The Internet of Elsewhere
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| Teil | 54 | |
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| Lizenz | CC-Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Deutschland: Sie dürfen das Werk bzw. den Inhalt zu jedem legalen Zweck nutzen, verändern und in unveränderter oder veränderter Form vervielfältigen, verbreiten und öffentlich zugänglich machen, sofern Sie den Namen des Autors/Rechteinhabers in der von ihm festgelegten Weise nennen und das Werk bzw. diesen Inhalt auch in veränderter Form nur unter den Bedingungen dieser Lizenz weitergeben. | |
| Identifikatoren | 10.5446/21568 (DOI) | |
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| Produktionsort | Berlin |
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InternetworkingDedekind-SchnittBitfehlerhäufigkeitGüte der AnpassungWeb SiteInternetworkingDigitalisierungXMLComputeranimationBesprechung/Interview
00:57
LOLA <Programm>PunktspektrumProgrammierungProgrammschemaPunktspektrumInternetworkingMereologieKontextbezogenes SystemMultiplikationsoperatorRotationsflächeNeue MedienBitCASE <Informatik>FacebookRechter WinkelKartesische KoordinatenQuaderInelastischer StoßSoundverarbeitungLeistung <Physik>XMLComputeranimationBesprechung/Interview
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InternetworkingLeistung <Physik>MathematikCASE <Informatik>Figurierte ZahlNeue MedienProjektive EbeneSoftwareentwicklerRechter WinkelTwitter <Softwareplattform>InformationInformationstechnikComputeranimation
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Rechter WinkelSoundverarbeitungInformationSoftwareentwicklerProjektive EbeneHilfesystemNotebook-ComputerInternetworkingVideokonferenzGrenzschichtablösungSpeicherbereichsnetzwerk
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EinsInternetworkingKontrollstrukturDatenfeldInternetworkingSelbst organisierendes SystemAggregatzustandRechter WinkelComputeranimationBesprechung/Interview
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InternetworkingMathematikInternetworkingHilfesystemMereologieComputeranimation
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InternetworkingProgrammierumgebungDiskrete UntergruppeLeistung <Physik>PunktInternetworkingMultiplikationsoperatorRechter WinkelComputeranimation
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Überlagerung <Mathematik>ZehnCASE <Informatik>Rechter WinkelPunktspektrumInternetworkingMultiplikationsoperator
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SchnittmengeStichprobenumfangPunktspektrumBitTeilmengeInternetworkingWeb SiteGruppenoperationStabilitätstheorie <Logik>CASE <Informatik>Leistung <Physik>XML
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InternetworkingRechter WinkelGrundraumMultiplikationsoperatorBitBesprechung/InterviewComputeranimation
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Formale SpracheFamilie <Mathematik>MereologieKontextbezogenes SystemVierzigFrequenzMultigraphBesprechung/Interview
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Rechter WinkelAuflösungsvermögenTouchscreenMereologieVollständiger VerbandLeistung <Physik>Physikalisches SystemZahlenbereichProgrammierungSoftwareentwicklerSchlüsselverwaltungBesprechung/Interview
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MathematikBeobachtungsstudieKurvenanpassungMultiplikationsoperatorSoftwareentwicklerComputeranimationBesprechung/Interview
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ARPANetMessage-PassingBitInformationMathematikGrundraumInformatikNeuroinformatikt-TestInternetworkingRechter WinkelARPANetProjektive EbeneRouterKontrollstrukturUnrundheitParametersystemComputeranimation
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Service providerThermodynamisches SystemRechnernetzInternetworkingt-TestZehnInternetworkingMultiplikationsoperatorFunktionalFlächentheorieZahlenbereichSoftwareentwicklerRechter WinkelBitBeobachtungsstudieSichtenkonzeptPhysikalisches SystemSoftwareComputeranimationVorlesung/Konferenz
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Web ServicesMereologieSoftwareProgrammierungProjektive Ebenet-TestMultiplikationsoperatorInformatikRouterOrdnung <Mathematik>Service providerNeuroinformatikRechter WinkelArithmetisches MittelGebäude <Mathematik>InternetworkingUbiquitous ComputingBesprechung/Interview
