More than a dozen United States cities have pledged to pressure Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to honor net neutrality, in response to last year’s Federal Communications Commission’s decision to eliminate requirements for equal access to the Internet, so now ISPs can block content, throttle speeds to some sites or services, or give preferential treatment to others. According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, “We’re gonna use our economic power to force the hands of these companies. We’re gonna build a movement among other cities.” It will interesting to see if this movement really takes off. Perhaps it may even lead to a resurgence of technorealism. We’ll see…
technology
The Urban Institute recently released a report about how three million Americans are disconnected from higher education. The report notes, “this study demonstrates what many Native Americans, rural Americans, and other Americans living in education deserts already knew: the internet has not untethered all of us from our geographic location. As long as broadband access depends on geography, place still plays an important role in access to higher education.” There is still a lot of work left in closing the digital divide.
SJSU Political Science Professor Lawrence Quill has co-written a provocative essay about universal basic income with Hasmet Uluorta, an Assistant Professor of Political Studies and International Development Studies at Trent University. They discuss how technology might enable a system of universal basic income and transform the function of government. For example:
Turning welfare provision into an app that tracks and monitors behavior means you can do away with many of the bureaucratic elements of the state. Of course, this would mean giving technology companies access to the entire database of citizens within a given territory, along with other data such as immigration records. This would arguably swap one form of paternalism for another. But where some observers see Big Brother, the tech entrepreneurs who wish to alter the behavior of people for the common good see “captology” or “persuasive technologies,” and substitute “surveillance” for “using apps to change the behavior of people for the better.” Thanks to phones and other wearable technologies, such “intimate surveillance” is now so pervasive that this participatory panopticon is the norm for a generation who have grown up knowing only the reality of Internet life.
Quill and Uluorta conclude, “The idea that poverty, like other social and political problems, can be solved by turning to technology and reducing the power of the state is a potent one with deep philosophical roots. We should keep this fresh in our minds when debating policies that herald privately owned technologies as the solution to complex social problems.” Well said!
One of my favorite websites is CityLab, a space “dedicated to the people who are creating the cities of the future—and those who want to live there. Through sharp analysis, original reporting, and visual storytelling, our coverage focuses on the biggest ideas and most pressing issues facing the world’s metro areas and neighborhoods.” The editors recently redesigned the site, and sent a note to subscribers about the changes. I’ll report the note below. I encourage everyone to visit the site!
Dear CityLab Reader,
Today, you will notice we have launched a major redesign to CityLab. The redesign is bringing you the same smart insights and strong journalism as before, but now enhanced by a design that is easier to read, and as sophisticated as you, our readers. If you want to learn more about how we redesigned the site David Dudley, our Executive Editor, wrote a great post here.
Over the coming weeks and months you will see additional changes coming to CityLab.
The first, and perhaps most visible, change to CityLab is refocusing our verticals down to an essential five.
- Design: covering how space elevates us, engages us and makes our cities and communities special and livable.
- Transportation: examining all aspects of mobility; from bicycles to autonomous vehicles to our own two feet.
- Environment: exploring how cities are on the frontlines of sustainability, resiliency and making our lives more green.
- Equity: connecting how we live in cities to how we provide opportunities for all to thrive and improve the wellbeing of all members of our community.
- Life: a refocus of our “modern urbanist’s guide to life” to engage a new generation to think and act in their pursuit of making their urban communities better, cooler and livable.
A second change is a deeper commitment to telling stories visually, especially with maps. Cities are visual experiences and we are supporting our writers who have long desired to expand the way we tell stories. There is new innovation in cartography, infographics, and custom visual information; which will allow for strong interactive features. This type of storytelling will become a hallmark of CityLab.
The third change at relaunch is that we are introducing several new features:
- Solutions: we will be building on our CityFixer articles by rebranding them “Solutions.” For select articles will be attaching a new “Toolbox,” so people who are inspired by the article can learn how to explore a solution for their city.
- Viewpoints: we will be expanding our POV content to support important new voices that will change the debate about our future cities. We will have special emphasis on men and women of color and other voices who have been underrepresented in the conversation about the future of cities.
