The once and future AT&T

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica has a really fascinating piece on the history of AT&T—why the company was able to become such a massive force during the 20th century, what changed that made the government step in to break up the AT&T monopoly in the '80s, and what's changed again that's enabling the company to make a bid to regain the power it once held.

Ultimately, Lasar writes, the past and the present have a lot in common. In the early 20th century and today, the company is really making the same sales pitch: Let us control the system, don't ask too many questions, and we'll make the system bigger so more Americans can get access to it.

When the antitrust hammer finally came down on AT&T in the early 1980s, it was in part because the pace of technology had overtaken the company. Even before the breakup, the FCC demanded that the corporation stop denying consumers and developers the right to freely connect devices to its network. Bell now stood in the way of too many innovators, prominently among them microwave upstart MCI, whose visionary Bill McGowan promised and delivered cheaper long distance service ...

Now here we are again, the latest version of AT&T asking for a merger with T-Mobile that will effectively turn the nation's wireless broadband system into a duopoly. At least one prominent scholar of the Bell system has sounded a worried note.

"Bottom line: this is one step too far back to the days of a single telephone company," warns Milton Mueller. "If you support a competitive industry where one can reasonably expect the public and legislators to rely on market forces as the primary industry regulator, this merger has to be stopped. On the other hand, if you welcome the growing pressures for regulating carriers and making them the policemen and chokepoints for network control, a bigger AT&T is just what the doctor ordered."

And what is the doctor promising in exchange for this regulatory approval? Once again: Universal Service.

"The proposed merger with T-Mobile will result in AT&T’s ability to expand deployment of its high-speed 4G LTE network to an additional 55 million Americans," an AT&T fact sheet on the merger contends, "representing an increase from 80 percent to 97 percent network coverage of the U.S. population."

Via Christopher Soghian

Image: Theodore Roosevelt Island Warning, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from mr_t_in_dc's photostream

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Back to the Future limited edition sneakers auctioned for charity

The Nike Mag, based on the sneakers seen in the popular motion picture Back to the Future II, is finally in existence.

The NIKE MAG is no longer the “greatest shoe never made.” The mythical shoe that originally captured the imagination of audiences in Back to the Future II is being released – and they’re here to help create a future without Parkinson’s disease.

1,500 pairs are under auction at eBay to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Bids are already hitting five-figure sums.

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Speculative fiction, and the art of predicting the future

John Schwartz has a nice piece in today's New York Times on science fiction as a tool for predicting the future:

The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that it’s hard to go wrong predicting that things will get worse. But while avoiding the nihilism of novels like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” in which a father and son wander a hopeless post-apocalyptic moonscape, a number of recent books foresee futures that seem more than plausible as the nation’s ambient level of weirdness rises.

Albert Brooks, the actor and director, brought out “2030,” in which the nation’s economy is sent into a spin by seemingly good news: cancer is cured. The bad-news twist: the resulting drain on national resources by an aging population that no longer conforms to the actuarial tables and continues to consume resources at baby-boomer rates, and a rather literal twist on the notion of intergenerational warfare. “I chose not to go too far,” Mr. Brooks said. “I liked having more present in my future.”

In “Ready Player One,” the novelist Ernest Cline extrapolates from the ripples that rising energy prices and climate change send through the economy, and gives us a future where the suburbs die off and many people are packed into in high-rise urban trailer parks, spending their days on an increasingly addictive Internet instead of facing the quotidian squalor. Readers who spend so much time issuing updates via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ that they have forgotten what their spouses look like might see themselves reflected in Mr. Cline’s funhouse mirror. “I did try to envision it as a possible future,” Mr. Cline said. “I don’t see it as a future we’re necessarily headed for.”

Read more: Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy - NYTimes.com.

Photo: "Book: A Real Page Turner," contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by SHOTbySUSAN. Union Square NYC Taken 6/12/11.

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