Detroit"s Digital Divide: Low Income Citizens Build Their Own Internet

The city of Detroit, in the U.S. state of Michigan, has experienced an impressive economic and demographic shift over the past 50-years.

Deindustrialization coupled with depopulation has stripped the city of it’s economic strength cascading it into turmoil. Global competition from automakers shifted manufacturing jobs out of the area. As businesses left, communities decayed, inducing a terrifying surge in violent crime. Urban rot came next festering from within and eventually sending the city into bankruptcy in 2013 where it reemerged in 2014.

Five-years later, Detroit has gotten worse – not better - and the city is having trouble providing basic utilities for its residents.

In particular, the city along with internet service providers are failing to deliver high-speed internet to a significant part of the low income areas. 

That is why one community group of technology geeks have banded together to create an internet of their own.

Equitable Internet Initiative (EII) is a program that teaches Detroit residents how to build high speed WiFi networks. EII says Detroit is one of the top 5 least connected cities in the United States coupled with 60% of the city residents that do not have access to high-speed internet. The group aims to stop the growing digital divide that is leaving many low income residents behind and forgotten in the inner cities where there is only death and destruction.

EII has trained teams in the North End, Island View, and Southwest Detroit to setup infrastructure: a church that functions as a hub and internet service provider which then a signaled is beamed to communities that don’t have access to high-speed internet.

Residents who want internet from EII have to meet two requirements:

1. can’t afford internet


2. don’t already have internet or <10 Mbps

Once the requirements are met, EII will send a team to the residential location and install an outdoor directional antenna and an indoor router with a setup time around one-hour. EII recognizes that access to high-speed internet is a worldwide problem and if that is not fixed a “digital class system” will develop.

EII wants high-speed access for everyone..Popular Mechanics also said,

The EII offers a radical proposition that would allow people to get Internet outside of a major telecom. But it’s got its own money concerns. Initially, it worked off a federal grant. When that money dried up, the deal with Rocket Fiber made it viable again.

 

But that partnership will not cover the costs of more and more internet connections growing in perpetuity. Jenny Lee, the executive director of Allied Media Projects, the group behind EII, raised the question in a recent article. “How do we do this in way that doesn’t replicate the inequities of other utility companies? Are we going to be the equivalent of water department coming to shut you off if you don’t pay your bill?”

 

One way the group hopes it will prove its worth is by creating apps. Its Next Gen Apps program teaches students coding basics like CSS, HTML, Javascript, and Node.js. Combined with the EII’s efforts to provide internet in their areas, there’s a hope that people will truly make the internet their own.

Bottomline: Detroit is a prime example of citizens working together for survival in a post collapsed bankrupt city. The one question we have: how long until government shuts down this private internet?

 

Is This The First Sign Of A Technology Dump And A Neo-Luddite Era?

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Are we on the verge of a rebellion against technology?

Yesterday I was taken aback when I noticed an elderly Wal-mart greeter amusing herself with a fidget spinner.

What the hell is a fidget spinner? It’s a toy you just spin with your fingers.

It’s the hottest selling summer entertainment item that retails between $2.99-$8.99 depending on wether it lights up or makes noise.

To compare, last summer the over-hyped fad was Pokemon Go which was a ho-hum attempt at the first virtual reality game which turned out to have multiple technology problems such as being underdeveloped for rural areas and worldwide server crashes.

Why does the fidget spinner trend matter? Because it doesn’t involve any technology at all. It’s as low-grade technology wise as playing with a hula-hoop or yo-yo.

The trend peaked my interest as I believe we’ve reached the end game of the social media and app crazes of the past 10 years. Social Media IPO’s have slowed down to nil.

Why would we need another iTech item when we’ve got too many flooding the market already?

At a time when companies are replacing low-skilled workers with robots and kiosk machines, it’s not promising for their business models for customers to turn their backs on technology. Which is exactly why I’m predicting it’s going to happen.

We are no longer living in an era where people are adopting technological advancements; rather it’s being imposed on us. When pushed too far towards the direction of technology the equal and opposite reaction would be to turn a generation into neo-luddites.

Apple set to destroy reality and ensnare “tech hipsters” into augmented worlds that disconnect people from reality

Just like Eve who was lured into taking a bite out of the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden, many people today are enamored with the idea of chomping down on anything that tech giant Apple throws their way. This includes so-called “next level” technologies like the one the Apple is currently working on and soon to unveil, known as “augmented reality.” A.R. will reportedly allow users to basically live in a fake world filled with superimposed images of things that don’t actually exist.

At the recent 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference (W.W.D.C.), Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook was brimming with excitement over the prospect of coaxing even more unsuspecting victims into his company’s latest technological snare. Speaking about A.R., Cook told the media that he is “so excited about it” that he literally wants to “yell out and scream.”

Whether gleefully naive or even demonic, Cook’s guttural response to A.R.’s release is particularly bizarre, especially when considering that it serves no real purpose other than to erase yet another element of humanity from the social sphere. By drawing more people into a fake reality projected through virtual simulations – similar to the Google Glass concept – society will become even more glued to their phones and other similar technologies at the expense of interacting with others.

“The first step in making it a mainstream kind of experience is to put it in the operating system,” Cook stated, admitting that A.R. could end up becoming a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences for society. “We’re building it into iOS 11, opening it to developers – and unleashing the creativity of millions of people. Even we can’t predict what’s going to come out.” (Related: To keep up with the latest developments in virtual reality technology, be sure to visit and bookmark VirtualReality.news.)

