THE RETREAT OF COSMOPOLITANISM
A big book that makes the case that “the internets” are anchored to particular regions
One big-picture realization that dawns upon the reader after reading Smart: The Digital Century by Frederic Martel is that national boundaries are not going to become irrelevant anytime soon. There are many benefits from everyone having access to smartphones and the author goes to great lengths to do a ‘field survey’ by travelling to many countries across five continents to see for himself how people are using their devices and their internet connectivity. Martel writes: ... Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have shown that the internet is compatible with all kinds of political power. It can be used by liberals as well as authoritarian regimes, offer a broadcast channel for terrorism as well as for peace, can be hijacked by jihad, but also by feminist militants and gay Arab activists. An instrument of liberation and repression — both these readings of the internet are equally true. According to the territories and the contexts, social networks can be for democracy or for dictatorship. These are double-edged tools, neither good nor bad in themselves, but they allow — which is already not that bad — interactivity, dialogue and open the door to new ‘conversations’.
The book begins in Silicon Valley and the foundational role played by Stanford University in creating Silicon Valley is described in some detail. In the India chapter, the country’s vast demographic challenge is implicitly underlined when the author notes that “1.5 million” is the number of engineers and IT professionals who are produced every year in our higher educational institutions. These two unconnected pieces of information beg to be put side-by-side — Stanford vs. India. As you hear from Stanford’s CTO and learn about the Stanford Management Corporation and the vast endowment of “$17 billion” that it is in charge of, you become acutely aware of how far behind Indian universities are — culturally, financially, technologically. Also in the chapter on India, you hear from both Aadhar evangelists and Aadhar skeptics. You get to visit the wellstocked puja room of one senior Aadhar official — its ‘US-return’ CTO — in Bengaluru. Dr Devi Shetty — also Bengalurubased — turns out to have great expectations pinned on the biometric ID system from a health care perspective. While India is, at least superficially, similar to the US in terms of giving various liberties to its citizens under the Constitution, China is the opposite in many ways. While California offers an open embrace of the rebel, China’s culture prefers conformists. And unlike America where freedom of speech is sacrosanct, censorship is the norm. China has three ‘Ts’ that are utterly taboo: Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen. China’s example shows that tools such as the internet and free flow of information do not automatically translate into a more democratic world. Other topics covered in the book include Israel’s success as a ‘startup nation’ and the evolving role of the ‘regulator’ (ie the ‘FCC’ in the US). Content curation, social TV, streaming services and their impact on the traditional revenue model of Hollywood, the ‘ongoing world war in video games,’ Cyrillic internet, and Quebec vs. Québec are some of the other topics covered.
The author’s aim was to ‘prove’ that there is no single Internet — rather, there are the internets. The larger realization, however, concerns the nature of humans. Nothing demonstrates better how ineffective the internet is in bringing about any deep, planet-wide change among humans than observing how jealously humans continue to guard national borders. So while the internet grows ever more intertwined with every moment of our lives, cosmopolitanism is on the retreat. People’s tribal instincts are becoming more pronounced. “As surprising as this may appear, the Internet does not abolish traditional geographic limits, does not dissolve cultural identities, nor does it smooth out linguistic differences: it consecrates them,” says Martel. “…The future of the Internet is not global, it is anchored to a territory…”
It is not the future you expected.