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SpieltheorieRuhmasseSchaltnetzAssoziativgesetzt-TestGruppenoperationRechenschieberRichtungInternetworkingArithmetisches MittelMAPSoftwareentwicklerAnalytische FortsetzungProgrammierung
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Abstimmung <Frequenz>DigitalsignalStochastische AbhängigkeitMathematische LogikTelekommunikationMathematikMathematische LogikThermodynamisches SystemRankingSoftwareentwicklerProjektive EbeneComputeranimation
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Workstation <Musikinstrument>Twitter <Softwareplattform>PunktMAPRuhmasseKartesische KoordinatenWeb ServicesSummierbarkeitKreisflächeAnalysisDiagramm
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InternetworkingDigitalsignalInternetworkingTabelleEinsDiagrammTermEinfach zusammenhängender RaumDigitalisierungSoundverarbeitungErhaltungssatzVorlesung/KonferenzComputeranimationBesprechung/Interview
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MereologieInformationsgesellschaftInternetworkingProgrammierungPunktDigitalisierungRechter WinkelAssemblerMultiplikationsoperatorNotebook-ComputerBesprechung/Interview
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InternetworkingDigitalsignalPrototypingKybernetikStochastische AbhängigkeitRechter WinkelTypentheorieInternetworkingMereologieEinsMAPGüte der AnpassungComputeranimationBesprechung/Interview
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BitNeunzehnPunktRechter WinkelVierzigOpen SourceBesprechung/Interview
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PrototypingKybernetikDigitalsignalKontrollstrukturStochastische AbhängigkeitRechter WinkelKybernetikProjektive EbeneBus <Informatik>ResultanteFrequenzWorkstation <Musikinstrument>InternetworkingFreewareBootenComputeranimation
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PrototypingKybernetikDigitalsignalStochastische AbhängigkeitProjektive EbenePlastikkarteBefehl <Informatik>Elektronische UnterschriftTermDigitalisierungPhysikalisches SystemBesprechung/InterviewComputeranimation
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MarketinginformationssystemInternetworkingZahlenbereichSoftwareStrömungsrichtungMultiplikationsoperatorMereologieBitrateInternetworkingPermanenteWeb logÄhnlichkeitsgeometrieSummengleichungPhysikalisches SystemHalbleiterspeicherZehnOnline-MedienWeb ServicesGruppenoperationComputeranimation
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Physikalisches SystemInternetworkingSelbst organisierendes SystemMomentenproblemInstantiierungMereologieBitGeradeNeue MedienOffene MengeBesprechung/Interview
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RotationsflächeComputerspielMereologie
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MarketinginformationssystemInternetworkingWeb logWeb SiteHoaxZahlenbereichFormale SpracheWeb logFrequenzElektronischer ProgrammführerWeb-SeiteLesen <Datenverarbeitung>VersionsverwaltungCOMInteraktives FernsehenComputeranimation
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Twitter <Softwareplattform>CodeBenutzerprofilWeb logCOMRechenwerkSterbezifferDivergente ReiheVorlesung/Konferenz
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BerlinePhysikalismusDifferenteMultimediaResultanteBesprechung/InterviewComputeranimationXML
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:19
Hi, good morning. I know everyone's maybe a little hungover or tired from yesterday,
00:25
but I appreciate your coming out to hear me speak. Yeah, so my name is Soroush Faravar. I am an Iranian-American journalist. I currently live in Bonn, Germany, and I've just written this new book called The Internet of Elsewhere, and it's coming out this month, and it'll take a little longer to get into Europe because, you know,
00:44
they still have to put it on ships and send it over, so I apologize. But if you Google it, you'll find my website, and you can order it or ask your local books or whatever. Anyway, I work currently at Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany, Deutsche Welle English, so your taxes pay for my job, so thank you. And I host this program called Spectrum.
