Arthur Attwell

I recently finished reading Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's great history of the origins of the Internet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Early in its story, it describes JCR Licklider's vision for computing when he first started working on networking projects in the late 1950s:

The idea on which Lick's worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be "informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government." He imagined what he called "home computer consoles" and television sets linked together in a massive network. "The political process," he wrote, "would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer."

That's my emphasis. Licklider wrote that when computers were the size of rooms and cost half-a-million dollars. Networks as we know them didn't even exist yet. It seems like extraordinary vision. And yet, it's a no-brainer today that this is exactly what technology offers, and astonishing that, sixty years later, direct political engagement with the promise of technology is the exception rather than the rule in Africa. Paul Kagame of Rwanda is one such exception. He wrote in the Huffington Post last year:

… this is the era of total global competition for raw materials, financial capital, skilled workers, and market access. The competition is intense and is characterized by discontinuous leaps in the productivity and prosperity of hundreds of millions of people, but also the exclusion and deprivation of billions of their brothers and sisters. The difference between these two experiences is access to information technology, and the strategic possibilities and self-determination such access provides.

There could be no more fundamental a key to our development than the "self-motivating exhilaration" that technology provides.