The good news about Global Voices? We do a pretty good job of giving you access to voices you might not otherwise hear from, translating and featuring bloggers from almost two hundred nations.
The bad news? Not everyone has a blog.
Every intelligent interviewer who asks me about Global Voices asks whether the people we feature on the site are a representative sample of the population of the nations we cover. The answer is “nope”. Bloggers aren’t a representative sample in the US, and they’re certainly not “the man on the street” in a country like Benin or Bolivia.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to bloggers. It just means it’s worth realizing that, for the most part, bloggers in developing nations are better educated, more technical and wealthier than most of their compatriots. In some countries, that leads to recognizable bias - bloggers in Venezuela are more likely than the national average to be anti-Chavez; bloggers in Zimbabwe are more likely than the national average to be anti-Mugabe.
But it does present a challenge for us at Global Voices - how do we broaden the group of people around the world who have access to blogs and other tools they can use to share their experiences with a global audience?
With support from the Knight Foundation, we’ve been running a project called Rising Voices, designed to introduce citizen media to a wider audience, giving people who might not have a chance to express themselves online the opportunity, training and access to tools that allow them to raise their voices.
One of the projects we’re supporting in Rising Voices is Voces Bolivianas, an effort by Bolivians both within and outside that country to bridge political divides, begin dialogs and bring different types of people into the online space. Today, the project is holding Bolivian Voices Day, a nationwide effort to train bloggers and bring more people into the conversation.
Project leader Eddie Ávila wrote to the GV team last night, talking about his reasons for starting the project. I thought his words were moving and asked him for his permission to share them. Here’s some of what he said.
It seems like ages ago, when I noticed a trackback on one of my blog posts that led to a site called Global Voices Online. Soon after came an email from David Sasaki, the Latin American editor at the time, inquiring whether I would be interested in representing Bolivia through weekly summary posts. That began my start with Global Voices. That was September 2005.
Little did I think it would lead me to where I am now, namely 12 hours away from the start of Bolivian Voices Day. In eight sites across the country, approximately 100 Bolivians from “underrepresented” groups will take part in a one-day workshop where they will learn how to create a blog, write posts, and most importantly, be part of this local, national and global conversation. In Oruro, a small mining town, teachers from rural schools will come into town to participate. In Tiqiupaya, an even smaller suburb of Cochabamba, members of neighborhood associations have signed up to take part, and in El Alto, a youth group of young men and women, who go to school at night because they work during the day to support their families, are others who will part of this event. These are just a few examples of who will be present tomorrow…
For me, working and moving back here to Bolivia holds special meaning. The decision of my parents to immigrate and remain in the U.S. some 40+ years ago, as you might guess, changed my world forever, but also instilled in me a special responsiblity to “do something” for Bolivia someday. In prior stays in the country, I’ve volunteered at orphanges, gave donations to buy children presents at Christmastime or other worthy deeds, but it never felt right. This project feels right, and even though it is a small drop in the bucket with a country of 9 million in an increasingly polarized society, it is the first step. Creating meaningful interaction with one another regardless of class, ethnicity, geographic location, is just what this country needs…
Good luck, Eddie, and good luck to everyone involved with this project. Can’t wait to hear what Bolivia has to say.
Readers of Global Voices - and of this blog - know that many Chinese people aren’t happy about western media coverage of the Tibet protests. Specifically, they’re really not happy with CNN. And April 19th is evidently slated to be “anti-CNN day” in a number of locations around the world.
Why CNN specifically? Well, Jack Cafferty’s comments didn’t help. Speaking on The Situation Room, he offered the commentary, “So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed… I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” (He’s subsequently clarified that the “goons and thugs” are the Chinese government not the Chinese people. Good luck with that.)
One of the protests that could be most interesting has been organized by a group calling itself “Revenge of the Flame“. They had planned on executing a massive denial of service attack on CNN’s website, launched at 8pm Beijing time on the 19th. The cat, however, is out of the bag, and CNN has reported that they’re expecting the attack and are taking countermeasures that might make the site slow or unavailable in Asia. (In other words, they’re likely filtering requests from large sets of Asian IP addresses and preventing those IP addresses from making more than a few requests per second…) Revenge has responded by calling off the attack and threatening another one at some unannounced point in the future.
Could a group of Chinese hackers shut down CNN? My guess - they could certainly make for a very uncomfortable Saturday for CNN sysadmins, especially if they’ve gotten hold of large botnets. Will some hackers attempt to attack the site tomorrow? Probably. Will they succeed? Wait and see…
Danwei is reporting that CNN is currently blocked in China. That might be a government response to anger over Caffrey’s comments, which have oddly been raised to the status of international incident, when they should probably be dismissed as the rantings of a xenophobic blowhard. But there’s another explanation - if the Chinese government were worried about the implications of an attack by Chinese hackers on cnn.com, blocking the site at a national boundary level might be an effective defense. Assume your attacker has a botnet built mostly from compromised computers within China. It’s pretty trivial to issue a DDOS on a specific URL. It’s trickier to order that DDOS via an unblocked proxy server. Even if you can, you’re far more likely to take down that proxy server than take down cnn.com.
Not saying that’s why they’re blocking the site. Just saying that it’s an interesting possibility. And one worth watching.
One of the highlights for me for attending Al Jazeera’s annual journalism conference in Qatar in March of last year was meeting Dave Marash. Marash is a veteran journalist who shocked many in the US journalism community by becoming the anchor - and defacto spokesman in America - for Al Jazeera English.
Now Marash has surprised journalism-watchers around the world with his decision to leave AJE. Columbia Journalism Review talks with him about his decision. It’s worth reading the entire interview, because it’s far too easy just to take away the (true, but incomplete) conclusion that Marash is leaving the network because he feels they cover the US poorly. What’s happened is a bit more complex.
When founded, the idea behind AJE was that there would be four independent bureaus - Doha, London, Washington and Kuala Lumpur. Each would have a great deal of editorial independence and would decide what to cover and how. In the past few months, news direction for the network has come more from Doha, and coverage of the US has suffered, Marash argues - he points to a piece of particularly weak reporting on poverty in the US that was conducted solely by a Doha team, with no US cooperation, which was an exposé of the remarkable fact that there are poor people in the US.