01:08
It's in English. It's about Germany and European science and technology, German and European science and technology. You can check it out there. I've also worked for these other radio programs in Canada and in the U.S. So my book is about the
01:22
Internet of Elsewhere. What does that mean? That means that the Internet, of course, you know, that some of you are using right now that we all know and love, you know, it's kind of the same, right? When you use the Internet in Germany or whether you use it in this case Mauritania, you know, kind of your
01:41
experience is the same. So what do I mean by the Internet of Elsewhere? Well, I mean that the things that the Internet produces are different in different parts of the world, right? So there's a reason that various kind of, you could call them applications, you could call them effects, emerge in different parts of the world, right? There's a reason why the Internet
02:02
itself was born in the time and the place in which it happened, which is to say Southern California in the late 1960s. But I feel like we've lost this understanding, this kind of historical context, if you will, of how the Internet is this kind of thing that collides, if you will, with history
02:24
and context. We recently saw things in Egypt and Tunisia and now Libya as well, other parts of North Africa and the Middle East, where there was this idea that, you know, that these were Facebook revolutions and that people were, you know, using social media and how great is that? And
02:43
you know, but of course, I don't know, I guess I'm a little bit more skeptical about that because as some of you may know, Egypt shut down the Internet for five days prior to Mubarak's stepping down from power. And yet the protests got bigger. So to me that seems a big kind of check against this idea that the Internet as a concept is an
03:04
actor in these things, right? That in this case it produces democratic change. We've seen this before in Iran, right? Two years ago, you probably know there was this presidential election. It was very controversial. Ahmadinejad won the election and is now the
03:21
president again of Iran. And there was this idea that, you know, people were speaking out against the government and using Twitter, using all kinds of social media, and again, really pushing people to the streets. This was this narrative that was created, I think, in the American media. I don't know how much attention it got over here in Europe. But, you know, there was this idea that, again, the Internet
03:44
is this actor that, you know, changes a country and changes a society. But that also applies to situations that aren't political, right? That applies to development. There's this concept that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, which is called ICT4D, ICT for
04:02
Development Information and Communications Technology for Development. So there's this idea that, you know, we see it in projects like the one laptop per child, or there's a nonprofit startup in San Francisco called Invinio, and there's all kinds of other projects where, you know, if only we bring technology, information technology, mobile phone technology, Internet technology, Wi-Fi, whatever, to a place, then
04:25
we create some effect, right? Then we create economic development, right? So, again, there's this idea that the Internet or technology or information technology is somehow acting upon that place. And I'm trying to say that, you know, it doesn't help, but I guess I don't
04:40
really, as I've done research for this book, I believe less in this kind of primary kind of acting relationship. But the thing is, we've seen this idea before. This idea is even older than that. Nicholas Negroponte said back in 1995 that, you know, the Internet will flatten organizations, it will harmonize people, the
05:01
nation state will go away, but the nation state, you know, as we all know, is still very much here. And this is an idea that's even older than that, right? This quote was taken from a book that I highly recommend you guys read, it's called The Victorian Internet, and it's about the rise of the telegraph around the world. And there was this idea back then, too, that the
05:23
telegraph, you know, is connecting people and harmonizing people, and that's so awesome, and, you know, and again, like, that didn't really happen. And so, you know, this is kind of what we've been reduced to, I feel like, is like when you have
05:41
the Internet and you bring it to a place, right, either some kind of change happens, some kind of political change happens, some kind of economic change happens, and that's great, you know, and again, I'm not trying to say that it doesn't help, that it's not good for people to have mobile phones and to have Internet access, of course it is, but what I'm trying to show is that it's more complicated than that, and I would argue more interesting than that. So, I took a look in
06:02
my book at four different countries, as he said, South Korea, Estonia, Senegal, and Iran. So you might ask, well, why these countries, right? And this is the longer part in my book that I explain how, you know, what I'm trying to argue is that when the Internet arrives in a particular place, it collides with what's already there,
06:23
right? The Internet doesn't arrive in the same point in a country's history in every place, right? Some people are more literate or less literate, more educated or less educated, have more economic power or less, or have more political freedoms or less, and when it arrives at that place at that time, it does something to the character of
