$100 Laptop Plus Mesh Networking Equals Salvation for US, Too

The ”$100 Laptop that the MIT Media Lab:1 has been working on has gotten some press lately, and for good reason. I was at the Lab for a reunion gathering a few weeks ago, and Nicholas Negroponte talked about the $100 Laptop as more of a vehicle for social change, as opposed to just another piece of hardware. It is cheap and functional, and it will enable entire countries to equip all of their children with an educational tool.

Most importantly, it will act as a vehicle for an entire country’s youth generation to gain a voice that is independent of the government and independent of the established power structures. Its action as a social tool comes almost entirely from the inclusion of mesh wireless technology into the Laptop, so that each child can communicate with every other child using peer-to-peer wireless connections. Imagine the early American Pony Express, where letters were handed from person to person in order to travel across the country.

Nicholas is appropriately concentrating on third world countries with the $100 Laptop. But as a vehicle for social change, the Laptop, with mesh wireless, stands to be a powerful force in the US and other first world countries as well, and not just for kids. Right now—and if you’ve read this blog, you know about this already—all communications technologies in the US necessarily get filtered through large Telco/Cable/Media companies. SBC plus AT&T and Verizon plus Sprint control a majority of this country’s communications pipes, and as I’ve spoken about in the past, are increasingly seeking ways to control the content and conversations that take place over “their” networks.

This is bad for everyone. A reliance on asymmetrical communication services (cable-modems, DSL) chokes off our voices, and our country becomes more and more influenced by fewer and fewer people who care less and less about us, the public.

What can we do? The mesh networking built into Nicholas’ $100 Laptop enables communication from person to person, without any need to interact with the Telco companies that want to stifle real conversation. If everyone in the US had a $100 Laptop with mesh networking, there would truly be conversation “For the People, By the People”.

This is the real power of a transformative technology, one that can effect change in both First and Third World countries.

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