Marash theorizes that shift in reporting may be a reflection of larger geopolitical realities. He points to a rapporachment between the Qataris and the Saudis, caused by Dick Cheney’s visit to the region to drum up support for possible war against Iran. In typical Bush administration fashion, the visit managed instead to produce more solidarity between Arab nations and help them transcend traditional tensions, coming together to resist US pressure to reject Hamas and isolate Iran. This shift helped change Al Jazeera English, Marash argues:
I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.
There are still two very good reasons to watch this channel, Marash argues. One is that the channel continues to provide unparalleled coverage of events in the developing world, especially in Africa and Latin America. (Indeed, AJE’s Africa coverage is a must-read. And if Mugabe had been hoping that having an AJE bureau in Harare meant hands-off coverage, he made a mistake.) The second is that it’s important to see an Arab perspective on American events, even when that perspective is unfair, biased and distasteful:
We need to know, for example, in America, how angry the rest of the world is at Americans. Our own news media tend to shelter us from this very unpleasant news. So if you watched and every piece seemed tendentious and pissed you off, and I don’t think that would be the case, but even if worst case the channel turned shrill and shallow, you would still want to watch them on the principle that millions—tens of millions—of people watch them every day and you need to know what’s going on in their brains.
Marash gets a lot of points in my book both for recognizing what’s wrong with the coverage and praising what’s right. I wish he could have stayed and helped fix matters, but he deserves a great deal of credit for being open and honest about his read on the situation and his emotions.
I’ve got a hip-high pile of books by my bedside, including several manuscripts written by good friends. But after Paul Collier’s talk at TED, his book moved to the top of the pile, and I spent a rainy Saturday diving into his new book, “The Bottom Billion”. It was time well spent.
Collier has dedicated the last thirty years of his life to the study of African economics, as director of the development research group of the World Bank and now as Director of the Center for the Study of African Economics. While he’s got a wealth of technical papers, “The Bottom Billion” is his first consumer book - at TED, Collier explained that he hoped to write an economics book that could be read on the beach. That might be a stretch, but it’s a good, quick and enlightening read, assuming you’re interested in the basic questions of development economics.
The most basic question addressed in development economics is “Why are some people poor?” There tend to be two highly political answers to this question: “Because capitalism is unfair” or “Because poor people don’t work hard enough.” Neither’s an especially satisfying response, and neither is well supported by data. The rise of China, India and Asia has had far more to do with embrace than rejection of the principles of capitalism, and those societies have collectively pulled hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. On the other hand, hard work and embrace of free market principles isn’t likely to have much impact on a rural farmer in Chad.
Most development economists avoid arguments this simplistic, but they’re subject to their own polarization. Two of the most influential popular economic books offer the contradictory advice that rich countries need to give the developing world a whole lot more aid, and that development aid is, for the most part, a near-criminal waste of money that damages as much as it helps. Collier, to his credit, references both Sachs and Easterly in “The Bottom Billion”. A warning to my Sachs-phobic readers - he’s a fan of Sachs’s economics, though he’s far more critical of his advocacy for increased aid.
While Collier’s work is significantly more nuanced than most popular books on development economics, he’s not exactly shy or soft-spoken. He’s particularly contemptous of ideological dreamers, with a special disregard for Marxists. (In describing China’s recent economic success, he notes, “Mao made his own invaluable contribution by dropping dead.”) But he’s almost as critical of free marketeers who believe that markets will solve all development problems, especially in the poorest countries of the world.
Collier is optimistic about the future for most of the world’s people. Nations like China and India are on the right track to “converge” with developed nations, in the long run, just as the poorest members of the EU (Ireland and Portugal, when they joined) have seen their GDP per capita match those of their neighbors. Many of the nations of the world are genuinely “developing” - as they develop further, they’ll become fully integrated into the global economy and provide more opportunities for their citizens.
The problem is a set of nations that aren’t developing. Since the 1960s, when many of these countries threw off foreign rule through colonialism, these nations have progressed very slowly or, in some cases, regressed. Most of these nations are in sub-Saharan Africa, but countries like North Korea, Burma, Afghanistan and some other Central Asian nations also are home to members of the bottom billion. Collier refers to this set of nations as “Africa+”, but that’s a bit deceptive - all his examples come from Africa, though some lessons may be applicable to countries like Tajikstan as well. (He never quite defines the set of nations - South Africa is explicitly exempted, and I assume nations like Botswana are as well - less clear if nations “on the bubble” like Senegal and Ghana are included.)
Leaning on Jeff Sachs’s identification of malaria as a “development trap” that can keep a nation from growing, he identifies four traps that the bottom billion nations are stuck in. Some suffer from only one of these traps - most suffer from two or more.
Conflict: The single easiest way to destroy economic development in a nation is to fight a civil war. Civil wars last a long time - six years on average - and devestate the local economy. Growth is reduced 2.3% per year on average in the countries Collier and colleagues studied. When you consider the effect that wars have beyond a nation’s border, especially impact on the economies of neighboring countries, the cost Collier estimates for a civil war is $64 billion. That sounds like peanuts in comparison to the cost of the civil war we’ve managed to bring about in Iraq, but it’s huge in the terms of bottom billion nations - it’s just below the GDP of Ethiopia, a country of more than 70 million people.
Collier and friends have also demonstrated that poor nations are far more likely to fall into civil war than wealthy ones. He’s skeptical of ideological explanations for civil war, believing that they take place, basically, when a group sees the opportunity to buy some guns, loot the national treasury and, preferably, exploit a nation’s natural resources. He calculates that the average low-income nation has a 14% chance of falling into civil war in a five year period - this percentage goes up if the nation’s economy is stagnant or contracting.
We shouldn’t expect civil wars to go away, even with the arrest of bastards like Viktor Bout - it’s just too easy to overthrow a government. “Rebel leader Laurent Kabile, marching across Zaire with his troops to sezie the state, told a journalist that in Zaire, rebellion was easy: all you needed was $10,000 and a satellite phone. While this was obviously poetic exaggeration, he went on to explain that in Zaire, everyone was so poor that with $10,000 you could hire yourself a small army.” And the satellite phone? You use that to strike deals with resource extraction companies for the territories you seize.
