Saturday, February 16, 2013

Access is King


I have a dream; That all man, black and white, yellow and brown, rich and poor, and especially the poor, will be connected to the web. Just as the roads are free for travelling, internet connection should be free. Should be considered to be a basic human right.
The web has become one of the main intellectual infrastructures of humanity. Just like the roads are the basic infrastructure of a country, and are therefore free to be used by anyone in the possession of legs, a bike, a car, so I think  access to the internet should be free for everyone.


1938, none of the events depicted here, 
have had any consequences for world war II
Life as cartoon character
I must admit I lack the knowledge to support this statement based on sound economic arguments. I studied physics and philosophy, and now I have this here webdevelopment-company. I usually barely understand what my accountant tells me. 
But I am convinced that the world will benefit should we decide to support this freedom of access. Akin to the OLPC project, the UN should flood the whole world with basic rechargable, reusable consoles. 
The web will feed an new enlightenment, just like the invention of the printing press fed the enlightment by flooding the market with a tsunami of affordable books.

Hypoxia
There are billions of minds capable of becoming scholars, solving the unsolvable environmental and social problems.
Hiding connectivity from these masses on economic grounds, or on whatever ground, is like a man denying some parts his brains oxygen. (There could be economic sound reasons to do so...)
No one is his right mind would decide to do that. But that is just what we do to the world. 
Let's see the group of all our minds as the brains of the world: A large part is not, or barely, connected to the other part.
The world now behaves like a man with his corpus callossum dissected: Weird, and in hindsight perplexed about its own actions.
All these unconnected people, they are like cures for cancer, aids, malaria etcetera, written on paper and stored in sealed cannisters on the planet Xon234523.
They contribute to world development just as much as any cartoon character in a single comic from 1938.


Reality
A live without connection to the web is a live lost. Acces is King, and purpose and invention are its children. The internet is this great new toy, humanities one-stop-shop library, it's the parallel universe where we store all our knowledge(and porn of course). If all man are created equal, than all man should be given access, and the basic means to access this web. I believe then, and only then, the world will thrive and prosper.

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