"How is that free speech?"
The kid rolled his eyes. "Come off it. You old people, you turn up your
noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell
phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with
each other -- even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this
stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the
polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound
the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines,
twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the
presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the
corruption hearings.
"And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important
phones are to democracy, there's always some old pecksniff primly
telling us that our phones don't give us *real* democracy. It's so much
bullshit."
He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt's
mouth hung open.
"I'm not old," he said finally.
"You're older than me," the kid said. His tone softened. "Look, I'm not
trying to be cruel here, but you're generation-blind. The Internet is
great, but it's not the last great thing we'll ever invent. My pops was
a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You're a PC guy, so you think
my phone is a toy."
Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt's shop for a
while, trying to marshal his thoughts.
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