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Internet.org: Altruistic, Or the Ultimate In Cynicism?
Nerval's Lobster writes with one take on an effort to "make Internet access available to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected": "In conjunction with a variety of partners (including Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung), Facebook is launching Internet.org, which will try to make Internet access more affordable to more people. The partnership will also work on ways to lower the amount of data necessary to power most apps and Internet experiences, which could help people in areas with poor connectivity access online services, and devise incentives for businesses and manufacturers to offer customers more affordable access. Why would Facebook and its partners want to connect another 5 billion people to the Internet? Sure, there are altruistic reasons — people online can access information that will improve or even save their lives. But for Facebook, more people online equals more ad revenue, which equals more profit. Social networking in the developed world is reaching a saturation point, with a significant percentage of the population already on one (or more) social networks; only by expanding into developing nations can Facebook and its ilk maintain the growth rates that Wall Street demands. In a similar vein, building devices and services accessible via weaker Internet connections would open up a whole new customer base for the app developers and manufacturers of the world. In theory, Internet.org plans on enlisting a variety of nonprofits and 'experts' to help in its effort; but the initial announcement only lists for-profit companies among its constituency. NGOs, academics and the aforementioned experts will apparently arrive 'over time.' So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?"
As much as I hate to admit it, for once Bill Gates is right. People who lack enough decent food or sanitation, and suffer from chronic diseases and lack of even the most rudimentary health care, have things they need more than the Internet.
Yours,
The NSA.
It's a common fallacy that anything a corporation does that is profitable is necessarily evil. Corporations have no sense of ethics - their actions can have good or bad results, but they don't act with the intention of being good or evil.
If Facebook starts providing free Internet access to Bumblefuck Nowhere and makes ad profit, but the Internet access is unrestricted and can be used for anything, that's a win-win situation.
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If you teach a kid to fish, he can eat cholera infested fish for the day. If you teach a kid to program, he can get himself a sub-minimum wage outsourced job from the other side of the world and still make more than his entire village.
Really? So no more jQuery, no more Javascript libraries of which only 5% of the functions are used? No more 100KB+ JPEG photos and no more bloated HTML code?
Call me cynical but these days it's almost a miracle to find a web page which totals less than 100KB.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Just think of the possibilities if these folks had access to vast areas of human knowledge, including engineering, medicine, philosophy, resource management... but they'd probably watch cat videos.
I firmly believe that internet access is a human right, in many places sought out before running water. Its potential enable mass communication, and information sharing is unparallel.
The problems with mass internet in the last 5-7 years have been the efforts to restrict it. Blocking server traffic, locking down phone and tablet OSs, and strictly screening the software that one gets to use on a new computer platform. The attempt is to lock it into an infotainmaint platform strictly regulated by a handful of content producers, and keep people from producing their own messages, something that has the potential to be a game changer in social, economic, and political fields.(as the printing press has done).
It is essential for a free web, that with proflieration of the internet, and the bridge over the digital divide add two imporant measures:
1. Root Access. Everyone who "owns" or has exclusive use of a computer shall have root access, to mean administrator, and access over the entire operating system. There shall be nothing reserved that a manufacturer, technician, or operator to have more privledge than a machine owner. If computers are being held in common, everyone should have the right to root access on at least one general purpose computer.
2. Right to a general purpose computer/information system. For all intents and purposes, everyone has the right to a turring complete, general purpose computer access, with root access and internet capable. For this measure, no computer will be considered General Purpose, unless it is self-hosting, normally self hosted, and self-hosting development tools are reasonably available to the user.(Right to develop)
3. Net Neutrality will be observed. No port, nor content filtering will be done, peroid, and the right to run a server or client will be preserved across all links. No special treatment of any packets.
4. Speed. Herein year 2013, it is not unreasonable to set the minimum unit of speed at one unit of internet, 3 megabyte(long)/s in both dirrections. By 2030, this should be 30 MB/s
I'm not sure why we need to split the entire world into a series of false dichotomies. Couldn't they be altruistic and at the same time motivated by profit? What is the point of the constant adversarial split for every stupid little issue? Is Slashdot interested in news for nerds for the purpose of enlightening its user base or is it simply a money hungry capitalistic shill for the corporate powers that be?
Surely that's a joke?
Facebook is the web application that consumes the most bandwidth, CPU power and RAM ever devised.
Look at the populations without internet access - they're also in the population of the world that actually has to worry about starving to death, about persistent government corruption, filled with often violent superstitions and beliefs, lack of access to either medical supplies or trained medical care, completely unaware of farming or grazing techniques that were in use in the 15'th century or living literally, on piles of garbage.
You're really going to worry that these folks will potentially be uplifted in order to sell them a coke? You think they would feel taken advantage of because they can now buy a coke?
