Adoption, Not Just A Game For Brangelina

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Who would have guessed that US Patent No. 3,906,166, granted in 1975 to Martin Cooper of Motorola would completely change the world?

My kids tell me that was a long time ago, which I suppose it was....

Here"s global cell phone penetration over the last decade. Not bad...

With hindsight we can look at this adoption phase and marvel, but let"s not miss some key points.

Specifically, how radically phones have infiltrated so many aspects of our lives. And no, I"m not talking about Sally who"s addicted to the endorphin rush she gets from hitting refresh on Instagram to see how many "likes" her stupid photo of her chicken-avocado salad is getting. I"m talking about real isht. Life changing isht.

Like the millions of Africans who now receive anti-malaria texts from football hero Didier Drogba:

It’s 9pm, are you and your family safe under nets? This is Didier Drogba, sleep well.

Ah... the humble mobile phone — doing more to fight Malaria than the UN, the WHO, or any government ever has. Power distributed and decentralised.

Or...

The Indonesian midwives" mobile phone project, which has drastically reduced infant mortality rates as villagers place more trust with midwives who can now talk to obstetricians and gynaecologists in the cities and provide better care.

Or...

Farmers, who prior to the mobile phone used to walk in blazing heat for up to two weeks to get to market, where they"d sell their livestock.... and sometimes wouldn"t because demand wasn"t there.

Those same farmers now use mobiles to determine ahead of time market prices for their goods before deciding where best to trade their livestock or crops. Not only that, but receiving live pricing of livestock and crops allowing them to more accurately plan and run their farming practices. Power distributed and decentralised.

And speaking of farmers in the third, world it was back in 2003 or 2004 — I can"t remember exactly — when my lovely lass (before she succumbed to my charms and became Mrs. Chris) and I were traveling in Kashmir, and I vividly remember realising then just how powerful the mobile phone really was.

We were chatting to a peasant rice farmer, I"ll call him Ranjeet. Because his father had done it before him, and his fathers father before him, and he himself had been at it for over 30 years since, Ranjeet was doing the only thing he knew: He was growing rice.

And like his forefathers before him, Ranjeet simply took whatever price was offered by the Delhi traders when they turned up at harvest time. Together with his fellow rice farmers in the village Ranjeet had no way of knowing whether the price he got from the traders from Delhi was fair or not.

Enter the mobile phone.

He, together with fellow farmers, had all clubbed together and bought a WAP phone. Remember those?

It was man"s first crack and connecting a mobile phone to the internet.

Ranjeet and his buddies would huddle around the phone, getting live pricing from the rice market in Delhi. And whoo... boy, had it made them mad. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.

Try telling that to Ranjeet, and he"d have punched you in the face. So when those slimy rice traders from Delhi rolled into town to buy Ranjeet and his buddies" rice, these dirt poor peasant farmers could no longer be hoodwinked into selling it at deeply discounted, "kill my family, make me starve" prices any longer. Power distributed and decentralised.

For most of us, we"re lucky enough to live in a developed country where we don"t think about this stuff.

The mobile phone helps us do many of the things we were already doing, but now we just do it without getting off the sofa.

But for those in emerging and submerging markets mobile phones help people do things they could never do before. They are, in other words, not a luxury but a necessity.

Ask folks today, and I"ll bet they"d sooner leave home without their underpants on than leave home without their phone.

What else?

Education. The mobile phone has revolutionised that, too. I was reading that in Vietnam 75% of the kids use their phones for educational purposes. This is good news because it means that Brangelina and Brangelina wannabes won"t have to adopt starving illiterate Vietnamese orphans any longer.

It was Malcolm Gladwell, the author, journalist, and speaker, who said:

Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation.

I"m going to put my neck out and say that the mobile phone has probably done more to break isolation and reduce poverty than almost anything else in the last 50 years.

So What?

Well, the mobile phone is similar to how to think about blockchain, and of course the most powerful (to date) blockchain is Bitcoin, which I spoke about last week. One changed the world. The other will change is changing our world.

Like the impact of the mobile phone before it, it"s going to be HUUUGE!

HUUUGE! I tell you!

Now, I"m going to suggest that Martin Cooper was an amateur, compared with Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever the hell she is. This is because blockchain technology has the potential to do what the mobile phone has already done but on steroids.

Applications are already being built in: Asset management (trade and processing settlement), insurance (claims processing), payments, title registry, deed registries, personal identification, distributed cloud storage, and an entire squadron of other applications far too long to mention here.

Many will scoff and laugh at it... and many do. This is how it must be, but I warn you. To ignore this is like ignoring the impact mobile phones were going to have on society when the first mobile handset went on sale in 1973. Completely revolutionary and disruptive technology would be neither revolutionary nor disruptive if it didn"t... how do I say this... disrupt.

And it"ll be fought hammer and tongs, especially by those who see it as a threat to their own business models. Hello Jamie :-)

But ultimately new technologies become overwhelming, and even those who poo poo it will be dragged kicking and screaming into its clutches because the utility function is too powerful.

