11–20 of 56 posts
Curious to note. This opens the possibility of it being almost like The Matrix: a “resistance” movement that’s even then ultimately controlled by the system.
OLPC also at times went with "some of the goodness here is the info, which we can distribute as HDD or CD and not as fetch it live" -So wikipedia and teaching materials do of course get revised but core competency knowledge overt in the older documents is rarely contradicted for maths, music, literacy, natural history, biology, chemistry to high school level. Whats different in El Paquete Semanal is the "samizdat" qu…
> “It is still unknown who compiles the material or from where it was obtained. Some have theorized that the lack of pornographic material and lack of anti-government views in the package may indicate the Cuban government is involved in its production.” Curious to note. This opens the possibility of it being almost like The Matrix: a “resistance” movement that’s even then ultimately controlled by the system.
Snowpiercer as well.
I think it's interesting to compare El Paquete Semanal to the response in the US to net neutrality and various social media scandals. When the threshold for action is high enough, the lack of open internet is overcome in Cuba without any special technology at all. Similar creative solutions pop up anywhere internet access is limited. In the US, most of the energy is spent on open source, high tech solutions that rare…
The high tech offerings are hype and little else, and are not social media, but venture capital sinkholes. The public does not interact with them, just rich people talking to rich people about it. Come to think, it's actually just rich people trying to make a buck. The situation in both countries is different - there is no internet in Cuba, so the least work for the best outcome is to run this kind of "net". In the U…
It reminds me of when the US said Cubans were not allowed to leave Cuba, and the mental hospitals and prisons were filled with political prisoners. Castro announced anyone who wanted to leave Cuba, even those prisoners or mental patients, could go to Mariel harbor and leave if they wished. Suddenly the US did a turnabout and began demanding Castro stop letting Cubans leave Cuba, and too many were prisoners and mental patients, when the US suddenly discovered those were the inhabitants of Cuba's prisons and mental hospitals.
It seems like another conclusion could be they just don't want to give gov an easy excuse for a crackdown. Even in dictatorships optics matter, and its much easier to shutdown something for being porn
It's bizarre how the US attempted to block Cuba from getting the Internet, and still blocks Cuban Internet through many means ( https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g... ), but the presentation is that the suppression of content is of Cuban origin. It reminds me of when the US said Cubans were not allowed to leave Cuba, and the mental hospitals and prisons were filled with political prisoners. C…
Read about what this person is talking about for yourself here, especially the section titled “Emigration process and violence”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift
So sneakernet never went away, it just got less fashionable. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
In Havana they also used to have "StreetNet" until 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFPjJM6yYS8