- Newsletters: we have found that newsletters are an excellent way for audiences to connect with us, and that our newsletter subscribers become regular, deep, and engaged readers. We have already launched a new weekly newsletter tied to urban living. We will be experimenting with additional newsletters focused on Maps, and a morning urban news round-up The Lab Report.
The last big change is that we have stopped accepting advertising that interrupts your reading experience. For CityLab’s highly engaged, educated audience we want our advertising to have impact, and even at times surprise and delight you. We are now working directly with our advertising partners to create stronger, useful ads that stand to the right of the content, which, befitting our site, we call “Empire Ads,” as well as sponsor content that we create with our advertising partners.
CityLab has never been a passive voice publication. Our writers and editors don’t write about the future of cities, but with our unabashed love of urban life we are a part of the process of how urban leaders, advocates and entrepreneurs discover the future.
Our commitment is to dive even deeper into reporting the stories that change the way we think about our urban future. And now we have a site that can showcase the best urban journalism in the world!
Shortly after President Trump took office Amazon reported that it was sold out of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, as many wondered if his election signaled that the dystopian society depicted in that work of fiction was now reality in the United States in 2017. However, another mid 20th Century dystopian novel – Brave New World – may be the more accurate reference. For example, in a seminal work of media culture the Chair of New York University’s Department of Culture and Communication argued,
There were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble)…. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”
–Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii.
The College of Social Sciences recently hosted the first Dean’s Office Book Club, and we discussed these books and Postman’s analysis. We asked folks for their thoughts on which book is the more accurate reflection of the U.S. today? Both books? Neither? Professor and Anthropology Chair Roberto Gonzalez and I co-facilitated the discussion; Professor Gonzalez assigned both books to his ANTH 136: Thought Control in Contemporary Society class this semester. We had a great discussion!
“Remember when Luke’s running the trench in the Death Star, and he’s about to fire his fateful shot, and at the last minute he decides to turn off the targeting computer and use the Force instead?” So begins an article that references a scene from the movie Star Wars: A New Hope to argue that “machines can now see into the future, and we ignore them at our peril.” The article continues, “We romanticize that moment—not just because it represents Luke’s coming into his own as a Jedi, but because to us, the decision to trust an intuition born deep in nature and honed over billions of lifetimes instead of some newfangled tech seems somehow right and good. The irony, of course, is that in our galaxy, technology is the Force. Increasingly, it’s computers that train our intuition. It’s computers that help us perceive beyond our senses.”
The article provides several examples of technology enhancing human intuition and performance, such as chess players using software to expand their abilities, and doctors using CT scans, ultrasounds, and MRIs instead of knives to explore the innards of patients. The article concludes with this prediction: “we’ll use computers to explore possible futures, and over time we’ll learn how to see those futures for ourselves, almost to feel them, to the point where it’ll seem to those not in the know that we have command of an arcane force.” That may be a bit far-fetched…I hope.
Dr. Lawrence Quill is an SJSU Professor of Political Science who often provides commentary on technology news (such as in a recent Financial Times op-ed: “Tech companies are doing what oil and steel companies have been doing for decades, but they have a halo around them.”). I asked him for his take on the article. He notes:
That article, it seems to me, is talking about augmented reality. Pokemon Go was an app that applied that in a trivial fashion. But Google Glass was a more sophisticated version.
Economists suggest that this way of thinking about the relationships between computer and human labor is the best version of a future that will be dominated by machines and information. Work with machines, they say, rather than against them.
I guess we’ll see.
But if we return to ‘the Force’ in Star Wars and Luke, I think the author of the Atlantic piece has omitted something important. For Luke, and the audience, the force was something without and within. A person looked inside in order to harness the power of the Force all around them. Technology is not the Force. Technology is always external and never ‘within’ – unless we take Elon Musk’s advice and become cyborgs, of course!
The ‘inside’ to which I’m referring is that ‘spiritual’ inside, the West’s inheritance from Christianity. Augustine’s interior space provided the foundation for Western concepts like free will and, more broadly, free agency; concepts that are fundamental to how we have come to understand politics and what it means to be human.
