The Online Revolutionary
Borsu Asisi is building a new foundation for digital communication
For every technology, there is a time to step down. The steam engine was replaced by the combustion engine, the airship by the aeroplane, and propellers by jet fuel. For Borsu Asisi, this is the bottom line of 200 years modern technology history and it poses a compelling question: “What about the internet? When will it reach its full potential? My answer is: now. Today. It already has.”
Asisi’s company Asibo moved to the fourth floor of the Innovation and Start-Up Centre (IGZ), in February, where he is now working on his vision of the future. His goal, as he puts it, is to “replace the internet.” His new system is an environment where users can move around without fear – fear of being hacked, fear of having their privacy breached, and fear of being flooded by information. A web that is one-hundred percent safe and user-friendly. But is that even possible?
Asisi, who was born in Teheran and grew up in East Germany, does not have much time for such questions. When it comes to the world of technology, he does not believe in impossibilities: “Is this a law of nature?” The only fact Asisi is willing to “accept as unchangeable” is that nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. But nothing more.
His criticism of today’s online reality is relentless. Wasn’t the whole thing meant to create a decentralised system of hyperlinked information? When did we go astray? “Never before in the history of mankind have monopolies been so unchallenged as in the digital age. Never before was surveillance so total.” Asisi is convinced that this will not be changed by incremental improvements: “I want to replace the whole foundation.”
This idea has been living in his head for two decades. He knows that there is no point in waiting for the giant internet corporations to help, who are reaping the profits of today’s web. In a past life, the 67-year-old made a small fortune from supplying equipment for industrial facilities to the Soviet Union and the Middle East. In his opinion, this was already “a data-driven business.” Even back then, he was fascinated by the problem of perfect information management. Twenty years later, he started a new life in the US, where he started working on his new project: an “automatic system for information processing and organisation” – in short: “Asibo.”
He worked “around the clock” for an entire decade and then, two years ago, decided to return to Germany. “I’m basically finished now.” He plans on going public with his technology in early 2019. Asisi is confident that, once again, the superior technology will persevere: “If you’re still alive in five years, you will be using it.”
By Dr. Winfried Dolderer for Adlershof Journal