Natural resources: For those of us who are obsessed with international development and have no formal economics training, it’s often disturbing to find out what sort of questions economists don’t know the answers to. (It seems like we should have a much better answer to the question, “Does aid work?” before giving lots more of it, for instance.) Weirder are some of the answers we do have. For instance, it’s pretty much conventional wisdom in developing nations that being “blessed” with natural resources is a bad thing.
Natural resources tempt would-be rebels, but that’s not the main problem. More troublesome is “Dutch Disease”. This is an economic term coined to explain the slowing of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of natural gas in the 1960s. In all economies, people want foreign currency so they can purchase imports. They trade with domestic exporters, who earn foreign currency by selling goods abroad. When a country discovers oil, for instance, it’s very easy to turn that resource into hard currency. Activity in that sector tends to “crowd out” other activities, especially the sort of labor-intensive manufacturing that’s helped economies like South Korea and Singapore move into high income strata.
Collier believes that Dutch Disease is a critical concept in understanding the bottom billion, and that aid can cause the disease just as surely as oil. But he sees other corrosive effects of natural resources - specifically, he thinks natural resources tend to subvert democracy. In a functional democracy, politicans are rewarded for policies that improve society. In natural resource-rich societies, he sees politicians more frequently rewarded for bribery and patronage. Collier terms this “survival of the fattest” and suggests that Nigeria in the 1990s is a pretty good example of what emerges when this happens.
As Collier argued in his talk at TED, the solution to this problem is to focus on the checks and balances of democracy, rather than on elections. Countries that have survived major natural resource discoveries have strong democratic institutions, especially a strong free press.
Landlocked with bad neighbors: Landlocked nations have a problem exporting - they don’t have ports. Somehow, this isn’t a problem for Switzerland in the way it is for Uganda. But Switzerland has some very wealthy neighbors, and these neighbors can serve markets, as well as providing infrastructure to use their ports. Uganda’s neighbors are much less wealthy, and relying on Kenya’s infrastructure to export wasn’t a great idea for Uganda even before the recent post-election crisis.
Collier has less helpful thinking on this topic that on most others - he advises these nations to rely on remittances, to ensure that they’re not “airlocked” or “e-locked” due to poor internet access (which is a challenge, as the fastest net access is through undersea cables) and to try to change their neighbors economic policy, while acknowledging that this rarely works. Unfortunately, he concludes, some of these nations simply shouldn’t exist as independent states - their boundaries are the consequences of Europe’s colonial carve-up of the continent. That depressing idea resonates with me, and seems to intersect with Lant Pritchett’s observation that Zambia currently has way too many people now that the copper mines have been exhausted - the fixed and non-porous nature of borders is going to be a problem for Africa for years to come.
Badly governed: Governance has been the cause celebre of the US aid community for the past decade - if you wanted money from USAID, you’d be well advised to build an economic growth program based around good governance and accountability. Collier is less worried about poor governance than many economists - he points out that Bangladesh was able to achieve economic growth despite being tied for the most-corrupt government in the world for many years. The path to economic success for Bangladesh was pretty conventional - high-labor manufacturing, a sector that, Collier asserts, doesn’t require too much goverment intervention to make work in countries with large labor forces and ports.
The situation is different in small nations, especially small, landlocked nations like Chad, which tied Bangladesh for the dubious honor of most corrupt government. Conventional paths to economic success are closed off, and the government needs to be more than “not a hindrance”, but an active player in creating economic development. Unfortunately, some of these nations simply cannot provide services to their populus anymore - Collier lists Angola, Central African Republic, Haiti, Liberia, Sudan, the Solomon Islands, Somalia and Zimbabwe as states that he would classify as failed under political and economic critera. (I assume Liberia is improving, and I wonder if a current list would include Guinea-Bissau.) Collier estimates that the cost - to citizens of the nation, to neighboring nations, to the world as a whole - of state failure at roughly $100 billion. Unfortunately, when states descend to this poor level of governance, they have a very small chance - 1.9% per year - of experiencing a turnaround.
Of the bottom billion nations, 73% have experienced civil war, 29% have economies dominated by natural resources, 30% are in landlocked nations, and 76% have experienced a sustained period of bad governance - some unlucky nations have three or more factors working against them. Collier believes that the two solutions most often prescribed for the developing world - trade and aid - won’t be enough for these nations, which are failing to develop.
Freer trade could help the bottom billion, but it needs to be the right kind of trade. Collier sees a great interest - especially from China - in African natural resources, but predicts that economies that overfocus on natural resources will become increasingly corrupt and increasingly uncompetitive in other industries. Most countries that have developed significantly have large manufacturing sectors, and their manufacturing exports earn vastly more than natural resource exports.
Manufacturing, however, requires major upfront investment to purchase factory equipment. We’d hope that global capitalism would mean that adverturous investors would be pouring money into these poor nations to spark manufacturing development. Nope - these markets are too risky, and most international investors steer clear. (See the country rankings from Institutional Investor to get a sense for the sorts of nations that are too high-risk for most investors.) Instead, the globalization of financial markets means that capital flows out of very poor countries, not it. If you’re lucky enough to become wealthy in the Central African Republic, you’ll likely choose to get your funds the heck out of your home nation, rather than investing in local industries. Collier sees a similar pattern with talented labor - if you’re a smart, ambitious Chadian, your temptation is to look for success in a global talent market, not stay at home.
(I think Collier oversimplifies these arguments. There’s a growing group of brave Africans looking for ways to return home and invest money earned in North America and Europe in their home countries. That said, while I’ve got piles of anecdotes about these investors, I have no idea if their total contributions would affect Collier’s statistical analysis at all. Ultimately, that’s the challenge in arguing with Collier - he’s dealing in broad statistical analysis, and it’s hard to know how much any single counterexample challenges his conclusions.)
The most depressing part of this argument is that Collier believes some of these nations may simply have “missed the boat”. They might have had a chance to enter into labor-intensive fields a couple of decades ago - now those fields are so thoroughly dominated by nations like China that these countries might need to wait for China to develop to the point where labor becomes expensive, a process that might take decades to become widespread.
If globalization won’t save us, perhaps increased generosity and compassion, expressed via aid, might. Nope. Collier is skeptical of many forms of aid, pointing out that in a dysfunctional state, many types of aid never reach their destined recipients, lining the pockets of corrupt politicians and subverting the rule of law. (Again, the example of choice is poor Chad, where a study of money donated to support rural clinics discovered that less than 1% of money donated was used for its intended purpose.) Aid dollars siphoned off by corrupt governments often end up financing military expenditure, which can fuel the conflict trap so many nations fall into.
