Hacker News Reader

Comment by catnaroek | Hacker News Reader

No. People need food, clothing, shelter, a job to survive. On the other hand, humanity has done just fine without the Internet or computers for most of its history.

Now, if Facebook is willing to pay the cost of providing every single human being with an Internet connection, they should be allowed to. But if they are implicitly suggesting every state in the world should make it easier for them to increase their user base by making it a top priority to provide everyone with Internet access (because "connectivity is a human right", right?), then someone ought to wake them up from their daydreaming.

View on HN

The thing is, food and shelter are the only two beginning rights humans had - if you can call them rights. Clothing wasn't around the entire time humans were, in fact some tribes and pockets of humanity don't wear clothing or at least not much of it to be on the same playing field as the Western world. A job - now that's practically modern if we're talking about the entirety of homo sapiens walking the Earth.

Those are meta-rights that have been appended on; those are privileges that make sense in contemporary, first-world culture. The access to knowledge is the prime candidate for being added to that list, if anything else should be added at all. I don't see why this isn't an important discussion.

Sure. Human rights are not universal laws in the same sense the laws of physics are. And, as our ability to provide well-being and comfort for ourselves increases, we can expand the notion of what the bare minimum is that everyone ought to be able to afford. [edit] But in a world where there are still people who die of starvation, it is immoral to talk about making connectivity a human right. [/edit]

===

By "a job", I did not mean "working for some company". Rather, I meant the opportunity to do something society considers valuable, and be rewarded in return.

Wow ... That's very clever, I'm impressed. I'm not trying to criticize you, specifically, but it just seems so odd to see such a constant barrage of unmitigated pedantry. What's funny is why, if our sole goal is show how clever we are, do we focus on such a laughable matter but instead question the very notion of rights themselves rather than some barely sophomoric clothing not being a right because of tribe this that or the other ... I mean I don't know, some tribes in the past decided a great many strange things but I'm not sure there is really a "meta" point to be made of it.

Neither food, clothing, shelter, or a job are human rights either.

As increasing automation concentrates capital in the hands of fewer and fewer during the coming century, that viewpoint will become increasingly untenable.

Seems familiar.

I don't see what one has to do with the other.

> No. People need food, clothing, shelter, a job to survive. On the other hand, humanity has done just fine without the Internet or computers for most of its history.

The implication of this statement being that we have a right to survive, and only a right to survive.

> The implication of this statement being that we have a right to survive, and only a right to survive.

More precisely, I would say we have a right to survive and to an opportunity to achieve more. But we have no intrinsic right to have a computer and an Internet connection handed down to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com