I hear a lot about companies getting the rights to certain bandwidths, so that they can in turn sell it to other providers, since bandwidth is something apparently everyone is going to need at some point, whether it's for a connection for a computer or a
phone. For someone ignorant of all things bandwidth, this idea seems to me like trying to buy the rights of the moon's gravitational pull. I mean, it's
air, charged with different levels of electrical and
cell power but still, it's just air. Now our air has become a market, a place to monopolize. I mean, how many natural resources do we have left? Is there a monopoly on
polar ice? Well, I guess we want the ice to stay where it is. Never mind.
I only wish bandwidths were visible to the naked eye. I would like to be able to look up in the sky and see bands in the various stratospheres, perhaps color coded to whatever corporation owns them. Nokia, Sprint, Acme, Intel. What have you. Wouldn't that be like seeing the Matrix, or what? But then, if we could see them, maybe we'd be disgruntled as to how little of our small world is free anymore. It would become the true glass ceiling, the snow globe effect we only want to reserve for the photographs of the Earth taken from the safe distance of outer space.
Earlier this week, I saw, on a friend's email forward, a photograph of the Earth at night. All those lights sprinkled like jimmies on an ice cream sundae. Even in my ignorance of geography and without the aid of the color codes of atlases, I would point like a child witnessing fireworks for the first time. Ooh, that must be Russia. That's Africa, and that, I point to the United States, is us. All of us. Ooh ahh.