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conflux

Salon Gates decries "market failure" in global fight against disease
"Gates, speaking on a panel with U.N. health officials, said he was shocked by the small amount of money going into research and treatment of diseases in the world's poorer countries.

"There is a real market failure here -- a failure of visibility, a failure of incentives, a failure of cooperation that has led to a very disastrous situation," he said."

redux [12.21.00]
Netfuture Bill Gates' New Concerns
"One of the salient facts about the globalizing culture of high tech, symbolized by the increasingly monocultural Silicon Valley, is its remarkable provincialism. It's a provincialism akin to that of the interstate highway traveler and the air traveler: the culture of highway rest stops and airport shops is "global" in only the thinnest of senses, its primary function being to conceal the cultures of the globe rather than to engage or cultivate them. This function is carried to a new extreme by the almost solipsistic isolation and immobility of the cybertraveler, which can be compensated for only through an intense (and often foregone) inner effort to reach out imaginatively and sympathetically.

What has led Gates to break through some of the provincialism of the high- tech culture appears to have been his responsibility (shared with his wife, Melinda) for billions of philanthropic dollars."

redux [11.03.00]
The New York Times Bill Gates Turns Skeptical on Digital Solution's Scope
[requires 'free' registration]
"As the "Creating Digital Dividends" conference drew to a close in Seattle recently, the final speaker arrived and started asking skeptical questions. The premise was that "market drivers" could be used "to bring the benefits of connectivity and participation in the e-economy to all of the world's six billion people," according to conference materials, but the speaker would have little of it.

"I mean, do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day?" the speaker, William H. Gates, asked. "There's no electricity in that house. None.""

Pacing the room, waving his hands, he conjures up an image of an African village that receives a computer.

"The mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, My children are dying, what can you do?" Mr. Gates says. "They're not going to sit there and like, browse eBay or something. What they want is for their children to live. They don't want their children's growth to be stunted. Do you really have to put in computers to figure that out?"

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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