PEARLS BEFORE SWINE a reply to a note on NII & Service to the Poor [I have a lot of disagreement wi

[David Farber <>]

Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 14:17:57 PDT
From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza@radiomail.net>




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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