Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Anti-globalization activists in Oakland, Calif., are recycling old machines, loading them with free software and shipping them off to Ecuador.
Sep 23, 2002 | It's surprisingly easy to build a computer. "There's only like seven or eight parts in a PC," Eddie Nix says as we stand in the cavernous warehouse of a computer recycling center in Oakland, Calif. We're surrounded by waist-high stacks of unwanted computers, but Nix insists that the systems only look like they're dead -- they can easily be resurrected, he says, and put to good use.
Wearing combat boots and a T-shirt emblazoned with a large skull and crossbones, Nix looks more like a biker than your stereotypical computer geek. He pulls out a "box" -- essentially a computer with all of the parts removed -- from a pile of old machines and sets it on a nearby worktable. "They have all sorts of people coming in here," Nix says of the warehouse, the Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC). "Some people are from drug rehab programs, from wherever -- and they can have you making computers in a day." He pops open the box and gathers all the necessary parts -- memory chips, a hard drive, a video card, a keyboard and a mouse. In less than a minute, Nix fits all the pieces into the machine and hits the start button.
It's a sunny Saturday afternoon in September, and Nix is here on behalf of the Independent Media Center, a loose affiliation of grass-roots journalists who specialize in staging anti-globalization protests at international conferences devoted to "free trade." In the run-up to the next meeting of delegates to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which will be held in Ecuador in late October, Nix and a handful of others have spent weeks turning unwanted computer parts donated to the ACCRC into working machines that they plan to use in their protest. Other volunteers are doing the same thing at Free Geek, a recycling center in Portland, Ore., and a group in Los Angeles is helping out as well. Together, the geek activists aim to build about 300 Linux machines, which they'll stuff into a shipping container and send down to Ecuador before the protest.
People at the Independent Media Center pride themselves on the decentralized nature of their organization. There are no actual, official "leaders" -- but I'm here to see Evan Henshaw-Plath, who's the main force behind the Ecuador project. Henshaw-Plath is a 25-year-old programmer who once founded a dot-com and now runs a dot-net: protest.net, a calendar site used by various groups to schedule their demonstrations. During the past year, he's also spent a lot of his time with activists in South America, helping them set up computer labs, networks and Web sites, all in an attempt to stymie what he sees as the formidable, and growing, influence of various international trade organizations in the region. During one of his visits, he met with some of the groups planning to protest at the FTAA meeting and had an epiphany.
Ever since the huge anti-World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in 1999, where the IMC got its start, many of the world's trade meetings have featured chanting, puppet-carrying anti-globalization activists, supported by a cadre of "journalist-activists" from Indymedia. But at most of the protests so far, says Henshaw-Plath, the activists who come in with their own equipment usually took their computers with them when they went back home after the demonstration was over.
"What we haven't been able to pull off is getting a large number of computers to a large part of the society that's at the center of these issues," says Henshaw-Plath, "and that's when we thought about shipping them computers."
After October's protest, the 300 computers that are being shipped to Ecuador will stay there; some will be used in Quito, the capital city, where activists will also set up a citywide wireless network, but many will be sent to various towns and villages all over the region. "It's interesting because on some level you might say these people don't need computers -- they need clean water, housing and some sort of economic base that's not exploited," Henshaw-Plath says. "But we're saying that giving computers to the right people, that's the tool to get that social change."
It's a tool that simply wasn't available as recently as five years ago, he says. One fortunate corollary to Moore's Law -- the hallowed business proposition that predicts that new microprocessors double in power every 18 months -- is that old computers, too, get better and better, but, because they're technically "obsolete," they're dirt-cheap, too. Thanks to this pace of innovation, there's a glut, these days, of old machines that rich societies don't know what to do with -- machines that poor societies could make use of.
The pace of computer obsolescence has been in effect for decades, but more recently, the thriving growth of the free software and open-source software developer communities means there is now a steadily growing body of software applications that are also free. The rise of wireless networking also means that the computers can easily be connected together in regions that don't have a solid communications infrastructure. The foundation for a tech-aided revolution is in place, says Henshaw-Plath; all that's needed is people to do the work, and that's where he and others at the ACCRC come in.
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