Tweet Like an Egyptian

Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers.

Like everyone else in the world I’ve been watching the events unfolding in Egypt with great concern. How can people be so cruel to one another? I’m referring, of course, to the shutdown of the internet and Twitter. It’s insidious.

We all know why it was done. The authorities felt besieged by revolutionaries. Naturally, they (the authorities) sought to deprive the revolutionaries of their power, so they unplugged them. I’m sure I would have done the same, if I were a dictatorial regime propped up by a rich foreign power, because I am also a walking moral vacuum, abhorred by nature.

That got me thinking, though. How would the history of the world been different if this sort of cruel drastic measure had been resorted to in the past?

For example, we’ve all heard of the American Revolution, and how, because of it, we live in George Washington State, instead of George William Frederick State, and we call ourselves Americans, after the continent, instead of British, after the fraction of the island. These are good things. But what would have happened had King George III done what Mubarak did, and cut off the colonists’ internet and Twitter?

One good thing: I’m sure that if they were cut off early enough the Boston Tea Party couldn’t have happened. They could never have pulled off that kind of organization without the aid of selectively distributed electronic communication. Consequently there would be no Tea Bagger Party today, which would be a relief. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know they could have existed, so we wouldn’t feel the relief, so we’d just complain about some other yahoos. Probably the Australians.

Then there’s the Declaration of Independence, which I learned in school was actually finished on MySpace, a sucky 18th Century predecessor of Facebook, on July 2, 1776, and only tweeted two days later. The British people were having their own problems and King George had already (this is real history!) shut down Twitter on their island. That’s why the British, including King George himself, didn’t know about the Declaration of Independence tweet until weeks later, when the ban was lifted and someone did a #revolution search.

That was what did happen. But if King George had shut down the internet and Twitter in the colonies that summer, the American colonists wouldn’t have been able to declare independence, so they wouldn’t know they were really having a revolution. No one would ever know they could pursue happiness, so we’d all be couch potatoes today.

No one would know what a “John Hancock” was. If you said to someone “put your John Hancock there,” they’d think you meant something dirty.

That’s just one minor revolution, hardly even the most serious one! What about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Velvet Revolution, the Velcro Revolution?

As we know now, without the internet and Twitter, none of those revolutions could have happened. Now I’m sure that some of you would say, good riddance to bad history. But you aren’t thinking how cool it was that all that went down. Just the French Revolution, for example, got us “Let them eat cake” and guillotines. Come on! That’s some cool s#*t!

Further hypotheticals to learn by:

It’s long been said that if the internet had never existed, children wouldn’t have learned violence from internet games. Discuss how the absence of violent tendencies among children would have affected history. First, pay attention to the Childrens’ Crusades, the development of the Mother Goose rhyming industry, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the world-wide stick and rock trade. Then, look away.

It’s also long been an established truism that without internet porn, men would never view women as sex objects. What would they have viewed as sex objects instead? List five possibilities and their relative likelihoods. Take into account the prevailing forms of agribusiness in ancient times and more recently, the rise of little tiny battery powered thingies.

Shooting an Elephant

Let’s ask weighty questions about philanthropy!

What a negative bastard I am, that I don’t think the world of Bill & Melinda & Warren E’s highly noble goal of donating $3 billion a year of their hoardings. I don’t care about all the fabulous good they will accomplish thereby. I don’t see any of the promised solutions to the world’s problems as being nearly such glorious goods as to justify the processes that led to this situation, meaning the processes that gave these jackasses so much power in the first place.

It’s all about the power. That’s all I see. Who elected these twits? Who really believes that these people actually deserve all the money (= power) they have to throw at us?

Don’t get me wrong. At heart I’m a screaming conservative. Watch me rant and rave on behalf of the rights of people to live the way they did during the Stone Age. I’m for Detached Accessory Dwelling Units, because I want Big Government to stay the hell out of my garage. I was vehemently opposed to the Supreme Court decision on eminent domain, because I didn’t think our Founding Fathers thought replacing George’s fighting bantam farm with a Wal-Mart constituted “public use.” I’m so opposed to Big Government I think we should all be allowed to run naked and drunk in the streets, and all of us enjoy public cockfights and bear baiting, if you know what I mean.

But there’s such a thing as Big Money too. It shouldn’t exist in the first place: no one, in the history of the world, nor any group of three people, has ever truly earned $60 billion. Bill & Melinda & Warren E didn’t just recently sit themselves down on a log and wipe the collective sweat from their brows and say “Whewee, that was a whole lot of work hoarding all that money the last thirty years, now let’s rest up a spell and pass some of it out.”

But back to the power. It occurs to me that we all might benefit from a little Gedanken experiment. Or in this case a Gedungen experiment. Because when I think of elephants in the house, I think of elephants.

Let’s imagine that they weren’t about to give away $3 billion a year in money, but $3 billion a year in elephants. What would that look like?

Let’s see. One elephant costs 1,000,000 rupees or less. That’s around $20,000. Figure in the $500 per year to feed one at wholesale prices, plus costs of keepers and temporary housing, 2.26 cents per ton-mile for railroad freight, 78 cents per ton-mile for air-freight, at about 5 tons per animal, and out comes the rough answer: The cost of obtaining, maintaining, and shipping elephants to anywhere whatsoever averages less than $100,000 per elephant. So Bill & Melinda & Warren E have the equivalent of at least 30,000 elephants per year to give away around the world. That’s one pachyderm to give to every 200,000 people, per year.

So if the elephants are distributed equally, and dropped in by helicopter, it should be virtually raining elephants everywhere on the planet. “Mbuzi! A present from the Gateses and the Buffett is about to land on your Mother’s hut!”

Or say they give them to cities and towns rather than small collectives. What would it do for Seattle to have an influx of 2.5 elephants per year? “Thank you Bill et al, our Mounted Police have never looked so Hannibalish! How retro!”

People are such suck-ups; you know they’re going to fall all over themselves thanking their donors not only for the elephants but also for everything that comes with the elephants.

I guess that’s what I’m really talking about. Thank you Bill & Melinda & Warren E for your $3 billion a year, but you’d better not send any poop with it.