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displacing all the other kinds of expression," Alan said. "This is in addition to all the ways you've had to talk --"
"Right, like this thing," the kid said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small phone. "This was free -- not twenty dollars, not even two thousand dollars -- just free, from the phone company, in exchange for a one-year contract. Everyone's got one of these. I went trekking in India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of abstract expression, but actual *talking.*"
The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from the people who believe.
Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to see through the bullshit, but just the opposite.
"But that's communication through the *phone company*," Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn't see how sucktastic that proposition was. "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 prim
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, page 278
by Cory Doctorow