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a beautiful day in the neighborhood
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Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 14:17:57 PDT
From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail)
The following comments are offered in response to the heartwarming story of information poverty written by Karen G. Schneider, an earnest Newark librarian. For a complete copy of her original note please contact Ms. Schneider at kgs@panix.com.
Feel free to redistribute and comment upon the essay below as you see fit. The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.
Willam A. Frezza April 4, 1994 frezza@radiomail.net
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
The clarion call has sounded harkening a new generation of poverty professionals. With increasing stridency their voices can be heard in public forums both old and new. Terrified at the prospect of being left behind by the new commercial information technologies that promise to both transform the fabric of society and undermine traditional sources of public income and prestige, they line the halls of congressional hearing rooms seeking to control a power they have not created and do not understand. I refer specifically to the self-styled advocates of the information "have-nots".
Lead by organizations like Mitch Kapor's Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ralph Nader's Taxpayer Assets Project, supported by a phalanx of tenured academics long accustomed to public subsidization, and supplied with emotional ammunition by grass roots workers like Ms. Schneider, these New Age Intellectual Poverty Pundits are determined to define, create, and manage a new form of public entitlement. Chanting their mantra "Information is a right, not a privilege" they have inserted themselves into an economic process that has already progressed far beyond the point where the coercive powers of the government to which they appeal can respond in anything but a chaotic and self destructive manner, much as it did a generation ago when it launched its failed "war on poverty".
At the heart of this campaign to bring the blessings of the information age to the underprivileged lies a paternalistic premise so bold and audacious that it has so far escaped serious challenge. The poverty professionals, not satisfied with their abysmal track record in housing, education, welfare, and public safety, have gone on to assert that the key to uplifting the poor is the provision of government subsidized, high speed Internet connections!
The fact is, the "information superhighway" technologies are still at the earliest stages of being understood by the most sophisticated and motivated corporations and individuals on the planet. Yet the intellectual poverty professionals claim they are going to magically transform legions of the marginally literate - people whose primary concerns include not getting shot by the drug dealers across the hall, who are challenged with the very concept of controlling their own reproductive behavior, who have been psychologically debased by having their families destroyed by generations of public assistance (offered by the same "well meaning" professionals) - these new technologies are going to somehow transform people whose skills are worth less than the minimum wage that bars them from employment into productive citizens of the global village.
Doesn't this strike anyone for its stark absurdity? Even if one were to accept the specious concept that the needs of the poor place a mortgage on the productive, isn't it likely that something more pressing than an Internet connection might be worthy of the forced charity we so frequently practice in our mixed economy? Have we really graduated to the point where we can be coerced into satsifying needs that the needy don't even know they have? And, worse yet, are we going to be bullied into financing an army of professionals whose job it is to explain to the "disenfranchised" why they have this need that they never heard of?
And here lies the heart of Ms. Schneiders appeal.
| Who, then, will speak for the poor? The problem is (at minimum) two-fold. | The information have-nots need advocates, guides, leaders and visionaries | to help them understand what it is they are missing out on, and why it is | important.
Stop. Think. Who will be empowered by this? Who really stands to gain the most? The poor? Don't be so foolish. And who must provide the means?
| Out of necessity, many of us now assume that the funds essential to | maintaining this network will come from local (city and county) resources. | (We are hopeful that we are eligible for a special infusion of funds to | help us initiate this project, but experience teaches city workers that | we cannot rely on federal resources for program maintenance.) This is not | new for libraries; in our country, the vast majority of funds for public | libraries are provided at the city or county level. If it is the de facto | funding standard for the new information resources, however, it bodes | poorly for our country's future with respect to equity in information | access ... We must not codify inequality for the next generation.
And here it is. The hand in the pocket. Rent seekers with a strangely perverse self interest in perpetuating the very poverty they decry.
Now, where will the money so urgently called for actually end up? Who will derive income and employment from these funds? Who will build secure careers around them? Whose families stand to benefit most? Think about it.
This brings me to the title of my missive. I would never insult the poor for the fact of their poverty or the shame of their ignorance. Quite the contrary. I count myself lucky that when my grandfather arrived in this country, penniless and alone, he was not met by a swarm of poverty professionals seeking to "help" him. I thank the unknown "greedy" operator of the sweatshop that allowed him to work 12 hours a day, six days a week through the bleak years of the great depression. I am forever grateful that he was able to build a family and a new life on the dignity of the wages he earned from his own efforts. It is why I am here now and not festering in a morass of poverty and resentment wondering why life is not fair and why the universe doesn't automatically provide me with the unearned.
No, the porcine perpetrators of whom I speak are not the poor. It is the "selfless" professionals so eager to feed themselves at the trough of the new information age.
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