Silicon Valley vs Washington: the new digital divide

[Commentary] Turning on the television while visiting Silicon Valley, in a bid to catch up with the presidential election campaign, is to crash back to Earth with a thud.

The talk is of income inequality, the collapse of the middle class, the banning of Muslim visitors and the building of walls to stop immigrants pouring into the US. The optimism of forward-looking West Coast entrepreneurs clashes with the pessimism of the backward-looking East Coast politicians. That coastal divide is particularly stark in the US but it exists metaphorically in many other countries, too. At its simplest, it is a tussle within ourselves, both as consumers and as citizens. The techno-optimists of California promise a further bonanza for our inner consumer, largely powered by the supercomputer smartphones in our pockets. They aim to dissolve remaining inefficiencies in just about every consumer transaction.

But when the Silicon Valley crowd pause for breath, even they worry about some of the consequences of this technological turmoil: the impact on so many traditional jobs, the erosion of employment rights and the unequal distribution of the fruits of technology.