Un-Un-Cat, Episode 23. — Heal the Digital Divide for the Humans. Cat versus Dog way of thinking.

President Green felt overwhelmed a lot with all the many directions requiring her attention as POTUS. America, as 1/5th of land by area and the 3rd largest population, and the number one devourer of all the world’s resources and products — self-described as the number 1 economy in the world. She was very aware that she was in a one in 7-billion rare position to make a significant shift for the better towards saving the world.

President Green the Cat-person had an action plan mapped out to save the Earth that was extracted from over a million words written honestly by a Dog. A Dog-person from a galaxy far-far-away, but still, from Earth or not, these were words written with a sincere love for humans like only a Dog-person can emote. (Please see the first 8 episodes of this story is you don’t know what extraterrestrial Dog-person I’m talking about). U.G. knew she had to be very careful with the humans. Because she was not as nice as any dog, but, as a Cat-person she also possessed concepts and a perspective on the fragility of life many humans seemed to completely lack.

If you have a job that realistically will take a thousand years to do well, and only have four years as President of the United States to take a crack at it. Who do you call? You don’t call on ghosts or those who bust them. No, you call the top nerds in the country and pick one to reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment, a cabinet position that for some reason only lasted from 1972 to 1995?! (1.) And of course as Commander and Chief you call on the US Military, way before inauguration day.

The US Military and the top geeks in the US working together to heal the digital divide in the US? Really? — Yes. Really. They built the internet in the US, to begin with, they will lead the army it will take to build the new internet, and dig the trenches to fight this information/climate change war. Yes, I said war.

This isn’t a trench war like World War 1 or 2, not a metaphorical war like the ‘war on drugs’. This is an actual war on climate change and pollution. Make no mistake, this war, is horrible as most any war where the innocent suffer worst. Women and children and those fortunate enough to be elderly suffer and die along with all the small things in the land that few weep for. Have a 6th of our planet’s forests burnt yet? Is a great army marching from the North? Can we agree to melt our weapons into plow shears? Is 10% of the Earth’s fresh water still there where the North Pole was or has it melted into the salt of the sea already? Is there still hope for planet Earth? Only time will tell. And if we are going to succeed in postponing the inevitable apocalypse any dog or cat sentient or not would agree, it’s going to take all the humans working together to do it.

Therefore the first point to attack against climate change is to heal the digital divide to bring everyone into the conversation. And how we connect everyone to the conversation matters very much. Capitalism has failed us all. The give-the-people-what-they-want approach, with a goal of profit, results in profit being valued more than life on Earth.

Government holding the reins as in communism has proven to be worse and also failed, multiple times over the span of world history. Communism never got a good foothold in the US, only floating drifts of idealist dreamers attempting and failing to build their version of utopian societies in the land of the free.

A precarious balance of government for the people by the people must be maintained. A dynamic market to innovate and a people controlled democratic government to keep the market balanced between regulated and “free” — a.k.a. unfettered free-market capitalism.

Back home in her snug cabin in the beautiful rocky hill country of Idaho with her best friend, the conversation between Dog and Cat had been easy. In Lee’s mind, (Lee is what her Dog friend called himself while on Earth). Lee imagined healing the digital divide required three major components: 1. Text, black & white images only like a newspaper. 2. Public channels of video and audio shows (formerly known as public TV and radio). And 3. communication channels for networking, meetings, forums, letters, etc…

And all three branches a no fee, advertising free internet, owned by the people. The separate branches designed to be compact secure low-bandwidth able to be shut off when not being accessed, with backed-up data in multiple overlapping locations in the US, archived to survive solar flares, EMPs, power surges/outages, and hacking.

For the text-only channel, a universal standard of energy and code efficient plain text.

The lowest bandwidth possible to encrypt and then later to store archived in solid state memory safe from power fluctuations, EMPS, and solar flares. (Yes I repeated that because if we don’t fix it, everything we do online is just one giant solar storm away from being lost).

Lee liked LaTeX (2.) (pronounced La Te Kia, not like latex) because it could easily accommodate the formatting of math, science and every character of text on planet Earth, Chinese to ancient Egyptian. Fluid searchable content, with linked sources. Footnote resources and author specific header. A.k.a. Resource Description Framework RDF (3.) for all information like a wiki. All accessible with reader adjustable brightness and scale and accessible to voice readers for the blind or people who prefer to listen instead of read.

On the advice of the renewed Secretary of the Office of Technology Assessment, President Green proposed a standard. Universal-Standard-text or USTeX, and databases with URIs and URNs(3.), not just URLs and got some cross-eyed stares from most of her West Wing staff until she found the correct nerd who understood what she meant. Because, believe it or not this formatting standard, able to handle all the text data in the world efficiently is out there, coded in multiple places for decades now, waiting for the world to implement it.

Then (just before the inauguration in 2020) President-Elect, U.R. Green’s first choice to take on the newly reinvented cabinet position of The Secretary of Technology Assessment, was a man famous for his grumpy rants, whom every programmer in the world who has ever installed open source software knows by name. Few expected the Finnish immigrant to agree to a meeting, much less take the job. But, who can say no to a 150 pound talking Cat who just won the US Presidential election by a landslide?