06:42
the Internet, and it emerges really interesting ideas and really interesting things. So I looked at Korea, right? Why Korea? Because Korea is the world's most wired country in the world. I don't know how many, how many people have come to South Korea? Anyone from South Korea? All right, well, a couple of people. So South Korea is this really
07:02
wacky place, right? It's got the world's fastest and cheapest and most widespread broadband of anywhere in the world, right? This is according to the OECD. South Korea is also the place that has, and this is what this picture is showing, the world's most developed e-sports
07:21
league. These are young Koreans playing professional star craft, right? These are people who are paid tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars, to do nothing but play star craft. There are two television channels in Korea devoted to showing star craft. I'm not joking. And you can go, this
07:41
is in the e-sports stadium in Seoul, and you know, and so this is what they've done now with their Internet, right? This is one of the things that's come out of their history. So I would put Korea at kind of one end of the spectrum. The next country that I wrote about is Senegal, which I would put not on the opposite extreme end of the
08:01
other spectrum, but I would say somewhere a little bit closer. I would argue that Senegal is one of the world's best, least connected countries. What do I mean by that? There are lots of countries in the world that have terrible, terrible situations, places like Somalia, places like the former Zaire, places especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where there's been a
08:20
lot of political and economic turmoil over the years. Senegal is a Sub-Saharan African country that is different than some of these other ones. In that, they've had a peaceful transition of power over the last 50 years since they became independent from France, and they're economically stable as well. So they've had political economic stability, that's good. They happen to
08:40
be well placed to connecting to the undersea data cables that flow down the Atlantic Ocean, down across the western coast of Africa. And yet, so they have all these things that you would think, you know, would make the internet work well, would make more people get on the internet and use the internet and make websites like this, which is called FaceDakar, which is the
09:03
kind of Gawker, if you will, of Senegal. It's a relatively new website. It's kind of a gossip news site, I guess. But it's only used by a really small percentage of the population. And so, you know, my question is, if Senegal is one of the best cases, one
09:22
of the places in Sub-Saharan Africa where you would think the internet would work, why doesn't it work there, you know? And that's, so Senegal is a little bit on the other side. The other countries are Estonia, which again, I would put somewhere slightly less than South Korea, but you know, somewhere toward the middle top region. I obviously didn't write about
09:41
every country in the world, so I don't know precisely what the rankings are, but you get the idea. Skype came from Estonia, right? And Estonia is this kind of place that I had, anyone, any Estonians in the room? One Estonian, I love you. Anyone been to Estonia? Good, a few people. So, those of you who
10:03
have been to Estonia, you'll know, to me, Estonia is like a geek's paradise, right? There's free Wi-Fi everywhere, they have these really awesome digital ID cards, you can vote on the internet, you can access all kinds of government services on the internet, and of course Skype, you know, came out of Estonia. And why
10:24
did Skype come out of Estonia, right? Why didn't Skype come from Silicon Valley, or from Germany, or from Australia, or from anywhere else, right? Why did Estonia produce all of these kind of cool things? So that's what I'm trying to understand. And then again, somewhere in terms of connectivity, maybe further
10:41
down, a little less than Estonia, maybe not quite as low as Senegal, is Iran. And Iran unfortunately has a distinction of being the world's first country to arrest a blogger. And they arrested this guy, Mr. Sina Motalebi, who was a journalist and blogger, and he was arrested in 2003. He now lives in London. And
11:02
as we saw a couple years ago with respect to people using the internet as a way to fight back against the government, right, there's been this kind of seesawing that's actually been going on a lot longer than 2009. It's been going on for over a decade now in Iran, where the government pushes one way against the internet, and people push back, and so on and so on.
11:22
So this is a much longer, and I think, more interesting story. So we'll take the first one, South Korea. In my book, I write about this guy. His name is Chun Kil-nam, and he is a, this is just a little timeline of Korean history, and I think it's important to understand that.
11:41
But yeah, so this guy's Chun Kil-nam. He's now a professor. He retired from his university in Korea, and now teaches in China and Japan. I didn't know a whole lot about Korean history before I started this. I don't know how many of you know a little bit about Korean history, but one of the things that I think is really
12:00
important to understand about Korean history in the 20th century is this kind of weird relationship between Japan and Korea. And by weird, I mean, you know, not so good on the Japanese side. Japan annexed the entire Korean peninsula in 1910, and so Koreans were basically forced to become Japanese.
