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Why We’ll Keep Reinventing the Wheel in M4D and Otherwise

May 5, 2015

The Jester was recently consulted by consultants to provide input on a large upcoming mobile-for-development (M4D) project. At one point, it emerged that the client wanted to solve one of those problems that yours truly believes is “development-complete.”

And, what is development-completeness, you may ask? For this, the Jester must make a digression into technical computer science. One of the few areas of computer science that is actually a science (as opposed to hacking or engineering) is the theory of computation. Its practitioners prove mathematical theorems about different levels of problem complexity. For example, some problems like sorting a list, can be performed in a reasonable amount of time (with a non-quantum digital computer) relative to the length of the list. Other problems, like the canonical “traveling salesman problem” — in which the goal is to find the shortest possible route to visit a set of cities — are believed to take dramatically longer to solve as the number items in the list increases. What exactly is a “reasonable” or a “dramatically longer” amount of time? That’s one of the things that computational theorists explore, and in this case, they are quite confident (though not yet certain) that there is a hard line separating sorting from optimal route planning. In addition, on the more complex side of that line, there is a subclass of problems which have the following interesting quality: If you could solve any one of the problems in that class in a “reasonable” amount of time, you could solve all of the problems in that class in a “reasonable” amount of time. That class of problems is called NP-complete (where NP stands for “nondeterministic polynomial time,” in contrast to the polynomial time it takes to solve reasonable problems). Yes — until he was demoted, the Jester’s previous occupation was court Geek.

Thus, computer scientists have an admittedly poor inside joke in which whenever they encounter a situation in which in order to solve one problem, you’d have to be able to solve a set X of other problems, whose solving would obviate the need to solve the original problem, they call the original problem X-complete. So, if a problem is development-complete, it means that if you could solve that problem, you could solve all of international development itself. End of digression.

So, what in this case, raised the Jester’s development-complete alarm? In this case, it was that the consultants’ client wanted to end what is formally called “too many pilots,” or “reinventing the wheel,” or “total lack of coordination” among those who work on M4D projects. Ah, yes. The recurring problem of people ignoring history and each other in international development! Can’t we just spend a few million bucks and end this problem once and for all?!?!

Before the Jester goes into why this problem is development-complete, it’s worth considering its root cause. It’s very simple, actually: There is no single entity in charge of global development. There is no world government either dictatorially or democratically deciding what development projects will be undertaken or not. The “or not” part is essential, because in order to avoid too-many-pilots and reiventions-of-the-wheel, someone must stop those pesky other people (and they are always other people) who start unneeded pilots and reinvent wheels. But “or not” can only be imposed by an entity who can coerce compliance, and of course, there is no such entity on a global scale.

Without a world government, anyone who can afford an air ticket can fly to a random urban slum or rural village and start messing about. And importantly, they can do so without ever having studied or even having heard of any other development projects. It’s quite possible, for example, for someone to start a new cookstove project without ever having heard that the history of international development is strewn with failed cookstove projects.

Imagine if tomorrow, through some miracle, every M4D actor joined a single consortium, aligned with a single M4D standard, built on the same technology platform, agreed to a single set of interventions that is known to work, etc. Hip hip hooray! But unity would be shortlived. The day after tomorrow, you can be sure that some Silicon Valley entrepreneur will enter the fray and ignore the consortium because (1) he has never heard of it; (2) he once visited a poor village and realized he could be their savior; (3) he wants to build his own humanitarian empire; (4) he can in any case do it better than everyone else; (5) he has his own money and no one can prevent him from spending it how he likes; and (6) he may or may not actually have any humanitarian intentions at all.

Actually, this is pretty much what Mark Zuckerberg is doing with Internet.org. (Which, incidentally, further demonstrates how technology amplifies underlying human forces.) In designing his rhetoric, he has chosen to completely ignore the fact that providing poor villages with the Internet through telecenters really didn’t do much for them except in instances where there were significant, accompanying investments to nurture local human capacity. (In reality, he may just not care at all as long as those folks all get hooked on Facebook, too.)

There are only two ways to solve this problem of total lack of coordination. One is the aforementioned world government. The other is spontaneous total world coordination — by which the Jester means that all seven billion of us agree to a set of rules about how to engage in development and enforce it ourselves. You may laugh and say, “These are the pipe dreams of children or of a crazed monomaniacal dictator!” and you’d be right. But, let’s just suppose we could achieve either of these things in any meaningful way. If so, we might as well focus on development itself, instead of worrying about the minor problem of too many uncoordinated pilots.

Hence, development-complete. QED

P.S. The commentary above does not appear in the Jester’s alter ego’s forthcoming book, Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Nevertheless, the book is worth pre-ordering if only for the photograph of its extremely handsome author on the jacket flap.

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Posted in international development, Not Quite ICT4D, rhetoric | Comments Off on Why We’ll Keep Reinventing the Wheel in M4D and Otherwise

Internet.org Posts and Ripostes

September 2, 2013

Over at the TIER mailing list, the Jester’s last post was part of a swarm of fast-flying posts and ripostes about Internet.org. Now that the outbreak appears to have died down, it seems a good time for a post-mortem.

The Jester’s main point was that Internet.org made almost no effort to explain how the indiscriminate spread of the Internet everywhere was a good thing. (Zuckerberg’s whitepaper alludes only to that bastion of expert, unbiased knowledge known as a McKinsey report.) In this, it was a striking step back even from the days of telecenters, whose proponents made direct attempts to aid agriculture and healthcare. Zuckerberg’s endlessly repeated premise is that the Internet is so important that he and his merry band of hardware companies will spread it farther and wider for the sake of “driving humanity forward.”

The Jester then implied that Internet.org’s rhetoric was based in part on a misguided consumerist concept that deserves to be questioned much more often: That “giving people what they want” is necessarily a good thing; that’s what the machine masters of the Matrix do. So should we praise Zuckerberg for seeking to expand his attention-sucking, productivity-reducing machine across the planet? Quoth the Jester, nevermore.

“Kurtis” graciously rose to his newly appointed role as Fool for the Day to argue that he had personally seen positive uses of Facebook in Papua New Guinea and believes that Facebook is good overall. (The full conversation on mailing list is available here.)

