literacy, and troubleshooting capacity. Those who cannot afford these inputs simply fade from participation; their absence rendered invisible because it occurs in negative space, in services not accessed, jobs not applied for, benefits not claimed.
The mechanisms operate with particular sophistication: systems designed to require digital access while maintaining the fiction that such access remains optional. “You can always come to our office,” the website assures, neglecting to mention that the office opens three hours twice weekly and requires booking an appointment (online, naturally).
The mathematics reveal themselves in individual lives: the single parent working multiple jobs has neither time nor money for reliable internet. The elderly resident on fixed income chooses between connectivity and medication. The newcomer navigating settlement services faces not just language barriers but device barriers, connectivity barriers, literacy barriers compounded into impossibility.
Every service moved online without ensuring universal access creates barriers that fall most heavily on those already marginalized.
The Infrastructure We Refuse to Name
We understand that roads constitute infrastructure. We accept that electricity constitutes infrastructure. We acknowledge that water systems constitute infrastructure. Each represents a foundational capacity required for participation in modern society, and each receives corresponding public investment and universal access mandates.
Yet we hesitate to extend this logic to digital access, despite its equivalence, or perhaps even superiority, in determining life outcomes. Try finding employment without internet access. Try completing education without a functional device. Try accessing government services, managing healthcare, maintaining social connections, or simply navigating daily logistics without digital capacity.
The refusal to name digital access as infrastructure serves particular interests. It allows continued privatization of what might otherwise be public goods. It permits the telecommunications industry to extract maximum profit while providing minimum coverage, prioritizing wealthy areas while abandoning rural and low-income communities. It enables device manufacturers to design for planned obsolescence, creating perpetual upgrade cycles that generate mountains of electronic waste while pricing out those who need technology most.
Most perniciously, it transforms structural problems into individual moral failings. Cannot access services? Should have bought a computer. Missed the job application deadline? Should have had internet. Children falling behind in school? Should have provided devices.
The language of should obscures the reality of cannot, converting systemic exclusion into personal inadequacy.
Mountains of Waste, Oceans of Need
Here is where the contradictions become almost poetic in their absurdity: we live simultaneously with desperate need for digital access and catastrophic oversupply of functional devices. Canadians discard approximately one million tonnes of electronic waste annually.
Much of this “waste” consists of devices that remain entirely functional but have been rendered “obsolete” by artificial upgrade cycles, by operating systems that refuse to run on older hardware, by social pressure to possess the latest model.
Meanwhile, families struggle to provide their children with devices for schoolwork. Seniors remain isolated from telemedicine and social connection. Job seekers cannot apply for positions. Newcomers cannot access settlement services. The digital divide persists not because technology is scarce but because we have chosen to treat access as market commodity rather than human necessity.
The contradictions compound: those most harmed by digital exclusion are also most harmed by environmental degradation caused by electronic waste. Low-income communities and communities of color bear disproportionate exposure to the toxic materials leaching from discarded devices. The same populations denied access to technology also suffer the environmental consequences of its disposal.
This is extraction and abandonment rendered in circuit boards; a crystallization of how our economic systems create scarcity amid abundance, exclusion amid plenty. We mine conflict minerals from the Global South, manufacture devices through exploited labor, consume them briefly in wealthy nations, then abandon the toxic remains back where the extraction originated. All while maintaining that those without devices should simply purchase their own.
The Circular Imperative
The solution exists in plain sight: divert functional devices from waste streams and redirect them to communities in need. Refurbish rather than discard. Distribute rather than landfill. Treat devices as essential, durable infrastructure rather than disposable consumer goods.
Perhaps this represents something more unsettling than charity – a correction of failures the market claims don’t exist. A recognition that the profit motive has produced socially and environmentally catastrophic outcomes that require intervention. The circular economy represents not merely environmental responsibility but structural intervention in systems designed to generate waste and exclusion.
Every refurbished device provided to someone in need performs multiple functions simultaneously: it prevents environmental harm by diverting waste, it addresses digital exclusion by providing access, and it challenges the growth-at-all-costs logic that requires perpetual consumption and disposal.
The market failed, so we route around it. Access is not luxury but necessity. We can build different systems based on different values.
Standing at the Threshold
We find ourselves at a particular juncture: the gap between acknowledging digital access as essential and funding it as infrastructure has never been more visible or more consequential.
The pandemic made the invisible sun visible – students without devices attempting to complete online schooling, workers without connectivity trying to maintain employment, vulnerable populations cut off from services and support. But visibility is not yet transformation.
We risk returning to comfortable myths about individual responsibility, about market solutions, about technological progress that somehow sidesteps questions of access and equity. We risk treating what we witnessed as temporary disruption rather than permanent revelation of systemic failure.
The path forward requires naming digital access as infrastructure and funding it accordingly. It requires recognizing that devices are not consumer electronics but essential tools for participation in contemporary society. It requires building circular systems that treat technology as durable public good rather than disposable private commodity.
We possess the technology. We possess the resources. We possess the knowledge. What remains is the question of will; whether we can build systems that serve human need rather than profit accumulation, that treat access as right rather than luxury, that recognize infrastructure for what it has become rather than what it used to be.
The devices exist. The need exists. Only the connection remains to be made.