Hundred dollar laptop--lookout, world!
A Night In Tunisia
for release 11-20-05
Washington D.C.
The Digital Revolution and the proliferation of the internet is changing the way the world communicates, does business, conducts education and commerce and politics. Just a decade ago, if I wanted to do research on any subject, I would physically have to go to a library, spend hours wading through card catalogues and periodic digests and the Dewey fucking decimal system. Now that same information is at my fingertips in seconds thanks to the internet and Google.
The internet has changed the whole process of political dissent and given new meaning to the term 'grassroots.' Howard Dean demonstrated this in the Democratic primaries in 2004. He raised money one click at a time. Muslim extremists make liberal use of the internet and protesters and anarchists of every stripe use the net to organize.
The last decade has been a giddy time on the new frontier in cyberworld. We have seen the appearance of mega money making companies with such unlikely names as Yahoo! and Google and Napster and Amazon and Microsoft (which I thought was only a term I used to describe my penis). We have witnessed the dotcom boom and the dotcom bust and a feeding frenzy of big fish eating little fish and sometimes even little fish eating big fish. It's a whole new world of free pornography and music and movies and interactive everything, from dating to gambling to recipes.
I admit that I was intoxicated with the idea of this new frontier. Here was the Wild West at my fingertips. I saw a new boldness and vitality that was missing in the existing mass media. There were wide open spaces and everything was free and the notion that you could talk back as well as simply being talked to was a thrill to my Jeffersonian nature. I saw it as a golden time, a Camelot of information.
But all good things come to an end. The Wild West is inevitably civilized. First you get laws and sheriffs and schoolteachers and soon the wide open spaces become housing developments and strip malls. Before you know it Wal-Mart has parking lots where the prairie dogs used to run. The same is true of the internet.
Last week the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society convened in, of all places, Tunisia. Tunisia does not have a glowing record when it comes to freedom of information. In fact Tunisian bloggers with anti-government views are routinely gathered into the trunks of gestapo automobiles in the middle of the night and imprisoned or tortured. Tunisia also uses American made software systems to block access to web sites which are critical of government policy.
But Tunisia is not the only country whose government is panicked about the free flow of information. Egypt and Iran and Syria and most importantly China are all using American made control systems from Cisco and Yahoo and Microsoft and Google to monitor and block internet traffic in their countries. How long do you think it will be before BushCo will be arresting bloggers under the Patriot Act and whisking them off by private jet to Afghanistan for questioning?
I've often said that the internet is built for crime. Every con man and anonymous snake oil salesman can pull up his wagon. But it's also built for control. When you think about it, the internet is one of the most controllable mediums of communication in the history of man. Every keystroke is recorded somewhere, on your hard drive or on some server that you don't know where the hell it is. Be careful what you type.
The Poet's Eye sees that the information superhighway is fast becoming a toll road and we will all need to watch for the speed cops that are positioning themselves on the back side of every hill. Enjoy it while you can, like a wild Night in Tunisia.
The stars are aglow in the heavens
But only the wise understand
That shining at night in tunisia
They guide you through the desert sand
Words fail, to tell a tale
Too exotic to be told
Each night’s a deeper night
In a world, ages old
---Ella Fitzgerald lyrics to A Night in Tunisia
Lrod version of A Night in Tunisia by Dizzy Gillespie
