The Last Mile
It's an oddly pregnant phrase I encountered while wading lip-deep into the murky torrent of information and sewage that surrounds the network neutrality controversy. "Lip-deep" is a manner of speaking by means of which I mean to communicate the desire to have said nothing while fairly-relentlessly reading to learn how to sift the sense from bilateral propaganda; decks awash with foul-smelling water...building on the intriguing premise that information in this new age is better-envisioned as a fluider substance than solider, architectural structures; nimbler, more mutable, and capable-er of being transformed in a flood of inspired enlightenment than are blocks on which elaborate erections are raised, then razed; simpler, less predictable, and far more surprisingly profound.
The Last Mile was the terrible distance between your cell on Death Row and the chamber that contained the means by which The State would separate your remains from your life, with the requisite aid of a priest and a virtuoso harmonica player. That's why the interpretation of information conveyed through language is probably better attempted in a perceptually fluid frame of mind; although the relationship between intent and execution is endlessly fascinating.
In context of net neutrality, The Last Mile refers to the sphere of influence exerted by internet service providers who own the physical and/or contractual interface between The Backbone (a mysterious network of networks) and the (b)millions of Users who inhabit the bricks&mortar world at the peripheral edges of the internet; they connect Us to one another.
Being old, I found the wading tedious, largely because the nomenclature used in the literature is liberally peppered with abbreviations, neologisms and esoteric metaphors with which I was and am (still) largely unfamiliar. It will be sufficient here to say that the number of internet service providers (ISPs) has dwindled in the past ten years, and that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are the largest and most powerful corporations among the many ISPs that simply provide access for Users of computers to The Parent of Information Rivers, the internet; they connect Us to one another. Broadband, for example, goes where it pays ISPs to put it, and that ain't everywhere in America, and our broadband in America isn't as fast nor as cheap as elsewhere in the world. In penetration, cost and speed our access is at #15, and slipping.
Of all the folks blogging and talking abbreviated, neologistic, and esoteric gibberish, nearly none I've found have bothered to state the obvious fact that the internet is not America's first rodeo. Networks are not new, and the railroads, canals and highways..., the infrastructural thoroughfares built in earlier centuries, provide several historic records of the interaction of We, The People (who need goods and services from one another) with the magnates and corporations who own or built those thoroughfares. So hundreds of models of the modern controversy are doubtless buried in the cultural treasury of American civil engineering and civil law, but I don't know that there's adequate time to exhume and study that record before next August 1, when the FCC is expected to make an example of Comcast's arrogant abuse of its power. It takes a year to smell a rat?
Without having done the cultural homework, I resorted to The Human Comedy, simply because I remembered that Mickey Rooney as Homer Macauley had an afterschool job delivering telegrams. It's a wonderful film about the American Heartland, set during World War Two, when a kid delivering telegrams knows that some of the packets on his back will plunge certain households into irrevocable despair.
Homer's a good, responsible kid who doesn't afford himself the luxury of ditching any packets, no matter how dire the consequences of delivery. He does his job with conscience -- and that's the fundamental difference between that model of The Last Mile and the controversy I've been dicking with. Corporations exist to optimize their profits while minimizing liability. That sociopathic ethos is a luxury that an individual of conscience can't afford. And conscientious corporations are acquired by soulless, vertically integrated conglomerates that do business more conventionally.
This evening, I've been studying Angela's Ashes in which Frank McCourt has Homer's job in Limerick at about the same point in time. Some of his packets contain desperately needed money wired home (there was plenty of work for Irishmen in England when Nigel went off to war), others offer condolence for personal loss of a family member. It's one thing to trust a good, responsible kid with your datagram, and something entirely else to entrust it to a corporation that's oversold its capacity, hidden its "traffic shaping" technologies and evaded liability before the law at each and every opportunity. Frank's story is a great deal darker than Homer's, his crises of conscience more ambiguous, contradictory and plausible. Each is a wonderful story.
Network neutrality is formative legislation intended to inject a moral compass into a predatory corporate mentality that's made of teflon and evolving toward the apotheosis of unregenerate greed. Tomorrow the AMPTP represents ISPs.
