Archive for April, 2011

Bad Influence

April 28, 2011

The Jester recently attended yet another conference on doing good with ICT. He initially wondered whether he should attend, but went for three reasons: (1) the event happened only blocks from the royal palace; (2) several of his old pals were there (from the days before the Jester was rescued from his depravity by the royal court); and (3) in spite of himself, the Jester hoped there might be some enlightenment among save-the-world technologists.

Alas, there was little sign of nirvana. Although there were a handful of presentations by those who had attained moksha, their wisdom was lost among the many fancy plans to scale positive change with ICT (which the Jester doubts ever happens even in alternate universes).

One thing the Jester did notice, however, was the incredible bluster of some of the presentations. In fact, the less evidence there was that good work was happening, the more confidently the speakers seemed to project the future potential of their technology projects.

The only other context in which the Jester has witnessed this phenomenon is when business school types make venture capital pitches. The Jester is surprised not to have noticed it before, but there is a distinct tendency among ICT-for-doing-gooders to promote their projects in the same manner.

The Jester speculates that this happens for one of several reasons:

  • Some people are recycling some or all of their VC presentations, particularly in light of so much delusion about Prahaladian bottom of the pyramid.
  • Some people are recycling the presentations they made for the recent spate of dubious contests for mobile apps for development.
  • In the tweet-magnified ICT-for-good sphere, people come to think of every presentation as a VC pitch or a contest submission.

Even supposing that the underlying technology-for-good projects were worthwhile (a temporary supposition, the Jester assures you!), this is an abhorrent development. Other words to describe this phenomenon include lurid, execrable, putrid, detestable, loathsome, and whydontwealljustselloursoulstothedevilable.

Although the Jester appreciates attempts to make the world of do-gooding as efficient as the world of for-profiting, there are some very real differences. The for-profit world, for example, has a natural (eventual) check against pure bluster without substance, and that is the bottom line. In addition, the only people who lose in the for-profit world, if a start-up goes under, are the rich folks who bet on the start-up.

In the world of doing good, there is only a theoretical bottom line of positive impact. In practice, because impact is so hard to measure, rarely does impact figure in what receives support. Furthermore, there is an irretrievable opportunity cost when a bad project is funded over an impactful project.

Together, these two things mean that while in the business world, it’s perfectly ethical to pull all sorts of random numbers out of a hat and confidently claim them as the market potential, the world of doing good requires a bit more… doing good. More honesty and more humility.

Unfortunately, because social VCs and telecom competitions are judged by people drawn largely from the for-profit world, they bring their bad habits with them. Namely, they reward cleverness, confidence, and fake numbers over humility, genuine intent, and determination… exactly the opposite of what we want in good ICT-for-good.

So, what can be done? In a vain attempt to influence the juries of social enterprise competitions, and an even vainer attempt to influence the competitors, the Jester offers the following guidelines:

  • Above all, presenters should be up front about what is known and what is not known. Among the unknown, the process by which they might become known should be highlighted over attempts at speculation. Where speculation is necessary, the fact of its guesswork should be highlighted in neon colors. Judges should dock points for hollow confidence that comes ahead of real knowledge. Judges should award points for humility and interest in finding out the reality on the ground.
  • Presenters should highlight the role of organizational partners or efforts to build the non-technological requirements for success. If 80% of the effort is not technological, why should technology dominate the presentation? Anyone who thinks magic will happen without non-technological components should be required to do community service.
  • It should be made clear what stage a project is in. Those projects that are only planning to have impact should be presented and judged differently from those projects claiming a history of impact.
  • For projects claiming to have had impact, a good presentation should include evidence of concrete impact, lessons learned, and what open questions remain for the next stage. Judging should look at the quality of impact first, and scale second.
  • Early-stage projects will have limited evidence of impact. In its stead, there should be more discussion of open questions about what kind of impact is expected. Attempts to guess at the range of possilibities, the possible theory of change, what is known about impacts from related projects, should all be cast as question marks, and not exclamation points. Most importantly, the intended methodology by which open questions might be answered should be presented. Judges should assess the completeness of the list of questions and the plans to answer them, not skill in speculation. 
  • Presentations will presumably also include boasts about the technology, etc., but the less the Jester says about that portion of the presentation, the better.

