Of $100 Laptops and the Decline of Emor.

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab is in negotiations with Brazil to provide the country with $100 Linux-based laptops, offering the largely staggeringly poor nation the opportunity to distribute know-how and information to people regardless of social caste, while modern caste-based theocracies like Emor are busy consolidating the power of the state and industry over it and thwarting plans for public-works wi-fi networks (see recent pyrrhic victory of heading off a PBS funding cut only to have a former RNC honcho installed at its head, see freepress for details on the ongoing consolidation of media under fewer and fewer corporate banners). In Emor it isn't enough that you are a human being. It's really quite a handicap. You have to be at the top of the heap and willing to devour as much human flesh as it takes to get there and stay there, either by actively doing or by simply acknowledging that you get ahead while others starve, or you ride the greased ladder to penury and charity before anyone has anything to do with you, before you get that country's hollow hags to look at you. In Brasilia they're giving information, access, know-how to the people, taking them off the gold standard once and for all, closing those cash flow gaps so long convenient to the caste system by ignoring them and moving on to a new currency, one that, even though its adoption was spurred by the need to scrape by and get ahead, is more human. Each person can learn to use the machine, each person's ideas can take form and reshuffle the deck. Access! A country that does not offer its people simply frightened and narrow careerism, cash analogs to human relationships, cash analogs to poetry, cash instead of romance! Cash and the means to get it or nothing at all! A country that does not simply offer protectionist, group-enforced mediocrity! An enormous country.
Would that Emor would recognize the potential of its people with such openness, instead of with restraining, exclusionary fear and in-group schadenfreude. Would that Emor would see its people for people and do a little thing now and then to let the playing field level just a bit.