we are at an incredible moment right now where are billions of people across the
world have access to the Internet in very different ways in many cases more
different than similar often through their mobile phones couple billion
people are so have access to Google and Facebook services as well so that kind
of perpetuates the myth that spreading internet access to somehow evangelizing
or emancipatory all we need to do is get everybody connected to our services
right and that involved that's that's a myth and sort of a corporate branding
strategy that is pushed out of Silicon Valley but it's also pushed out of
Chinese technology companies as well and what that does is actually flatten and
objectify the vast majority of people who are Internet users which is
astonishing because if you actually experience the joys that I have in
beyond the valley to actually go to these different parts of the world and
look at what people are actually doing with technology you see so much
creativity you actually see innovation in action innovation from this
perspective isn't about just blindly using some technology that was
introduced in Silicon Valley that in many cases was introduced to die like
Apple introduces phones with planned obsolescence with an expiration date so
they go into landfills and potentially cause cancer much like Monsanto
introduces seeds to die so what is happening across the world this is an
example of innovation in the bottom and bottom-up sense it's actually the idea
of doing more with more with less which is actually like being resourceful it's
a whole other model of thinking what innovation is innovation with constraint
innovation with scarcity so let me give you a couple quick examples of this
probably my favorite chapter of beyond the valley is the story of these
indigenous peoples and communities that I've been working with the last few
years mainly just writing about and learning from in the Oaxaca region of
southern Mexico these are a Zapotec mix thick and me
hate communities and they want cell phone service and of course they're not
worth the investment to not only internet service providers but also
mobile service providers like Carlos Slim from tell cell one of the
wealthiest men in the world so they said hey we want these mobile
phones for various reasons and I can elaborate on that but we want it now in
our terms rather than being dependent on the terms of these large distant
corporations that don't even see us as worth the investment so what did they do
they built it themselves community owned cell phone network so what's occurring
across this region dozens of communities have built the largest community owned
cell phone set of federated networks autonomous networks in the world
thousands of users and here's the key point
these networks are built collectively by these indigenous communities these
networks are designed based on values even cosmologies and political
philosophies of commonality everybody doing it together they call it Coleman
al-assad or Takeo which means good work these are sort of concepts of
collectivity you know which we all have as humans the love of collectivity but
sometimes we ignore that and we get stuck an individualistic like silos so
you know so they are building it together they own in the network they're
designing the network they're monetizing the network the network is allowing them
to speak in their traditional languages of which there are dozens Sabbath
techniques they can me hey different families of languages they're even
communicating using these phones with relatives who are who are in the Los
Angeles area where I'm a professor so it's incredible for me to see them make
the call on one end in the rainforests in them in the cloud forest sexually of
the Oaxaca region and on the other end see how people are receiving these calls
on the other end and a lot of this comes out of a technological movement that is
highly underreported and under known even though it's so powerful community
radio they're all over the world when you go there I've seen this in multiple
continents I've been to over 70 countries looking at some of these
issues sometimes it was just for fun but sometimes it was like research if you
will and you see people administering and creating community radio stations
because they're inexpensive their oral a lot of languages have been discriminated
against being written and they are eight and they're and they're able to be
managed by people in places they can kind of govern the technology so the
idea of the technologies of tomorrow layered onto
the mindset and and ideas of community radio is a very interesting different
kind of alternative alternative pathway for technology so that's one example I'd
like to share a second example I'd like to share occurs again it's very similar
to the examples of community telephony or community or even community Wi-Fi
networks and we see that occurring all over the world what we call mesh network
technology on this these are communities that are trying to think about how they
can kind of recover technologies right I mentioned earlier how Apple technologies
and mini phones are designed to die so where do those things go we don't even
think about that easily in the West in many cases they end up in places like
Ghana in landfills Greenpeace has done some great video work on this showing
how people are going into these dumps and trying to extract metals and
contracting cancer as a result but in East Africa and you actually see this in
many parts of the world people are taking dead technologies opening them up
and creating new technologies out of that this is a concept that they call
jus Akali jus Akali and pronunciation isn't great in Swahili which basically
is translated to hot Sun because basically what you see and you actually
see this in Latin America South Asia etc people setting up tables soldering guns
opening up technologies and making them work again or bringing technologies
together like different parts of mobile phones are brought to create new mobile
phones this is a concept of recycling of repair and resourcefulness that we don't
even begin to imagine when we sign on to blinds contracts that are built upon the
absence of sustainability so that's one and it blew my mind and I describe this
and Beyond the valley to see this occurring not just with phones but with
3d printers people are taking recycled dumpster parts and kind of rigging these
things together to create 3d printers this is happening in Nairobi a group
called a be 3d Africa born 3d it's not completely recycled parts but largely
they've built 3d printers and have a sustainable business they call
themselves Colly and they say hey but we now have a
roof because they've built a sustainable business but the key with these
businesses is they aren't extractive they're not blind they're not ignorant
they're not socially unaccountable they're built upon the environments and
communities within which they exist so they have actually built 3d printers
that are obviously a fraction of the cost of American printers but they
perform better why is that because they're built by people for people in
the environments where they live so this idea of decentralizing technology
governance hardware software what-have-you is very very powerful is
very promising and more than anything what it opens up to me is it moves past
this flattened objectified category of thinking of people who are engaging with
the Internet and new technology as users and instead thinking of them as
innovators