Overall, judges should judge as VCs supposedly do — not for the idea or clever technology, but for the right qualities in the “management team.” For do-gooding, the key qualities are genuinely benevolent intent, determination with humility, and healthy respect for non-technological aspects of the solution. (For more along these lines, see the Jester’s comments on teaching ICT4D design.)

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Posted in conferences, Teaching ICT4D | 3 Comments »

The Gap to Be Closed

April 21, 2011

The Jester now turns to the comments by Eric Brewer from a panel about ICT4D a couple of weeks ago (audio available here). Brewer started his comments with the following: “Technology is the only path forward, it’s not optional… if there’s a gap to be closed, there is no other mechanism.” He continued that economics might be an alternate mechanism, but that if so, it was so that people could become richer and then buy more technology.

This is an established line of thinking, and on the surface, it’s incontrovertible. Certainly, the incredible quality of life that most middle-class people in the world enjoy today is a direct consequence of incredible technologies. We’re freed from the tyranny of darkness because of lighting and power infrastructure. We can set up white-collar offices anywhere because of modern heating and air conditioning. We have terrific mobility due to automobiles and airplanes. We have much longer lives due to improved nutrition and amazing healthcare. And, we can know when some distant acquaintance has a hangover because of Facebook. As the cliché goes, the average person in a developed country today has a dramatically higher quality of life than kings and queens did even a century ago. And, it certainly is because of technology. The Jester cannot disagree.

So, if all of this is true, and it does seem to be irrefutably so, where is the error in thinking that “if there’s a gap to be closed, there is no other mechanism” other than technology? Ha, Jester! What do you say to that?!

The simple response is that the real gap to be closed is a gap of human intent and capacity, and not of temporary outcomes. Short of a technology that really could replace caring, capable parents and teachers (and no, Mr. Negroponte, even OLPC version 10 isn’t going to be it), technology doesn’t contribute significantly to closing that gap. In terms of the tired fish analogy, the goal is to show people how to fish, not to provide them with a turbo-charged robotic fishing pole.

In fact, at some subliminal level, Brewer is sure to understand this despite the words that come out of his mouth, because the Jester is certain that as a father, Brewer cares deeply about how his children are raised. They will get caring parenting and a great teacher-led education. Ironically, they will probably be limited in how much TV they can can watch, and Brewer will probably carefully monitor their use of mobile phones and the Internet as they grow up. The advantage Brewer’s kids will have over the children of a poor illiterate banana farmer in Uganda is that they will be well-educated and have access to Brewer’s Rolodex. Does Brewer really believe he could even begin to replace that with even the best of today’s technology?

The Jester anticipates two possible reactions…

First, technology could be deliberately applied to those with the least capacity. The Jester applauds progressive efforts; inequalities can only be reduced through them. But, the world being what it is, it is difficult in reality to design a progressive technology that isn’t desired by the rich and powerful (and which they could do more with) but which is still desirable and meaningful for the poor and marginalized.

Apparent examples of such technologies are not real examples on closer inspection. For example, a mid-tier farmer in the developing world would definitely benefit from a better treadle pump, which the Jester has no use for. But, that’s because the Jester’s court salary and the wealth of his kingdom buys him a much more expensive and sophisticated system of irrigation that he doesn’t even have to know about to benefit from. Whatever technology might benefit a very poor person, the rich will have better versions of. At best, progressive technology building is playing a never-ending game of catch up without addressing the core inequality of human capacity.

