The Digital Divide as Geographic Inheritance

In 2025, roughly 2.6 billion people — one-third of the world's population — had no internet access at all. Not slow access. Not intermittent access. No access. The map of the unconnected overlaps with disturbing precision with the map of the world's poorest populations, which overlaps with the map of the world's least educated, which overlaps with the map of the world's most geographically disadvantaged. Landes was criticized for acknowledging the role of geography in economic development; the criticism was partly justified but missed his actual argument, which was that geography conditions rather than determines outcomes. It creates starting advantages and disadvantages that can be overcome by institutional effort but do not disappear because one wishes they would. The digital divide is the AI-age expression of this geographic conditioning.