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Bill Gates: Internet Will Not Save the World
quantr points out an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about setting priorities for making a difference in the world. Quoting:
"The internet is not going to save the world, says the Microsoft co-founder, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley's tech billionaires believe. But eradicating disease just might. Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity's most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. 'I certainly love the IT thing,' he says. 'But when we want to improve lives, you've got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.' These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world's unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called 'one of the greatest challenges of our generation.' But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's second-richest man does not hide his irritation: 'As a priority? It's a joke.'"
It's a very obvious capitalistic endeavor.
Every person that dies is one less customer. You don't have to be Internet connected to be a Microsoft customer.
Facebook, on the other hand, requires Internet connectivity. Every person that doesn't have Internet service is an untapped customer.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
and just to add a little more, Bill is part of the nation-wide movement to squash open-to-all public schooling in favor of a selective, segregated, for-profit charter and private systems. That's great for the lucky kids who have parents with the money and/or contacts to get them educated but for the majority of our youth that means they're screwed. It's also a long-term plan that's guaranteed to be non-sustainable. As for Bill and Melinda's much touted health projects, it's a massive cash dump for Big Pharma and right-wing contractors like KBR who benefit from exclusive bidding laws that their own lobbyists pushed through Congress.