Second, even if inequalities increase in an absolute sense, isn’t it still better if very poor people benefit even a little? This is the core of neoliberal philosophy, embraced both by free-market economists and Rawlsian political philosophers. It says, as long as everyone benefits a little bit, it’s okay for the superrich to get richer.

The answer to the abstract question is, it depends. It depends on how much the absolute inequality increases over the benefit to the poor. Rawls’s conception is nice in pristine theory, but given human nature (“power corrupts”) and limited resources (which gives global economic growth elements of a zero-sum game), many situations that appear to lead to minor benefit for the poor and major benefit for the rich actually lead, in the long run, to no real benefit for the poor and often increased ability for the rich to do as they wish. For example, note that in technology- and free-market happy America, the poor have not actually gotten any richer for some decades.  

The answer to the specific question of whether there are ICTs that would be of value to the very poor, even if rich owners of mobile telecoms get even richer is also, it depends… but the opportunities are preciously few, because the value of information and communication technologies is so dependent on information processing ability and social capital, two things which poorer, less educated people have much less of compared with richer folk. Unlike technologies like roads, electricity, and running water, it takes a lot more to extract value from them.

In the end, ICT is more a consequence than a cause of development. Technology correlates with development and it does contribute to development. But, a greater cause of both technology and development is human intent and capacity. The critical gap we want to close is not the having of technology, but the ability to design, build, and support technology. It’s again the difference between having access to Google products and being a potential employee at Google.

One way to see this, is to consider a genie who offers you one of two options at the snap of his fingers:

  1. Every poor person in the world immediately has free access to every ICT that could conceivably be invented over the next decade.
  2. Every poor person in the world immediately has the mental equivalent of a first-rate bachelors degree.

Knowing what will happen to the technology, knowing the costs to maintain the genie’s gifts, knowing that a good university degree grants far more than knowledge, and anticipating the impact on the next generation… which would you choose?

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Posted in Myths of ICT4D, rhetoric, technology pessimism | 2 Comments »

Talent is Not Universal

April 14, 2011

The movie Being John Malkovich features a wacky wormhole where people slide down a chute originating in a Manhattan office and end up occupying a portion of John Malkovich’s psyche (and later get dumped near a highway in New Jersey). The person who finds the wormhole is played by John Cusack, an aspiring puppeteer, who discovers that the wormhole allows him to enter Malkovich’s mind and experience what Malkovich experiences. Then, he finds that with effort, he can manipulate Malkovich’s behavior, as well. At one point, Cusack takes over Malkovich’s body and uses Malkovich’s platform as a famous actor as an opportunity to express his own puppeteering talents. At the end of the movie, though, Cusack’s character ends up “locked” in the psyche of a baby, whose experiences he has access to, but whose actions he is entirely unable to control. (The Jester thanks Christoph Derndorfer (@random_musings) for tweeting his appreciation for the previous movie-related post. Derndorfer may have created a monster for which the Jester takes no responsibility.)

The Jester felt a little bit like the trapped Cusack as he sat on a panel about ICT4D last week at UC Berkeley (audio available here). The panel featured Megan Smith (head of Google.org), Eric Brewer (head of TIER),  Wayan Vota (head of Inveneo‘s education efforts in Tanzania), and Kentaro Toyama (head occupied by the Jester). Toyama made a valiant effort to counter the surprisingly unrestrained technological utopianism of the rest of the panel, through his well-worn and by now utterly snooze-worthy claim that technology only amplifies human intent and capacity.

The Jester would have loved to jab at the more insidious claims being propagated by the other panelists, but he proved to be no Cusack in his ability to control Toyama. Toyama muffled this poor Jester. But, now that the Jester is back in his own mind, he’ll have his say!

Two statements stuck out for the Jester. First, Smith mentioned an old adage (apparently quoted in a recent book on social entrepreneurship by Rye Barcott), “Talent is universal; opportunity is not.” Then, Brewer followed up with, “Technology is what makes development possible.” These statements are remarkable for their clarity and their apparent truth. They seem unassailably true. And, they lead to a conclusion that working on technologies that deliver opportunity is the most sensible thing.