Collier ends up promoting a kind of aid that’s become extremely unpopular in liberal development circles: technical assistance. This involves paying experts from developed nations to offer advice and training to governments and businesses in poor nations. It’s the business I used to be in, and I’ve fielded my share of criticisms that giving money to wealthy American PhDs is a stupid way to go about development. Collier counters that very poor nations often don’t have human resources in key fields and need to import trainers, and that technical assistance is one of the few forms of aid that isn’t susceptible to corruption or Dutch Disease. He also favors aid to build the infrastructure that makes exporting possible.
So if aid and markets alone won’t help us, what will? Collier has solutions, but they’re technical, policy-directed and less sexy than you might hope. It’s hard to imagine a pop concert on five continents pushing for improved international norms of transparency on natural revenues accounting, but that’s the sort of change Collier believes the bottom billion needs. Specifically, he’s in favor of:
- Targetted military interventions. Collier understands that it’s politically untenable to advocate for outside regime change in the waning days of the GWBush era, but he notes that there are cases where military force allows very poor nations to get back on a path towards development. His analysis of British intervention in Sierra Leone suggests that the economic benefits of ending a civil war exceeded the cost of intervention by a factor of 32.
- A set of international charters that set basic standards for developing nations to follow, in the fields of natural resources transparency, democratization, budget transparency, investment and the management of post-conflict situations.
- A lowering of OECD trade barriers towards bottom billion nations and barriers between bottom billion nations. Collier promotes an unusual strategy to encourage export diversification in bottom billion nations - he recommends maintaining tarrif barriers with Asian nations and eliminating similar tarrifs with the bottom billion - AGOA done correctly, in effect, over a long period of time.
- A rethinking of the reciprocal nature of the WTO - bottom billion countries shouldn’t be striking bargains with rich nations. They need a trade forum where wealthy countries are willing to make concessions on development grounds.
After Collier’s brilliant articulation of the problems facing bottom billion nations, I expected a call to action that would send me into the streets, rather than sending me to Wikipedia to review the history of GATT and the WTO. That might have been overly optimistic on my part. Solutions to problems of this magnitude are going to require changes in multilateral institutions and international norms.
The problem, I suspect, is that if I have trouble getting excited about Collier’s proposals, it’s going to be difficult to get people not obsessed with international development pumped up. Collier acknowledged this problem in his TED talk, ending with a story that a blogger had written “Collier is not charismatic. But his arguments are compelling.” That’s why, Collier said, “If you agree with that comment, you realize that I need you.”
I don’t think it’s charisma that’s the problem - I think it’s complexity. Collier does the best job I’ve seen of answering the question, “Why are nations trapped in poverty?” It’s going to take more effort - from him and from other people who care about this topic - to make a set of policy recommendations and build a movement around them that’s as cogent and compelling as the first half of this book.
I’d forgotten just how much fun ETech is. Not only are the talks some of the most creative and innovative you can hear in the tech community, the room full of people is one of the most congenial, smart and funny you’re likely to encounter anywhere. Tim O’Reilly won’t come out and say that it’s his favorite conference, but he’s willing to declare it the most important that his organization puts on.
Singel did an excellent job with my talk as well, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. I was grateful to have the excuse to explore at more length some of the ideas I’ve been writing about for the past year, and was gratified that the talk was well received. There were several requests for me to post the slides - that’s not really realistic, as they were 100MB and rather video-rich - what I’m going to do instead is post my notes, a bunch of links and a few of the slides. This won’t be an accurate picture of what I said - it’s more likely to be a picture of what I meant to say.
Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
I had a front-row seat for this transition, working with Tripod. We sincerely believed that the purpose of the web was to give college graduates helpful information about renting apartments, applying for jobs and investing their money. Our users rapidly told us that what the web was really about was publishing their own information… which left us with the difficult challenge of figuring out how to make money off of people’s collections of cat pictures.
User-generated content, on average, is a lot less interesting than professional content. But there are a lot more people creating their own content for fun than those doing so for a living, and in aggregate, that content is at least as interesting.
Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
In late 1996, we noticed that Tripod was receiving a great deal of traffic from Malaysia. Searching through the server logs, we found lots of pages in Bahasa Malay talking about “Reformasi” and “Anwar Ibrahim”. I had to visit the Political Science department at Williams College to figure out that we were apparently hosting much of the Malaysian opposition political movement, dedicated to helping deposed and imprisoned deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim return to power. Malaysian media was largely closed to opposition voices, but investment in internet infrastructure meant that the opposition was able to access the internet and publish material that couldn’t be disseminated any other way. (Several of these pages still exist on Tripod.)
A more economically rational company would have likely removed the Malaysian content, as we had no way of selling ads to Malaysian advertisers. Economic rationality was never Tripod’s strong suit, and we ended up sponsoring Malaysia’s olympic team instead. (They took the silver in Men’s team badmitton.)
With web 2.0, we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.
There’s been understandable excitement about use of online video by the Obama campaign. I was in Doha, Qatar, when Larry Lessig showed the above video as an example of the way that remix culture could reinvigorate American political culture. Others have pointed to the video as an example of “user-generated swiftboating“, and the potential for amateur nastiness to be even more evil than our debased professional political culture.
I was sitting next to Tunisian activist Sami ben Gharbia at the meeting in Doha, and he nudged me, saying, “We did this years ago in Tunisia.” I thought he meant the idea of using video to motivate voters. Actually, he meant that Tunisian activists - specifically a friend of his who works under the name “Astrubal” had remixed the 1984 Apple ad for political ends. (See my post “Democrats Invent the Remix, only three years after the Tunisians” for more on this story.)
In the Tunisian video, the guy on the screen is Ben Ali, a major opponent of free speech and a long-serving dictator. No matter how negatively you feel about Hillary, he’s a more Orwellian figure, in part because he’s so skilled at PR. Tunisia is more repressive than many of its Middle Eastern neighbors, but it enjoys widespread tourism and was selected - absurdly - to host the World Summit on the Information Society conference in November 2005. (For more on this absurdity, you may want to refer to my posts from WSIS, perhaps starting with this one.) Because Ben Ali is so good at PR, Sami, Astrubal and others see themselves as an ad agency, making videos designed to embarass the government on an international scale.
