Folks, Please join us for the kick-off of the 550 Challenge at the New America Foundation from 3:30-5:00 on Friday, February 3, 2012.
Register via http://oti.newamerica.net/events/2012/550_challenge The 550 Challenge promotes extension of Internet access to include everyone on earth by the 550th anniversary of Gutenberg's death on February 3, 2018. http://vcxc.org/550/ The kick-off panel discussion will include Shalini Venturelli (American University), Rebecca MacKinnon, and John Perry Barlow. The event includes a book signing and networking session from 5:00-6:00 for Rebecca's new book "Consent of the Networked". The blog post below outlines the underlying motivation of the 550 Challenge. Regards, Dan .......................................... Daniel Berninger Founder, Voice Communication Exchange Committee e: [email protected] tel SD: +1.202.250.3838 SIP HD: [email protected] w: www.vcxc.org >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> (http://vcxc.org/blog.html) 550 Challenge: Extend Internet to Everyone on Earth by February 3, 2018 Daniel Berninger, founder, VCXC [email protected] The 550 Challenge asks what it would take to connect everyone on earth to the Internet by the 550th anniversary of Guttenberg's death - making the world borderless by February 3, 2018. The Internet provides a means to test the benefits of treating humanity as a continuous global fabric. Taking global interdependence to a new level provides the developed world the growth necessary to make debt levels more sustainable. Bringing everyone on earth into the global economy becomes a matter of self interest in this context. The magnitude of the challenge remains unknown, but it seems unlikley to surpass the capacity for global cooperation demonstrated by world wars in the last century. John Perry Barlow's 1996 "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" articulated the transformative promise of the Internet at a time the online population consisted of 36 million people. The subsequent growth of the Internet to two billion people leaves little doubt about this transformative potential. The population of the Internet already exceeds the largest countries on earth. An Internet connection diminishes the arbitrary power of birthplace over prosperity. Bringing the Internet to everyone on earth offers both metaphor and means to embrace the interconnected destiny of humanity. The 550 Challenge provides a unifying goal and the discipline of a date certain to engage the seemingly intractable survival and safety challenges that still confront a large segment of the 7 billion people on earth. The 550 Challenge represents a call to individual action as a sort of reverse imperialism alternative to the troubling track record of state interventions. Expanding the reach of the Internet brings everyone into the global economy for mutual benefit. The 550 Challenge addresses the same universal human aspirations articulated in the preamble to the US Constitution "...to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare,..." The American experiment applying these ideas illustrates the threat global turmoil holds for a pursuit of "a more perfect union" even given oceans on the east and west and friends to the north and south. The decision of the US colonies to go it alone reflected inherent technology limitations circa 1776, but the increasingly frictionless global reach of the Internet provides a platform to apply these principles in a global context. Innovations continue to close the gap between communication options and physical presence. Collaboration and cross border economic exchanges grow in importance even as there remains considerable friction and legal constraints to the physical movement of people between countries. The nation state remains unchallenged for its invented purpose - resisting occupation by foreign powers, but the model has proven less of a resounding success in achieving universal prosperity The notion of cyberspace sovereignty asserted by Barlow remains an open question. The relatively brief history of the Internet makes it the clear the virtual does not exist entirely independent of the physical. There exists no forward looking vision of how Internet sovereignty might work, although efforts to mirror the rules of the physical world in cyberspace do attract organized resistance. Realizing the benefits of connecting everyone on earth requires finding models of governance incorporating the complementary strengths and weaknesses of physical and virtual. The deep conviction of a shared destiny achieved in the context of a nation state can also find expression in the task of connecting everyone on earth to the Internet. New forms of governance incorporating the new realities can develop bottom-up through trial and error. The Arab Spring and subsequent Occupy demonstrations illustrate how this might happen. The techniques applied in deposing repressive regimes in the middle east combined traditional citizen action with new modes of communication. Ubiquitous communication allowed the strategies to appear and get refined in the Occupy protests. A focus on empowering individuals as the source of change through direct democracy and an absence of hierarchy allowed the movements to resist the corruption that tends to arrive with authority and representative democracy. The number of countries applying some form of Internet censorship grew from four to 40 over the last decade, so it would be a mistake to view progress as inevitable. Experimentation around a notion of sovereignty incorporating the benefits of nation states and the borderless Internet need not slow work expanding the reach of Internet connectivity. Communication infrastructure offers the same economic multiplier effect motivating other types of infrastructure investments, so spreading the reach of the Internet translates directly into spreading prosperity. Humanity retains the option of declining to accept the status quo only to the extent there exist a willingness to act. The Internet like the printing press alters the means of collective action for expressing consent of the governed. The 550 Challenge seeks to assemble the collective action necessary for the Internet to realize a Communication Renaissance rather than new forms of oppression. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
