NEW YORK. In Hartsdale, Westchester, in Ferncliff Cemetery (New York State), many writers, actors, psychiatrists and scientists and legendary figures such as Ed Sullivan and Malcolm X are buried – held underground by heavy decorated stones. Cremations, where you look up, the names of Nelson Rockefeller, Jim Henson, John Lennon and Nikola Tesla appear. Some of their ashes are stored there, another is scattered in the sea or in their places of the soul of those concerned, such as Central Park. There are threads – not a casual word – that connect these four men suspended in a non-underground cloud. Nelson Rockefeller, as Vice President of Gerald Ford, was also in charge of infrastructure: he was a progressive, pro abortion, who fought for civil rights and passed the Equal Rights Amendement in New York, eliminating legal discrimination against women in cases of divorce, possession of property and work. He wanted the equalization of the sexes and he struggled all his life to widen the inclusion.
Jim Henson, the inventor of the Muppets, sewed puppets without strings moved by his hands like puppets from fairy tales, for the Sesame Street program. He made them the childhood idols of at least a generation: those puppets taught the alphabet, history, geography and served as a second school to a state. John Lennon obviously imagined that there were no countries and all people shared the world, and “the world will be as one”, and Tesla, already at the end of the 19th century, hypothesized that it would soon be possible for a man in New York to dictate instructions that appeared instantly in London, typing on a keypad and that all telephones would be cordless and be as big as a clock, broadcasting distant sounds.
All of this connects to the history of the internet in America but even more to the current situation. If there is only a small country lane between the two parts of the cemetery, the digital divide is still enormous in the United States. The pandemic and the school in Dad have increased these inequalities. There are over 21 million people not connected to the internet between the Atlantic and the Pacific – not by choice of course. It starts from Rockefeller, from the fact that the Internet is defined by the current Secretary of Transport and Infrastructure Pete Buttigieg as an infrastructure more important than the roads, a basic necessity. It is about civil rights, having access to a law firm in 3 seconds, essential medical information and in some cases it can even broaden horizons.
We pass by Jim Henson and the future of children. Internet is now essential to education, school inevitably also takes place there, better if added to the real, an extension of this, but even in free time there are apps and programs that create new politicians, new readers, new scientists, new visionaries , just a musical note in a headset, you don’t have to be a little genius. And also Lennon, who in imagining a world without borders you know would certainly be expressed on the new wars that are fought for technological supremacy between China and the US, and how a wireless vehicle can lead people to barricade themselves, to misunderstand each other, to think that what you are looking for on Google is the same in Italy as in America or in new definitions of private and public. And finally Tesla who was fighting Marconi’s radio waves and seems to have predicted everything (according to a funny theory even the rise of Trump, and among other things, the legend circulates that Trump’s grandfather with FBI agents, entered his hotel and confiscated his briefcase with plans for a time machine).
The pandemic in the United States has improved some health services, cut the costs of many medical visits thanks to the use of new latest generation telematic techniques (with devices at home that measure fever, heartbeats, etc.), new frontiers of psychological support; it also provided free swabs and vaccines and related services. The vaccine is also given to illegal immigrants and does not require special identity documents. Despite the political divides and the different scientific opinions, it has made individuals more responsible rather than imposing continuous rules, curfews, closures and openings, focusing on efficiency and speed making it a common experience among peers and friends. Access to the internet and to sites such as turbovax, or to dedicated apps, has been crucial and has harmed those who are not connected to the network.
In addition to the fact that in many rural or poor areas the internet does not arrive or does not exist, or cannot afford a computer, there are, as in the rest of the world, different qualities of the internet. If the topic of net neutrality and monopolies is still hot, it is strangely no longer as it was a few years ago when it became the catchphrase of comedians who explained in a clear and amusing way what it meant to see the internet as different highways, some with cars in queue, others with preferential lanes, or why we have a faster or slower internet depending on which company controls it or how many control it and share it. It seemed like an issue that had finally united America in a battle for a fairer network, swept away by political events and the shocking last year.
The Internet is a strange spell, it gives the possibility to see everything and hear everything, but even the most informed do not realize how much they do not see or hear. It often happens that the series, the films, the comedians most followed in America by those who grow up there – the most exported country in the world – do not at all coincide with the America that is followed in Europe and discussed in the living rooms, even in the homes of experts. . Or on the contrary, just search Virginia Agnelli on Google USA to find three pages of a Californian gynecologist and not the Italian aristocrat.