Oh, and Tim Cook doesn’t really like President Trump, by the way

For some reason during an interview that was supposed to center around A.R., Cook was asked by Bloomberg about his experiences working with President Trump. Perhaps expectedly, Cook was all to keen on commenting about the many things he and the president disagree on, including issues like illegal immigration and climate change.

“There are clearly areas where we’re not nearly on the same page,” Cook explained, adding that he was “very disappointed” when President Trump decided to pull the United States out of the deceptive and illegitimate Paris Climate Accord. Unwilling to even consider the reasons why the president shut down the deal, Cook emphasized his misguided opinion that “America is more important than blood politics,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

As the interview circled back around to the topic at hand, Cook added a little more about the eventual release of A.R., which isn’t quite ready for the mainstream. Even so, Cook stated that “it’s time to put the seat belt on and go,” insisting that people are already having A.R. experiences every time they eat a meal, for instance.

Apple hopes to release it’s first A.R. glasses later in the year, with plans to have them sync up to people’s iPhones and Apple Watch devices. The goal is to convince the public that it’s completely normal to walk around with futuristic-looking goggles on their faces that recreate the world around them into a Pokemon Go-type virtual reality simulation. The prospect of creating a fake world for humans to live in is “really cool,” according to Cook, though he insists that it will somehow encourage rather than replace human contact. His rationale is that rather than fully embody a virtual reality, augmented reality technology will simply enhance what’s already there.

Via Natural News

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Featured Image: Håkan Dahlström/Flickr

Riots, Fear, Anger Predicted By AI: Simulation “Detects Your Emotions Under Stress”

It is true that how you react to a situation will determine whether or not you achieve a successful outcome.

During an emergency, the strength and resolve of your mindset, and of your psychological state, will ultimately be the driving factor in whether you become a survivor or a victim. Your supplies and plans will be secondary to that. During a large scale breakdown, keeping calm under stress and resisting crowd forces to join into mayhem will be among the most valued traits.

If the animal over takes rational man, the battle is lost. Society will immediately devolve into the worst behaviors, and people will get hurt before order is restored.

Now, a new generation of artificial intelligence is using a facial recognition feed of users’ features to detect emotional states during a major crisis scenario (while immersed in a VR simulation). While the software hasn’t evolved to a stable level yet, it is determining the threshold for which violence, chaos and absolute unrest sets in. Experts believe that AI now understands when a person is upset enough to resort to rioting, and may be directing people to keep their calm instead.

via the London Guardian:

An immersive film project is attempting to understand how people react in stressful situations by using artificial intelligence (AI), film and gaming technologies to place participants inside a simulated riot and then detecting their emotions in real time.

[…]

Riot was inspired by global unrest, and was specifically inspired by [immersive filmmaker Karen] Palmer’s experience of watching live footage of the Ferguson protests in 2015. “I felt a big sense of frustration, anger and helplessness. I needed to create a piece of work that would encourage dialogue around these types of social issues. Riots all over the world now seem to be [the] last form of [community] expression,” she said.

[…]

Designed as an immersive social digital experience, the objective is to get through a simulated riot alive. This is achieved through interacting with a variety of characters who can help you reach home. The video narrative is controlled by the emotional state of the user, which is monitored through AI software in real time.

[…] We see looters, anarchists and police playing their parts and “interacting” directly with us . What happens next is up to us: our reactions and responses determine the story, and as the screen is not enclosed in a headset, but open for others to see, it also creates a public narrative.

Currently,Riot’s pilot interface can recognise three emotional states: fear, anger and calm.

Is there ultimately something we can learn about ourselves in simulations of how we would react under stress, and to the harsh environments of an unstable society during which some actors will resort to ugly extremes?

The emotional state is directly influenced by physiological reactions by the body under stress – and the ultimatum fight or flight response kicks in. As Lizzie Bennett wrote:

The Physiological Basics

Pupils dilate to take in as much light as possible
Blood-glucose levels increase
Veins in the skin contract allowing extra blood flow to the muscles
Smooth muscle relaxes to allow extra oxygen for the lungs
Heart rate increases
Blood pressure increases
Non-essential systems shut down (digestion for example)
The only focus is the task in hand

Such information may be useful to training, and indeed, a computer-fed feedback loop could help an individual doing repeated simulations to learn to keep calm, maintaining such factors as blood pressure and heart rate under thresholds for calm and sober reactions.

Awareness of these factors may increase your control over them, to aid in your advantage.

The other side of the coin is predictive behavior, real time surveillance analysis of the population, and the programming of artificial stimuli to make people react. Now they know what makes them tick – and they know what type of event, real or manufactured, might make them react.

“We have been doing research in emotion detection from facial expression, voice, body gesture, EEG, etc for many years,” said Meng. He hopes the project’s success will make people see the benefits of AI, leading to the development of smart homes, building and cities.

The only question is whether they want to provoke a crowd into riots (maybe to demonize the opposition) or whether they want to calm and pacify the crowds (maybe to keep people from caring about the effects of oppressive laws or bad policy).

The near-future now promises to regulate our lives this way – this technology will be used to direct people in real-life living environments, with inputs from smart devices nudging your behavior, socially engineering your meaningful activities, and perhaps your thinking.

How will you prepare for a future of tracking and behavior monitoring? Will it alter your preps, change your thinking or lead you to alternate strategies?

Read more:

Understanding The Stress Response: It Can Buy You Valuable Seconds

The Prepper’s Blueprint: Be Ready, Body, Mind and Soul

Selco On Riots: Do Not Go Out: “You Do Not Prepare to Be a Hero… You Prepare to Survive”

Character Traits And Skills That Are Hard To Find During A Crisis

The Survival Mom Teaches You How To Prepare More, Panic Less