Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Network

Forget free markets or Marx. The real power behind these systems lies in the network.

Today's society is based on the master-slave mindset. Some humans work very little and gain much, while most work constantly and gain little or nothing. Warfare, psychological stress and violence result. This model is inherently unstable and must eventually collapse for humanity to reach spiritual equilibrium in a more fair and equitable global world. So let's break it down to the fundamentals.

The Global Citizens Movement demands three things for every human:

1) Health
2) Freedom
3) The Network


Health includes food, medicine and a clean environment. Freedoms encompass everything that does not harm another being, like freedom of expression, freedom to move freely across the earth, and the freedom to pursue your dreams.

The final demand of the Global Citizens Movement is access to the Network, which is an informal term for an efficient communication system linking millions of humans across the globe. This is currently most similar to the Internet, which allows anyone, anywhere, to access the full spectrum of human knowledge instantly and cheaply. The Network allows global citizens to create cheap business models, bypass middlemen and distributors, and most importantly, tap into limitless information. Have you ever heard someone observing a new gadget remark "what will they think of next?" Increase the pool of inventors by a few hundred million and see what they say then.

Take a big picture view of the planetary phase of civilization. In this new era, the real divide is between the urban and rural. Urban cities will have the easiest time transitioning into a global citizens movement since they already (usually) have better access to medicine, doctors, and internet connections. The real choke point, however, is the villages.

Rural villages across the world don't need dimly lit factories and call centers. They don't need to migrate into vast shantytowns in mega-cities. The point is, once the Network penetrates fully into the villages-- they won't have to. E-learning, online conferencing, telemedicine, direct-to-consumer agricultural sales, and a hundred thousand thousand similar possibilities are waiting for Network penetration. You could be born a farmer's son in rural Nepal and still study economics. That same young man could work for an international consulting firm, or publish microcredit analyses, or find the best prices and distributors for his father's harvest. He could do all this, and more, through the Network, since the Network destroys traditional barriers like distance and the accident of birthplace. It is a new planetary paradigm unfolding before our eyes.

This blog will focus on one highly important obstacle to the Global Citizens Movement-- the lack of universal network access-- and the ways we might bypass traditional, expensive and impractical ways to link villages with the internet.

Let's get connected.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you are right on the head... what is the best way to actually make network penetration increase in the third world and rural environments? you need more information and posts, keep it up

Anonymous said...

People should read this.

Valmiki the Younger said...

@Virginia--Thank you so much for the encouragement.

@Anonymous-- I don't claim to know the magic bullet for spreading network access, but it appears that the market is providing the infrastructure for mobile phone coverage all over the world. Looks as though the mobile phone may be our "global platform" for accessing the network.