My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.
We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.
So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.
If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.
We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.
As usual Gnome do it's best to alienate users and have some who restore good behaviors as the can. Meanwhile the fraction of power users who still use Gnome are less and less. In few years if they keep going they'll earn a share of Windows expatriate newbies and lost all power users, becoming then irrelevant like many who have choose the same path.
Well... Until people will react protecting their own interests we will only go in a death spiral.
Only recently have we witnessed, particularly in the EU but also in the US and Canada, the blocking of personal bank accounts of individuals who were simply "inconvenient" to the ruling class, from Wikileaks to OnlyFans creators, Francesca Albanese, Frédéric Baldan, Jacques Baud, and various players in the crypto world, all without trial, without any crime committed, just unwelcome.
This makes it clear that for Democracy to exist, a balance of power is needed, including internal balance, which requires that the population remains outside the potential control of the State to preserve a significant degree of freedom. Privacy is one of these fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech, because the ideas circulating can be dangerous, but it is far more dangerous to have someone with the power to prevent ideas and news from circulating.
In the past, for technological reasons, because it is technology that determines every civilisation, cities were rich places, because they had trade, nearby arts and crafts; knowledge and economy travelled in this way.
Today, for similar reasons, cities are chicken coops where the inmates are not much different from the human batteries in The Matrix; they live to work, generally without realising it, for masters who are no longer in the city. Technologically, they are failed places, because they cannot evolve without being rebuilt from scratch, and they cannot be rebuilt on such a scale, both due to the impact of the work and the quantity of raw materials required.
Most people never weigh the real cost of a modern city; they are so accustomed to owning nothing that they think what is there is natural, ignoring what they don't see, whether underground (like the cathedral with mega-pumping stations to mitigate flooding beneath Tokyo) or in the surrounding areas to bring water and food, because we all eat, but in the city no one produces.
The cities of the coming century are ghettos, polluted and devastated, where misery is concentrated like a compound, while wealth leaves the compound to reclaim life in nature.
Basic FLOSS desktop knowledge must be in high schools for everyone, you can't study in the modern time without contemporary tools. LaTeX must also be in the game, because we need people who know how to express themselves crafting good quality documents.
Like frigghome.ai I do not see much interest in these, but they could be an interesting way to bring a homeserver per home, potentially powering a public blockchain for digital identity, (smart)contracts hashed publicly, and a digital currency not owned by anyone in particular with also Liquid Feedback blockchain to construct a new society.
The road is very long, but technically feasible, obviously I expect ferocious push against...
Hem... Geographical distance isn't a sensible parameter when computers are involved, because what matters is informational distance. Knowledge isn't transmitted through physical proximity but through the exchange of information.
The problem here is that most companies and workers lack the IT skills to operate as a virtual company or a learning organisation, so onboarding is complicated and gaining experience is difficult. Skilled workers are frustrated by the inefficiency of less competent colleagues and the organisation itself, while all the friction points are highly visible rather than hidden within in-person collaboration.
This can't be studied without comparing virtual companies/learning organisations to companies from the time of Taylor/Weber/Fayol.
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