You don't need to be a Weatherman or read the Popol Vuh know which way the breeze is blowin'.Originally Posted by KJ3N
The near future feels ominous as the intro to All Along The Watchtower. The potentials for world economic collapse and nuclear war in the Middle East seem higher by the day. Couple that with diminishing belief in central authority, be it government, media, corporate, religious, you name your Evil Doer, with all his ilk and inc., and we're looking at a shift, if not a landslide, to local, semi-autominous, do-it-ourselves. Sure, up to now, the drift has been in the opposite direction. Food, energy, medical care, commerce, public safety, every day brings another Triffid tendril of central control into the fabric of our lives. The system is large and complex and I'm not confident it could handle outside stress on the order of regional nuclear war and global depression. The end is near? No way. Clear away all the hand-wringing nonsense and this remains a country of strong, brave, resourceful individuals. And there's some new wrinkles in the social fabric, American as apple pie that will held bind us together as events conspire to rip us apart. As racism and sexism remain and boil up in modern grotesque ways, I think it's not Lincoln's 1865. Socially we do better. And when the going gets tough, we do best. If, at least for the purpose of discussion, you buy that premise, do you think the ham brother & sisterhood might engender a self-supporting, decentralized network? Yes, public safety would probably be part of that, but I'm thinking more of personal communication, that which we might want to share beyond the back yard fence. Text. Pictures. Video. Whatever we might still be able to share, given what remained at hand.
PS, Funny, I just remembered that The Old Man's "American Radio Relay League" was, essentially, an embryonic form of autonomous network. When I was a kid, I could never get my head around the need for "Traffic."
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