In the “why, oh why” section…

Howard Rheingold sent me an e-mail with a fairly innocuous question about my peronal reason for leaving a 'normal' job to work with Digital Divide issues and wire.less.dk. It's something I've spent a part of my recent vacation (Vienna, Slovakia, Prague) thinking about, so it prompted a bit of a word flood.
And since this is the first time I've written anything fairly coherent about the subject, I figured i'd pop it into multiplicity for laughs, so here goes:

[...] in general making this change in my life is the best thing I have done in my professional career. Last week (somewhere in Slovakia) I was eating an icecream, thinking about why I do what I do (I started thinking about the luxury of actually being able to buy an ice cream when you feel like it), and especially why i do it. I think it comes down to not buying into 2 of the commonly heard statements/excuses for our western lifestyle and excesses:

Some people say: "I worked hard to get where I got, and I deserve to enjoy the benefits", I don't believe a word of it. I never really worked that hard, never really suffered the uncertainty of not knowing where my next meal should come from, and never really needed to worry about getting a job. What's more, at the moment I am living a very nice and comfortable life only getting paid 2 days a week, and still not sorely lacking any luxury. At the same time I have met litterally hundreds of people who have worked harder than me, at every step of my life, but ended up with decidedly less. It's not so much that I've earned it, but that I've been lucky enough to have been handed the opportunities and smart enough to grab them when offered.

Some people add to that: "It really won't make a difference whether I part with a little of what I have, not in the large scheme of things at least." Well, I stopped believing in the large scheme of things. It's a useless abstraction, because to me as an individual there is no large scheme of things, and if there was, I should probably just stop eating, breathing and living, it wouldn't make a difference either way. There really is only the small perspective, the one in which I, by definition, can make a difference. And making a difference is not only very possible, (I learnt that in my 3 months as a volunteer in Ghana, and in my earlier days backpacking South America), it doesn't even have to difficult, disrupting or painful.

The conclusion to this is not that I need to become a pauper, giving away every last thing I have, but that I feel a need to take into consideration the perspective of other people than myself when I choose what to do and work with. It's difficult, sometimes to justify ever doing something selfish such as spending my money on a vacation and ice cream, but luckily I'm post-modern enough not to have to follow my essential beliefs to their extreme conclusions :-)

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but it's the first time I've managed to explain to myself the reason for doing what I am.

The more practical background is different, and concerns itself with that nagging feeling that what I was doing in the Internet industry, while challenging, succesful and interesting, wasn't really "enough" in that metaphysical kind of way. First I went off backpacking, back in 1997, looking for different perspectives on life, and while the immediateness of that life appealed to me I couldn't really see myself in that kind of nomadic life. Frankly the fear of losing touch with friends, family and anything else remotely permanent was quitely nagging. So I went to work in a series of interesting, well-paying, jobs where I both learnt a lot and had a large degree of freedom, but could never shake the feeling that there was little value in being part of the make-the-rich-richer-while-pleasing-the-investor approach. I finally decided I didn't entirely fit in when I realized I was one of the only people in a 130 person web-company who didn't belive the hype enough to buy stock in the company I worked in, even though we were succesful enough in that dot-com kind of way.
At the same time, I kept looking for worth-while projects, especially in the developing world and technology sphere, to do in my spare time. But projects were rare, and my spare time rarer yet.

So when the company I worked for started consolidating, and I was pointed by my brother to a slashdot posting about GeekCorps (some time in May 2000), it took me all of 20 minutes to decide I would apply for a volunteer position with their first group going to Ghana, and that evening I calmly told my girlfriend that I was hoping to go to Africa for a while to pursue my dreams. I settled back into work and heard nothing for 4 or 5 months (while the first group of geeks was sent to Ghana by geekcorps), until one day I got an e-mail from North Adams, Mass., asking me whether I was still interested. A quick yes, a phone interview and a stack of e-mails later, I was making appointments for various innoculations, and trying to get rid of my apartment.

I won't say much here and now about my 3 and a half months in Ghana and North Adams, most of that is covered at geekhalla and GeekCorps as well as at my old blog, except to say that ultimately what I got out of it was faith. A belief that working with the digital divide was not just a silent dream of mine, but was actually possible in real-life, that people where interested and that it probably could make a real difference.

Since I returned from Ghana into the midst of a dot-com crisis, I did some (but not enough) traditional consulting, but kept my ears and eyes open for possibilites in the digital divide area. And so I find myself today working with a few projects in the area (most importantly wire.less.dk, as well as seriously considering going back to get a master's degree in this area (that is if I can find a university that is interested in the area, and will have me as a student :-).

Why wireless? Well, it's what I worked with in Ghana, due mostly to a confusion between my mobile Internet expertise (WAP/GPRS/SMS etc.) and the wireless Internet (802.11b) expertise wanted by my partner company. But more imprtantly the political and democratic perspectives of community owned, low-cost wireless networks are obvious, oh and it's a lot of fun too.