Yet, they mask complexity that if carefully disentangled, would suggest altogether different policies. Since both are huge Gordion knots, the Jester will save the second statement for another post, and consider just the first here. Appropriately, it addresses a theme raised by Being John Malkovich: Could every puppeteer have a successful career, if they could just have the opportunity to be John Malkovich? Is opportunity really the only thing that dollar-a-day people are missing?

When Smith mentioned the quote, there was a hush in the room. Everyone wants to believe that talent is universal. Smith went on to comment on the second clause, as if the first clause was obvious and to be taken for granted. Decades of progressive and politically correct thinking have pounded this belief into so many of our neurons, that no one questions it. 

The unfortunate reality, however, is that talent is NOT universal. There’s a tendency to take a truth that is meant to apply to whole groups — i.e., that no particular ethnic group has more or less talent than others — and apply it to individuals. But, people are not equally talented, by any reasonable definition of “talent.” Whether one believes talent to be fully inherited or sculpted by a range of environmental forces (including genetic endowments, nutrition, upbringing, education, social influences, individual efforts, etc.), talent is universal only in the same way that height is universal. Sure, everyone has some height. But, some people are taller than others.

Smith, as a VP at Google, is herself well aware of talent disparities. Her company goes to great lengths to hire people based on talent, weeding out anyone who cannot pass a few IQ tests or muster the many talents needed to impress interviewers. If talent really were universal, and Google.org were hoping to do something about equalizing opportunity, why don’t they randomly select people from the low-income parts of the world and hire them to fill out the team? Why waste the opportunity of a high-paying job on someone who needs the wealth less than another person of equal talent? Obviously, talent is not universal.

Obviousness doesn’t prevent us from wanting to believe the fairy tale that talent is universal, though. It’s romantic to believe we are all equal in talent. It aligns with traditionalists wanting to believe that outcomes are due to personal effort alone, and it jives with progressives who want to believe that we are all inherently equal. The fairy tale allows us to believe that we deserve what we have (convenient for readers, who are likely to have more than what 99% of the planet’s population has). It allows us to believe that meritocracies reward diligence, not luck. It allows us to believe that inequality is a purely social construct, and not dependent on a throw of genetic or geographic dice. But, none of this changes the fact that it’s still a fairy tale.

What’s the danger of believing that talent is universal? It leads to the foolish implication that we only need to worry about providing opportunity, and be largely unconcerned about developing talent. It allows ICT4Ders to believe that providing an online international market is a great service, because talent is universal, but the opportunity to sell to rich people is not. It allows ICT4Ders to think that giving out laptops with Internet access is necessarily an education, because the talent to learn on one’s own is universal, yet the opportunity to access Wikipedia is not. It allows ICT4Ders to pat themselves on the back for building mobile financial services, because the talent of business entrepreneurship is universal, but the opportunity to deal with formal financial services is not.

Unfortunately, though, exactly the opposite of these statements is true. As Smith noted, opportunity is becoming increasingly universal. (The Jester stresses “increasingly,” not “universal.”) But, talent remains as inequitably distributed as ever. The Jester tends to accept a view of talent that incorporates many factors, and under such a definition, poorer people, who generally have less exposure to good education and to social values that appreciate a broad range of talents, are at a great disadvantage in nurturing their own talents and that of their children. Sure, there are some poor families that counter this trend, but they do so exactly by fostering talent.

Talent universalists like to tell stories of a clever village child they happened to have met who managed to build a solar-powered SMS-activated robotic hand-pump from scrap metal. Yes, such talented individuals exist here and there, and the Jester sees nothing wrong with catering to them and giving them an extra boost through opportunities, ICT or otherwise. (That still doesn’t justify any rhetoric along the lines of “devices for all” — why not just “devices for the self-starters” and save some cash for other purposes?)

