The UN's World Summit on the Information Society is happening at the end of this year, and during the summit, they are running The HelloWorld Project, described thusly:

During the four days of the World summit on the Information Society, people from all over the world will be able to send in messages, either by going to the project website (www.helloworld.cc) or by sending an SMS to a dedicated number. The messages will be projected almost instantly by a laser beam on mountains and buildings in Bombay, Capetown and either New York or Geneva. It is a unique opportunity for people from all over the world to engage in a global dialogue.

Global dialogue via laser beams! This must be the future, right? Better get my unitard... But wait, there's more! The PDF description invites us to think of the internet as a highway, for ideas! And, we are told, the creators of the HelloWorld project believe that "The power of words can overcome dissent" and "Information technology can strengthen the voice of every person, worldwide." (Working out the byplay between those two ideas is evidently left as an excercise for the reader.) I used to have to deal with clients who talked like this all the time: _Client_: We want community. _Me_: That means letting people talk to one another. _Client_: Oooh, that's bad. Can't we just have them send testimonials in, and we'll post the ones we like? _Me_: I thought you said something about communi... _Client_: I know! We'll call it the "ACME® RocketSled Testimonial Community!" I used to think I had to have these conversations because advertisers were stupid, but now I recognize that most organizations work this way. Faced with the idea that they could end up hosting unfiltered conversation, they will instinctively opt for "Letters to the Editor"-style control, and then label it community (and themselves progressive.) So here we have a governmental organization and an artist collaborating on something they call dialogue, but is in fact just the 1996 Joe Boxer billboard, now with new laser beams! And of course they have to call it dialogue, because they cannot possibly admit that they are spending UN dues to create a write-only billboard with censored content (catch the "almost instantly" reference? That's the 7 second delay for the censors), and that the project offers no opportunity for dialogue of any sort, at any time, between any of the participants or between the participants and the hosting organization. The Berkman Center has analyzed filtering patterns in china; it might be interesting to do the same here, and send in expressly political messages, to see which ones get piped to /dev/nul. The UN wants to use this lame attempt to get the goodwill of dialogue with none of the risk (or even the dialogue), but what they're actually demonstrating is that it is the power of deletion that can overcome dissent.