Depression 2.0

This piece, about how a new Great Depression now would differ from the last one, seems to me to miss a key point. In place of last time's bread lines and hoboes visibly criss-crossing the landscape, Drake Bennett forecasts a lot of unemployed people staying home, watching television. Suffering will take place in isolation, hidden from the public sphere, because we're all habituated to filling our empty hours with 21st century media.

Here's the problem: How will we pay our cable bills, if we're all out of work? Accustomed as we our to information access, we forget easily that it costs money. Money, if we crash, will be very scarce. And vital as Google feels to us all, fast-search never will compel people to spend in the same urgent way that food does.

So I think access to information -- 700 TV channels, yes, but, more importantly, the Internet -- will be the most important casualty of a new Depression. Economic collapse in our time instantly creates a great digital divide. In Depression 21st century style, some Americans would continue to take part in the Google-YouTube-Twitter world we know now.The rest of our people would become be digital Joads, no longer participating in modern life. The effects of that division would reach far and last long.

One more reason to hope we dodge the bullet.