The deeper problem of prioritizing opportunity over talent development, though, is that it doesn’t address the real question, which is… what does it take to nurture everyone’s talents? People with rare talents in otherwise talent-starved environments have often had subtle but unusual support in their upbringing, whether it was a grandmother who overruled parents to send a boy to school, or an uncle who secretly bought books for a girl to read at home.

If there is something that we can do to contribute to international development, it’s not to pretend that equal access to some technology will offer the opportunity for people to transform their life despite a 4th-grade education. It’s to confront the reality that what we really want “for all” is a universal nurturing of talent. If talent isn’t universal, can we make it more universal? Giving a person access to Google is a minor accomplishment; helping a person become a viable job applicant at Google is the real and meaningful challenge. And that takes a whole lot more than anything any current technology — or any techonlogy on the horizon — can deliver, Nicholas Negroponte not withstanding.

The Jester often hears, “That makes sense, but it’s a huge effort to educate a person. Shouldn’t we do something that can easily impact a lot of people, even if it’s a lot less effective?” Ay. It’s exactly this kind of reasoning that has led to trillions of dollars on foreign aid leading to so little result. The mad rush to broad impact biases us towards solutions that scale, not solutions that work.

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Posted in Not Quite ICT4D, rhetoric | 3 Comments »

The Return of the Jester

April 8, 2011

There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club, where Ed Norton’s character has blurry dreams of Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter romping in the bedroom. Norton wakes up from those dreams in a disoriented haze. The Jester has had similar experiences recently, except that instead of wild nights with Bonham Carter, the dreams were of blogging for The Atlantic online on topics beyond ICT4D.

Maybe “similar” isn’t the right word. In any case, all this is to say that the Jester apologizes for two months of absence. To recover from his own disoriented haze, he will attempt to recapitulate what his alter ego has been up to, some of which is relevant to readers in that it begins to attempt to answer a question that the Jester is asked frequently: “I get that human intent and capacity is what matters. So, what then is worth focusing on?”

In six parts, the Jester’s other (better looking) half, tried to answer this while guest-blogging for James Fallows:

  • Technology Is Not the Answer: Standard Jester fare about technology amplifying human intent and capacity, but hinting at generalizations beyond technology to other packaged solutions called TIPS — technologies, institutions, policies, systems.
  • The Enduring Power of Virtue: Trying out the word “virtue” instead of the cumbersome “intent and capacity.” Confucius’s view of it; virtue as benevolence, self-control, and wise judgment. How virtue is the ultimate controllable cause of good outcomes.
  • The White Lie of the Self-Made Person: Tackling the hairy question of “blaming the victim” that immediately arises when successful outcomes are ascribed to virtue.
  • Why Can’t We Talk about Virtue? Entrenched Cynicism: Why many smart people don’t like to talk about virtue.
  • Fostering Virtue: Virtue is not easy to grow, but it’s not impossible. What can be done to foster virtue.
  • Lost in Transition: Virtue for people in developed countries.

Of these the “White Lie” article received the most feedback, and the Jester agrees that it is the most interesting of the series. It attacks head on, the sensitivity around any suggestion that character traits matter in international development. The Jester recommends passing it on to anyone who says that people are equally capable, but differ only in the opportunities available to them. (Just two days ago, the Jester heard repeated that “Talent is universal; opportunity is not.” More on that in the next post.) Of course, the other articles are also worth committing to memory.

The Jester is not sure whether “virtue” really captures the idea of “human intent and capacity” that is amplified by technology. Intent and capacity, at least as the Jester understands it, seems to involve a little more than good intentions and the self-control to follow through. The Jester welcomes other suggestions for a word or phrase that succinctly captures the essential element that makes development work. He promises to mock those only ideas that are not thoroughly exemplary.

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Posted in Not Quite ICT4D | 2 Comments »