Facebook is filling some fundamental communication need for people. It really is. The people in Papua aren’t playing farmville (though they might if they had bandwidth), they’re communicating over a closed facebook group representing the teachers. Media is shared on that page, sorta like a mailing list (as they don’t have emails). They also connect to their friends and family in other communities and abroad, as many teachers are shipped in. I am told it is a *critical* service; teachers, doctors and others would leave the community if they were not able to talk with spouses on the central islands.

[…]

I would wager though, that if you asked teachers, they’d say internet access makes their jobs easier. That’s good enough for me, and probably a net positive overall too.

The Jester concedes that this is a valid perspective – it’s not one that the Jester agrees with, but neither can the Jester prove otherwise. We will probably never have indisputable objective evidence about Facebook’s overall social value, but we probably can agree that there is disagreement. In fact, several people from developing countries (though all well-educated and with the leisure time to monitor ICT4D chit-chat), chimed in with conflicting views.

Assane (from West Africa?) expressed dissatisfaction:

I feel very frustrated when I enter to those internet cafe’s (in Senegal where I am from) and see all those young kids spending more than 2 hours with the “machine” using facebook, visiting p*** sites, watching photos etc…

The problem is not to bring Internet to the people, the problem is what they are going to do with it to have a better quality of life. I would rather vote for a program (with a sustainability plan) to help school kids learn how to “usefully” use the Internet!

Pablo (from the non-rural part of a developing country) focused on insufficient content and cost-benefit:

I think FB does not care only on rural and communications only, so it is fair to address the ‘content’ question (i.e. what will be done with this infrastructure?) and also the urban problems associated with the so desired ‘development’.  In other words assess the cost-benefit of this program in broader terms.

Donald from Indonesia argued that Facebook was an important force in building up the Internet:

Facebook (moral, corporate, credit aside) has been an enormous force of change in spreading internet (and broadband, with the help of youtube)…

Let’s just credit facebook for its ability to bring about the mobile internet revolution in indonesia and (hopefully) continue to drive the buildup of the data infrastructure. And let others build more socially responsible / beneficial applications of it.

“Ibrahim” (from Pakistan?):

Every solution requires variable amounts of Multi-directional information flow and i guess there is no other silver bullet. Putting your knowledge to test with the existing knowledge (www) spurs innovation which in effect promises better solutions to the daunting challenges faced by humanity. In my opinion connectivity is one of the most effective, if not the only, solution to these problems.

Having said that, no one denies that every giant has its primary profitability motives but this does not necessarily implies that these motives can’t coincide with the greater good of the people.

Two people struck a conciliatory tone. Keshav from India emphasizes the importance of having Internet.org learn from the past:

Even the best-intentioned action, when carried out without adequate care, can lead to indifferent or negative results. We need to ensure that this initiative learns from the successes of the past.. and avoids making the same mistakes as many others.

And “Paul” (who said only that he was from BurgerKing.org… BurgerKing.org?), in a private e-mail suggested an alternate analogy:

facebook is more like mcdonalds. it’s great that it exists because it fills a real human need more cheaply and conveniently than almost any other option. but it’s addictive, the side effects of overuse are not very attractive, and the vendor has an incentive to get you in there as often as they can.

in america nobody needs to starve to death because there are dollar meals. but fast food basically creates a lot of fat people. fast food is widely considered to be an industry that needs reform, not promotion as a social good.

The Jester agrees that this is a far superior analogy. However, the same argument can be made with just about any product or service with debatable merit. It’s not clear, for example, that it would be praiseworthy to make unconditional cash transfers universal, for example, even though there will certainly be cases of positive use, and almost everyone would say they benefited?

So, to summarize, anti-indiscriminate-Facebook-spreading sentiments focus on (1) its negative effects (many of which the Jester believes the company actively encourages); and (2) other factors which are necessary to make Facebook a positive force.

Pro-Facebook arguments focus on (1) the existence of positive uses of Facebook (which the Jester does not deny); and (2) the importance of universal infrastructure even before it is clear what to do with it. (2) is an interesting perspective, and it deserves to be taken seriously, but the case against it is complex. For now, the Jester will summarize and leave the discussion for another time. The two issues are whether the Internet/Facebook is among the primary aspirations of the people of a country as a whole, or just that of a tech-excited elite; and, whether it makes sense to focus on universal Internet first simply because it can do good things, even if the foundations for its positive use are not in place. As the Jester’s alter ego has written elsewhere, “can” is not “is.”

To put this long post out of its misery, the Jester will answer a question raised by Ibrahim, who is appointed Fool for the Day for his happy innocence within the ICT bubble…

[The Jester says that] “there are many, many other more morally credit-worthy ways than the indiscriminate spreading of [Facebook.]” Jester can you please enlighten us with some?

Again, there are many possibilities. But if the Jester had gazillions of dollars, he would build on his currently meager support for favorite efforts like…

  • Shanti Bhavan, an Indian boarding school that takes children of very poor dalit families and nurtures them into smart, capable, well-adjusted, socially aware young adults. (The last time the Jester visited, the school had no Internet, but there was a computer lab for teaching a computer class. The first batch of graduates are now working as accountants, software engineers, and teachers at organizations like Goldman Sachs, Ernst & Young, and the Indian Army.)
  • Ashesi University, Ghana’s first private liberal arts college whose founder has a clear vision for how to impact Africa: Patrick Awuah is a former Microsoft employee who mercifully decided not to use his technical skills to build a gadget to save the world, but instead to do what Silicon Valley companies really don’t like doing: investing in people’s education.
  • PRADAN, a north Indian NGO that helps rural communities form effective self-help groups and guides them to realize their livelihood-related aspirations.

And, for ICT lovers…

  • Digital Green, an international non-profit that uses digital tools and unique organizational processes to amplify the impact of organizations like PRADAN. The Jester previously wrote about DG.

The Jester thanks the court for an interesting conversation!

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Posted in Not Quite ICT4D, Q&A with the Jester, rhetoric | Comments Off on Internet.org Posts and Ripostes

Internet.org and Why Facebook Is the Matrix

August 28, 2013

The Jester thanks Ashwani Sharma for requesting jesterly opinion on Mark Zuckerberg’s latest announcement. Last week, Zuckerberg announced vague plans for Internet.org, a collaborative effort involving Samsung, Ericsson, Qualcomm, et al., and of course, Facebook, to bring better Internet connectivity to the “next 5 billion” people… that is to say, the 5 billion people who still aren’t slaves to Facebook.