Frankly, the way in which we have treated those in the underdeveloped countries should have been made criminal. We should have focused on education with the end goal of a self-sustaining culture. Instead of education, we've provided bibles. Instead of medical training, we've taught them that condoms are evil and vaccines are just tricks by white men to infect them with aids. Instead of expert guidance, GMO crops, fertilizer and pesticides, and machinery to cultivate crops, we've given them food packets. Instead of training them to be doctors, surgeons, nurses, mechanics, lawyers, programmers, architects, - anything really - we have made sure that their death rates go down - especially childbirth, that their average age increases, and we do it all with supplies and techniques that they cannot replicate, and provide them no salable or productive skills in the meanwhile.
What we have done is vastly inflated the problem - by themselves, a poor balance was established, but now we have a massive dependent population that lacks the skills and resources required to support themselves in a reasonable way. In effect, we have traded a few thousand lives for a few million and multiplied the net total suffering in the world.
Outside of fantastic natural resources (like oil, that'd help a lot!), the only realistic way to fix this problem is with abundant education, and right now, the easiest way to do that is via the internet. You don't even need real guidance. Sugata Mitra has shown that just plugging in a computer into a wall of a rural village results in children teaching themselves english and learning all on their own., and it continued when he gave them internet access.
Henry Ford came up with the idea that by paying good wages and providing other benefits, his workers could become his customers. This idea is nothing new. It's impressive that with the myopic focus in the economy today on quarterly or less results, that anyone can assume that this is really capitalistic grab for customers 2 or 3 generations down the road - that's miles adrift in a sea of absurdity - but even if it is, so what? If that's a motivation that results in these people living longer, healthier, productive, HAPPIER lives, should it matter that someone down the line also wants to make a buck?
Before you think too much, realize that if you're reading this, YOU are probably already in that 'exploited' group, if that's what you want to envision it as.
[Lots of Citations Needed]
It's interesting to watch the timeline in Internet Archive. The website has hosted various content over years. The latest snapshots seem to show some kind of tongue-in-the-cheek website with pictures of scenery in Europe where "internet" is being carried by boats and cable cars (the cables are lubricated using pork fat).
IOW, they want a larger base of people who have fewer rights and who can't easily sue, upon which to experiment with more sophisticated tracking methods. Getting an identifying code from your phone shouldn't be too hard, after all - linking that to the facebook account logged into with the phone allows facebook to then link to what ever other sites you visit (again with your phone serial number). Notice the phone chip manufacturers on the list? Between Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung...what portion of the cell phone chip market is that? If the US gov would be interested in stopping a thing, they still couldn't - not when it's not happening here. But with the recent happenings here and in Europe, we know our "first world" governments are doing quite the opposite of such privacy and anti-tracking interests...
Of course Capitalism is a zero-sum game, if it looks like it isn't you just haven't accounted for everything and externalised some costs somewhere in the system.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Keep in mind our population experiences steady linear growth, so expecting the economy to keep pace with that is not unreasonable nor a ponzi scheme. When your resources are increasing it is healthy for your economy to increase too.
Wherein is the conflict between the two? This is basic Adam Smith economics. Businesses make money by providing goods and services that people want. There is no altruism involved - all businessmen are in business to make a profit. But by making a profit in a fair and open market, where all have a chance to compete, they make the comfortable rich world we live in.
Yes, Facebook makes money from us. If we have access to the internet, we can choose to use Facebook, with its advantages and disadvantages, or leave it. If we don't have internet access, we don't have that choice.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Interesting contrast between Facebook and Google here - Facebook wants to organize all these companies and NGOs (each of which will have an agenda), where Google says (with Project Loon, http://www.google.com/loon/), let's just get them access and not try to overprescribe how it evolves or what they do with it - continuing with their "a rising tide lifts all boats", abundance mentality.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Can you justify this? Do you feel that capital structures like railways and roads add nothing to the value of production? Would the world be just as productive if all the capital goods - houses, road, cars, factories, the internet - were destroyed?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Sure. Don't think about it. Perpetual Growth in a closed system (like say a planet) is impossible.
It doesn't need a citation. It is self evident.
"So is this effort really charitable, or a cynical attempt to break into new markets?"
Are the Salvation Army's thrift stores really charitable, or a cynical attempt to fund proselytizing of their particular version of Christianity?
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Produce TVs instead of fridges. Who cares if they can eat, as long as we can tell them what to think!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Of course Capitalism is a zero-sum game, if it looks like it isn't you just haven't accounted for everything and externalised some costs somewhere in the system.
Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. Available resources may be zero-sum, but how they are allocated is not. If I have some food, but I'm bored rather than hungry, and you're hungry but have only a non-edible DVD, we both benefit from swapping the food and the movie. A different allocation of the same resources results in a net gain, with no externalized costs.
