If I had known last week, when I wrote the article on hacking, that 'tesla' is the Serbo-Croatian word for 'adze' it would have given me the ammunition to round out the metaphors associated with hacking more eloquently.
Nikola Tesla, like hackers today, was intent on solving the problems of his day. He considered his exploration of various questions raised by science as a means to improve the human condition.
He envisioned a world where "man will connect his apparatus to the very wheelwork of the universe... and the very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery".
He experimented with wireless energy and communication. He provided a means to hack into nature and give the world free access to power and communication.
The companies that owned the wires, however, did not fancy the idea of people being able to tap into a network that didn't need their wires, and Tesla's funding was withdrawn.
He died in 1943, plagued by symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, and dirt poor, reduced to feeding pigeons, which he called "his most sincere friends".
Tesla would have been delighted by the efforts of some municipalities to set up wireless networks for entire towns and cities, allowing anyone with a suitable device to communicate, disseminate and exchange information, without having to pay for a landline, effectively obliterating the digital divide.
All this is bound to make the pipe-owners very cross, even crosser than they were in Tesla's day.
Try this exercise. Go on the internet, while you still can, and type in a who owns whom search. For instance "Who own Google?" Your search will reveal that AOL owns a large chunk of Google, and Warner Brothers owns AOL. When it comes to who owns Time Warner the picture is harder to decipher. So Google, who as a service provider uses the pipes provided by the telecoms to publish, is owned by an invincible oligopoly. Paired with telecoms providers that pack enough punch to lobby for increased control of wireless providers, the future of the net looks murky.
The way Doc Searls, senior editor of the Linux Journal sees it, there is a basic lack of understanding of and hostility to the internet: "The thing is, they’re hostile to it, because they don’t get it. Worse, they only get it in one very literal way. See, to the carriers and their regulators, the Net isn’t a world, a frontier, a marketplace or a commons. To them, the Net is a collection of pipes. Their goal is to beat the other pipe-owners. To do that, they want to sell access and charge for traffic."
What makes the net such a dynamic place is that it is fundamentally dumb. All it knows is that it has to carry bytes and bits from end to end. All the intelligence is on the outside – at the ends. If you optimize a network for one type of application, you de-optimize it for others.
To keep the internet as we know it, we have to keep it dumb.
What the carriers are attempting to do is to turn their industry into a system that will ultimately be paid for by us, the end-user. They will attempt to sell themselves to the content industry, the service providers and search engines, as a value-added service, rather than remaining a utility, like water, gas or electricity. Ultimately this will have the effect of making the net intelligent; precedence will be given to select applications and the others will be placed on hold.
The carriers see us as consumers, rather than contributors to a world of innovation, invention and new business. Once the Information Superhighway is regulated by a system of toll gates, weighbridges and customs checkpoints the only freedom left for us will be to choose our walled garden. © Debbie smit – The Sunday Independent
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