It will come as no surprise that the Jester finds this effort pointless from the perspective of international development and ineffective even for reaching its own stated goals. (The Jester laughed at the conspicuous absence of telecom operators in the consortium, who, more than anyone else, control bandwidth in the target geographies. Presumably, they were not interested in further eroding their profit margins for the sake of customers who have the least disposable income. Note to Zuckerberg: There’s a reason why free-market solutions for the bottom billion don’t work.)

What’s surprising, though, is that the response of the media has been appropriately tepid, even critical. The New York Times (in what otherwise reads like a corporate press release) quotes Bill Gates making a general comment about universal access efforts: “When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that.” Chris O’Brien at The Los Angeles Times astutely notes that Internet.org “fails to recognize the complexity of reasons that people don’t use the Internet.” And then there’s Gawker’s Sam Biddle, who shows off that surprisingly rare commodity in an age of instant information: critical thinking. He calls the effort “faux humanitarian” and a “long con.”

Perhaps the world is becoming a little jaded by Internet giants claiming to save the world with the same toys they unleash on smartphone-addled developed-world users. Hurray says the Jester – it’s about time! (The Jester likes to imagine that there are clandestine anti-tech-hype cells forming all around the world, trafficking in tattered paper copies of old Jester posts lovingly transcribed at dusty Internet cafés where the printers are broken. The Jester daydreams that those cells are having some impact, but more likely, it’s just people coming to their senses. And even more likely, it’s just journalists going through a cycle of negative sensationalism about the tech industry. Whatever the case, the sun is shining in Jesterland!)

With the critique out there, the Jester has less to say. Less, but not zero. (Does the Jester ever have zero to say? Unfortunately for readers, no.)

What’s amazing about Internet.org is just how thoroughly empty it is of any attempt to connect Internet access to something tangibly good in the lives of the next 5 billion. At least in the nostalgia-inducing days of telecenters, people tried. Proponents explained how specific projects would deliver agricultural advice to farmers or would improve healthcare through telemedicine. They had detailed plans and prototypes. Zuckerberg doesn’t even bother…

  • “The Internet is such an important thing for driving humanity forward.” in The New York Times
  • “Making the internet available to every person on earth is a goal too large and too important for any one company, group, or government to solve alone.” Internet.org
  • “The internet […] is also the foundation of the global knowledge economy.” Zuckerberg’s whitepaper

So, according to Zuckerberg, the Internet is important, and it’s important. And, by the way, did you hear that the Internet is important? Even compared to telecenters, the Jester has seen very few claims that Facebook leads to better healthcare, improved education, greater income, or anything like that. Even misguided cheerleaders of the “Facebook revolution” in the Arab Spring have fallen silent now that Egypt teeters between failed state and military dictatorship.

The most that can be said of Facebook is that users appear to want it. There’s no doubt that the billion+ people with Internet access do in fact spend unfathomable amounts of time on Facebook. But usage doesn’t always mean positive social value, as we know from the tobacco industry. Calls for universal Internet access tend to hang on the neo-liberal consumerist rationalization that is the bane of so much that is wrong with the world today: Namely, that by giving more people something that they want – or by making it cheaply available in the free market – the world necessarily becomes a better place.

This was articulated recently on an ICT4D mailing list by someone the Jester will call “Kurtis.” Kurtis – whom the Jester dubs Fool for the Day – writes, “at least [Internet.org] is a project that’s trying to give people things that they want instead of telling people what they should want (e.g., crop prices).”

At least. Well, it’s hard to argue against giving people what they want, but the Jester will take on this thankless task.

Of course, giving people what they do not want should not be the goal of development. That much seems obvious.

But it’s also the case that giving people what they want shouldn’t be the goal of development, either.

Giving people what they want is just another word for charity. It stunts local capacity; it creates dependent relationships; it strengthens corrupt power. Giving people what they want is to jack them into the Matrix, where lost in a semi-pleasurable, mind-numbing digital dream, they don’t mind squandering their productive energies to feed their machine masters. And in case no one has noticed, Facebook is the Matrix! It’s exactly an artificially intelligent Internet overlord that lulls users into a semi-conscious reverie of bourgeois fantasies while it harvests their energies to feed itself. It is reported that among American smartphone users, the average Facebook user is on Facebook for 30 minutes a day. 30 minutes a day! To put that into perspective, the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2012 American Time Use Survey shows that on average, Americans spend 32 minutes “caring for and helping household members,” 38 minutes on “educational activities,” and 18 minutes on “participating in sports, exercise, and recreation.” (And, even in the Internet age, Americans still spend two and a half hours a day with that other major opium of the masses, television.)

“But wait!” shouts the attentive reader. “If you neither give people what they want nor give them what they don’t want, what else is left to do?” Well, the attentive reader also seems an unimaginative reader. There are so many other things we could do other than give or trade in stuff. If giving people fish is suboptimal, so is giving people Internet access. We could instead teach a class where good teachers are scarce. (Zuckerberg can be commended for doing this himself.) We could instead help strengthen healthcare systems. We could instead march in the streets together against injustice. We could dance the funky chicken.

Indeed, there are many other ways to frame the goal of development other than as “giving people what they want.” The Jester’s personal favorite is that the main goal in development is to help people become better versions of themselves. But that’s a topic for another court session.

So what should those of us who aren’t Silicon Valley gazillionaires do? Alas, there is little recourse for most of us to reign in the power of the Matrix Facebook, as it seeks world domination in a way that previous evil empires hadn’t even dreamed of. In the current global zeitgeist, the ethic of “let corporations do whatever they want unless they are breaking actual @#$% laws” is just too powerful. But as people concerned with international development, we can still avoid getting on this and other Internet-access bandwagons. Publicly funded organizations can avoid the apparently immense temptation to partner with grandiose but substanceless technology projects , especially when there are plenty of other genuinely meaningful projects to engage with. Bloggers can post their own critiques of Internet-access-disguised-as-philanthropy. And practitioners can strengthen their resolve to resist the attraction of save-the-world-quick schemes. In a universe where the virtual world is ruled by the multi-tentacled spawn of Silicon Valley, it is all the more important that some of us spend years in the real world organizing under-voiced communities into effective political and economic actors.

In short… take the red pill!

[A follow-up to this post is here: http://blog.ict4djester.org/2013/09/02/internet-org-posts-and-ripostes/.]