One of the most amazing of these videos features the peregrinations of the Tunisian presidential aircraft. You wouldn’t expect to see this jet in Europe very often, as Ben Ali is famous for rarely leaving the country. But Sami and Astrubal used planespotter sites - sites like Airliners.net that allow amateur plane enthusiasts to post their photos - to determine that the President’s jet travels a whole lot more than he does. They He used footage from Google Earth and pictures from the plane spotter sites to make a video that shows the power of the participatory web at its best. (Sami has asked me to make it clear that the Tunisian flight video was solely Astrubal’s work - his function was solely to publicize it, on his blog and in talks given about online activism.)
Their video raises all sorts of ethical questions - is it permissable for the country’s first lady to take the Presidential jet, fueled and crewed on taxpayer dollars, for shopping junkets in Europe? Foreign Policy magazine didn’t think so, and ran an article critiquing the first lady. They also published instructions on how you, too, can become a presidential planespotter.
Sami and Astrubal posted the video on their personal blogs… but as known activists, their blogs have been blocked in Tunisia for years. They also posted it on DailyMotion, a video site popular in the French-speaking world. Shortly after, the Tunisian government blocked access to DailyMotion.
This is a good thing if you’re an activist. Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politicially active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.
Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.
So why don’t governments block only he offensive speech? Why would governments be stupid enough to close off these tools entirely? It’s a reasonable question and one that’s an active research topic. One answer is that it’s surprisingly difficult to censor the web well. (Pakistan’s recent shutdown of YouTube shows one remarkably stupid and dangerous way to screw up and overblock web traffic.)
If you want to prevent your users from accessing online content, you’ve got four basic options. You can block keywords, block URLs, pollute your DNS or block IPs. It’s surprisingly hard to block keywords - you need to open and examine all the packets crossing your network. China does a bit of this, but mostly blocks keywords within URLs - it’s prohibitively expensive to examine every packet for an entire nation and check against a blocklist. URL blocking simply doesn’t work very well - it’s easy to rewrite a URL and access the same content. DNS blocking is very simple, but it tends to backfire - your smarter users simply switch towards using an unpolluted DNS and you have no way to control their behavior with this technique in the future. And so, most repressive governments block IPs, which limits access to banal as well as sensitive content.
But perhaps this isn’t stupidity on the part of nations. When Pakistan blocks YouTube, it limits traffic to the site. Google notices these sorts of things. Perhaps it’s coincidental that the video named by Pakistan has been removed from YouTube due to a terms of service violation - perhaps not. But while advocates try to raise the price of censorship for governments, smart governments are raising the price for noncompliance for Web 2.0 companies.
My colleagues at the Open Net Initiative began documenting net censorship a bit more than five years ago. At that point, Saudi Arabia and China were censoring widely. Now at least two dozen nations censor the net regularly, and more may be participating in “event-based filtering”, blocking access to political sites before a key election, for instance. My fear, in the medium to long term, is that every nation that constrains freedom of the press will begin filtering the net, realizing that the Internet is where important press takes place these days.
Of course, the activists win sometimes too. When Google Maps became accessible in Bahrain, it let Bahrani activists answer a pressing question in that small, crowded nation - who owns all the land? From the air, it becomes pretty clear that large chunks of the nation are reserved for palaces owned by the royal family.
An anonymous Bahrani activist thought this was pretty interesting, and made a PDF document of screen captures from Google Maps, enhanced with notes comparing crowded communities with spacious palaces. The document flew around the country from mailbox to mailbox. The Bahrani authorities couldn’t block the file - it’s a PDF, and blocking PDFs has nasty consequences for businesspeople. So they blocked Google Maps, which got bloggers like noted free speech advocate Mahmood Al-Youssif up in arms. After a brief block, they simply gave up and let citizens see the site, rather than letting Mahmood and others train people to use proxy sites. (More on this story is available on my blog.)
When governments really want to shut people up, they don’t just block them, they imprison them. Egypt has blocked very few websites - the Muslim Brotherhood site gets blocked occasionally, but most are uncensored. But they’ve jailed Kareem Soliman for his critical remarks about Islam, and they haven’t hesitated to arrest protesters seeking political reform.
This, in turn, has been known to backfire. When Kefaya activist and open-source proponent Alaa Abdel Fateh was one of 700 activists arrested at a protest supporting the independence of the Egyptian judiciary, it was hard for government authorities to know that they were about to have a PR crisis on their hands. Alaa began blogging from prison, passing notes to his wife, Manal, who jointly maintains their blog. These blog posts helped attract international attention to the case, which meant that camera crews from Al Jazeera and CNN covered a situation they normally would have ignored. It probably meant that Alaa spent much more time in jail than he otherwise would have, but it also may have meant that he was safer than if he’d been anonymous in prison.
(A piece of advice I offer at this point in many talks - if you’re planning on being an online activist, marry a blogger. It’s worked very well for me.)
The imprisonment of bloggers has taught activists some interesting lessons about advocacy in the era of Web 2.0. When Global Voices China editor Hao Wu was arrested and detained in Beijing, I and other GV friends wanted to go online immediately and advocate for his release. But that’s not the right way to do things - you’ve got to get permission from the detained person’s family first. And it took Rebecca MacKinnon a month of phonecalls to get his sister, Nina Wu, to agree to let us advocate on Hao’s behalf.
More importantly, Nina began blogging herself. Unsurprisingly, she knew a lot more about her brother than we did, and she wrote much more movingly than we could. Eventually, our campaign focused on translating her posts from Chinese to English and disseminating them as widely as possible. My conclusion from this: good advice for the advocate in a web 2.0 age - “Don’t speak. Point.” (Bruno Giussani explains what I mean by that phrase far more eloquently than I ever have.)
Nina wasn’t a professional activist. She was a successful career woman, a young mother, living the Chinese dream in Shanghai. She became an activist because she was forced to and she reached out for the tools she had access to - which hapened to be MSN spaces. MSN is heavily censored in China - it’s certainly not what we would have chosen for her. But you don’t get to choose the tools - activists use what’s at hand. It’s fine to build tools for activists, but even better to build tools for folks who don’t know they’re activists yet.