It is that space that is collapsing (and freedom with it). There are a few reasons for this:
1) The assault on religious thinking especially since Darwin but more broadly as a result of Modernity
2) The twentieth century equivalence (post-Turing) of mind and machine (and information)
3) Paradoxically, the quasi-religious desire to free ourselves from the body in order to download consciousness so that we may become immortal – you never really escape from Christianity’s influence. It just becomes a mash up!
Elon Musk’s comment should be taken against the background of the ideas (1-3) above. His cyborg future, which may become reality, is a kind of protest against an uncontrolled future of AI where human agency disappears. The message is simple: become a cyborg or be a human slave. Augmented reality or bust.
The Atlantic article channels the same message. Those who use The Force (technology) will leave the rest behind in their wake. How curious that the author would use a modern myth of techno-spirituality (Star Wars) to make the point.
This sounds like technological determinism and it is. But while the myth of human freedom remains, I will probably keep on saying that the present, and the future, could be different. It could be more humane (?). We could imagine a future where AI and robotics serves human (?) ends, rather than the other way around.
I am not especially hopeful, however, as neither policy-makers, nor the public, nor any other group are providing us with the key ideas of a human future that embraces technology for human ends. Instead, we must turn to William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) style corporations and Hollywood which, for now at least, seems obsessed with a dystopian eventuality.
I am a little bit more hopeful that we can escape dystopian ends. Keeping Professor Quill’s commentary in mind can help us to try to journey in a more positive direction.
Every weekday (and usually also on Sundays) I commute to work via the Amtrak Capitol Corridor train from Oakland to San José. The trip takes about an hour and 15 minutes each way. Adding time to get to or from the stations in Oakland and San José plus allowing extra time for potential traffic delays, my commute is about two hours each way…four hours per day (!). According to the short documentary Train Life, however, my Capitol Corridor commute is pretty normal. Train Life was made in 2004, and is composed of interviews of passengers on the Sacramento-Berkeley leg of the Capitol Corridor. Someone should remake it to focus on the Oakland-San José leg. If I were the filmmaker I’d also add interviews with the conductors, and ask folks about their use of technology while on the train [I’m a bit surprised that this did not come up in the interviews.] I’d be a lot less happy, for example, without my iPad, Internet access via free Wi Fi, and wireless headphones…
One of my meetings today was about SJSU’s forthcoming search for a Chief Information Officer (CIO). A executive search firm will assist with the recruitment, and was on campus today to speak with administrators about the elements of the position. One of my comments was that information technology (IT) on campus is often viewed like a public utility: it’s a necessity, but we only notice it when it’s not properly functioning; the new CIO will have the opportunity to collaborate extensively with folks and make investments to refresh the infrastructure and reduce some of the problems. When I got back to the office I discovered a Pacific Standard magazine story about why the American Internet should be regarded as a public utility. While not directly reacted to IT on campus, I’ll have to share it with the new CIO…
The “digital divide” has classically referred to the gap between those with access to computer-based technologies such as the internet, and those without. The Pacific Standard article “The Term ‘Digital Divide’ Doesn’t Work Anymore” extends more recent arguments that the divide is now not so much about access to technology, it’s also about how technology is used.
Simple “yes or no” questions no longer suffice. The questions now must also address access (does the person have a home computer or are they smartphone-dependent?) and speed (do they have dial-up or broadband?). These factors aren’t simply ancillary, they are integral.
This distinction is important because it casts light on another concept at play: Those left behind are further behind than ever before.
The article closes with this argument:
“Digital divide” denotes a chasm that can be crossed. What we should be talking about is a “digital spectrum,” the endpoints of which widen with each innovation.
Moving from a discussion of the “digital divide” to the “digital spectrum” sounds like a good project to me. Non-profit organizations can play a strong role in this expanded understanding, as discussed in an earlier Pacific Standard article, “How Non-Profits Help Close the Digital Divide.”