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Posted in Q&A with the Jester, rhetoric, technology pessimism | Comments Off on Internet.org and Why Facebook Is the Matrix

People are the 99%!

February 14, 2012

On Thursday, the Jester donned his civilian clothing, took a red-eye to Washington D.C., and participated in a panel hosted by the New America Foundation (NAF). Mobile Disconnect was among the best panels the Jester has experienced, either as panelist or attendee, due a combination of good organization, moderation, and mix of panelists. The audience was also excellent, with good questions during Q&A that stayed on topic. Missing was that one guy who manages to appear at every panel discussion, who raises a “question” that doesn’t end in a question mark, and whose irrelevance and incomprehensibility is only matched by its length. An associated debate-style forum appears on CNN.com.

The other panelists were Maura O’Neill of USAID, Katrin Verclas of Mobile Active, and Michael Tarazi of CGAP. The Jester would summarize the panelists’ positions thus:

  • O’Neill: M4D might be overhyped, but it’s all upside from here.
  • Verclas: M4D might be overhyped, but the important thing is mobile security.
  • Tarazi: M4D might be overhyped, but everyone loves mobile money, and it should be made available to everyone.
  • Jester: M4D is overhyped.

(The Jester blames any oversimplification on lack of space, but anyone interested in the nuanced details is directed to the video of the event online http://newamerica.net/events/2012/mobile_disconnect.)

The Jester, being his compassionate self, will avoid a boring play-by-play, as much of the discussion will be all-too-familiar to ICT4D enthusiasts. Instead, the Jester will focus on two things that occurred to him during the panel – one in this post, and another in the next.

First, for almost a year now, the Jester has not heard or read public comments that express total naïveté about the potential of ICTs for development. Nobody seems to believe that ICT4D is a slam dunk any longer. Discussions of project successes are qualified with their challenges. The idea that “the technology is only 10% of the solution” has gone viral (though Nicholas Negroponte appears to have a unique mutation that confers on him a robust immunity). Is it possible that the broader ICT4D community is becoming ever so slightly more sophisticated? Is it possible that social scientists, FailFaires, and Yours Truly are actually having an impact?

The Jester certainly hopes so. But, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. And while a little knowledge is a necessary way station on road to true wisdom, this part of the path might be a low point on the journey. Most worrying is the trend where clever rhetoric is way ahead of actual practice, due to cluelessness, marketing, hypocrisy, or outright mendacity.

An example of the more innocent brand of this disjunction was demonstrated a couple of weeks ago on the TIER  and Change mailing lists. A young man, let’s call him “Ashish,” started a thread about the Raspberry Pi, a $25 “computer.” (The price in practice is considerably higher since the device requires additional investments in a display and input device, but the Jester will avoid mentioning this fact which is irrelevant to the larger point.) Ashish then proposed that the Raspberry device was superior to the Aakash tablet and the OLPC XO3, as a device for education.

A group of experienced ICT4D-ers descended on the hapless Ashish, and in a positive sign of the increased sophistication of the ICT4D community, chided him for his techno-fetishism.

Ashish, though, responded with a comment along the following lines: “I get that technology only amplifies human intent and capacity au Jester, but seriously, won’t the Raspberry work a lot better than the Aakash in changing rural Indian education?”

This caused the Jester to wonder what exactly Ashish means by the word “get.” Does this word mean what Ashish thinks it means?

On the NAF panel, O’Neill and Tarazi displayed another version of the rhetoric-practice mismatch, which is all-too-common in D.C.  In both cases, they were happy to mouth the facts of “ICT failures” and “partial solutions,” while remaining in the thrall of the techno-deterministic delusion that technology is largely good in and of itself. When it came down to it, both seemed to believe that expanding access to certain technologies or services is, in fact, the primary issue.

The Jester believes that these are analogues of the oft (but perhaps not oft enough) criticized Washington Consensus: O’Neill is a pusher of what might be called the “ICT Consensus” that assumes that the great benefits that America gains from ICT would naturally follow elsewhere and without any of the negatives. Tarazi backs the “Banking Consensus” that imagines that a formal bank account for all is a pressing need in international development. At one point, Tarazi let slip that this was the first event he had attended where anyone even questioned whether being connected to the formal banking system was a good thing.

This caused the Jester to wonder which events Tarazi had been attending. Were there, in fact, underground ecopods where whole groups of people have been blissfully unaware of subprime mortgages, European debt crises, and credit default swaps?

To return to the rant, people appear to have internalized the notion that at the very least, ICT4D is not an easy win, and that some qualifiers are necessary to be credible. Unfortunately, this ushers in a new era of doublespeak, where everyone says the right thing, while continuing to throw resources into their one killer app that will undoubtedly save the world.

Just before the panel, the Jester heard an interesting story from Greta Byrum, a policy analyst at NAF. She mentioned meeting an ICT4D practitioner on a recent trip to Delhi. This man apparently told her that it’s not that the technological is 10% of the solution and the rest – social, political, institutional – is 90%. It’s that technology is 1% of the solution, while the rest is 99%. This would be an admirable level of comprehension, except that it apparently caused no cognitive dissonance for this IT consultant.

Why do so many of us want to keep supporting the 1%, which would really take care of itself, if the remaining 99% were in order? The Jester is tempted to start a new protest called “Occupy ICT.” Its motto: “People are the 99%!”

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Posted in conferences, rhetoric | 1 Comment »

ICT *or* Development, Part 3: The Jester Meets the White African

November 7, 2011

A blog post by the White African attacks the term “ICT4D.” As a card-carrying citizen of ICT4Distan, the Jester takes offense! No, wait, the Jester agrees with White African! Actually, no, the Jester still takes offense! Throwing pies at ICT4D is the Jester’s job!

How very confusing.

Never fear – whenever the Jester is confused, he takes a few deep breaths, practices mindful self-awareness, centers himself in a place of deep humility, and then looks for other people to blame. In this case, the White African is a convenient Fool for the Day (FftD®)!

It should first be noted why he is not Fool for the Year (FftY®): The White African is absolutely right when he says that “ICT4D” is a terrible term. As communication researcher Jonathan Donner notes, critiques of the term abound. Among the most stinging critiques is one by the Jester himself, that the abbreviation sounds too much like a coinage by the dyslexic cousin of rock/pop singer, Prince.