(In making this point, I should be very, very careful to point out that I have deep respect for tools that have been developed successfully for activist uses, tools like Martus or FrontlineSMS. My point is simply that there are huge numbers of web users who don’t yet think of themselves as activists who are likely to reach for the tools they have at hand, not to look specifically for tools designed for activists.)
Most activists discover they’re much more effective out of jail. It’s possible that bulk SMS tools - especially Twitter - might be useful in keeping activists out of jail. Alaa now uses Twitter to report on his political activities - this gives friends watching his feed the possibility of relauching the FreeAlaa site, should we see his note that he’s going in to talk to the police, and there’s no message letting us know he’s out of the police station afterwards. (Alaa tells me that tons of people are now subscribing to his Twitter feed and that they should back off because it’s a very boring time right now in Egyptian politics… :-)
Kefaya activists were able to use mobile phone messages, some sent through Twitter, to alert activists to the impending arrest of Malek Moustafa. As activist came to the place where Moustafa was being taken into custody, they attracted a huge crowd of police, who effectively blocked the street and prevented the police car with Moustafa from leaving the street. He was eventually released. Corresponding with Alaa about the situation, he raises questions of whether this was really a victory for Twitter - this is something Egyptian activists have done with SMS for a long time. Twitter may simply be useful in confusing Egyptian authorities, who might choose to block local SMS in a crisis, but might not consider blocking an international SMS number.
Twitter is also becoming more useful in crisis reporting. Viktor Markovic used a Twitter feed to report live on events in Belgrade after Kosovo declared independence; Juliana Rotich has used her feed to report live from Eldoret during post-election violence. And mobile phones are allowing people to report incidents in Kenya and include them within the map on Ushahidi.
Twitter is far from the perfect tool - it’s centralized and easily blocked. But it’s also used for lots of dumb purposes, which means it passes the cute cats test. Lots of the tools that have become most useful to activists have characteristics that un-recommend them for activist uses. Facebook, which has helped organize major protests against the FARC in Colombia, is notoriously bad about letting users pull data out of the system. Imran Jamal spoke about the challenge of trying to move a community of 400,000 users from Facebook to Avaaz, so they could fundraise more easily. (See “Pros and Cons of Facebook Activist“.) One challenge for activists using Web2.0 tools is figuring out when it’s time to get real and get onto dedicated platforms.
What happens when governments begin taking Web2.0 activism seriously? A funny example comes from Belarus. Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko noticed that YouTube was beginning to carry a wealth of anti-Lukashenko content, and suggested the Belarussian government might build it’s own YouTube competitor. Belarussian bloggers went one better and built LuNet, a set of parody sites designed to represent a Lukashenko-compliant read/write web. Perhaps the best of the sites was a Google parody - most searches resulted in a page telling you that the KGB was on lunch break and asking you to try again later when they could watch what you were doing. (See Global Voices Advocacy coverage of the story.)
More competent regimes have managed to exert significantly more control. China filters the internet more effectively than any other nation, using a combination of keyword filters, IP blocks and some DNS fiddling. The system is extremely complicated, involving filtering at a national boundary level and throughout the network, with some blocking taking place deep within the national network. China uses some techniques not widely seen elsewhere, including sending RSET packets when certain keywords are detected to knock users offline.
But that’s not the sinister part. Effective as the Great Firewall may be (and, actually, it’s not that effective - lots of dissidents get around it using various proxy techniques), the most relevant Chinese censorship takes place within Chinese Web 2.0 companies - including US companies operating servers in China. There’s an incredible wealth of Web 2.0 startups in China. These companies allow Chinese users to share video, post photos and write blogs. They’re much more useful to the average Chinese user as the tools and content are in Chinese, not English. And, unlike most popular web 2.0 tools, they’re not blocked in China.
And they’ve got censorship baked in. The above image is from research conducted by my colleage Rebecca MacKinnon. She discovered that MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s Chinese-localized and Chinese-hosted service prevented her from putting the terms “democracy” or “human rights” in the title of her blog. According to a report published by RSF, the heads of web companies meet weekly with censors who instruct them on what keywords to block, allowing the system to be extremely flexible and adaptable.
Some Chinese bloggers have responded by being extremely creative in their use of images. Some Chinese bloggers began posting images of river crabs on their blogs. The joke is that the term for “river crab” sounds very similar to the word “harmonize”, a term that had become slang for “censored” - “My blog just got harmonized.” The term “harmonized” became so popular that it became blocked. So Chinese bloggers began to refer to their blogs as having been “river crabbed”. The watches are a pun on “the three represents“, a political philosophy put forward by Jiang Zemin. This is also a commonly blocked term, so has been rewritten as “wears three watches”… which explains the oddly dressed river crab.
Here’s the thing - for the vast majority of Chinese internet users, they’re encountering a much more free information environment than their parents experienced. Michael Anti argues that Chinese society is much freer than the US in terms of personal behavior, especially around premarital sex and homosexuality. The vast majority of young Chinese are enjoying these personal freedoms and are willing to accept a world in which political freedom is somewhat constrained.
China’s censorship genius is that they’ve found a way to let people have their cute cats and have censorship as well. While China will block sites like Human Rights Watch, they won’t block domestic Web 2.0 sites, and hence the collateral damage from blocking banal content doesn’t draw non-activists to become aware of activist issues. Is this unique to China, or will we see this technique spread? It’s hard to imagine Ethiopia, for instance, being capable of building their own Amharic internet applications and blocking all Web 2.0 tools.
It’s also interesting to see what tools China won’t block. GMail, thus far, has remained unblocked - Anti theorizes that it’s popular with the communist party. Skype is unblocked, and it has some intriguing holes in it - Skype voice chatrooms are tailor-made to serve as pirate radio stations. Pipe a podcast into a chat room and you’re broadcasting audio via an encrypted system to users around the world. And China’s unlikely to block MMOGs, even if people periodically stand on hills inside games and shout out the IP addresses of proxy servers.
It seems criminal to give a talk at the ancestral home of Lolgeeks and not talk about the brave and noble Lolcat. We did some informal research within the Global Voices community and discovered that, while our non-north American, non-European colleagues thought Lolcats were very funny, they simply didn’t exist within their own communities. (Trading funny pictures of animals was quite common, just not the leet-speak captioning.)
