Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED. That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct.
(Laughter)
I said, "Chris, that would take a miracle."
He said, "Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex?"
So, yeah. Then I thought, let's go even further than 25 years. Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began. Three thousand years ago, civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile, some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance,smelling of sheep shit, I guess, proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne, "We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you."
And the Pharaoh replies, "Oh, no. You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding."
And they say, "No, no, that's what it says here in our holy book."
Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same ideaof equality with a different book. This time it's called the Facebook. Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square. They turn a social network from virtual to actual, and kind of rebooted the 21st century. Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, neither to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what's possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upside down, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were. It's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality, because facts, like people, want to be free, and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner, even for the poorest of the poor -- facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia, facts that tell us