[p2p-research] Slashdot | Developing Nations Crippled By Broadband Costs

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Ryan Lanham wrote:
 > On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Paul D. Fernhout <
 > pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
 >
 >>http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/23/1552237/Developing-Nations-Crippled-By-Broadband-Costs
 >> "If you live in the EU, you probably enjoy low broadband costs. If you
 >> live in Finland, it's even a legal right. If you live in the US, you
 >> probably pay a moderate cost. But if you live in the developing world,
 >> a UNCTAD report  paints your picture pretty grim. Ridiculously high
 >> bandwidth costs are inhibiting developing nations from enjoying
 >> productive use of the internet — like online banking and market tools."
 >>http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/2229231/-1Mb-Broadband-Access-Becomes-Legal-Right-In-Finland
 >> http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE59M08620091023?sp=true
 >
 > I agree with the Finns.  It is a human right.  But then again, so is
 > healthcare, food, freedom of movement, ideas, etc.  Few of those are
 > accessible for most.

More of my same old... :-) Perhaps as a more concise analysis/synthesis.

Those "rights" you mention to goods and services and information might be 
considered part of the "Freedom from Want" aspect of "The Four Freedoms":
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms

Things like food, travel, and healthcare in theory are all accessible 
through the market (to the extent they are not public goods that can not be 
individually purchased, like a good hospital network filled with caring 
doctors or a reliable healthy food supply system run by happy farmers or a 
safe reliable global transportation network operated by those who love 
taking people places they want to go).

The problem is, as Frances Moore Lappé has pointed out, the market only 
hears the needs of those with money (either spent by those having capital or 
spent by those with jobs that earn some money). And, in the long term, as 
the market needs most people less-and-less (from automation and better 
design), the idea of an income-through-jobs link for having a right to 
consume is breaking down. As predicted in 1964 (and indirectly earlier, even 
by Karl Marx and before him, Charles Fourier), this is happening first in 
the USA, but it will spread globally eventually:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, people had lower expectations as well 
as more relatives with farms, plus more natural land with berries and small 
game close by, so subsistence living in the USA was more achievable for most 
people. In the Great Depression of today, there are few natural alternatives 
and expectations are much higher. People can live on much less, but it would 
be a lot of culture shock in the USA, assuming they had access to natural 
capital like a farm or wilderness (and most people do not, and our 
populations are probably too high to use park land for hunting and gathering 
and support everyone anyway):
   http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Jobs can be created using war, schooling, and prisons, but war is 
increasingly dangerous globally (nuclear weapons, plaques, drones), and 
schooling and prisons both poison the mind in various ways, creating other 
social dysfunctions that can feed back to more war. All three are being 
tried in a desperate struggle by our society to destroy abundance before it 
threatens the social order, but in the long term, it is questionable if we 
can burn up abundance fast enough to keep the capitalist system working. A 
humorous take on this:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

So, the only other solution in a capitalist society is for everyone to have 
access to the primary industrial capital of society, remitted as a basic income:
   http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
   http://www.peoplescapitalism.org/
   http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

One can do a basic income the hard unpleasant way, based on proving "need" 
like US welfare, or one can do it the easy pleasant way by just giving a 
basic amount to everyone without proving "need". Historically, that is the 
difference between the US welfare system (need based) and the European 
welfare systems (universal entitlement). Thus, Europe is psychologically 
better positioned to deal with abundance and joblessness in the long term.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare#Welfare_systems

There are other approaches too, but they move beyond capitalism:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/

But, the whole nature of "work" will begin to break down when most people 
are not compelled to do it because they have a basic income. Work will need 
to be rethought at that point, either as Bob Black suggests (building on 
Charles Fourier's ideas of around 1800) or in some other way:
   http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Offshoring has accelerated the job loss trend in the USA, but it would have 
happened anyway from robotics and computers and better design increasing 
industrial efficiency (thought of as output per unit of human labor). Other 
countries will have different dynamics as there is global pent-up unmet 
demand to live like US Americans materially (in part from seeing US media). 
But at some point, that pent-up demand will be satisfied, and then a 
self-limiting of demand will happen. People will begin to realize the social 
and environmental and political price they have paid to become US Americans. 
A law of diminishing returns will set in as far as increasing happiness 
through increasing material goods. Or, even, a law of negative returns on 
happiness will set in since everything you own, owns you, and time spent 
with material things can displace time spent with people or nature which may 
bring more happiness. The next twenty years of politics will be dominated by 
the playing out of these overall interwoven trend, IHMO. (And then other 
singularities will come along, like human+ machine AI and we will be in 
better shape to deal with those singularities in a happy and healthy way if 
we as a global society are happier and healthier first.)

