shortsighted (Score 2)

I haven't logged into slashdot for a really long time. But I felt the need to do so just to point out how I feel that Vint's outlook might be a bit shortsighted. Sure, today I might agree as an American that the Internet isn't necessarily a right unto itself. But for the people in the countries he mentions who have managed to enact some serious political change because of their ability to easily communicate, it certainly is a much more tangible quality right now for them to have that ability to easily communicate seeing how the governments involved usually tried to remove that ability almost from the beginning in each and every case. Bottom line is, people communicating is pretty much the only force which can actually topple governments every time. There's a cetain tipping point, a critical mass, an amount of momentum - call it what you will - that movements, like those throughout Africa and the Middle East just recently, require to make change actually happen. But once they hit that point, there's really nothing to prevent them from achieving their goals, short of wholesale destruction by nuclear weapons or some equivalent. It's the same kind of thing that needs to happen in the USA to help mitigate the impending collapse of empire, but that's a different post altogether.

Anyway, that's just today. We're going to be living in a world in the not too distant future where each and every one of us is plugged into some sort of global communication network, directly, biologically. And yes, that network will be ensuring the safety, health, and happiness of everyone on planet Earth. In the beginning, it will most likely be a sort of LifeCall system. Everyone will have the ability for EMS/paramedics to arrive on your location within minutes of a life threatening event, regardless of where you are. Later on, that same global communication network will be allowing you to instantly communicate via thought with anyone you know on the planet. Hell, we're almost there today aside from the total lack of coverage in large, mostly uninhabited or extremely poor portions of the globe. But it will happen eventually. And after that, you'll be accessing information in real time, probably with a retinal heads up disaply, about your surroundings on a constant basis. Where to go to find something? How much something costs? How fast you're moving? All of this will be right there for you to see, at the turn of a thought. And that's only the very tip of the iceberg using my kind of thinking today. How fundamentally life altering will it be for every person on this planet to be essentially wired directly into one another. Memes already spread culture and thinking across vast sections of the population. What happens when those memes become instantaneous and pervasive, presented in thoughts, sights, sounds, smells and touch possibly even?

Just as important as GPS is to the miltaries of the world today, which is why both China and the EU have started launching their own constellation of GPS satellites to remove reliance on the US system, access to the always on, directly connected global communication network will be in the future, for every single citizen of planet Earth.

Is it going to be awhile before we get there? Sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean we should ignore fighting for those rights now. Especially with the direction the world has started to turn lately. I applaud the places in the world already moving to guarantee these rights for their citizens now. Because like it or not, the Internet as our current global communication network is here to stay, and it does enable people to change their worlds entirely, today. That's important. And there are very entrenched powers who are already trying to limit our access and use of said network. Sure, it might be done in the name of intellectual property protection today. But what will be the reasoning tomroow? To prevent dissent amongst the populous? One can only imagine.

Anyway, something to think about. It will most likely have evolved from being "the Internet" at that point. But communication is like a Pandora's box - once people have it, they aren't very likely to give it up. And that starts to sound like something one might call a right which we need to think about protecting for all of us.