Steve Reads

I don’t know why I bother reading Tom Friedman. I think it’s masochism, really. Today he writes about technology as though it were important to democracy. It’s one thing to assert that, say, cities have a good reason for deploying free municipal WiFi, and that cities are thereby doing what companies are too slow to provide. There’s an interesting discussion there about what role cities should have, and the specific places where government does things better than private enterprise. However, I don’t understand why having free WiFi around a city has anything to do with productivity, or with democracy. Friedman gives a few examples — say, photo-blogging about a crime in progress — that ring fairly hollow; unless your city is a lot different than mine, you won’t have that many opportunities to film a mugging. And whether you a) blog from a coffee shop using your own laptop and pay $6.50 for a day’s worth of net access; b) blog from your home using Ethernet connected to a cable modem; or c) blog from the middle of the sidewalk, I don’t see that it matters at all for democracy.

It’s techno-fetishism that suggests this matters. Let’s suppose that Japan races far ahead of the U.S. on cell-phone coverage and wireless technologies. Suppose the U.S. is stuck with relatively slow broadband while Japan gets gigabit-per-second Ethernet to every home. What have we lost? What does it matter?