Our early attempts to propogate lolcats in other cultures have been largely unsuccessul. (That’s a lolcat by Rachel with our cat, Thorn, saying “Oh Hai”…) There’s a real challenge within the world of lolcats - making activism viral probably means making it funny as well as political and heart-wrenching. My single favorite comment on SUP’s acquisition of LiveJournal is a lolcat, which sums up the situation better than any angry post could have.
It’s typical to end these sorts of talks with a call to action, possibly a better one than “export lolcats to repressive nations”. If there’s a single message to the talk, it is that activists are going to use your tools if your tools are any good - watch them, pay attention to them, protect them and learn from them. They’ll make tour tools better, and they’re one of the reasons to make social software in the first place.
Imran Jamal is at the Berkman meeting in Istanbul as the “unofficial UK representative” of the Burma Global Action Network, a group that advocates for the monks and citizens who protested the Burmese junta during the “Saffron Revoluion”. His focus is on the use of Facebook for digital activism, reporting his experiences using Facebook during a recent campaign.
He reminds us that Burma has been a dictatorship since 1962, when the military junta took over from a democratic government. The junta now calls itself the “State Peace and Development Council” - SPDC - a truly Orwellian name. Since the 8888 uprising (a widespread protest on August 8, 1988) the nation has been officially named “Myanmar” - Jamal contends, “It’s another way to make the world forget about Burma.”
Burma vaulted back onto the global stage in August 2007, with the “Saffron Revolution” - widespread economic protests led by Burmese monks. To document the events in Burma and to coordinate events in solidarity, Jamal and others began a Facebook group. The group, at its peak, reached 440,000 users, a fairly astounding number. The users it reached were different from the dedicated activists who were reading the main Burma advocacy websites. Jamal feels like the Facebook group served as a clearinghouse for information, as some of the Burma advocacy sites don’t work well together.
Some of the “features” of Facebook are problematic when using the tool as a professional organizer. The “wall” of the Burma Facebook group was a very popular feature… but thousands of comments asked whether the protests should be about “Burma” or “Myanmar”, a debate that’s taken place for years and has no good resolution. As the administrator of a Facebook group, you have limited control over your page. Messages can get lost - during the peak of the campaign, over a hundred pages of status messages appeared per day. In that flood of data, it’s possible to lose key messages, like the announcement of an event in Mongolia. There were major layout changes the organizers wanted to implement, but they weren’t possible within the Facebook system.
The Facebook group didn’t attempt to raise money - it partnered with an outside foundation to support that work. Instead, it focused on bringing as large a group as possible together. The people who got involved weren’t dedicated activists, for the most part. They were bored students, clicking on their friend’s links, possibly being drawn in by some of the striking images of monks marching in the streets. The hope is that some percentage of the people involved with these groups could turn into long-term advocates, but Jamal characterizes many of the users as “serial activists”, moving from Darfur to Burma to whatever cause is next.
There were clear upsides to the Burma Fcebook group. At the very least, it worked as an intermediary between the different Burma activist groups, some of which don’t communicate well with one another, and many of which are poor at communicating with the wider world. But there were a lot of downsides as well. The organizers found themselves characterized as spammers by the Facebook operators because they were sending too many messages a day.
Jamal wonders whether Facebook is simply a glorified petition. “It’s very easy for peopl to join, but there’s no guarantee they come back, and it’s not neccesarily the tool for building an activist base.” One of the major things the BGAN group tried to do is move dedicated users to their website, in the hopes they would get more engaged with the effort, and that communication could be organized outside the Facebook structure.
In a discussion after the talk, people speculated that Facebook might be more anonymous than blogging, suggesting that the Facebook operators would be loath to release information on Burmese users posting information on Facebook. Jamal explained that most Burmese bloggers weren’t actually posting directly, but were sending information to friends outside Burma via the phone, rather than posting online. Given the pervasiveness of surveillance in Burma, it’s likely that posting to Facebook is as dangerous as posting to a blog from within the nation.
Another update from the Berkman internet and democracy meeting in Istanbul:
Ken Banks, the creator of FrontlineSMS, offers a presentation on the strengths and weaknesses of mobile phones for activism. His software is a clever and powerful tool that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone to send a large number of SMS messages. The software runs on the laptop and can send a message - through cable to a mobile phone or through a GSM model - to a list of recipients. It can be quite slow - Ken says that on old Nokia mobiles, it sends about eight messages a minute, and overwhelms the phone in the process - but it’s vastly faster than manually sending thousands of SMS messages.
Banks developed the tool in response to a situation in Kruger National Park in South Africa. Large numbers of people were displaced from their land in the process of creating nature preserves. There was a strong need to communicate with these dispersed populations, but there’s very few media that can reach these populations. Banks was inspired to create a tool that communicated with these groups via SMS and hacked a tool together in Finland for use in South Africa. (In a sad note, the tool wasn’t used very effectively in the Kruger situation, as the government did a very poor job of involving the community in the decisions to create preserves.)
The tool is being used by several dozen groups in over forty nations. A Lebanese group uses it for education on human rights; in South Africa, another group uses the tool to provide feedback to community radio programs; an Albanian group uses it to monitor corruption in public services; in Uganda, the tool is used for community healthcare. Banks says that he’s amazed the tool has been useful to people beyond the ones he’s originally intended to serve.
One of the major applications for FrontlineSMS is election monitoring. Banks tells us about a project that allowed 800 Filipino election monitors to coordinate their work via SMS, performing very thorough monitoring of elections. A similar project in Nigeria put the ability to monitor elections into the hands of private citizens, not official election monitors. The results were interesting - the citizen monitors were very interested in getting good news out about the Nigerian elections, combatting the perception Nigeria has for corruption and for election violence. This may not be a completely accurate picture of the recent Nigerian elections, but it shows the desire of the people in Nigeria to combat negative reporting and stereotypes about the country.
Recently, Banks has been working with an NGO in a highly repressive nation that’s looking for ways to deliver audio content via mobile phone. He’s working with Tad Hirsch’s Dialup Radio project to help make it possible for NGOs to deliver radio-style content via mobile phone. In conjunction with Dialup Radio, Banks developed a tool that can accept thousands of SMS messages and make them available over the web. This would allow a radio station to conduct polling via SMS and then display results on a website, perhaps allowing for a voting system to prioritize questions that are submitted.
