Assignment 13: Changes! - Alex Wyllie

We must connect the last billion. The last billion people. They don’t know what they are missing, a digital world full of wonders, of social media and news sights, of forums and wikis, of porn and cyberbullying. Yes, I am talking about the internet. We need everybody to have internet access. Everybody needs access to these wonders of technology - that is, except the porn and the cyberbullying. Nobody wants those. Today, we face that problem, where only that last billion people remain disconnected. And we want them to be connected. They live in their houses, among us, old grannies who call their sons every time the washing machine breaks (“Just buy a new one grandma!”), crazy paranoids who believe that the government is trying to kill them (someone please call the insane asylum). There are those who suggest that the best way to connect them to the internet is by using balloons that provide wifi, floating above their houses every day for the next decade that they survive. But I say this: Those balloons will only remind these oldies of the barrage balloons over London during the german air raids in World War II. Those paranoids will think the bombs are government surveillance blimps, spying on them. I propose a simpler, less expensive solution. We wait for nightfall on Christmas eave, when the Old grannies and the paranoids who should be in mental institutes have all gone to sleep. Next comes the hard part, but if Santa Claus can do it, so can we. We slip down their chimneys, and leave them the presents, a wifi router and a computer. We make sure to address them from either that grannie’s grandson or in the case of the paranoids, “Anybody but the government”. If we are sufficiently lucky, we could do the whole world in one night. And then, everybody would be connected. And if we get caught, well …, that’s a few months in prison.

Thursday, November 20, 7:34 pm