ManyMedia

So President Bush proposes that the Department of Energy spend $2.7 billion on R&D in 2008. That’s up 30% from this year. And down 67% from 1978. It’s also about 2 weeks worth of budget for fighting in Iraq.

It surprises me that energy R&D, government plus private, is down overall, not up. The authors of a study cite a “50 percent decline in U. S. companies’ investments in energy research and development between 1991 and 2003″. They go on to “estimate that energy research and development spending of $15 to $30 billion would be sufficient to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at twice the levels of pre-industrial times.”

Total cost of Iraq war: conservatively, will end up at $1 trillion (pdf) according to Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

What could we have done if we’d spend a trillion on R&D?

You could say this is an unfair question, that we believed (right or wrong) we were going to war to protect ourselves, not defend an oil-addicted lifestyle. First of all, if our belief about the threat from Iraq was wrong, as it certainly seems to have been, that calls into question why we’d rather fight than just go to the library and look up something about 81mm rockets. So at the least, I’d say we went to war to protect intellectual laziness.

But the most critical issue here isn’t just the instinct for self-protection or even our collective mental sloth. It’s the failure of imagination. We could have spent that treasure on something useful or at least interesting. Could it be that it was actually our all-American addiction to television that atrophied the national imagination, the synchronized audio and video and rapid transitions filling evermore of the white spaces of public life?

It might seem boring, but now it’s time to make R&D policy a priority. And it isn’t boring. R&D is the art of the possible.

Policy budget, choice, energy, globalization, R&D, research and development, self-determination

There are those who believe the Internet offers unprecedented opportunity to inform people, develop our global culture(s), connect devices, and more.

There are those who believe the Internet offers a new money-making opportunity, a way to limit the development of any possible competition, and an ideal cat-bird seat as privileged economic middleman in a service quickly becoming a necessity in modern life.

The fortunate truth is that the Internet is still a primordial lake. The enzymes are all there: a network, interested people, compelling things to do and places to go, and imaginative devices that can be used in a wide variety of settings and for a wide variety of purposes, to fullfil our desires and needs. However, life is not certain: many of the powers that “control” the Internet have visions of a dead sea.

Our friends have often pointed out that there are ways for us to route around the rocks of DRM, censorship, and other obstacles–as if these were no more significant than a broken router. Still, there’s reason to complain when entering a bright cove, confronted with a seemingly unavoidable pre-roll video advertisement that’s the price of watching a great piece of footage (like this one, if you can get past the snakes).

Biologists tell us that the eye emerged many times in separate lines of evolution, and they use the word convergence or parallel evolution to describe that kind of emergence. Maybe like the eye, the “routing around” phenomenon will repeat itself in history over and over. It’s in the DNA of packets. In fact, it’s in the DNA of DRM: By definition, DRM systems give you everything you need to decode something you purchased. (When in doubt, just download a copy of Audacity and let it rip. This should not be construed as encouraging infringement. Instead, you might want to lean how to make mashups.)

Still, without a pipe, there’s no packet. If the octopus controls all the pipes, what then? Are there new pipes that have the “routing around” DNA? Are there enzymes in the primordial soup that have the power to break down the walls of the octopus’s garden?

Yes. There. Are. Unlicensed spectrum. Mesh networks. Ultrawideband communications. Detect-and-avoid. 802.22. We could go on. But not yet. Stay tuned.

Network choice, closed networks, Internet, network neutrality, open networks