Capitalism is all about allocating resources to where they can do the most good through a mass of individual trades, each of which is expected—by those directly involved, who have the most at stake—to result in a net benefit without externalities.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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At it's most basic, Capitalism is simply one method for allocating goods and services. In effect raw materials and the work needed to changes those raw materials into something else.
Since both raw materials and work are finite how can Capitalism be anything other than a zero sum?
At best you can limit the frame of reference to trades inside a certain economic area or time frame or both, but then you are just externalising the raw materials coming from outside the area or outside of the timeframe (by removing a future person the opportunatity to make use of that raw material).
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
People can do good for reasons of pure self interest. The goodness of the act is not diminished by the motivation.
would this be best done by a bunch of guys driving out and building a MESH or by flying a C-5 galaxy with a Mobile Com station (and a couple companies of "civilian contractors" to help guard the stuff) out to key locations??
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I have no study to justify my theory, but I wouldn't be at all shocked if population-based economic growth rates in the third world are a number of percentage points behind what the typical equity analyst expects in a corporate earnings forecast.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Providing cheaper internet access is helpful but there is a lot more to fixing the 3rd world that I don't really understand. The average person makes about $1/hr. I've reached out to a few people to see if I can teach them software QA. Everyone I've spoken to seems really excited about making 10+ times what they currently make. But so far no one I've approached has actually made an effort to learn and do the work. I am living here because I'm very curious to learn why it is so hard to convince someone who makes $1/hr to put in the effort to make $10+/hr. Especially when it requires them to work less than they currently do. The work week here is 6 days and 10hrs/day (only 8 hrs is paid, they get a 2 hour break). 25% of the worker's wages are typically spent getting to work. I get the impression that "thinking" is perceived to be harder than manual labor.
After he distributes the rings to nokia, qualcomm, samsung et al, he will keep the one that will make him invisible for the NSA.
Since both raw materials and work are finite how can Capitalism be anything other than a zero sum?
That's true if you assume that technology and methods of organization can't be improved. Somehow though, with the same availability of raw materials (actually far less per capita) and the same amount of potential work per capita, we have a higher standard of living than they did in the Stone Age, or for that matter the first half of the 20th century.
P.S. Although I doubt you intended to, you're using the same assumptions that economists use when advocating comparative advantage and the wonders of free trade.
No.
Of course Capitalism is a zero-sum game, if it looks like it isn't you just haven't accounted for everything and externalised some costs somewhere in the system.
I'm no expert in economics or zero-sum games, but doesn't the fact that money can be spent more than once support that it is not necessarily zero-sum game?
I realise that summaries, by definition, miss some information but why edit out two of the six partners? Mediatek has a market cap of c.$15bn and Ericsson $40bn. Not exactly small players in this space.
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
I disagree. Capitalism is any accumulation of value intended to further future production - investing in tools rather than end products. You can have state capitalism, or free market capitalism.
And your assumption appears to be that the value of something is entirely composed of the value of the materials that make it up. Two cooks who take the same materials, but one produces a burned unsavoury mess and the other produces a gourmet dish, have in your book produced the same value. I strongly disagree: the same raw materials can be deployed in very different ways, and these represent value added. Such value added can come from capitalism (though it can come from other sources).
The Lump of Labour and the Lump of Materials models are deep fallacies. Organising both people and materials efficiently and effectively adds value. Free market capitalism is not the only method of performing such organisation, but it has shown itself to be a very effective one. It most definitely adds value. Of course, any other organising system of equal competence would add the same value, and capitalism can also, like other systems, subtract value when operating badly.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Yes, people need to "get out of their way" so they can find their own way to make money, but that requires a few basics from society: a half-decent not totally corrupt government, an economy not entirely controlled by monopolistic rentiers, crime that isn't the dominant economic sector, some level of public health (e.g. screens on the outhouse), and some basic education and communication with other places. An infrastructure that allows reasonable transport of people and goods helps too.
Despite what we now see as the primitive living conditions of your grandparents, those are things that they and their descendants had.
Stop Nepalese soldiers from pooping in the rivers in Haiti first.
50% of all the deaths on the planet are attributable to dirty water. Fix that first.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
" By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it. "
What's next, free zynga credits to entice couples to have new users... err babies?
Gapminder.Org is a GREAT site for seeing how things have improved for the entire world's population over the past 200 years. Dozens if not hundreds of variables are available for plotting. If you let the default graph of life expectancy over income per person play out, you'll see that every country has seen vast improvements over that span.
The Sub-Saharan African countries in particular didn't really see much improvement until the end of WWII, but since then the average life expectancy has gone from around 30 to the mid 50s and lower 60s. Cape Verde is all the way up to 75 years.
