The fight against Geographism
Being an internationally active individual living mostly in cyberspace, I am confronted on a regular basis with geographism.
What the hell is geographism, I hear you ask. Geographism is the habit of companies and individuals to discriminate against people like me solely due to their outdated perception of where I supposedly live.
It starts with Apple not setting prices with the formula that 1€ = 1$ and goes on with hulu.com only streaming to the US, Flip only selling to the US & UK, or audible.com restricting book-sales to certain geographic locations.
Tell me, what’s up with that? Who says that just because I bill some things to my German credit card doesn’t mean I live in Germany. Just because I have a UK IP-address doesn’t mean I live there, just because I … I think you get the drift.
I truly believe that this concept of geographic location and the associated consequences is fully outdated. In our current globalized world geographic location has become more of a temporary inconvenience than a basic fact of life. In the middle ages people defined themselves using their geographic location. They described themselves as “Leonardo da Vinci”, meaning Leonardo the one that comes from the village of Vinci.
These days people define themselves differently. They define themselves as “Pete of Mashable” or “Steve of Apple” or
