The United States of America Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will overhaul our “Lifeline” with a “Verifier” in 2016. Our nation’s Lifeline program has been in place since 1983. As with most bureaucratic programs, it’s fraught with fraudulent and unscrupulous practices. Lifeline has great purpose and profound meaning. Its purpose is to help bridge the digital divide. Its profound meaning is all children in the United States of America can do their homework without searching and surfing Wi-Fi hot spots that are inconvenient and disruptive to the typical American way of family life. 43% of our children living in poverty do NOT have readily available access to the Internet. 

A “digital native” living in the USA cannot compete in our global society without the most powerful and pervasive platform deployed in the last 13,700,000,000 years. This “pervasive platform” has a name: The Internet. She’s evolving at an accelerated rate since 1973. 10 short years after Eleonor Rigby died of loneliness and 10 short years prior to “Lifeline”. 

The Internet has an inherent flaw. The Internet has a “computer bug”. This inherent flaw is NOT a technical nor an economic problem. The root cause of the Internet’s inherent flaw is ANONYMITY. The digital divide in 2016 is described in terms of the impoverished. This is a smoke screen. Every illegal teenager in the USA can and does find a “hot spot”. It may take them hours out of their typical schedule but it gets done day in, day out. Internet access ranks up there with food and water in 2016. 

Let me be perfectly clear! The root cause of the inherent flaw is NOT poverty. The root cause of the problem is ANONYMITY. 

The FCC just solved this problem! It has a name: Verifier. It has a nickname:

The Great Verifier! 

Eleanor Rigby died of loneliness. She left her face in a jar by the door (had there been Facebook in the 60s, her profile picture would not have been her own) BECAUSE SHE COULD LEAVE HER FACE IN A JAR BY THE DOOR. Her skeleton (still wearing socks) was discovered eventually. In 2015, Facebook generated $18B in revenues with 1,000,000,000 DAILY active users. That is 3 times more than the daily food consumption of every man, woman, child and newborn in the USA. Think about that for a second. Take a minute if needed.

We Americans consume more social media (those numbers are just Facebook btw) than food on a daily basis.

We Americans leave our face at the door because we can. At IBM, I was asked a simple question, “What is the single greatest invention in the grocery industry”. I did not hesitate, I quickly responded, “the Universal Product Code (UPC)”. I had to be right. I was wrong. The single greatest invention in the grocery industry is the shopping cart. Still is in 2016 and for the foreseeable future.

The single greatest invention in the Information Age is

The Great Verifier!

We will study ANONYMITY at Wharton and Harvard and abroad. Anonymity will be embedded in Ted Talks for the next three decades. The genocide of Anonymity will be prophecized and the center of controversy and conspiracy theories for the next century. “Reinventing Cool” and “Killing Anonymity” (books by John Rector, Jr.) will NOT make the New York Times’ Best Sellers List. The offer to buy the New York Times for a fair market value in September of 2016 will fall on deaf ears. It will formally declare bankruptcy in March of 2017. However, the “List” will live on in the Twitterverse as many well respected and VERIFIED Knowledge Curators will curate with the unbiased truth of the zeros and ones that are WELL KNOWN and discoverable by any and all.

 

This is a tough pill to swallow, so let me explain as clearly and concisely as my brain may allow me. When Facebook and later Google published their terms of service, both corporations made it clear that WE (all of us) had to provide our first and last name as given to us by our parents. Snoop Dogg is not a legal name. It is a nickname. An alias. A pseudonym. YOU only have one name. In mathematics it is expressed as a 1:1 relationship. Unfortunately civilized societies have always allowed names to change. A tribal leader 10,000 years ago might change your name with great purpose within the confines of well established and KNOWN tradition.

However in the world of zeros and ones, this poses an inherent flaw in the stability of the equation. Without an unchangeable constant, the math becomes unbearably complex. The speed of light actually varies. We (all of us) made it a constant in the equation to simplify the math. The law of the conservation of energy must balance. It doesn’t btw! We (all of us) make it balance. It must balance in order for our limited imagination to exist in an incomprehensible universe.

Every human ever born since Abraham is cataloged. A few name changes are well documented, most are not. Elenour Rigby was not always Elenour nor a Rigby. She died of loneliness and no other human noticed until HIS rents were too far in arrears. She seemed real on Facebook. Poor old Elenour was not her profile picture. Actually, Elenour was not even a woman. She was a He. He was a liquor store owner in Alabama in the USA. Her gravestone is in Woolton, England.

We all owe Facebook a huge “thank you”. However, it is the FCC’s turn. EdgeRank tried but failed. The GREAT VERIFIER will now parse WE humans (all of us) in the name of protection, security and helping the poor.

You can run but you cannot hide.

Every click you make, I’ll be watching you. I will catalog you. You will have a “mark”. Your mark will NEVER change. Welcome to 1983, the year prior to 1984.

Embrace your mark. The benefits of KILLING ANONYMITY are life changing.

As always, you can thank me later.