The Atlantic has posted an interesting story about What3Words, a British startup firm that has divided the earth into 57,000,000,000,000 [57 trillion] three by three meter squares, and assigned a three-word name to each square in order to map physical locations. One of the squares that identifies my office, for instance, is galaxy.mental.yarn. Mongolia is the first country that has signed up to use the scheme as its official postal system. It will be interesting to see if other countries follow suit.
The Urban Institute recently released a report about how three million Americans are disconnected from higher education. The report notes, “this study demonstrates what many Native Americans, rural Americans, and other Americans living in education deserts already knew: the internet has not untethered all of us from our geographic location. As long as broadband access depends on geography, place still plays an important role in access to higher education.” There is still a lot of work left in closing the digital divide.
SJSU Political Science Professor Lawrence Quill has co-written a provocative essay about universal basic income with Hasmet Uluorta, an Assistant Professor of Political Studies and International Development Studies at Trent University. They discuss how technology might enable a system of universal basic income and transform the function of government. For example:
Turning welfare provision into an app that tracks and monitors behavior means you can do away with many of the bureaucratic elements of the state. Of course, this would mean giving technology companies access to the entire database of citizens within a given territory, along with other data such as immigration records. This would arguably swap one form of paternalism for another. But where some observers see Big Brother, the tech entrepreneurs who wish to alter the behavior of people for the common good see “captology” or “persuasive technologies,” and substitute “surveillance” for “using apps to change the behavior of people for the better.” Thanks to phones and other wearable technologies, such “intimate surveillance” is now so pervasive that this participatory panopticon is the norm for a generation who have grown up knowing only the reality of Internet life.
Quill and Uluorta conclude, “The idea that poverty, like other social and political problems, can be solved by turning to technology and reducing the power of the state is a potent one with deep philosophical roots. We should keep this fresh in our minds when debating policies that herald privately owned technologies as the solution to complex social problems.” Well said!
One of my favorite websites is CityLab, a space “dedicated to the people who are creating the cities of the future—and those who want to live there. Through sharp analysis, original reporting, and visual storytelling, our coverage focuses on the biggest ideas and most pressing issues facing the world’s metro areas and neighborhoods.” The editors recently redesigned the site, and sent a note to subscribers about the changes. I’ll report the note below. I encourage everyone to visit the site!
Dear CityLab Reader,
Today, you will notice we have launched a major redesign to CityLab. The redesign is bringing you the same smart insights and strong journalism as before, but now enhanced by a design that is easier to read, and as sophisticated as you, our readers. If you want to learn more about how we redesigned the site David Dudley, our Executive Editor, wrote a great post here.
Over the coming weeks and months you will see additional changes coming to CityLab.
The first, and perhaps most visible, change to CityLab is refocusing our verticals down to an essential five.
- Design: covering how space elevates us, engages us and makes our cities and communities special and livable.
- Transportation: examining all aspects of mobility; from bicycles to autonomous vehicles to our own two feet.
- Environment: exploring how cities are on the frontlines of sustainability, resiliency and making our lives more green.
- Equity: connecting how we live in cities to how we provide opportunities for all to thrive and improve the wellbeing of all members of our community.
- Life: a refocus of our “modern urbanist’s guide to life” to engage a new generation to think and act in their pursuit of making their urban communities better, cooler and livable.
A second change is a deeper commitment to telling stories visually, especially with maps. Cities are visual experiences and we are supporting our writers who have long desired to expand the way we tell stories. There is new innovation in cartography, infographics, and custom visual information; which will allow for strong interactive features. This type of storytelling will become a hallmark of CityLab.
The third change at relaunch is that we are introducing several new features:
- Solutions: we will be building on our CityFixer articles by rebranding them “Solutions.” For select articles will be attaching a new “Toolbox,” so people who are inspired by the article can learn how to explore a solution for their city.
- Viewpoints: we will be expanding our POV content to support important new voices that will change the debate about our future cities. We will have special emphasis on men and women of color and other voices who have been underrepresented in the conversation about the future of cities.
- Newsletters: we have found that newsletters are an excellent way for audiences to connect with us, and that our newsletter subscribers become regular, deep, and engaged readers. We have already launched a new weekly newsletter tied to urban living. We will be experimenting with additional newsletters focused on Maps, and a morning urban news round-up The Lab Report.