Still, because production is getting so efficient, and a few big 
industrialized countries like the USA or Germany or Japan or China (or some 
others) can produce so much, it is possible that some small nations without 
much industrial infrastructure will never have anything of much competitive 
value to offer the global marketplace (beyond being a nice place to live in 
or to visit, if that). This means some sort of global transfer of industrial 
wealth if they are not to be left behind. Alternatively, it would just mean 
the complete end of capitalism, with the acquisition of nanotech 3D 
printers, where one printer can print other printers plus solar panels for 
power and devices to process raw materials into 3D printer toner.

So, the debate in the USA about universal access to health care is only the 
tip of the iceberg of these trends of equitable access to the fruits of 
industry. We will see this sort of issue played out again and again. And, if 
we look back at history, we can see it has been playing out for centuries in 
various ways already (like arguments over land reform or slavery or 
unionization or workplace regulation and so on).
   http://www.historyisaweapon.com/
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States
"""
A reviewer for the The New York Times suggested the book should be "required 
reading" for students. In a 1998 interview prior to a speaking engagement at 
the University of Georgia, Zinn told Catherine Parayre he had set "quiet 
revolution" as his goal for writing A People's History. "Not a revolution in 
the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning 
to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers 
would take power to control the conditions of their lives." In 2004, Zinn 
published a companion volume with Anthony Arnove, titled Voices of a 
People's History of the United States. The book parallels A People's History 
in structure, supplementing it with material from frequently overlooked 
primary sources.
"""

Note that the idea of "worker" itself becomes obsolete. In the USA, we went 
from 90% of the industrial workforce being in agriculture to 2% over 200 
years. We've gone from 30% of the workforce in manufacturing to 12% in about 
fifty years and it continues to drop (especially with the Great Recession). 
Do we really need all those "services" that make up most of the rest of what 
people do, especially with the internet and computers for education and even 
distributing some medical care? And even if we need some of those 
"services", do they really need to be done directly for money?
   "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic 
interest diminish if task is done for gain"
   http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

In a way, email is the new currency. :-) Or twitters, or blog posts, or 
whatever. These messages play the role fiat money used to play in 
structuring a big part of our economy. An email message is a much more 
nuanced way to effect a productive system than fiat money. It's the 
difference between, say, talking to a person about life philosophy (with 
conversation through email) and training a dog (with treats bought with money).

Right now, "developing" nations are seeing an internet dominated by the 
wealthy in those nations, (even the USA has aspects of this), and that is 
one reason the OLPC project (and predecessors) was so significant as an 
idea, to empower materially poorer people to have their needs and their 
views known globally and hopefully acted on in a positive way, even as they 
make their own unique contributions of insights, stories, and wisdom to the 
global commons. My writing on this in 2000, envisioning something like the OLPC:
   http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0754.html

 From what I wrote last year:
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible 
horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have 
remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational 
products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip 
of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading 
our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, 
are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a 
"post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social 
institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social 
institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will 
they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice 
like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?
"""

Mobile phones have proved to be more of the bigger concept though.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone

Though all these trends are interrelated.
   http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html

But, I can't know for sure how it will play out, because people may come up 
with unique solutions,
   http://www.blessedunrest.com/
or the whole thing may dissolve into global war as the social systems 
collapse because it becomes too hard to enforce artificial scarcity and the 
new models based on universal abundance are fought. James P. Hogan, Bucky 
Fuller, and Jacque Fresco have different, but related, takes on this I tend 
to lean towards as a techy person, but there are many others with 
alternative expectations and proposals (Frances Moore Lappé, Jane Jacobs, 
Ursula K. Le Guin, and so on) that will all be part of working out this 
issue of "accessibility" of the fruits of the means of production and global 
capital of various sorts (or solar-system-wide capital, eventually).

Of course, another complexity is that many do not believe in the potential 
for global abundance, thus justifying creating more artificial scarcity and 
fighting over that perceived scarcity, etc..
   "A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd?hl=en

And there are likely those very few who do understand the potential for 
abundance, but fight it with everything they have got to maintain a 
pyramidal society where they are either on top or "wannabee".
   http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
   http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47

I fictionally implied something like that back in 2003 when doing a tiny 
little bit along with many others to prevent the Iraq war:
   "The Lion Memo [With apologies to C.S. Lewis & The Screwtape Letters]"
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-lion-memo.html

Or, as has been said to be an ancient Chinese curse, it seems we live in:
   "Interesting times". :-(

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/