I quit my job in the technology world not out of boredom or disinterest in what I was doing. I love working with software, developing applications people find useful and bringing value to customers or community members through the products I produce. What I took issue with was my skills and talents were being invested in businesses whose profits benefited the richest elements of society. My bosses didn’t need my help getting and staying rich; someone half as smart with a fraction of my ambition can do that job and reap the benefits.
The Impedance Mismatch
It seems so obvious to many people that technology is fundamentally important, even essential in the struggle to make the world a better place. Ranging from alternative fuel sources to reduce carbon emissions, AIDS research to the development of communications technology to give everyone the world a voice.
However, if we were to use Collier’s definition of the bottom billion and to target solving their problems using technology, the momentum of innovation slows to a crawl. For anything resembling high-tech to get a foot hold in these places there are simply far too many requirements that need to exist.
Some social entrepreneurs seek to circumvent these limitations by adapting the technology to suit the environment - projects like the One Laptop Per Child with its XO device pursue this. They’ve built a rugged, portable, low-requirement laptop.
My issue with it is relatively simple - a huge percentage of children born in the developing world will die of diarrhea, smoke inhalation or other preventable diseases before they even get to see the shiny green and white slab of plastic.
How can you expect a 13 year-old Somali farm-girl, the eldest in her family tending a parched scrap of land to appreciate the wonder of the XO? It doesn’t spit out food or clean drinking water, it doesn’t make her crops grow or the market prosper. Literacy is pretty overrated to the starving.
This does not diminish the accomplishment of Negroponte it merely reinforces the notion that connecting what Silicon Valley does with Sierra Leone is a very difficult task.
In electrical engineering and computer science there is a term called the impedance mismatch. We have this very problem with the innovators in technology, the innovators in foreign policy and the people of the bottom-billion developing world. The technology world and the political world don’t understand each other and the solutions the technology world produces have relation only to theoretical problems.
The Infection of Centralized Information
I still haven’t found an answer that lets me stand next to AIDS researchers, agricultural scientists or civil engineers and not feel like I’m wasting people’s time.
What I have figured out is this - information technology cannot possibly hope to change Myanmar or Bolivia for the better until it changes some of the fundamental aspects of Canada or the United States; particularly in the way our political system is formed.
The political system in both Canada and the United States, and in many other countries is profoundly distorted by the capacity for message-control by policy makers. Particularly in the United States, the tightly-knit connections between federal politicians, corporate interests and the Pentagon and their stakes in media outlets results in bizarre interpetations of factual information being spread throughout the country.
Broadcast media has gotten progressively better at what they do. They’re more covert, more pervasive and ultimately more influential than ever before. The handling of politics in 1960’s television looks practically ham-handed by comparison.
Political voices have become more shrill, more extreme and less accountable. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, who are still broadcasting; cannot hold a candle to the irrational and provocative rhetoric being wielded by people like Anne Coulter.
The media, particularly the news, used to be the sentinal against tyrrany. It was the citizen surrogate to provide information for voters to use when they elected leaders or chose to act out against them.
Instead, now, the media acts as a self-interested agent. A mercenary force of fact generation. The pages and airwaves are filled with a homogenized, undifferentiated miasma of falsehoods, opinions, entrenched ideological rhetoric or outright bafflegab. I have never once been surprised by what I read - the analysis and conclusions are drawn almost before news occurs. The established political groups are pandered to by their preferred media source. Rational, impartial examination of fact - the universally-respectful discussion of policy options; these are mythical pipe-dreams.
Cynizens of the World Unite!
If there is one word to describe the dispositions of Canadians across country it would be “cynical”. The victory of any party is a dubious proposition. This cynicism is exacerbated by the fumbling, knock-kneed analysis by the national news media.
The cynicism is the unsurprising result of many policies which restrict the level of interaction voters have with their supposed representatives. Professional politicians have taken the word “leader” altogether too literally - they believe they establish an agenda that the country follows. With a very narrow collection of people the notion of representing the citizenry, not just your constituency has vaporized in Canada and has only started to resurface in the United States.
The media has failed us utterly - it has been cowed by Harper and leaders like him across the world. It has curried favour with the most disgusting elements of our society and decides to seek the biggest, fattest most ignorant audience upon which it can lay hands. The Globe and Mail and the National Post produce a slaw of op-eds with nary the mention of potential bias or disclosure. If Slashdot were arbiter of the news the combined efforts of the media oligarchy would bat zero in the Insightful scoring.
What is a disaffected, disenfranchised cynizen to do? How do we become citizens again?
We take back the message and we fight for our right to know.
A politician should never ever be more afraid of a reporter than a voter. When and if that happens all journalists the world over have become the mortal enemies of democracy.
Distributed Information And The Reclamation of Awareness
When examining the greatest failures of humanity in the last decade - some of the grossest and most abysmal acts it’s difficult to not notice that the level of media coverage after-the-fact is tremendously higher than before.
Anyone who owns a television set can appreciate the difference between being informed and paying attention. There’s a huge difference between a crawler and a half-hour-pseudo-news program.
There has yet to be a single catastrophe wrought by the developed world that resulted from a lack of information - they can be readily isolated to a lack of attention. the comprehensive carpet bombing of Cambodia, the invasion and destruction of East Timor by Indonesia, the genocide Rwanda, the rapine destruction of Sudan, the unrestrained war in Somalia, the rise of international Jihadist terrorism - the list goes on and on for particular incidence.
However, the international attention-deficit-disorder extends to chronic problems - the spread of malaria, AIDS, shortage of drinking water, food, the narcotics trade.
There also exists examples of what happens when attention is paid - Bosnia, CFCs and the ozone layer, Small pox. These were not issues that stealthily resolved and announced - the impetus to act came from overwhelming public pressure on decision makers to act.
Technology promotes self-organization
Clay Shirky teaches at NYU, he has discussed the new-found capacity for disperate groups to cooperate using technology as the medium of communication. Shirky predicts that this ability for technology to enable self-organization based on self-identification will severely disrupt and undermine the authority and centrality of institutions.
The importance of this to the developing world seems pretty far off until you think about what stands between the starved, malnourished and dying and a life of work and meaningful existence - that barrier isn’t necessarily you and me; it’s potentially our classmates, co-workers - the people disengaged and uninvolved. They feel this way because they feel unimpowered.
Institutions serve as a resilient bulwark for politicians against public opinion. The media used to serve as channel controls - allowing enough to flow back and forth that progress was made.
The ediface of the long-held consensus of apathy is quickly revealing itself to be the product of orchestration and collusion. The degree to which citizens care about the world around them is higher than ever before and people, especially young tech-savvy people, are beginning to feel constricted by the confines of traditional channels.
The capacity to control the discourse is ultimately the most powerful influence in politics - if it is not in the hands of everyone it is fundamentally corrupt.
By expanding the pervasiveness of global connectivity in the developed world - increasing the bandwidth of media and information coming from the bottom billion - we increase the awareness and attention. Linus’ Law suits this well - the more eyes looking at the problem the faster solutions become available and the greater the will to act on them.
This is where it starts - this is where technology can really help the world.