Lighting a Candle by Building a Better Mousetrap

First, I'm with you on the recognition that we're in the midst of a national, as yet largely unacknowledged crisis. But I would argue that our crisis of broadband infrastructure is one more symptom of our greater crisis - that of leadership, which you also implicate in your blog, and which I feel is the deeper problem. Still, I would challenge your call for better leaders - in fact, we get the leaders we deserve, and we as a people continue to re-elect and tolerate the meager minds that we call leaders these days. I think the problem and solution then lies within ourselves. As individual thought leaders, we need to find our voices and articulate our visions - both leadership traits.

I believe our hope lies in the growing concept of emergence, as evidenced by such things as the democratization of journalism (blogging) and other forms of media creation enabled by new technologies. I'd suggest such emergence is becoming possible when it comes to infrastructure as well.

In fact, never has the man/woman on the street had more power at his/her fingertips than today - today's world enables emergent leadership - we all need to find our voice and take action to make things better and that includes our infrastructure crisis. What could communities do, for instance, if they formed Internet Cooperatives to provide for their own infrastructure needs collectively? That's what rural coops did to get electricity 70 years ago.

I believe that we can now conceive of a world without big telecom companies (I know I can, its a favorite fantasy). That's a challenge to all you thinkers that read this blog. What would a world of distributed locally-self-provided telecommunications services look like?

Instead of the dark image of Its a Wonderful Life that shows what the world would have looked like if the telecoms had had their visions realized and the Internet had not happened, what if we were to focus instead on a fantasy where the telecoms are now made irrelevant and infrastructure access becomes the commodity it deserves to be?

I think the act of creatiivty begins with imagination, so I'd challenge you creative types to imagine a way out of our infrastructure crisis. Here's a wacky idea: Why doesn't some big corporation, maybe one whose name rhymes with oodles of money (does that ring a Bell?)create a contest like that one with the rocket that goes up to space, comes down, and goes up again the next day. That was thought impossible but it was finally accomplished through lots of trial and error. Thankfully, infrastructure is not rocket science.

So this particular contest to stimulate emergent thinking would be about how we could as a world of users create an emergent communications system that would fulfill the need for last-mile broadband connectivity, so that everyone would finally be on the Internet. When the whole world gets on, doesn't Metcale's Rule tell us that the Internet is worth - well, I can't do that math, but wouldn't it be a WHOLE LOT more valuable with million/billions more nodes?

Anyone?