The last big change is that we have stopped accepting advertising that interrupts your reading experience. For CityLab’s highly engaged, educated audience we want our advertising to have impact, and even at times surprise and delight you. We are now working directly with our advertising partners to create stronger, useful ads that stand to the right of the content, which, befitting our site, we call “Empire Ads,” as well as sponsor content that we create with our advertising partners.
CityLab has never been a passive voice publication. Our writers and editors don’t write about the future of cities, but with our unabashed love of urban life we are a part of the process of how urban leaders, advocates and entrepreneurs discover the future.
Our commitment is to dive even deeper into reporting the stories that change the way we think about our urban future. And now we have a site that can showcase the best urban journalism in the world!
Shortly after President Trump took office Amazon reported that it was sold out of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four, as many wondered if his election signaled that the dystopian society depicted in that work of fiction was now reality in the United States in 2017. However, another mid 20th Century dystopian novel – Brave New World – may be the more accurate reference. For example, in a seminal work of media culture the Chair of New York University’s Department of Culture and Communication argued,
There were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble)…. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”
–Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii.
The College of Social Sciences recently hosted the first Dean’s Office Book Club, and we discussed these books and Postman’s analysis. We asked folks for their thoughts on which book is the more accurate reflection of the U.S. today? Both books? Neither? Professor and Anthropology Chair Roberto Gonzalez and I co-facilitated the discussion; Professor Gonzalez assigned both books to his ANTH 136: Thought Control in Contemporary Society class this semester. We had a great discussion!
“Remember when Luke’s running the trench in the Death Star, and he’s about to fire his fateful shot, and at the last minute he decides to turn off the targeting computer and use the Force instead?” So begins an article that references a scene from the movie Star Wars: A New Hope to argue that “machines can now see into the future, and we ignore them at our peril.” The article continues, “We romanticize that moment—not just because it represents Luke’s coming into his own as a Jedi, but because to us, the decision to trust an intuition born deep in nature and honed over billions of lifetimes instead of some newfangled tech seems somehow right and good. The irony, of course, is that in our galaxy, technology is the Force. Increasingly, it’s computers that train our intuition. It’s computers that help us perceive beyond our senses.”
The article provides several examples of technology enhancing human intuition and performance, such as chess players using software to expand their abilities, and doctors using CT scans, ultrasounds, and MRIs instead of knives to explore the innards of patients. The article concludes with this prediction: “we’ll use computers to explore possible futures, and over time we’ll learn how to see those futures for ourselves, almost to feel them, to the point where it’ll seem to those not in the know that we have command of an arcane force.” That may be a bit far-fetched…I hope.
Dr. Lawrence Quill is an SJSU Professor of Political Science who often provides commentary on technology news (such as in a recent Financial Times op-ed: “Tech companies are doing what oil and steel companies have been doing for decades, but they have a halo around them.”). I asked him for his take on the article. He notes:
That article, it seems to me, is talking about augmented reality. Pokemon Go was an app that applied that in a trivial fashion. But Google Glass was a more sophisticated version.
Economists suggest that this way of thinking about the relationships between computer and human labor is the best version of a future that will be dominated by machines and information. Work with machines, they say, rather than against them.
I guess we’ll see.
But if we return to ‘the Force’ in Star Wars and Luke, I think the author of the Atlantic piece has omitted something important. For Luke, and the audience, the force was something without and within. A person looked inside in order to harness the power of the Force all around them. Technology is not the Force. Technology is always external and never ‘within’ – unless we take Elon Musk’s advice and become cyborgs, of course!
The ‘inside’ to which I’m referring is that ‘spiritual’ inside, the West’s inheritance from Christianity. Augustine’s interior space provided the foundation for Western concepts like free will and, more broadly, free agency; concepts that are fundamental to how we have come to understand politics and what it means to be human.