In fact, when the Jester was thinking about what domain name to purchase for his blog, he considered many slicker, more appropriate names such as “TBBITW” (The Best Blog in the World) and “Un-OLPC,” but a book on branding strategy noted that if one is handsome enough to turn heads on the street, sexy names are superfluous; it’s better to go with an accurate descriptor. The Jester chose “ICT4D Jester,” because “ICT4D” is the most recognized of the many bad buzzwords circulating in the field. “Japan,” too, is a Western mispronunciation of a word that means “the source of the sun,” which is ridiculous from many perspectives, but the word is too thoroughly ensconced. The country is not about to change its name to something more appropriate such as “the source of really sexy people.”  

So, ICT4D remains a terrible non-acronym whose only redeeming quality is that it is a lot better than ICT4E, ICT4A, ICT4YAT, (“Yet Another Thing”) M4D, YAT4D, RHOK, OLPC, and BOP. The FftD White African is right to call out its patronizing, condescending tone. (Though, that particular accusation coming from a man who calls himself “White African”… well, let’s just say it gives the Jester a new blog idea: “Yellow American” – a blog highlighting technologies invented by clever white Americans. Tagline: How did they manage to invent those things on their own?!)

But paternalism can’t be helped in development, as the Jester believes. When rich, powerful, educated people interact with poorer, less powerful, less educated people with the intent to somehow help them out, it is necessarily paternalistic and condescending, even if one learns a lot more from the spear-chucking natives than the converse (a cop-out defense that competes with “Some of my best friends are X!” for the world’s least-convincing excuse). If we really wanted to avoid paternalism and condescension altogether, we’d stay out of international development entirely. But even the Jester doesn’t have that level of wisdom.

So, if the White African is right to criticize the term, why should the Jester call him confused?

 

This question dovetails nicely with the other series of blog posts that the Jester has been remiss in completing (labeled ICT *or* Development and ICT or D, Part Deux). In those posts, the Jester has been trying to explain why it is so difficult to succeed at making a profit and serving poor customers with the same activity. Due to a karmic connection, those posts are based on a talk the Jester’s alter ego gave at the iHub, home of the White African.

The underlying issue is a deep one that goes straight to the heart of economic development. To compress the last century of economic history into a nutshell,* countries that attempted centralized socialism lost to capitalist countries in the contest to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. That is to say, the United States won the Cold War. The victors and their economists then proceeded to commit the classic error of overgeneralization and extrapolated the lesson that free-market capitalism is an unalloyed good (buoyed by another overgeneralized hypothesis known as the Kuznets curve).

In the last few decades, however, countries like the United States have been running the experiment of rampant free-market capitalism. Among other things, this led to the dramatic financial crash of 2007-2008, a population unable to wean itself off of resource consumption, and increased inequality, not only economically but also in terms of health, education, and well-being. If that’s what happens under what could be argued is the closest thing to a “pure” free-market capitalism, any reasonable person should be reconsidering the lesson of the Cold War victory.

While capitalism is terrific for economic growth, something else must also be present to ensure other values we care about. In the context of international development, for example, we particularly care about mitigation of inequality. In that context, the something else that is necessary to counterbalance capitalism is progressive activity – which the Jester defines to be any activity that provides more for people who have less. Thus, a progressive tax is progressive activity, because it taxes poorer people less. Also progressive are additional educational resources for children of less educated families and free healthcare for those who can’t afford private care.

Capitalism grows the whole pie, so that there is more for everyone, but it also tends to concentrate wealth, so that only a few actually get the additional slices. Progressive activity distributes wealth and capacity more evenly, but in and of itself fails to generate growth.

And, here is the big secret that everyone knows deep in their hearts, but few seem able to articulate: Both capitalism and progressive activity are good and important; the key is a delicate balance. (The reader who understands this is certain to have an IQ with at least one more digit than that of the average American politician.)

This delicate balance is at the heart of good international development, at least in an economic sense.** Developing countries need a healthy capitalism to grow their pies. Being without a capitalist engine dooms a country to an empty crust. But developing countries also need healthy progressive activity, or the existing inequalities will compound, just as is occurring in countries like India.

ICT4D, being a subset of international development activity, theoretically includes the promotion of both capitalism and progressive activity, but in practice, it tends to embrace the progressive side of things. (The Jester would argue that it is right to do so – business will take care of itself in the end, but progressive activity always needs more allies.) Few people consider that when Infosys – India’s most successful IT company  – uses computers, it is engaging in ICT4D. Yet, the company is undoubtedly contributing to India’s development at a scale far greater than any non-profit ICT4D project, and it is doing so with ICT. It’s contribution, however, is solely on the growth side.

Balance requires weight on both sides, and it’s the difficulty of splitting one activity to serve two purposes that makes it exceedingly difficult to make a profit while serving a poor population. ICT4$ is needed, but someone also needs to focus on D. (The Jester, of course, does not necessarily say that D should proceed via ICT4D!)

 

And, this brings us to the point of confusion of our FftD. In his activities, the White African splits his time between progressive activity and for-profit capitalism. In projects like Ushahidi, he is explicitly using donor money and self-subsidized labor to create software and adapt it for explicitly progressive use, such as crowdsourcing for Haiti. (Self-subsidized because he and his colleagues could conceivably be earning a lot more if they applied their energies towards purely for-profit ends.) On the other hand, at the iHub, he is trying to encourage African technologists to grow for-profit businesses. Among them are folks who’d like nothing more than to become the next Bill Gates.

Much of the developing world needs both – capitalism-fed economic growth and progressive activity catering to its least privileged – and the White African is laudably contributing to both sides. His difficulty with the term “ICT4D” is not due to terminology, however, but rather because of confusion caused by engaging in both types of activity without keeping them conceptually separate. To this day, the White African is juggling two spheres in the same space – the iHub grew out of his success with Ushahidi, and Ushahidi still operates out of the iHub.

Since juggling is something the Jester knows a lot about, here are some unsolicited suggestions, not just for the White African, but for anyone caught with one foot in development as progressive activity and another in development as economic growth…

The Jester notes first that the White African should acknowledge the value of being associated with ICT4D. Ushahidi is a non-profit effort that runs on grants from donors such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Humanity United, and the Omidyar Network. Its renown is intimately tied to its non-profit goals; map-and-mobile mash-ups are otherwise a dime a dozen. It’s the progressive use to which Ushahidi is put that makes it unique and why wealthy philanthropists want to make grants to it. Without the ICT4D face of Ushahidi, there would be no Ushahidi.