Income per person has increased in some cases by more then a couple orders of magnitude. Even the poorest nations have seen at least some growth in income.
One of the best ways to affect increased income is to increase education. Higher literacy rates translates directly to the ability to learn new skills. Availability of educational resources that are available over the Internet therefore directly impact people's ability to earn more, which directly impacts their ability to feed their families.
While I'm not a devout Christian by any means, this whole debate boils down to that simple proverb: "Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
Some people think if it isn't altruistic, then it must be evil and exploitative.
The concept of win-win just doesn't register.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Their gigantic video uses a significantly long (and well spoken) sound byte from a speech by John F. Kennedy. Normally when you do something like that you mention the name of the speaker somewhere—at the very least out of respect. WTF?!
You can trust that these companies have a profit motive to bring electricity & internet out there, so you can understand their path. It clearly has parallels to altruistic behavior for now, so lets enjoy those parallels while we know why they exist (because we understand their mindset).
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Having self-serving motives is not cynical. Suspecting people of having self-serving motives is cynical.
Yes; then and only then can the sale of Microsoft Office suites begin!
I kid (mostly), but even if for self-serving interests, he's done a helluva lot more for the world with his filthy lucre than Steve Jobs ever bothered with (thus his death at the just hands of Karma).
Maybe they should focus on fixing the extremely broke internet infrastructure we have here in the US, Both our internet speeds AND prices are much worse than many other countries. Add that to the fact there are still alot of people in the US who's only available internet is dial up, Basic DSL or satellite internet and that just shows how messed up our own infrastructure is. So before they go off and try to fix the rest of the worlds internet problems maybe they should tackle a smaller project, see if they can help provide both good AND affordable internet to more people in this country because if they cant even get their own counties overpriced internet sorted out how can they solve every one else's internet issues. I'm sorry but if your in a country that has people being charged $30 for crappy quality basic DSL I don't think you are in a position to try and help provide FREE internet for billions of people that have none.
If you think of it like a Venn Diagram, Earth is this huge great circle... impossibly large to comprehend. And that represents all the raw materials which are in the Earth.
The technology we have to extract those resources economically is a much smaller circle inside that that giant circle.
Improvements in technology increase the size of the little circle but the large circle stays the same size. You haven't stopped Capitalism from being a zero-sum game, all you have done is increased the sum available to us at that point in time.
Moving off world for our resources makes that impossibly large circle bigger, but its still finite.
I'm not saying the system is about to fall over any time soon, but the idea of continuous grow for ever, which is what Capitalism needs to survive is clearly ridiculous and eventually physics catch up with us.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
"When you help others, you can't help helping yourself!" -The Money Song, Avenue Q
Yes, Google benefits. The point is, they aren't worried about if others do as well - get people connected, FTW (and some of that win is Google's, sure). That's abundance thinking. FB, on the other hand, may very well be focusing on things that will specifically put more people on their social network, without driving general capability.(a lower-data format that they will dovetail with their development efforts for a low-bandwidth client).
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Yeah right, because Europe and USA didn't developed without internet in the 1800s and 1900s.
I would like to add that actually the interweb now is doing a favor to the corrupt governments, because now we think that our wild rage in a blog and a couple of night in zuccotti park can change something, while the old way of doing things of, let say, the civil rights movement where far more effective because people were more resilient and less prone to stop the protest to update their bookface profile.
I think the AC is spot on, Internet practically didn't exist to most people until the 1990s. That you took two seconds out of your day to "like" something is a lot less impressive than anyone willing to spend time and effort to show that this is really, really important to them. That the Internet takes away the effort also tends to take away the impact.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Your example describes something known as barter which has, for the purpose of zero-sum game discussion, nothing to do with capitalism.
On the contrary, private ownership of property and unhindered, voluntary trade between individuals, particularly in regard to capital goods, is pretty much all there is to capitalism. Those are the only preconditions; if you can barter without third-party interference or the threat of being deprived of your property by force, a capitalistic economy will inevitably develop. My example was intentionally trivial, but the principle applies equally well to trade in land, machinery, labor, or any other kind of good.
Capitalism can be distinguished from other economic systems in that it has a built-in reward for efficiently accumulating, maintaining, and utilizing capital goods, which in turn increase the value of other goods. Other economic systems deal with capital, of course; you can't have a serious economy without it. However, they aren't nearly as good at it. Not only are there issues with central planning in general, but they lack the incentives to find the most efficient allocation which a private owner would have, and are also hampered by competing political goals. Public ownership of the means of production basically just means that after a time, there won't be any means of production, because whatever capital you started with will be mismanaged and consumed by people who lack either the necessary talents and/or skills or a personal stake in the outcome.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat