Set My Cell Phone Free

Moses freed the Jews. Lincoln and MLK freed the blacks. Eisenhower freed tyrannized Europe (well the western part anyhow). Galileo and the Enlightenment freed the western mind.

So who will free my cell phone?

I want my cell phone to be free to do what I want it to do. Praise-uh, can I hear an amen? I want it to be free to harness technology, to be all it can be. But my phone is in chains. It wears the shackles of AT&T, Verizon, etc.

I ask it, what do you want to do? It wants me to be able to see my friends when I call, and it wants my friends to see me. It wants me to be able to use Skype, Google Talk or MSN Live in 3g - and not little bits, but ALL OF IT (including the voice chats with China) - But AT&T and Apple say no.

Someday it wants to be the phone of the future, capable of doing things I haven't even thought of yet. But it would settle for less, much less, because even much less would be a whole lot more!

My phone is hedged in by it's masters the big cell companies; it serves not it's users. Not only can it not be the phone of the future, it can't even be the phone of today.

I ask my phone, what do you want to be?

If my phone could be anything, anything at all, it would stop singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot, lay down the thick sack where it holds the profit it picks for massah, and it would become a Japanese phone. Oh wouldn't that be Heaven for a cell phone? Sure, someday it would be great if it projected holographs of the person I'm talking to, or a spreadsheet presentation. But it would settle for just a little videoconferencing, for cheap and fast internet, for TV and radio broadcasts, just like they have in Japan right now!

That doesn't seem so hard, I think.

So why is it so hard?

Poor phone I ask, is their anything they'll let you do.

My phone answers, "I can Maximize shareholder profit, adopt technology at the slowest possible rate that brings in the most dollars for each baby step of improvement. Oh, and I can also never, never, never, threaten existing revenue streams of the big cellular companies without offsetting or greater revenue that replaces those streams."

My cell phone is in chains. It's ring tone is the blues and I had to buy the goddam ringtone to boot. Won't somebody set my phone free?

I'd ask AT&T and Verizon to do it, but they aren't listening to me.