Bestselling novelist Jon Evans begins his third-world tech blog, exclusive to walrusmagazine.com
COLOMBIA—Welcome to World Fast Forward’s inaugural post!
In honour of the event I have instructed my editor to break a bottle of champagne on the server rack. I’m sure he wouldn’t dare disobey. [Ed. note: Jon's new around here.]
Hi. My name’s Jon Evans. I’m an author, an engineer, and a bit of a travel junkie. I write novels, journalism, and now, World Fast Forward — a blog devoted to exploring how technology is revolutionizing the developing world.
Don’t look now, but we’re in the midst of one of the most amazing transformations in history. No, I’m not talking about the stock market. Think bigger. When the historians of the future write about this era, the Great Crash of 2008, the invasion of Iraq, and the fall of the World Trade Center will be seen as irrelevant sideshows.
The most important thing happening in the world today is happening in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where four billion people, some two-thirds of humanity, are finally fighting their way out of hopeless poverty — and at an amazing rate.
Imagine nineteenth-century London and New York: a tiny minority of rich aristocrats and a vast majority of poor people living in grinding, Dickensian poverty, plagued by disease and violence, corruption, bloody warfare, vicious sexism and racism. Now imagine a fast-forwarded view of all the disruptive changes in Europe and America in the centuries since; all the bold steps ahead and painful steps back.
Well, that fast-forward view is exactly what’s happening in the developing world today. Billions of people are morphing from work as subsistence farmers or shantytown squatters to becoming modern middle-class professionals, repeating in the space of a generation or two the same transformation that took centuries to occur in Europe and America.
The rate of change is dizzying. I first traveled to India in 2000; only four years later, changes were apparent in everywhere. Going to Beijing in 1997 and returning in 2006 was almost like visiting two different cities.
On the other hand, I went to Zimbabwe in 1998, and again in 2005… only to find it had withered from hope to despair. “Developing” nations often aren’t. Corruption, AIDS, tribalism, natural disasters and environmental collapse are causing many to regress to even worse poverty and horrifying violence. The global wave of urbanization has its costs, too — I, for one, would much rather live in a peaceful rural village than a seething, festering shantytown.
What triggered this colossal transformation? Political scientists might say it was caused by the end of the Cold War. Economists might talk about globalization. But both are full of superficial hogwash. The real catalyst for this change — the disruptive force behind almost every major global change in the last century — is the technology that makes it possible.
The science fiction author William Gibson once wrote, “The future is here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” How right he was. While Virgin Galactic takes bookings for commercial space flight, there are tribes in the Amazon jungle who have barely had contact with the outside world since the Stone Age.
The future is slowly percolating out into almost every corner of the globe. Africans in mud huts walk for hours to reach a hilltop where their Nokias can send texts. Peruvian jungle dwellers cluster around their satellite dish to watch the World Cup. Egyptian slum dwellers look for love online. Indonesian subsistence farmers plant genetically engineered rice.
World Fast Forward is intended as a chronicle of the new technologies that are driving this massive global transformation, and, more importantly, their social ramifications of these changes. When I’m traveling, which I seem to do a lot of, I’ll report on what I see; when I’m back in Canada, this blog will be a clearinghouse for relevant news from other sources around the world.
I’ll be kicking things off by diving in at the deep end. As I write this, I’m on the road in the troubled and kaleidoscopic nation of Colombia; and the first “real” World Fast Forward post, in a few days’ time, will feature both severed heads and software. Watch this space!
If you have any tips, suggestions, or feedback, please comment here or email me at wff@rezendi.com. And of course, don’t hesitate to subscribe to WFF’s RSS feed.
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