Most people are not insane. They want to make a living, have a healthy
family, better themselves, and have a bit of time left over to laugh
with their friends. It is rare that an overly agressive attitude to
others cannot be traced to a genuine fear, however unfounded, that
those others threaten these simple, honest desires we have in life.
The problem we have as a species is not so much that when scared and
confused and ignorant, people will be over-cautious of their own
interests at the possible expense of others, after all anyone who
takes the reverse attitude is simply less likely to survive. The real
problem is the amount of misinformed or simply uninformed views that
cause people to either become aggressive, or rally around those who
seem to have all the characteristics of an authority, and tell them
that aggression is what is needed.
While there will always be people who are at heart tyrants, a small
portion of the population in any society that does not possess the
natural default concern for their fellow humans, that most of us take
for granted; it is important to remember that these unfortunate freaks
are a small minority. More common are those which have been driven to
fear the society they live in, or portions of it because they perceive
it as harmful or threatening to their interests.
The way to both empower and pacify people is to educate them, and
while one way this can be done is formally within special
institutions, the fact is that people are naturally inclined to
educate themselves.
It is easy to scoff at this remark in first world countries where we
are forced into socialised public-education for 6 hours a day, and
bombarded constantly in the various media with political arguments
that we disagree with and know that a large section of the population
buy in to. We see people avoiding educating themselves, but only
because the amount of education provided to us, is at an early age,
when we do not know much better, far more than we would pursue on our
own.
But a person forced in to public speaking for hours a day every day
from an age well before they could understand the context of what they
were doing, would not appreciate what it's like to be denied the
ability or the forum to express their views. They would not have much
pity for those in countries where free speech is only a dream, since
speaking your mind is boring and too much work anyway. Such apathy
would be hard to understand for the oppressed masses who want to speak
out against their government, but lack even this basic level of
freedom that we in the first world feel entitled to and take for
granted.
Similarly, there are requirements for self-education, which we may be
tired of, spoiled as we are, but which much of the world lacks, and
would desperately like to have. If, in such a society, you increase
access to information relevant to the citizens, and the freedom to
debate it with their neighbours, those of the inclination to learn,
and those of the inclination to teach, will not waste the
opportunities afforded to them, and the intellectual enrichment will
ripple through the rest of the nation.
The internet provides both these things in spades. It increases the
access because it is easily the cheapest most efficient text-delivery
system so far invented, able to handle a countless transactions from
decentralised, constantly increasing sources. The freedom because it
is hard to police and relatively easy to achieve a practical degree of
anonymity.
Even in nations that try hard to tightly regulate the flow of
information, and have some measure of success on the internet, it is
still the medium that provides the biggest, most troublesome challenge
to this totalitarian style of education. New web sites must constantly
be added to ban lists, or existing approved ones constantly reviewed
for changes that need to be judged as to their acceptability.
Newspapers, television and radio in these same countries can hardly be
said to hold a candle to the power of the internet in freeing the
masses from state-imposed ignorance. In further testament to humans'
burning need for practical kinds of enlightment, citizens of such
countries are constantly finding new ways to circumvent any attempt at
cyber-censorship.
Yes a lot of the internet is used for porn, no doubt. But a lot of
newspapers are over-hyped gossip; this does not address the question
of whether the printed word, and more importantly *access* to the
printed word, both in its production and its consumption; is good for
a society. The level of education and practical information transfer
that the printed word has allowed for us, can hardly be dismissed by
the amount of apparent crap that people like to write down. Similarly
the abundant benefits that the internet provides better than any
current alternative, do not themselves find any weakness in other uses
that many dismiss as, at best, a waste of time.
The internet is one of the few ways to start making dents in the
world's problems, that most governments and citizens alike can agree
on, because its economic benefits are also clear, profound, and, for
the most part, not seriously disputed. But more needs to be done,
charitable individuals looking to help strangers on the other side of
the world, must take internet access as seriously as water-pumps and
food-rashions. Access to food and water could save someones life who
would otherwise die very shortly, and this urgency can not be
dismissed, but it is completely unrealistic to think the greedy first
world is suddenly going to turn around and use their massive wealth to
stop the counter on preventable deaths from malnutrition or treatable
diseases.
It is not misguided to donate things which can prevent short term
deaths that are otherwise a sure thing, but it is misguided to think
that this should be the first and only priority, when one knows that
many of these deaths are going to happen, whatever you the individual
does about it right now.
Internet computers, the infrastructure to connect them, and the
software to run them, are a kind of charity that accumulates rather
than getting consumed, and ability to communicate instantly, as well
as collaborate on any scale imaginable, from local to international;
is a vital part in any long term strategy to modernise and enrich a
village, or a country. A computer that is embarrassingly old and slow
in the first world, with a fresh install of a free operating system,
is in fact no slower than the day it was bought, and could last for
years as a basic but amply functional internet terminal, in any
village with at least one phone line.
Ordinary citizens too need to realise that the educational and
economic benefits of increased net access, make a nation richer, and
more fit more often for mutually beneficial trade of goods, services,
ideas and technologies.
The vast supply of weird and geeky early-adopters who seem to have a
love for technical innovation that goes beyond any real usefulness of
the product, even beyond the obvious practicality of the internet;
should not dissuade people from seeing that this is far more historic
and empowering an invention than even the printing press, and is much
cheaper to bring to the masses. No level of access will magically
transform the world into a painless utopia, or destroy imbalance and
injustice, but societies that have it would never give it up.
Of course far from just a revolution in the distribution of the
written word, this machine facilitates more efficient distribution of
goods, and is tearing down the costs of traditional media, with voice
calls and tv shows, increasingly transmitted over the generalised
internet instead of each over their specialised delivery systems. No
country should leave the 20th century without it, and no charity that
fails to take it seriously should be taken seriously themselves. Any
government who neglects to provide it to their citizens, and neglects
to include it as part of their foreign aid strategy, can credibly
claim to be making their citizens wealthier, or their neighbours
healthier, or to be contributing to international trade.
A computer is largely a calculator and a typewriter, but put it online
and it is a radio, a newspaper, an encyclopedia, a television, a
bulletin board, a phone, a personal soap-box, a research collobaration
system, a means of political dissent, an international market, and a
library. In many of these capacities, it is cheaper than other, more
specialised systems, in all of them combined it is both an economic
and a moral failure, to spend anything more than the bare minimum on
supporting old ways of doing things.
If you can use it in your daily life in any of these capacities, but
are using slower and more expensive systems that have no benefit, even
in your own opinion, other than that you are used to them, then it
likely you are simply wasting money. If you want to help the
embarrassinly large number of poor people in our species, and neglect
to consider their network access, even, and perhaps especially in the
poorest of poor nations; then you are wasting your compassion and
good-will, which I think is far more serious.
If you're not really committed to charity but would like to help
others if you can do so by spending money on yourself, then get more
internet access that you need, and exploit every cool and useful thing
about it. This will increase economic demand, which increases
innovation and production, and will serve as an example when others
see the benefits of the higher-end connectivity, like broadband
wireless; and demand will further inrease. All this will ultimately
make technology that is a toy for some in the first world, more
affordable and widely considered in the third world where it an
indispensable tool for development, and making people's lives livable,
and free.
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