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Tony Carpenter was one of the original testers for Vavo.com, a community website for the over 45s. The site has already made its mark by exposing the fact that the elderly are paying too much for all forms of insurance.
But 71 year-old Carpenter is more than a silver surfer: he's an e-vangelist.
vnunet.com talked to Carpenter about his background, which revealed that if the Royal family suffered a disaster of soap opera proportions, we might be calling him King Tony.
The interview also suggests that, in his idealism about cyberspace, he has more in common with your average teenager. While the 20 and 30 somethings want to be dotcom millionaires, this guy sees the web as a tool to make the world a better place.
How long have you been surfing the web?
About three to four years. We've been using it for genealogy mostly. I've traced my family right back to a Norman knight in about 840. We got the name Carpenter from the battlefield. The King noticed the knight who was wielding his British battleaxe - chopping people's heads off I presume - and he said: 'I will call you The Carpenter.' That's where the family name comes from. I am the 15th cousin - two generations removed - to the Queen.
As I am a retired person on a state pension, I decided to see if we could set up a community website with Richard Spinks from Vavo.
How many hours a week do you spend online?
We go onto Vavo a couple of hours a day. A lot is done by email backwards and forwards.
What did you personally want to get out of the net and Vavo specifically?
I realised that we screwed up television.
Really!?
What can you get out of television? You sit on your backside and you get what some call entertainment. It is one of the biggest educational systems that you could have to inform people. I can see at the moment with the internet that people are more interested in selling things, in turning it into a shopping centre. That is wrong. This is what we are working on. There should be community sites that people can go into. Imagine the old English pub where you just open the door, go in and see your mates leaning up against the bar. You could talk about anything under the sun.
Like Cheers - where everyone knows your name!
Yes! You could put the world to rights. That is the way I want to set up the Vavo community site. You go in, say anything, discuss anything and come out and say: 'I feel better now. I've got that off my chest.' My aim is to put all the senior citizens online. All those who are on their own, lonely, have nowhere to go but can get on that computer and talk to someone, anywhere in the world.
You mentioned the commercialisation of the web. Are there any other features that you don't like?
The biggest problem is pornography - when an innocent person goes onto the net who doesn't know how it works and ends up on a pornography site. I believe it frightens a lot of people. Then it's ringed so you can't get out. It's not the children I'm thinking about, it's the senior citizens. It goes completely against the grain as far as they're concerned.
What I want is a safe site like Vavo. Vavo is for the over 45s. There's plenty of stuff [elsewhere] for the juniors. We can take anybody on the site [and] you can talk about anything. Once you've spent a couple of months on Vavo learning how the thing works, then you can go into the big wide world. Don't rush out there, it's a big world.
What advice would you have for people who are just starting to go online?
Find a safe site by searching somewhere like Ask Jeeves, or a site where someone monitors what's going on. If we can get a rubber stamp for safe sites, that would be absolutely superb.
If there was one thing that you think would make the web a better place, what would it be?
Something like I said: like a web-pub with all sorts of people of all races worldwide all talking to each other. Wouldn't that be lovely when the politicians couldn't declare war? Who gave them the right to say that I've got to go to war when I have friends over there? We should have all the common people together - the Arabs and Jews talking together.
The world is divided into little units controlled by a few men. They only do that by communication. We, the common man, need to communicate between races and between countries. Take Ireland. If you could get the majority of them on the web you could save a lot of trouble by conversing and communicating. But what you do is rely on a few politicians who've got the power, and they screw it up.
That's the way I feel the net should be used. It's a communications tool we've got to guard with our lives. Governments don't like it. They are going to try and twist it, try every trick in the book to stop us talking freely to each other.
Is there anything you are working on at the moment?
What we are trying to do is to take all these computers that big businesses are getting rid of and refurbish them. They are going to a company called Free Computers [which is] putting them into schools. I want to take some of those computers which will be used for working on networks. I want to take some of them, get them refurbished, set them up for the internet and give them to each pensioner group in villages to put them on the internet.
The cost of refurbishing and everything else comes out at £240 [per machine]. They are ready to go on the net. We need to get a sponsor to start to get everybody wired up. I'm talking to adult education [groups] to get them training. We ain't going to do it any other way. If we rely on the government and the local council it will take bloody years. Something like the Pentium 100 or 160 is perfectly all right for internet work. There is a ready, existing source of computers which could be re-used, instead of going into landfill [sites]. Then we can make people communicate and start putting the world to rights.
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All IT Management
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