It is a complex and frightening web we have woven around our world. It seems both too strong and too fragile and has also become too indispensable for the modern world. Will it sweep away the chance of autocracy and censorship? Will it remain a Western, industrialized artifact or be taken over by the developing world that is so quickly, astonishingly quickly, absorbing it and learning to rely on it. Here in Mexico, it seems like the status of telephones when we came here ten years ago. The wiring of America pretty much completed in the 1930s and after the War in the U.S. did not happen in Mexico. In 1996, we arrived and were surprised to find the cell phone had leaped into dominance. The cell phone is changing the nature of many less-developed societies. Here, we have phone poles now and phones in the house as well as broadband service (about four months ago). The world is being wired now and becoming more wireless. We found some villages well into the backcountry near the Guatemalan, Belize borders where a pole held a public cell phone with a solar panel at the pole-top. Hello, Central. The centers of little villages change. Powerful cities change. The globe sports this new spiderweb and it remains to be seen what the spider will bring with it.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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Article comments
1 - Bliffle
Naaah. As a user of the internet (originally called ARPA when it was just mimeographed synopses and abstracts of various grad student papers mailed among grad schools), and a technical implementor of several proprietary networks such as IBM SNA and DECnet, I'm here to tell you that circumvention of attempts to control and stifle "internet" activity are doomed.
Why? Because the underlying technology is decentralized. Anyone with primitive internet TCP/IP on their PC is capable of hooking into an underground secure network through a shift-register modulated spread spectrum broadcast system which is not only data secure but undetectable! All one needs is a simple modulator/demodulator for an RF network that could, for example, exploit the 2.4ghz cordless phone band. Childs play.
2 - Deano
Ummmm...Wow. Is dilithim involved? Anywhere?