FrontlineSMS is more expensive than solutions that depend on the cooperation of local phone operators - it’s expensive for an individual citizen to send thousands of messages, while in partnership with a phone company, you might be able to bring these costs down. But Frontline is very useful for grassroots groups that don’t want to cooperate with the local telcos - Banks tells us about an application in Pakistan, where the organizers sent thousands of SMS messages from a laptop in the trunk of a car that drove thoughout a city to avoid detection.
Banks reminds us that there’s a huge gap between software developers and practitioners. People who develop mobile applications often don’t understand the context in which they’re going to be used. “Tech people vho write things requiring Nokia 95s really don’t understand that people in Uganda don’t walk around with those kinds of phones.” It’s important to introduce developers to the people who actually use these tools to ensure they’re appropriately designed. Banks also wonders how he would feel if his tool had been used to spread ethnic hatred in the post-election violence in Kenya - it’s an important reminder that any sufficiently powerful tool is a double-edged sword.
One of the slides I use in many of my talks nowadays is a map from TeleGeography, a consultancy that specializes in international telecommunications infrastructure. It’s their submarine cable map, which does an excellent job of explaining how just tenuous sub-Saharan Africa’s connection to the internet is - at present, a single cable that runs down the west coast of the continent.
TeleGeography has gotten a huge number of media mentions the past couple of weeks because there has been a rash of cable cuts in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, affecting connectivity throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Single cuts aren’t uncommon - cables get snagged by ship anchors and damaged by earthquakes. But as the number of cuts - now up to five - increases, observers are getting increasingly speculative about possible causes. Possible information war against Iran? Probably not. But it’s deeply weird, a coincidence that seems to transcend statistic and demand some serious investigation.
In the meantime, bloggers are predictably distressed. In a report on Global Voices, Amira Al-Hussaini finds middle eastern bloggers asking why their connectivity depends on just a few fragile cables, and why there isn’t more redundancy in the system. Actually, as an Africanist, I’ve been amazed at how much redundancy there is in the Middle East, compared to the African situation. With a single cable connecting South Africa to Portugal, a cable cut would radically impact connectivity for much of the continent. However, since cable access has been so expensive, many African ISPs rely on slower satellite connections, so in the case of a cable failure, they aren’t entirely shut off.
It’s fascinating to remember that, as much as we depend on this fantastically complex network, it ultimately comes down to some thick bundles of fiberoptic cables lying on the bottom of an ocean. No matter how creative we all are in our uses of the Internet, sever that cable and you cut off whole regions of the world.
Forgive me, blog readers, for I have sinned. I’m three days behind in posting my notes from a Berkman talk. Blame Canada.
Beth Kolko joined us as a fellow at the Berkman Center this summer. I’m especially excited about having Beth at the Center because she’s fascinated by some of the same phenomena that interest me, especially the adaptation of technology in the developing world. And I’m inspired by the off path her career has taken, from a background teaching English and Rhetoric to a current position teaching technical communication at the University of Washington.
Her talk at Berkman is titled, “User, Hacker, Builder, Thief - Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age.” She points out that there’s a great deal of literature that helps us understand user-generated content (citizen media, mashups, fan fiction, alternative newspapers) as a form or resistance. There’s much less work done on understanding hacking - in a sense, user-generated or user-modified technology - as a form of resistance.
Her talk has two goals - to get listeners to think of emerging markets as creative places that shape the emergence of technology, and to rehabilitate the word “hacker”. The word, she worries, has been corrupted, turned into a term of fear. “There’s a movement to protect ourselves against hackers, and this movement can threaten innovation.”
To set a framework for thinking about technical innovation and adaptation - hacking - she invites us to think about fan fiction. The practice of fans writing unauthorized sequels and extensions to existing books, movies and tv series, is viewed by cultural critics as “resistance to scripted consumer roles.” The fanfic authors worked their way from an existence as passive consumers into a new role as producers, embracing “a dynamic that says, ‘I will not passively consume. I will speak back, and add my voice.’” In her earlier work, Kolko wrote about women who wrote romance novels, fascinated by the way fans of these novels moved “from consumers to producers of a variant artifact.”
The move into digital media makes this sort of cultural extension seem somewhat mundane. But the adaptation of the technologies themselves opens some interesting questions. Even the question of what technologies get adopted is worth exploring - “What do people choose to use, and what do they use it for?”, which implies the questions “What do people choose not to use and what possibilities are foreclosed to them?”
Kolko has studied these questions in a variety of environments, primarily southeast Asia and central Asia, over the past decade. She some observations about technological adaptation:
- People’s adoption of technology is similar to hacking. They use technology in novel ways to make it serve local needs and purposes
- People use older, “obsolete” tech and figure out how to make it work for contemporary purposes
- People share systems we think of as single user. A computer user in Uzbekistan might not be literate in Russian or Uzbek, but might visit a cybercafe with a child in tow to translate and help her send messages to friends. Youth might pool money and surf together.
- Games fuel the growth of internet cafes. In Uzbekistan, cafes often have tiered pricing structures - 2.5 som an hour for internet access, 1.5 for “online”, which means low-bandwidth internet activites like chatting, and 1 som an hour to play LAN-based games or watch movies stored on local servers.
Kolko notes that NGOs that open cybercafes tend to ban gaming, hoping that users will seek more “productive” uses of the internet. But gaming may be what makes internet cafes viable in low income communities. She observes that the countries of Central Asia tend to place very well in the World Cybergames, an international competition of videogamers, based on their extensive experience playing these games competitively in cafes.
The importance of gaming in Central Asia and the high cost of connectivity lead to some fascinating adaptations. World of Warcraft is a very popular game in Central Asia, but connectivity to the Blizzard servers is very expensive. So, in regional cities, people are setting up rogue World of Warcraft servers that allow players to compete against people in the same town. She observes that many of the dynamics of World of Warcraft simply don’t work in a 200-person universe, and that the operators of these rogue servers are discovering they need to change some of the rules to keep the game competitive and interesting.
Hacking in Central Asia extends beyond PCs. She shows slides of “phonebooths” - phones hanging out the windows of private homes. To use them, you give some money thro