The discussion about the internet is really crucial: not those – identical since Seneca’s time – on the generational struggles of the moment but the one on the codes, on the toll booth of a highway that seems without borders and without wires and instead is made of pipes under the ocean and valves that few know how to turn. There is a cost problem in accessing a universal, free network that Rockefeller would have liked. Access to broadband obviously also collides with nature, beyond the swamp of Louisiana and hurricanes, the mountains of Montana, entire forests of Virginia where he does not pick up the phone. The pandemic has accelerated everyone’s interest investments in a less expensive high-speed internet, promoted by Biden and his administration. More than 22 billion have already been invested in this project but the FCC (Federal communications commission, internet regulation, in form and content) is unable to trace all the mapping of the network and there is a political correlation between the most disconnected areas and less progressives.
Even in cities where spending is high, it doesn’t have to be privatized by companies (like AT&T and Verizon), and while it seems like an exaggeration, it should be like free water in New York. It is also fundamental to understand a new type of colonialism in Africa and in less developed countries, where far more thorny issues than vaccines pass from giving access to something that determines work and the economy. It should be and in part is one of the few bipartisan battles, without flags. Reagan passed a law allowing all poorer citizens to have phone access to call the police (911) with the government giving about $ 10 each month for a basic phone connection. In a certain sense, in the USA, a country often misunderstood in its innermost dynamics, there are already many programs of socialist support of the state, welfare and worker protection (even during the pandemic helped much more than in Europe).
The Great Divide is a path, a division between the mountains, a topos of folk music, country and even songs like The Last Resort of the Eagles, a mountain range that divides the United States in two, mythical to do on foot, by bike or by motorbike, but today it has become synonymous with the great internal divisions, with the fiber that connects the country that seems to have broken up. And thinking about fiber, revolutionizing old static laws, helps to get it everywhere.
The 2009 Recession Stimulus Act created the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program with $ 4 billion for internet-related infrastructure projects and changed Kentucky, providing far more jobs. North Dakota has become one of the regions of America with the most efficient network, even of large cities. Apart from adventurous travel we don’t often evaluate first world regions with respect to their internet connection, nor anthropological impacts.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that suddenly the internet is no longer just optional: you cannot promise as a politician to revive the economy, to improve people’s social position if you don’t give them a fast connection. The branches of our dependence on the internet that has clearly transformed the new frontier, beyond the Great Divide, into an articulated new state parallel to the nations, are ethically complex and also lead to different visions on privacy: for example that of Apple which since the by Steve Jobs fights to protect the rights of individuals more than Zuckerberg and Facebook (which Steve Jobs ironically called Fecebook from recent revelations). We need to find a minimum support for everyone (the 2015 standards were 25 megabits in, 3 out).
Biden has promised a $ 20 billion investment for communities in need, calling it a twenty-first century “great economic equalizer” in which no job can be disconnected. And he had to figure out how to deal with China, after the Trump sanctions and also oppose it with its control policies and in other less democratic situations. The land of the internet is a huge global colony, with hyper-specific laws and others completely to be defined.
On the sitcom The 70s show Kelso, a not-too-smart teenager played by Ashton Kutcher, predicted that the computer would change the world. Kutcher who for his physical likeness played the part of Steve Jobs in a film in 2013, has become a crucial investor in the Silicon Valley of Uber, Airbnb and Bitcoin before a thousand others (his wife Mila Kunis recently told by Colbert that at every her husband’s new app idea had reacted upset “Who would use a site to sleep on the couch of others? Who would get in the car with a stranger?” and admits with irony that he was wrong).
Steve Jobs’ son Reed spoke in an online interview about a betrayal of the public trust of some large Silicon Valley companies. It is useless to summarize almost 40 years of debate on the news of the internet and at least 15 of the social world, which on the one hand makes us behave like in any other era, on the other it has had an impact in our relationships. Perhaps it has only changed our speed of reacting, of thinking, of getting excited, but in that wireless speed there is also a lot of real politics, often ignored by debates and a speed that everyone must access, at least to start from the same step.
In October 1969, the modern internet with arpanet was born between UCLA and Stanford, and the exchange of the first message which was to be “login”, but only the first two letters arrived: “lo”. Perhaps that unwanted interruption was more prophetic. “Lo”, also means “lights out”, where no electricity arrives, but also “loved one”, a loved one, and “learning object”, an object that learns from its mistakes, a perfect summary of internet, its divisive and communal power, its magical and dangerous powers, its delusions of power and democratization.
The internet continues to seem new to us and it really isn’t. It is an antiquated system, monopolized, there are roads to be fixed and many parts are now broken in the foundations underground. We are already scattering its ashes but in giving everyone the same possibilities we find at least that invisible energy and frequency that Tesla liked, that force that has always been revolutionary.