On second thought, there's probably plenty of time to study the cultural record because this fight won't end on August first, and it probably won't resolve in this century. Projects like Strike.TV and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along musical can utilize the internet to end-run 'round the studios and networks, but still they'll depend upon the neutrality of ISPs to deliver desired packets (of independents and start-ups that undermine the vested interests of incumbent-powered-cronies like studios, networks and ISPs) to us Users. And that's why it's important to read, then help them swim with sharks. Thanks for your patience.
The Last Mile was the terrible distance between your cell on Death Row and the chamber that contained the means by which The State would separate your remains from your life, with the requisite aid of a priest and a virtuoso harmonica player. That's why the interpretation of information conveyed through language is probably better attempted in a perceptually fluid frame of mind; although the relationship between intent and execution is endlessly fascinating.
In context of net neutrality, The Last Mile refers to the sphere of influence exerted by internet service providers who own the physical and/or contractual interface between The Backbone (a mysterious network of networks) and the (b)millions of Users who inhabit the bricks&mortar world at the peripheral edges of the internet; they connect Us to one another.
Being old, I found the wading tedious, largely because the nomenclature used in the literature is liberally peppered with abbreviations, neologisms and esoteric metaphors with which I was and am (still) largely unfamiliar. It will be sufficient here to say that the number of internet service providers (ISPs) has dwindled in the past ten years, and that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are the largest and most powerful corporations among the many ISPs that simply provide access for Users of computers to The Parent of Information Rivers, the internet; they connect Us to one another. Broadband, for example, goes where it pays ISPs to put it, and that ain't everywhere in America, and our broadband in America isn't as fast nor as cheap as elsewhere in the world. In penetration, cost and speed our access is at #15, and slipping.
Of all the folks blogging and talking abbreviated, neologistic, and esoteric gibberish, nearly none I've found have bothered to state the obvious fact that the internet is not America's first rodeo. Networks are not new, and the railroads, canals and highways..., the infrastructural thoroughfares built in earlier centuries, provide several historic records of the interaction of We, The People (who need goods and services from one another) with the magnates and corporations who own or built those thoroughfares. So hundreds of models of the modern controversy are doubtless buried in the cultural treasury of American civil engineering and civil law, but I don't know that there's adequate time to exhume and study that record before next August 1, when the FCC is expected to make an example of Comcast's arrogant abuse of its power. It takes a year to smell a rat?
Without having done the cultural homework, I resorted to The Human Comedy, simply because I remembered that Mickey Rooney as Homer Macauley had an afterschool job delivering telegrams. It's a wonderful film about the American Heartland, set during World War Two, when a kid delivering telegrams knows that some of the packets on his back will plunge certain households into irrevocable despair.
Homer's a good, responsible kid who doesn't afford himself the luxury of ditching any packets, no matter how dire the consequences of delivery. He does his job with conscience -- and that's the fundamental difference between that model of The Last Mile and the controversy I've been dicking with. Corporations exist to optimize their profits while minimizing liability. That sociopathic ethos is a luxury that an individual of conscience can't afford. And conscientious corporations are acquired by soulless, vertically integrated conglomerates that do business more conventionally.
This evening, I've been studying Angela's Ashes in which Frank McCourt has Homer's job in Limerick at about the same point in time. Some of his packets contain desperately needed money wired home (there was plenty of work for Irishmen in England when Nigel went off to war), others offer condolence for personal loss of a family member. It's one thing to trust a good, responsible kid with your datagram, and something entirely else to entrust it to a corporation that's oversold its capacity, hidden its "traffic shaping" technologies and evaded liability before the law at each and every opportunity. Frank's story is a great deal darker than Homer's, his crises of conscience more ambiguous, contradictory and plausible. Each is a wonderful story.
Network neutrality is formative legislation intended to inject a moral compass into a predatory corporate mentality that's made of teflon and evolving toward the apotheosis of unregenerate greed. Tomorrow the AMPTP represents ISPs.
On second thought, there's probably plenty of time to study the cultural record because this fight won't end on August first, and it probably won't resolve in this century. Projects like Strike.TV and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along musical can utilize the internet to end-run 'round the studios and networks, but still they'll depend upon the neutrality of ISPs to deliver desired packets (of independents and start-ups that undermine the vested interests of incumbent-powered-cronies like studios, networks and ISPs) to us Users. And that's why it's important to read, then help them swim with sharks. Thanks for your patience.
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