Signal Boost

Yesterday morning I was sitting at the table reading a Usenet group. As a kid, Usenet scared me. It was more involved than typing URLs into Netscape. There was a complicated, or seemingly complicated, system of not just finding Usenet groups, but navigating the connections between them and your connection. Plus, I was too scared to ask anyone for help. I didn’t want to look like an idiot, which I certainly felt like in asking things that people talked about as though they were basic. But somehow, recently, I ended up on a Usenet group. Subscribing and connecting to it proved to be so simple I hadn’t even realized its true nature until sometime after the fact. The conversation I was reading was about open internet.

Molly came into the kitchen. As I am one to do, I began talking to her about the conversation.

I told her about a part of the discussion where the idea of techie versus non-techie definitions came up. The implication being definitions of “open web” for tech people and those not in technical fields. She got angry.

“This dichotomy,” she said “is what created things like the iPad.”

She doesn’t like the iPad.

Molly has a complaint about culture around technology. Technology is divided into two categories: there is technology for techies and technology for non-techies. “So easy even your mom can use it,” she said. I think this divide is bad for several reasons, such as limiting the potential of someone to start batting for the other team, for example, but really it perpetuates an idea that technology is somehow magical.

Once we got past that we began talking about the history of the internet. It wasn’t created as this free open thing. It was created, in some way, by DARPA. Go DARPA! I love the internet, so I think it’s spiffy that they, in some small way, began networking computers together to share information. However, in the internet there’s been a tradition of change and innovation. Some people associated with universities began playing around on a fledgling, proto-version of the internet. It was open to people with computers and phone lines. Schools got computers and phone lines. Students were connected. Businesses. Libraries. Molly’s cell phone connects to the internet.

“The internet is for Westerners,” she said. “It’d be nice if it was for everyone.”

“But it isn’t,” we finished together.

This is a lot more personal than most of the posts so far–in the sense that it almost exclusively talks about me. Even worse, the other person present is also named Molly. I’ve traveled a bit. I talk about this a fair amount, but I just came back from being abroad for work. It’s hard to separate these experience from me because I feel as though they are fairly quintessential to who I am.

When I was living in Mongolia, I talked to a friend of mine actively involved in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project. He’d said to me that there was uncertainty about the effectiveness of the laptops outside of the population centers. About one third of the population there lives in the capital city. The average population density of Mongolia is around one person per square kilometer. In some places it’s less than half a person per square kilometer. The internet was not only not designed for a significant part of the Mongolian population, it’s completely out of their reach.

This is not just true from a functional level, but from a linguistic one as well. The internet, much like New York City, is divided into regions where people speak, predominantly, a single language. Sometimes these regions overlap in location, but the content rarely matches up. There are limits on interactions. The internet, as it stands now, is for Westerners. It is a medium that can connect the world–I know this firsthand claiming friendships in countries I’ve never visited–but it being able to do something and doing it are the same thing.

It’s a lot like the iPad. The Dev Team, a group of nerds who do these things, hacked an iPad. They changed the operating system. This may or may not directly violate the Terms of Service (TOS), meaning changing their iPad could have been illegal. Yes, they could change things–similarly to how on the internet some people can connect–but it’s not accessible. In some places you can get the internet, but not with the same accessibility we can in America (and other Western countries) by going to a library. Or San Francisco.

One of the struggles in defining open web is trying to have ideals and truth match up in language. It’s great to be able to say things like “The internet is a human right,” but it’s not. It’s a privilege. We can say it should be, but that’s not as catchy. Saying that it embodies the ideal of “one world, one internet” is possibly true, but sure leaves a lot of people out. What I see is a struggle to say, simply, “people have rights to access and expression, and the internet is the place to fully actualize these rights.” To me, that’s what open web is about. It’s about having a place to explore the joys, and experiences, certain freedoms give us. Being able to connect to the internet is a privilege, but what people do there is a right. I think opening up the internet, demysticizing how it works, ensuring and protecting the same first amendment rights that Americans have in the physical world, not limiting access, and not disclosing information about what people do on the internet is necessary.