The iHub, on the other hand, is all about incubating for-profit technology companies. This aspect of the White African’s double life is all about start-up companies and capitalist growth. Of course, no one who wants to make money wants to hear about ICT4D – investors want profit, and the successful ones have long recognized that the most profitable ventures cater to rich people, maybe middle-class people, but definitely not to poor people, or heaven forbid, charitable causes. (Impact investing and the World Bank’s infoDev notwithstanding – those folks (1) lower their return-on-investment expectations, because they know they can’t make as much profit as otherwise, and (2) are anyway living in some la-la land where oil is unlimited and poop doesn’t smell.) To make the iHub successful as an incubator, the smart thing would be to dissociate it from Ushahidi. The Jester would go as far as to get Ushahidi staff a different office, so that their do-gooder ways don’t taint the ambitious capitalists. Maybe one day, cohabitation will work, but it’s not easy when at least one party is struggling to establish itself.

As to the White African’s complaint that foreigners pouring in money towards development efforts are killing the local business scene, that would hold only if they were aiming for the same target market. But, they shouldn’t be. Foreign aid money aims for the bottom of the pyramid, yet it’s the middle and the top of the pyramid that African start-ups should aim for — that’s where the disposable income is (ignore C. K. Prahalad). It’s important to keep business goals separate from doing-good goals. (The White African’s comment  that foreign aid is a cause of atrophy of local governments is closer to the mark, as Dambisa Moyo and others have noted. But, the issue here is not in the giving or accepting of aid, as much as how it’s done. The Chinese often took foreign aid, but then did the hard work themselves with good results.)

Along similar lines, the Jester would advise keeping all other social-impact activity separate from for-profit activity. Conferences should either be about social impact or for-profit start-ups, but not both. Evening mixers should involve development organizations or high-tech entrepreneurs, but not both. Branding should make clear which goal is served, with clarity either on business or social impact, but not both. Staff should be hired by one or the other kind of organization, but not both (the last thing a start-up needs is the anchor of non-profit salaries for its staff). Even dress can conform to the stereotypes of each community: T-shirt and cargo pants might be okay for the dusty development types, but start-up geeks ought to consider at least dress shirts and slacks.

To sum up, the Jester says to the White African: “Yes, ICT4D is a four-letter word (with a number), but wear it proudly in your progressive technology activities, and cast it off – way,way off – for your for-profit ones. Meanwhile, don’t forget that the world needs both types of activity. Of course, the one thing you can’t do is split yourself in two.  And, that, perhaps, is another reason why it’s so difficult to make a profit and serve a poor population simultaneously.”

(*) It’s good to be the Jester!

(**) The Jester does not attempt here to answer the very relevant and extremely hairy question of whether international development should support the economic growth of developing countries when we all know that will only add to the world’s resource crunch and accelerate our date with global economic crisis. The Jester’s hunch is that we should do so, anyway — the demographic transition is our best hope, and not doing so is morally hypocritical. But, that’s just a hunch.

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Posted in economic development, rhetoric, social enterprise | 3 Comments »

ICT *or* Development

August 14, 2011

[The Jester is in a rambling mood. Those who wish to get straight to business should skip to sixth paragraph, just after the break.]

It’s been over two months since the Jester last wrote, and he returns with renewed amazement at bloggers who blog every week, Facebookers who update each day, and Twitterers who tweet once an hour.

It’s not that those two months have been without comment-worthy incident. The Jester’s notebook is filled with notes to self: “write post on ridiculous belief that associating with a for-profit guarantees breaking even”; “blog about non-profit crisis of faith in non-profit model”; “add Seva Mandir to list of NGOs keeping their eye on the real target of human growth”; “do Q&A entry for people thinking about an ICT4D PhD”; “spank Thomas Friedman for superficial analysis of role of IT in global problems”; etc.

So, the intention to write those posts was all there, and so was the technology. So, the Jester is left to conclude that it’s his own lack of capacity that is at fault. He will conveniently place blame on his advancing age.

Instead of starting with his backlog, which would (in the manner of the Indian rail system) cause all entries to fall behind by two months, he will instead reschedule his backlog to some as-yet-unknown future date (also in the manner of the Indian rail system), and continue with his most current thoughts. (To be fair to the Indian rail system, their on-time rates, particularly on express trains, has improved dramatically in just the few short years the Jester has known it.)

This week, the Jester finds himself in Nairobi, where he will debut a new act titled “ICT or Development: Why It’s So Difficult to Get Rich and Help the Poor Simultaneously.” Those fortunate enough to be in Nairobi can catch the talk at the iHub on Aug. 18. (The announcement does not yet indicate the time of the event, but not to worry – the Jester doesn’t know, either!) Throughout this week, the Jester will, if his advanced age doesn’t prevent him, post portions of the argument. So, to begin…

*

In 2004, the Jester visited some of the Akshaya rural telecenters in the Malappuram district of Kerala, India. These centers were initiated and subsidized by the state government, who sought “100% computer literacy” for the state, meaning that one person in every household should learn the basics of PC operation, e-mail, and Internet browsing. The state saw it as a development project, but unusually for communist-leaning Kerala, the telecenters were meant to be run as for-profit businesses by local entrepreneurs.

The telecenters the Jester saw on that trip varied in their apparent success. One had a row of shiny new PCs in a swanky air-conditioned office space and bustled with customers furiously working through a computer-literacy curriculum. The owner boasted that he was already making a good profit. Another stacked computer equipment floor to ceiling, so that at most one PC was actually usable. The owner said that he dragged members of low-income families in his village to his center to learn about PCs, even if they kicked and screamed. When asked about breaking even, he demurred, “What I care about is the development impact of this project.”

A year or two later, then-PhD-student Renee Kuriyan went back to the same district to explore in depth, and among other things, she confirmed what the Jester had seen informally – that most Akshaya entrepreneurs fell into one of two categories: Those who made money by marketing to richer clients, and those who had some impact on poorer clients, but made little money. A very small minority made money and served poor clients.

Since then, the Jester has seen or heard of myriad attempts to make a profit by serving the poor, or as C. K. Prahalad put it, “eradicate poverty through profits.” Yet, despite the ongoing excitement around social enterprises and the bottom of the pyramid, in actuality, it is very difficult to make a lot of money by selling goods or services to poor people in a way that has meaningful, positive impact on their lives, particularly with ICT. The Jester made a similar point last year as ICT4D Myth 4, and will delve further this week, by explaining why impact through profits is so difficult, why the development world should stop being distracted by this mirage, and what the alternatives are.

