The Man sticks it to The Man; or, the Country-club Revolt; or, Whitey’s Revenge

So Fake Steve, who I like, thinks it would be funny to try to overload AT&T network tomorrow. Which, fine, OK, but consider this.

This would be an act by a bunch of well-to-do people (the iPhone costs over $2000 over the life of your contract) against a bunch of other well-to-do people. You’re not sticking it to The Man; you are The Man.

You’re in a friggin’ chair in the sky. You should be amazed that you are carrying around a device that does more than the Pentagon’s supercomputers of decades past. Without wires. You’re essentially complaining about the softness of the towels at the country club.

Look, I don’t give a damn about AT&T or Verizon or any other logo. I do give a damn about technology and its progress. AT&T’s network is serving 40x more data than it did 3 years ago. There is no (mature) company of any sort that has scaled up their service like that. They’ve increased the aggregate bandwidth of (their part of) the mobile Internet by a factor of 40. I am happy to see it happen, regardless of the ticker symbol.

I have an iPhone 3GS. I lived in San Francisco until last fall, when I moved to NYC. These are the two (well-to-do) places where critics claim to have the biggest problems. But I’ve really never had complaints. I probably have a dropped call once a month. The 3G works fine, but keep in mind, the best, most optimal 3G “working fine” is still painful compared to what you have at home. And yet the whole thing is a miracle.

So please, white people, try this: instead of spending that hour f’ing with AT&T’s network, donate an hour of your time (or money) to charity.