It is that space that is collapsing (and freedom with it). There are a few reasons for this:
1) The assault on religious thinking especially since Darwin but more broadly as a result of Modernity
2) The twentieth century equivalence (post-Turing) of mind and machine (and information)
3) Paradoxically, the quasi-religious desire to free ourselves from the body in order to download consciousness so that we may become immortal – you never really escape from Christianity’s influence. It just becomes a mash up!Elon Musk’s comment should be taken against the background of the ideas (1-3) above. His cyborg future, which may become reality, is a kind of protest against an uncontrolled future of AI where human agency disappears. The message is simple: become a cyborg or be a human slave. Augmented reality or bust.
The Atlantic article channels the same message. Those who use The Force (technology) will leave the rest behind in their wake. How curious that the author would use a modern myth of techno-spirituality (Star Wars) to make the point.
This sounds like technological determinism and it is. But while the myth of human freedom remains, I will probably keep on saying that the present, and the future, could be different. It could be more humane (?). We could imagine a future where AI and robotics serves human (?) ends, rather than the other way around.
I am not especially hopeful, however, as neither policy-makers, nor the public, nor any other group are providing us with the key ideas of a human future that embraces technology for human ends. Instead, we must turn to William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) style corporations and Hollywood which, for now at least, seems obsessed with a dystopian eventuality.
I am a little bit more hopeful that we can escape dystopian ends. Keeping Professor Quill’s commentary in mind can help us to try to journey in a more positive direction.
Every weekday (and usually also on Sundays) I commute to work via the Amtrak Capitol Corridor train from Oakland to San José. The trip takes about an hour and 15 minutes each way. Adding time to get to or from the stations in Oakland and San José plus allowing extra time for potential traffic delays, my commute is about two hours each way…four hours per day (!). According to the short documentary Train Life, however, my Capitol Corridor commute is pretty normal. Train Life was made in 2004, and is composed of interviews of passengers on the Sacramento-Berkeley leg of the Capitol Corridor. Someone should remake it to focus on the Oakland-San José leg. If I were the filmmaker I’d also add interviews with the conductors, and ask folks about their use of technology while on the train [I’m a bit surprised that this did not come up in the interviews.] I’d be a lot less happy, for example, without my iPad, Internet access via free Wi Fi, and wireless headphones…
One of my meetings today was about SJSU’s forthcoming search for a Chief Information Officer (CIO). A executive search firm will assist with the recruitment, and was on campus today to speak with administrators about the elements of the position. One of my comments was that information technology (IT) on campus is often viewed like a public utility: it’s a necessity, but we only notice it when it’s not properly functioning; the new CIO will have the opportunity to collaborate extensively with folks and make investments to refresh the infrastructure and reduce some of the problems. When I got back to the office I discovered a Pacific Standard magazine story about why the American Internet should be regarded as a public utility. While not directly reacted to IT on campus, I’ll have to share it with the new CIO…
The “digital divide” has classically referred to the gap between those with access to computer-based technologies such as the internet, and those without. The Pacific Standard article “The Term ‘Digital Divide’ Doesn’t Work Anymore” extends more recent arguments that the divide is now not so much about access to technology, it’s also about how technology is used.
Simple “yes or no” questions no longer suffice. The questions now must also address access (does the person have a home computer or are they smartphone-dependent?) and speed (do they have dial-up or broadband?). These factors aren’t simply ancillary, they are integral.
This distinction is important because it casts light on another concept at play: Those left behind are further behind than ever before.
The article closes with this argument:
“Digital divide” denotes a chasm that can be crossed. What we should be talking about is a “digital spectrum,” the endpoints of which widen with each innovation.
Moving from a discussion of the “digital divide” to the “digital spectrum” sounds like a good project to me. Non-profit organizations can play a strong role in this expanded understanding, as discussed in an earlier Pacific Standard article, “How Non-Profits Help Close the Digital Divide.”
The Atlantic has posted an interesting story about What3Words, a British startup firm that has divided the earth into 57,000,000,000,000 [57 trillion] three by three meter squares, and assigned a three-word name to each square in order to map physical locations. One of the squares that identifies my office, for instance, is galaxy.mental.yarn. Mongolia is the first country that has signed up to use the scheme as its official postal system. It will be interesting to see if other countries follow suit.