But, before he does so, he will insert a few clarifications for those contentious readers who have cued up potential counterexamples. The hope is that this will save the Jester from having to name more Fools-for-the-Day than are strictly necessary.

First, the statement contains a hedge: The Jester only says that it is very difficult, not that it is absolutely impossible to make a lot of money by selling meaningful goods or services to poor people. One or two counterexamples do not falsify the assertion. Even with the hedge, though, the Jester pushes back against bandwagon-jumpers who assume every development challenge can be solved with a for-profit solution.

Second, the thesis is about making a lot of money. A little money is easy. Of course, what is a lot depends on the eye of the beholder, but it seems reasonable to suggest that “a lot of money” is not what microentreprises make when they primarily serve poor communities. There are also some interesting social businesses, of the kind that Muhammad Yunus advocates. For example, Yunus says that microfinance organizations should charge no more than 15% above operating costs (that does not allow for profits a la Compartamos Bank in Mexico). Another example is Aravind Eye Hospital, whose sincere focus on ending preventable blindness keeps the owners from becoming Sir Richard Branson.

Third, the claim is about profit and impact made by selling goods and services to poor customers. Specifically, it excludes instances where the buyer is not the beneficiary. The most prominent cases of this are when governments or charitable donors purchase goods or services on behalf of poor customers. Here, it’s possible to get rich, as some “beltway bandits” do in the United States – these firms, so called for the circular highway that runs around Washington D.C., earn their primary income by winning development contracts from USAID, the World Bank, and other large funders. Bandits raise two kinds of issues: One, do they deserve credit for serving the poor, if someone else is footing enough of the bill to make them rich? If a Good Samaritan pays full price for a loaf of bread to feed a hungry child, does the baker get to claim to have aided the child? The Jester thinks not. Two, if the beneficiary isn’t paying, then does it count as social enterprise or public service? The Jester says public service. The only enterprise in such cases is the outsourcing of a task – that part of it is not social. Conversely, the social intent lies between the funder and the beneficiary. Anyone getting rich in the middle is a profiteer.

Fourth, the net impact must be meaningful and positive. Coca Cola is certainly making a lot money by selling to poor clients, but is their impact positive? Does the joy from carbonated sugar water outweigh the consequences of lost teeth? Is the cost of changing a ring tone really worth the money spent?

The Jester has so far avoided the possible counterexamples of the mobile phone (voice call) and M-PESA, both of which appear to be making lots of money and serving the poor. Indeed, if their net impact on the poor were conclusively positive, the Jester would concede that they are valid – and powerful – counterexamples. But, the Jester would not be the Jester if he accepted conventional wisdom without a fight. He denies, rather, that all the evidence is in yet.

He can’t help but think of the case of television, once hailed as the means to bring education to millions, but now the means by which millions self-lobotomize by watching Snooki. Mobile-watchers rhapsodize about the rapid proliferation of GPRS and the ironically named smartphone, but won’t they just become another channel for Snooki? And, what will corporations with large marketing budgets do when the world’s least educated people can transfer money by phone? It’s almost enough to make this nut long nostalgically for market imperfections.

In any case, the Jester’s core point is a warning for those hoping to get rich by selling to the poor and a caveat for those thinking breaking-even is the only, or the effective, route to scale. In the next post, the Jester will enumerate why it’s so difficult to make a lot of money by selling goods or services to poor people in a way that has meaningful, positive impact on their lives, particularly with ICT.

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Posted in Myths of ICT4D, rhetoric, social enterprise | 5 Comments »

My Internet, Right or Wrong

June 8, 2011

The stars have aligned for the Jester, who is fortunate today to have four Fools for the Day (FftD). Jaume Fortuny and Tony Roberts, both of whom commented on the Jester’s previous post, were joined by Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani of Pakistan and U.N. Special Rapporteur, Frank William La Rue, in affirming the need for the Internet to be a human right. (Thanks to @jeffswin and @fortuny for bringing the Pakistani and U.N. news to the Jester’s attention. The Jester chuckled at @fortuny’s triumphant tone, and appreciated @random_musings’s wry remark about the U.N. ignoring the Jester. The Jester demands that his country be recognized by the United Nations!)

In light of both grassroots and grass-tops support for the Internet as a human right, it might seem all too foolish for the Jester to rant against the idea. Nevertheless, ranting is the Jester’s favorite pastime. If only some queendom would actually pay him for it!

The Jester has already posted his arguments against human-right-ism of ICT. So, he will focus on rebutting rebuttals.

Fool-for-the-Day Jaume Fortuny begins, “Human rights must ensure an environment of social harmony and personal development that dignify the lives of people,” and continues with several such platitudes. The Jester is certainly not against social harmony, personal development, or dignity in the lives of people, and actively believes that these things should be worked on very directly.

The real question is not whether these things are important, but how best to achieve them. ICT, alas, is simply not even a partial cure for challenging social problems. Technology amplifies human intent and capacity. Consider social harmony: if people want to fight rather than to reconcile, then the Internet only makes the fighting more intense. Witness the phenomenon of cyber-balkanization in the United States, for example, where conservatives and liberals each have their vocal representatives and blogs, and only scream more loudly at each other. Just a quarter of a century ago, it was common for Republicans and Democrats to collaborate on legislation. Today, with the miracle of the Internet, politicians are even more beholden to their constituents, and constituents isolate themselves in parallel Internet universes that never intersect. Is that ICT-enabled social harmony?

Mr. Fortuny is on firmer ground when he suggests that developing countries might want to learn from the Finnish capacity for innovation. The Jester agrees, but capacity for innovation and use of technology are two different things. It’s relatively easy to drive a car; it’s much harder to engineer one (and then to profit from it). Not understanding that difference is at the heart of much ICT confusion.

FftD Tony Roberts asks, “In a world where oppressed groups with the volition and potential ability to overturn dictators and challenge injustice, chose the internet, or other ICTs as the most efficacious tools in a stage of their struggle, should we deny them the right?”

