Monthly Archive for December, 2010

From Charli Carpenter, Lawyers, Guns, and Money

I hope most of you following the Wikileaks story read Aaron Bady’s essay at zunguzungu last week, in which he examines two early essays attributed to Julian Assange and provides his explanation of Assange’s broader theory. It’s a sophisticated read with at last glance 567 comments – the sort of blog post political theorists will (or should) assign to their graduate classes.

I also think Bady makes some mistakes in his interpretation of Assange’s essays – or at least glosses over some of the more disturbing implications in his zeal to paint Assange as smarter and less objectionable than might be assumed by those not familiar with his writings.

Let’s begin with what Robert Baird at 3QD argues is the central insight of Bady’s essay: “the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes ‘information wants to be free’ as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland.”

In Bady’s words:

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.

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From Jon Ostrower in Flightglobal/Blogs:

Today is December 17, 2010, 107 years after  Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight at the beaches of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Needless to say, a lot has happened since then. Just 65 years after that first flight, which saw Orville at the controls of the 1903 Wright Flyer, the maiden sortie could have been accomplished in the span of the wings of the Boeing 747-100.

The Wright Flyer, or at least the nearest replica to the aircraft, is enshrined at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum here in Washington, DC. The aircraft, in fact, did not arrive at the museum until December 1948, at the conclusion of a decades-long feud between the Wrights and the Smithsonian surrounding the brothers’ claim of being the true inventors of the airplane.

Aviation is an afterthought for most in the industrialized world, we transit seamlessly from one distant point to another thinking only of the destination or origin. The duration of our journeys are slashed by days, weeks, months, perhaps even years from their original attempt. Today, we are nagged by airport security, bad food, tight economy seats and what we perceive to be long waits. I’ll allow comedian Louis CK to put it all in context.

Happy Birthday, Aviation, you don’t look a day over 100.

Aviation is an afterthought for most in the industrialized world, we transit seamlessly from one distant point to another thinking only of the destination or origin. The duration of our journeys are slashed by days, weeks, months, perhaps even years from their original attempt. Today, we are nagged by airport security, bad food, tight economy seats and what we perceive to be long waits. I’ll allow comedian Louis CK to put it all in context.

Happy Birthday, Aviation, you don’t look a day over 100.

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From Kentaro Toyama, Boston Review

A ten-year-old boy named Dhyaneshwar looked up for approval after carefully typing the word “Alaska” into a PC.

“Bahut acchaa!” I cheered—“very good.”

It was April, 2004, and I was visiting a “telecenter” in the tiny village of Retawadi, three hours from Mumbai. The small, dirt-floored room, lit only by an open aluminum doorway, was bare except for a desk, a chair, a PC, an inverter, and a large tractor battery, which powered the PC when grid electricity was unavailable. Outside, a humped cow chewed on dry stalks, and a goat bleated feebly.

As I encouraged the boy, I wondered about the tradeoff his parents had made in order to pay for a typing tutor. Their son was learning to write words he’d never use, in a language he didn’t speak. According to the telecenter’s owner, Dhyaneshwar’s parents paid a hundred rupees—about $2.20—a month for a couple hours of lessons each week. That may not sound like much, but in Retawadi, it’s twice as much as full-time tuition in a private school.

Such was my introduction to the young field of ICT4D, or Information and Communication Technologies for Development. The goal of ICT4D is to apply the power of recent technologies—particularly the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the Internet—to alleviate the problems of global poverty. ICT4D sprouted from two intersecting trends: the emergence of an international-development community eager for novel solutions to nearly intractable socioeconomic challenges; and the expansion of a brashly successful technology industry into emerging markets and philanthropy.

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