Flutterby™! : Bill Moyers on the Digital Divide 2013-02-10 16:00:05.034807+00

Bill Moyers on the Digital Divide

2013-02-10 16:00:05.034807+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Getting it wrong: Bill Moyers interviews Susan Crawford: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair. I totally agree that U.S. Internet access is slow and costly, and that the monopolies haven't served us well, are continuing to not serve us well, and that they're playing with bundling issues to try to keep us from a truly connected person-to-person network in order to maintain the dominance of the centralized content providers.

However, this has the two big flaws of "social justice" and "digital divide" thinking. The whole "digital divide" fallacy has been mentioned previously on Flutterby:

(And many other times) In short, poor families keep doing poor family things, rich families do rich family things, the access to the tool doesn't change that.

But the other thing is that we have

SUSAN CRAWFORD: Well, here's the problem. For 19 million Americans, many in rural areas, you can't get access to a high speed connection at any price, it's just not there. ...

Yeah, this is the problem with subsidizing rural living: When we transfer money from the urban cores out to the rural areas, we're funding automobile culture. Just like when we build roads with income taxes rather than funding their construction and maintenance with use-based fees.

My impression on reading Agenda 21 was that because it was non-binding from some minor event, it became a "let's throw a bunch of stoned-hippy ideals that don't actually have any rational basis for becoming reality in here" sort of document. The only person taking it seriously is Glenn Beck, otherwise it's seen as something the Occupy folks might have dreamed up had they gotten an unlimited supply of weed.

I'd like to just see us stop perturbing the market so dramatically with the subsidies, or, given that we need to do something to change the economics of the rural poor so that they don't keep sucking us down, an understanding that the macro-economic effects of what we're doing aren't sustainable. We're incenting the middle-class to build suburbs rather than subsidizing the poor to help raise them from poverty.

And I mean "sustainable" simply in the economic sense of things, not in the agriculture or energy use or any of those other modern meanings.

Brining the rural to the urban could great, w/ Agenda 21. Agenda 21, would be a great idea, but too many UN-sponsored ideas have been deemed to "destroy our independence" from the Tea Party and therefor, die in the communities who would greatly benefit.