The Jester has two responses to this question: First, Mr. Roberts may have misunderstood the nature of a declared “human right” as the Jester was critiquing it. The Jester never said that anyone should be actively denied the use of the Internet. Though it may come as a surprise to readers, the Jester doesn’t go around sabotaging telecenters as a side hobby!

The question is whether the Internet must be actively made available to everyone, which is the implication of something being a human right. There are many things that are desirable, but which cannot practically be provided for all, and are not absolutely critical to dignified human life. For example, if Twitter ever becomes necessary for dignified human life, the Jester will likely take the blue pill and go back into the Matrix.

Note that the United Nations has not issued a declaration of the human right to gasoline-powered vehicles, even though it could be argued that physical mobility is an even more fundamental need than the ability to watch YouTube. Despite the immense utility of transport, human beings can, amazingly, live decent lives without automobiles (unlike food, water, air, shelter, or basic healthcare), and it would likely burst  developing country budgets to provide transport to every citizen.

A second interpretation of Mr. Roberts question might be that for the very sake of fighting for human rights, shouldn’t we make the Internet a human right? This point of view is particularly relevant given the current uprisings in the Arab world. Unfortunately, it is also very circular. It falls into the category of the most common response that the Jester receives: “If X, not ICT, is what’s important in development, then how about using ICT for X?”

If the Jester had a dime for every time someone asked him that, he would simply fund a T1 line for everyone on the planet, just so that we could all move on to the real challenges. Of course, it would be nice if freedom fighters everywhere (the good ones, anyway) could have access to the Internet so that they could communicate with each other and the world, while their evil oppressors are stuck with carrier pigeons. Maybe if declaring the Internet a human right got us one inch closer to that possibility, we ought to do it. FftD Frank La Rue in his report writes, U.N.“ Special Rapporteur calls upon all states to ensure that Internet access is maintained at all times, including during times of political unrest.” (The Jester would like to know, where did they come up with his fancy title, and can he have one like it, too? Perhaps, Special Royal Gluteal Ache to the U.N.)

But the reality is that any dictator willing to shut down or censor the Internet is already engaged in violating other more important human rights, such as the right not to be shot in the head or tortured by secret police. Mr. La Rue filed his report on May 16, a couple of months after the Syrian uprisings began.

The Jester likes to imagine President Bashar al-Assad having the following moral quandary: “In order to stay in power, I’ve killed a thousand of my fellow citizens, detained tens of thousands, and even had one 13-year-old tortured and killed. But, the U.N. says the Internet is a human right. Gosh, maybe I shouldn’t shut off the Internet. Hmm, what to do…?”

On June 3, al-Assad reportedly shut down much of the Syrian Internet.

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The Internet: Human Right or Human Wrong?

May 31, 2011

About a year ago, the Jester gave a version of his “Myths of ICT4D” talk to an audience of Indian students. Among them was Samujjal Purkayastha, who in an follow-up e-mail asked what the Jester thought of Finland making the Internet a human right. The Finns passed a law requiring that every household in the country have access to a 1Mbps broadband connection. Estonia, France, Greece, Spain, and Costa Rica have followed suit with similar legislation, providing further fodder for self-unaware techno-utopians like Nicholas Negroponte, and fueling ongoing public discussion in international development.

The rhetoric of human rights is emotionally powerful. Anyone who argues against X as a human right must answer the challenge, “How can you deny someone X, when X is so essential?” And of course, few people — not even the Jester in his most Luddite of moods — are explicitly for denying anyone the Internet. (The exceptions are dictators losing their grip on a country making a last-ditch effort to stymie the opposition by cutting communication lines. It does seems to the Jester, though, that any dictator willing to suppress his opposition by force and shut down the Internet will hardly be concerned about public shaming by some foreign diplomats.)

But, the question is not whether to deny someone something that they’ve never had, but whether, of all the things they could have next, the Internet should be it. Unfortunately, when the list of things they don’t have includes reasonable access to clean water, quality primary and secondary education, basic healthcare, and basic sanitation, the Internet falls far far behind in the list of priorities. (Nor, incidentally, can any of those things be meaningfully addressed via the Internet. The Jester does not encourage young ICT4D PhD candidates to work on a mechanism by which to convert bits to water, at least not if they wish to finish their dissertation within the third millennium. )

Human rights rhetoric admits no greys. It allows no ordering of priorities. In fact, the whole point of anyone arguing for X as a human right is to turn what is in fact a question of when and how much into one of black-and-white either/or. Proponents hope that once something is accepted as a right, those in power will spare no expense to provide it universally. 

Unfortunately, this logic is short-sighted and counterproductive if true development, and not the selling of some technology product or service, is the goal. As the Jester has written ad infinitum, the Internet is of minimal value to a poor, undereducated farmer earning less than $2 a day. Countries with the highest rates of Internet penetration today are those that happened to be rich already (and which, incidentally, often also have the highest penetration of lots of other things requiring money, such as automobiles). The belief that the Internet makes a country rich is not far from the belief that sticking one’s tongue out makes one Michael Jordan.

Even if broadband access were to cost as low as $5 per month (the current cost of a monthly broadband subscription in India, likely among the lowest in the world), at $60 a year, that is a sum that could be put to use much more meaningfully towards other purposes, such as contributing to a clean-water kiosk, hiring assistant teachers for classes to boost educational outcomes, purchasing decent medical insurance, or installing a latrine.

Furthermore, by adding yet another item to the growing list of human rights, Internet-rights activists diminish the emphasis on those rights that might truly deserve special status. The world is very far even from guaranteeing clean water and minimal nutrition to all 6.7 billion people on the planet. Given that, it’s pure delusion to suggest that international development is ready to take on an information technology as a universal right.

And, if none of that is convincing, consider that the world is marching steadily and quickly towards a world in which everyone will have access to the Internet via their mobile phones. The latest figures are around 5.3 billion mobile phone accounts and 2 billion Internet users. Hungry telecoms will make it happen, anyway, so why should good people interested in development waste their time when other development objectives are being neglected?

None of this is to suggest that Finland, or any other country in particular, is  wrong to provide the Internet to all. For countries that have secured water, nutrition, sanitation, healthcare, shelter, and education for every one of their people (as Finland has more or less done), the Internet seems a reasonable next step. But, if developing countries have an aspiration to be more like Finland, it seems clear that there are many other priorities before universal broadband. To start, countries ought to learn from the Finn’s terrific educational system, which, incidentally, uses relatively little ICT.

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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 »

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