And we should all be as happy about this as these guys.

Because power in the hands of many is always everywhere better than power in the hands of the few.

To the future... and a jolly fine weekend. Thanks as always for reading!

- Chris

"Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else." — Clayton M. Christensen

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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What You Do On Your Cell Phone Could Come Back To Haunt You

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

As far as Big Brother is concerned, nothing that you do on your cell phone is ever private.  And if the government really wants to see what is on your cell phone, they are going to get that information one way or another, even if that means resorting to physical violence.   On Monday, NBC News provided us with yet another glaring example of how the United States is being transformed into a Big Brother police state.  On January 1st, Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick from Buffalo, New York were coming back home from a trip to Toronto, and they didn’t anticipate any unusual problems when they got to the border.  Unfortunately for them, U.S. Customs & Border Protection agents decided to take their cell phones, demanded their passwords, and kept them in custody for the next two hours as they searched for anything that might be incriminating on those phones.

You might be thinking that sounds like it should be illegal, and you would be correct, but sadly federal courts have ruled that our constitutional rights do not apply to border searches.  So authorities use this legal loophole to do pretty much anything they want at the border.

If that young couple from Buffalo would have had something illegal on their phones, they could have been immediately arrested and put in prison.

And we haven’t even gotten to the worst part of the story yet.  Just a few days later Akram Shibly and Kelly McCormick took another trip to Canada, and this time border agents physically assaulted Akram when he did not immediately turn over his phone.  The following comes from NBC News…

Three days later, they returned from another trip to Canada and were stopped again by CBP.

“One of the officers calls out to me and says, ‘Hey, give me your phone,"” recalled Shibly. “And I said, ‘No, because I already went through this."”

The officer asked a second time.

Within seconds, he was surrounded: one man held his legs, another squeezed his throat from behind. A third reached into his pocket, pulling out his phone. McCormick watched her boyfriend’s face turn red as the officer’s chokehold tightened.

Is this still America?

I can’t believe that this is what the United States has become.  When I was young I remember reading about this sort of thing in Nazi Germany, the USSR and Communist China, but I never imagined that it would happen here.  For years I have been warning about this growing “Big Brother police state control grid”, and I wish that more Americans would realize how evil all of this government surveillance truly is.

You can watch an interview where this couple from Buffalo talks to NBC News about this recent incident at the border right here. 

It is so disgusting that this is how we are treating law abiding people when countless numbers of drug dealers and gang members are pouring across unprotected sections of our border every single day.

Unfortunately, cell phone searches at the border appear to be rising at an exponential rate.  According to NBC News, more cell phone searches were conducted at the border during the month of February 2017 than in the entire year of 2015…

Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of cellphones by border agents has exploded, growing fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016.

According to DHS officials, 2017 will be a blockbuster year. Five-thousand devices were searched in February alone, more than in all of 2015.

And of course it isn’t just searches at the border that you need to be concerned about.

Not too long ago, it was being reported that the CIA has helped the Justice Department with technology that allows law enforcement officials to scan “data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time” from the safety of a plane…

The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work.

The CIA and the U.S. Marshals Service, an agency of the Justice Department, developed technology to locate specific cellphones in the U.S. through an airborne device that mimics a cellphone tower, these people said.

So the next time a strange plane flies over your house, this may be what is happening.

Here is more on this disturbing new technology…

The program operates specially equipped planes that fly from five U.S. cities, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population. Planes are equipped with devices—some past versions were dubbed “dirtboxes” by law-enforcement officials—that trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.

I have a feeling that if this program was ever challenged in court that it would be ruled unconstitutional, so let’s hope that happens as soon as possible.

But then again, the NSA has been collecting and storing all forms of electronic communication for years and nothing is being done about.  We have even had a 36-year veteran of the NSA named William Binney come out and publicly admit that all of our phone conversations “are being monitored and stored” and still nothing is done to stop it.

So don’t do anything on your cell phone that you wouldn’t want the government to see, because someday they could use it to nail you.

Of course we also need to use discretion regarding the things that we know the public will be able to see.  When you post something to Facebook or Twitter, you may think that it is harmless, but it could end up costing you big time.  In fact, I just came across an article about how a number of pastors have actually been fired because of what is on their social media accounts…

“It’s not fair I lost my job,” the pastor told me.

“My church members post a lot worse things than I do on social media. It’s a double standard.”

He’s right. It is a double standard. But it’s reality. And, with greater frequency, more pastors and church staff are losing their jobs because of what they post, particularly on Facebook and Twitter and, to some extent, their blogs.

By the way, churches will not always tell the pastor the specific reason for the firing. But, once we begin to infuriate our church members with our posts, many will find a myriad of reasons to give us the boot.

Like the title to this article says, what you do on your cell phone could come back to haunt you.

For many Americans, cell phones have become an essential part of modern life, but the truth is that those little electronic devices can also destroy our lives if we are not careful.

So if you are going to use them, use them wisely, because people are watching.