At the annual Pop!Tech gathering in Camden, Maine, the discussions on stage are meaty and so are the conversations outside the opera house.
The governor of Maine, Angus King, is speaking now. He’s a political independent — and a smart, entertaining talker.
He’s talking about the connection between the Net and government. “Government is overrated,” he says. “In reality the important stuff is happening out in the countryside.”
The most important developments in 20th century on real people’s lives were the automobile and the computer, he says, and “government operates at the margin.”
“Government does not create wealth; government does not create happy people,” he says. “Government’s job is to create the circumstances by which other people can create wealth.”
Think of government as the ultimate ISP, he says — where ISP stands for “Infrastructure service provider,” such as roads and schools, where government is “the provider of that big mass of stuff that allows us to get about with our lives.”
(This dovetails with my upcoming Sunday column, in which I say that America must invest in its infrastructure — in public health, communications and energy independence — as a national security matter in the short term and economic boost in the long range. I’ll post a link as soon as the column goes “live” on the Web.)
Last night at a speakers dinner, Gov. King was telling me about Maine’s decision to equip every 7th and 8th grader with a laptop computer by the fall of 2002. He saw my skepticism — computers are no panacea for anything when it comes to our lousy educational system. He said he’d persuade me as soon as we could have a longer conversation. We’ll be doing that soon (not today, though), and I’ll report what he says.