As some of you know, I spend quite some time thinking about why.

Why I left a good, solid job in the Internet industry to first go to Africa as a volunteer, and later spend most of my savings, and a whole bucket of time working with non-commercial non-profit stuff like wire.less.dk.

Why, at the young, but not as young as I used to be, I feel an urge to get back in academia and spend even more money and significantly more time learning more about ICT for Development and researching?

Why I can’t just relax, make loads of money, buy DVD’s, hang out in bar’s, wear women’s clothing… Oh, sorry I know the answer to that, that’s because I’m a lousy lumberjack.

Part of the reason is value.

I seem to remember that in Confucian philosophy the hero’s of society are the farmers and the craftsmen. Those that create real value to society.
I recently saw a piece on some blog somewhere talking about how there were simply too many lawyers and accountants in the u.s. and europe compared to the higher efficiency societies in south-east asia. how lawyers and accountants essentially add no value, but just spend their time thinking about how to divide up the value there already is.

I dig that!
I’d even extend that to saying that a lot of the Internet business was (during the boom) just another way to make the same value a different colour.
The stock market, doesn’t create value. it redistributes value. and in most cases it does it all wrong. Accountants, Management consultants, lawyers (with a number of notable exceptions), redistribute value.

So i’ll add to that. There is a fundamentally flawed distribution of value and wealth in the world today. So redistributing value is not necessarily a bad thing. it makes sense. That is, if you’re redistributing it to right a wrong.

I want to create value, or at the very least give a hand in redistributing it in a fairer manner. I happen to be at my best when working with technology, especially internet communications technology, so i really don’t want to be a farmer or craftsman (in the traditional sense of the word), because every plant i’ve ever had to care for has died, and every piece of clay i touched in school turned into some horrible fantasmorgasmic trash.

So I’ve taken a middle road. Stayed with IT, but tried to apply myself to the redistribution problem. Or maybe even creating. I’m not sure, but maybe it’ll dawn on me at some point.