Back Talk — Can we Build the Offline Internet

How did we ever live without the Internet? I ask myself that when I look around at how much of what we do every day is either on the net or work or play or everyday householding that couldn’t be the way it is without our networked lives. But for all the three billion network users in the world (according to the International Telecommunication Union), for most of the people on the planet it’s still a netless world. It shouldn’t be. The obvious way to increase net usage is to increase net accessibility: broadband everywhere, that sort of thing. But there are also a lot of people beyond the reach of the net. They live in remote and impoverished locations, or they suffer under post-conflict or post-disaster conditions, or perhaps they live in the Bronx and can’t afford data plans on their phones.