In the Afghan city of Jalalabad, aid workers mostly from the United States working on a project called FabFi.
FabFi is a high-tech but low-budget project that aims to bring high-speed internet to world’s most remote places.
Douglas Rushkoff has championed the idea that the current corporate-controlled internet is far from the open commons we pretend it is.
“If we have a dream of how social media could restore peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and government, and if the current Internet is too tightly controlled to allow for it, why not build the kind of network and mechanisms to realize it?” Doglas Rushkoff asks.
Sounds daunting. And expensive, right? Wrong.
Residents can build a FabFi node out of approximately $60 worth of everyday items such as boards, wires, plastic tubs, and cans that will serve a whole community at once.
This low-cost project enables residents to access online educational, medical, and other resources. FabFi networks are used to aid local businesses and to prop up community infrastructure such as hospitals and clinics.
The director of the Jalalabad FabFi project, Amy Sun, says that Internet access is just one piece of the puzzle in Afghanistan:
“Fab Lab/Fi doesn’t solve everything. It’s only one piece: the rest have to develop at the same time. Infrastructure like roads, power, water, schools, teachers, and systems maintenance as well as the user terminals (laptops and computers), people who use them, and the content they’ll consume. It’s crazy to think that there was no cell phone service in the country in 2002 and now it’s pretty solidly working in every major population center (at least when the tower isn’t turned off or bombed). From roads to power to water, the task at hand (officially U.S. or not) was to set off a program that could go from zero to servicing 30 million people in a few years. Imagine deciding to colonize Mars and sending 30 million people first, ahead of the infrastructure”.
FabFi is funded primarily by the personal savings of group members and a grant from the National Science Foundation.