Lee the Dog’s second major component to healing the digital divide was quite insightful for a creature who didn’t live long enough to ever hear a single podcast. To repair the void left by local newspapers and oddly enough local phone directories. Lee thought advertising on TV, the radio and the internet was evil and praised public broadcasting. He thought everyone should have access to all the news and shows on streaming channels in chronological order from most recent to oldest organized by subject.

President Green asked the nerds to define a Universal Standard for public audio and video programs. Leave the high def to the corporations, but it should be good enough quality to watch with most smartphones or project on a wall or on a screen in a classroom.

Four public channels of radio and video to be broadcast wirelessly available to all Americans: news, sports, education, and government. Not one commercial TV channel, owned by a few wealthy broadcast stations, but a publicly owned digital page people could log into locally to select any of the local news, local sports, education opportunities for all types of life-long learning, and all that was happening in local government.(The government channel designed to augment the C-SPAN TV channel 5.) and to supply free air-space for political campaign to help eliminate some of the fundraising from politics.

Of course, if people got bored of their 4 local public channels or were from a very small town where not much was happening they could zoom out on the map to state news and state government going-ons, or go to any page they were interested in including the national news stations.

The third part of the three-part plan was interactive communication networking. The status quo of a social networking site that originated from a college ‘hot or not’ app that President Green referred to under her breath as F-Butt and a text chat app where people “yelled” at each other in ALL CAPS!!! and a video app overwhelmed by memes, stealing of proprietary content and porn was not even close to cutting it as relates to much needed communication to save the world. She would leave those as-is in the commercial paid by the month old internet.

The new public communication networks would take time, beta testing and revising. But, they would figure out something better for the free-by-the-people, for-the-people-internet. They had to; the world was waiting, it was time for a legitimate public forum.

The last major hurdle to the digital divide was, of course, the hardware. Laptop computers had been coming down in price somewhat, but were still out of reach for many Americans. But, the majority owned smart-phones. President Green was very disturbed by e-waste and the craze of the techno-fad inclined to throw out a perfectly-good, year-old-phone, for the latest-and-greatest, that lately, wasn’t that much greater than their smart-phone from a year before.

She had been using a very energy efficient black & white tablet and stylus for her text writing and reading for years. Part of her plan was being implemented by the US Secretary of Education. She was aware that children in school did better when they were not distracted by videos and texting each other on smartphones. They also do better when taking handwritten notes rather than typing. So, instead of a still expensive laptop computer, she thought every child in school should have a text reading and writing tablet with a stylus for their school books, note taking and assignments. Smartphones turned off and kept out of hands while in class.

Healing the digital divide to give everyone a chance to join in the conversation is easy to state as a concept, but how we proceed matters because capitalism run rampant has proven to be an environmental virus worse than a forest fire.

President Green felt the irony of the words ‘cat-walk’ as she precariously walked the metaphorical fence between Congress and big corporate money. She would and did tell Congress what she wanted to do to heal the digital divide across the entire nation, submitted to both houses on her second day in office, with a budget range for each action item and because of her years served as both a local state representative and in D.C. she knew how long it would take for them to get back to her. For this reason, she had worked with nonprofit conservation and private gardening organizations to roll out the native plant “movement” planning all and having the funding secured before day one.

Similarly, President Green’s three-part plan to heal the digital divide was going to start quickly, rather than wait for Congress. First by reinstating the Secretary of Technology for the renewal of the Office of Technology assessment, and second by utilizing a public transparent non-profit funded by any and all corporations who wished to participate in the new internet. There was some funding left behind by the previous administration’s failure to install commercial broadband in some communities still completely lacking in any internet connection. She picked up where they had left off, installing the two independent new internet systems, replacing old phone lines with new efficient optical cables. The funding left behind wasn’t going to go very far. But, it was a good test area, or rather three areas to test out the new USTeX and new over-the-air US-Wifi systems.

They would start with the areas with the worst internet coverage and the worst schools first for the hardware testing and connect education centers and proximity to military bases in Montana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Montana and Alaska would be the long-range coverage tests. Arkansas and Florida would be testing the new digital systems for local public news channels. The best tech schools in the US, East Coast to Westcoast, would be testing and refining the communication networking software for the public social forum apps.

President Green was confident they would make enough headway to impress the tech corporations enough to make sure they would not want to miss out. The country needed the tech giants to participate and fund the gap that was expected. Congress had a lot on their schedule already with the new President. They needed time write bills. Funding would realistically start with a pro-visionary chunk or two of the required budgets, not enough to heal the digital divide for the entire nation.

If we are going to save the planet, everybody needs to work together, and to work together we need a free internet, not owned by any corporation, but owned by the people, for the people. Divided for security and working united at the same time. Compact enough to be protected from SPAM and those with malicious intent. To have such an information highway, it can’t be owned by anyone, it has to be owned by everyone. The military is the best contractor for the scale of the job. President Green hoped she would make Benjamin Franklin proud. What a crazy-good man the nations first postmaster was; vile in all the best ways. The next four years were going to be very interesting times.

Up next, Un-Un-Cat, Episode 24. — Housing as a Right, the H in HUMAN.

Footnotes:

1. Office Of Technology Assesment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment

2. LaTeX https://www.latex-project.org/about/

3. RDF https://www.w3.org/RDF/

4. URI, URl, URN at W3c https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/

5. C-SPAN https://www.c-span.org/ Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network is an American cable and satellite television network that was created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service.