Juneau Empire Story Archive

Techwit: Consider these three ideas about Alaska's technology future

There's a fine line between being a visionary and a village idiot. Here are three ideas about Alaska's future that will test your ability to distinguish between leadership and lunacy.

Techwit
By Jason Ohler

Convert communities to digital economies. In many ways rural communities are the lifeblood of the Alaska character. Yet many are dying a slow economic death. Mine and lumber mill closures, as well as meltdowns in the fishing industry, are causing many inhabitants to leave and many communities to atrophy.

The typical response seems to be to look for more resources to develop. But there are only so many trees to chop down, fish to net, and barrels of oil to suck out of the ground. We need to begin aggressively expanding Alaska's digital economy. How about CHEAP as an acronym for such a pursuit? It stands for Commerce (including e-commerce, tele-commuting, etc.), Health services (current offerings are plentiful), Education (distance education offers a galaxy of opportunities), Access to government (many services are now Web-accessible), and Personal fulfillment (you name it).

Perhaps CHEAP doesn't quite capture the spirit of it. However, the point is clear. If rural residents knew how to grow their digital economies and to use digital services for education, health, government, and other purposes they would stand a far better chance of keeping their communities together without government subsidy. I recommend Alaska fund the digital conversion of four communities, study the results, and actively pursue the goal of communities achieving economic self-sufficiency through the development of digital economies.

Wire Alaska. Of course none of the above will ever happen until we get rid of our dependence on satellites to bring Internet to the home. This is probably more tech talk than you want to hear, but it's basically this simple. Satellites don't provide a fraction of what a digital economy needs. Picture trying to push a ton of peanut butter down a straw and you get the idea. The straw is a satellite; the peanut butter is what you are trying to do on the Internet. And satellite communication is expensive. An average Internet session at painfully slow speeds from a remote area in Alaska costs the equivalent of a week's groceries. A wire-based system could cost far less than that.

The fact is that we have the technical know-how to wire Alaska. Yes, I mean building a pipeline that carries data instead of oil or natural gas. Is doing so affordable? It is at least comparable to billions of dollars spent on launching satellites. Without a wire infrastructure, a digital economy outside the major metropolitan areas is unfeasible.

Add educational technology to the community infrastructure. What comes after water, sewage, and street maintenance in terms of community infrastructure? Technology in schools. I see no way to end the endless harangue about how to keep technology current in our schools other than to fold it into the infrastructure that our tax base supports. Not long ago the idea of a community water and sewage system seemed crazy. But these days if you want to see panic in the streets just start a rumor that your government's going out of the water-supply business and that citizens will have to find water for themselves. We don't talk about whether a school is going to have toilets, and we shouldn't talk about whether they're going to have computers and networks either. Like bathrooms, they need to simply be there and in good working order. It is the next layer of infrastructure we need if we are going to give our citizens the tools necessary to be truly responsible for themselves.

So, visionary or village idiot, you take your pick. But here's a fact: We either begin to supplement Alaska's resource-based economy with a digital economy, or communities will go the way of many our natural resources - toward extinction.

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