Saturday, May 03, 2008

Estonia's Digitized Garbage

Bruce Sterling writes:

Here on BEYOND THE BEYOND, we don't normally post raw, unsolicited press releases, but you ponder the motives and thinking behind an effort like this, and it's actually kind of scary. I'd be betting good money most of these Google Earth-tagged illegal dump sites date to the Soviet era. So you've got this Estonian cybergreen millionaire's web 2.0-style participatory scheme to scrape his nation's surface clean via orbital oversight... Russia would never dream of a campaign like that. USA, way too sloppy. Even Sweden Finland and Norway would be hard put. Ultra-tidy, public-spirited Switzerland maybe, but gee whiz... who are these people?

2 comments:

rojukene said...

Indeed a lot of it dated back to the Soviet times but as old habits die hard, many people still think that it's perfectly all right to toss their garbage into the woods or rivers.

As one of the volunteers I can assure you that the sight was rather horrible, to put it mildly. But those places looked a lot better afterwards - dozens of people worked hard for hours and hopefully we managed to make a difference.

Mac said...

Nice to have someone involved with the project drop by!

(BTW, nice glasses! ;-)