Access beyond use: Technology, Markets, and the Interdependence of Rights
Because individual solutions can't solve structural problems.
Should all children learn to code? Or should they get to eat a healthy amount of balanced foods every day? Framed in such terms, the answer is obvious: they should eat first. However, the question poses a false dichotomy where it’s either/or…that’s simply non-existent. Pushing for a certain set of rights should not mean we give up on others, and that makes it complicated, when we talk about access to technology, the idea goes beyond use, but how far does it extend?
Access to technology is frequently discussed as if it were a personal achievement: learn the skills, buy the device, connect yourself. This framing is misleading, every form of modern technology depends on layers of infrastructure, cables, data centers, satellites, energy grids, and supply chains, which precede the moment someone anywhere uses a device. Thus, having access to technology is not a personal condition, but a position within a system. One that is set by geography, income, policy, ownership, and market incentives before individual choice enters the picture.
Because technology is infrastructural, individual access to it is intrinsically a societal matter. Yet most contemporary technological infrastructure is not public in ownership. It is privately held, profit-driven, and designed to serve specific interests, mostly economic ones. Platforms, networks, and tools may feel universal in use, but they are selective in whose needs they prioritize. This creates a tension: technology presents itself as a public good while being structured as private property. Access is offered, but on terms set by markets rather than communities. Participation is encouraged, but governance remains distant. In this context, access brings up questions of control, dependency, and even exploitative extraction. Who owns the infrastructure? Who sets the rules? Who benefits from scale, and who absorbs the risks when systems fail or withdraw?
To me, these questions don’t point toward a culprit, but rather a group of actors that set the stage, so no it doesn’t mean that we need to debunk the big tech companies altogether, nor that instagram should become somehow communally operated or government owned. I still enjoy scrolling through my specially curated art feedback. However, in the face of privacy and agency loss, communities of makers, designers, developers, hackers, and many other doers are designing and building tools that serve local community needs. Like the work guided by New_Public for example. While others in the face of “casual market omission” have had to establish their own network connections (find examples of this, here: SRDC and Internet Society).
Looking back into the food security issue—in most countries and at an international level—hunger isn’t a problem of lacking knowledge in agricultural practices, it isn’t even a problem of insufficient production. Rather, it’s fundamentally a problem of distribution, access, and ownership (Basu, 2026; Li & Zhang, 2024). Food systems are deeply structured by land tenure, supply chains, trade and labor regimes, as well as price mechanisms—all of which are shaped by economic interests. And this is where both problems, malnutrition and digital illiteracy, meet: they’re both governed by the same structural logic. In both cases, access is mediated by markets, and markets prioritize return over need. That being so, the hunger problem isn’t going to get solved by people planting crops on rooftops. Although growing vegetables at home or in a community garden is generally a positive hobby and can also be a teaching-learning experience, the solution cannot be for all families to become self-sufficient. Individual solutions will not work, yet at a local level the story changes. Communities can, and in many cases have, build solutions to help support those in need, and I believe this to be the case for technology as well.
Since access goes beyond use, devices, and connectivity, it could also go beyond markets as the sole organizing principle. Also because access is structural, the solutions must be structural as well. Seems simple, it isn’t, as we dig deeper into the structures that uphold our digital environments we find data centers, satellites and submarine cables, and if we look inwards we find ever updating software and hardware, as well as the chip manufacturing monopoly. So replacing it all with community infrastructure is not a full solution either. Right now roughly 74% of the world population is online (ITU, 2025). That’s 6 billion people, and counting as the trend continues upward, which means data centers are going to continue to be a problem, as they seem to suffer from the same “not in my backyard” syndrome as wind energy. Plus we already have a general waste problem, and specifically an electronic waste one with all of us trying to keep up to date with the many devices we use daily.
This is yet another conversation the right to access has, this time with the right to an adequate living standard, one that opens up many other new rights, like the right to repair, for example. These dialogues are constant, because rights are interconnected, hence they cannot be pursued in isolation. The right to access technology does not stand apart from the right to food, to privacy, to education, to environmental protection, or to participation in public life. Each shapes the conditions under which the others can be realized. Understanding these interdependencies is essential if we are to move beyond simplistic either/or framings.
As I was writing this essay, I wanted a way to better navigate these connections. So I built a simple platform to explore human rights as interconnected structures. It lets you look up rights across different conventions, see research on their current status, and explore how different rights influence one another. You can test it here. Also, the repository is available on GitHub with full technical details in the README.
Full disclosure: I started prompting this in Google AI Studio, which made the initial prototype design straightforward despite lots of back and forth. Getting it deployed outside their playground was trickier though, and meant having to rebuild many times, which is something I’ll be writing about next.