12:23
And Korean culture and language was very much suppressed for the beginning of the 20th century. Japan, of course, bombed Pearl Harbor and entered World War II in the 40s. 1943, the Pentagon is dedicated, right? So this is, again, in the kind of World War II period, and Japan is
12:44
kind of being defeated in the war and stuff. Chun Kil-nam was born to a Korean family in Japan in 1943, and actually, he grew up speaking Japanese in Korea. Excuse me. He grew up speaking Japanese in Japan even though his family was Korean, and he was
13:02
ethnically Korean. Again, he was part of this idea of kind of Japanicizing people even if they were from other places, especially from Korea. So the war ended in 1945, and eventually, these kind of
13:21
issues, unresolved issues from the Potsdam Conference just down the river didn't resolve what was happening in Korea, right? And so the Soviets and the Allies were in disagreement over what should happen with Korea. So we've got this Korean War, North and South Korea. OK. So then we get into the 1960s, and there's this guy
13:42
named General Park Chung-hee who takes power in Korea. He was a general, and he becomes this kind of dictator, but he's an interesting guy because on the one hand, yes, he was a dictator. Yes, he was authoritarian. Yes, it was not a democratic system. However, he did create this amazing economic development
14:02
program that continued for decades, kind of what he set in motion. And just kind of a key example of that, I think, which is kind of amazing, is that in 1961, there were 30,000 cars registered in South Korea. 35 years later, that number was up to 10 million. And for those of you who have been to South Korea, you'll know that it's just as, I would say, just as
14:22
developed and modern as anywhere else in the world. So OK, so now we get to the 60s, right? And Chung-Hil Nam, he studies mathematics in Japan, and then he thinks about maybe going to do graduate work actually at Moscow State University to study
14:41
mathematics. But during the 1960s, as Korea, there were kind of pro-democratic protests going on in Korea at this time, and he was kind of, he kind of felt this pull toward Korea. He felt kind of alienated in Japan, and even though he didn't speak Korean, and has never actually been to Korea until the 60s, when he traveled there with his
15:01
mother for the very first time, he didn't really know anything about Korea. But yet, somehow, he felt like he didn't have a future in Japan, and he felt like he was kind of duty bound to help his ancestral home country. And so he thought about, OK, well, what could I do that would be helpful to this country that is undergoing this rapid, rapid development?
15:22
And he thought, well, maybe I could be a doctor, but it turns out that hospitals kind of freak him out a little bit, he doesn't like the smells and blood and stuff. So then he thought, OK, mathematics, maybe information science, and maybe computer science, because that would be useful to people as well. And so he looked around at various universities, and he
15:42
decided to enter UCLA as a graduate student studying computer science in 1966. Now, for those of you who know your internet history, you'll recognize this. UCLA, in the late 1960s, was like the place to be for people working on this obscure thing
16:01
called the ARPANET. And the ARPANET is what is now our internet. It started at UCLA in the 1960s as this American government funded research project. That guy right there is a professor at UCLA, still teaches. His name is Leonard Kleinrock. And what he's standing next to is something called the IMP,
16:20
which is the world's first router. So all those little 20 euro routers that you guys have in your apartments or houses, originally they looked like that, and they cost tens of thousands of dollars. So Chon-Til-Nam arrives at UCLA. He is classmates actually with Vint Cerf, who invented
16:40
TCPIP. TCPIP, of course, is what makes the internet function. So it was really kind of fortuitous that Chon-Til-Nam was around what was going on at UCLA at the time. And so what happens is Chon-Til-Nam, he studies, he gets his doctorate, he works and teaches for a little bit
17:02
in California. But then he gets an offer to come back to Korea. Again, he'd never lived there. And he starts working on what he calls the system development network. This is the 1980s. And he's made a professor at this place called KAIST, which is the Korean Advanced Institute of
17:21
Science and Technology. It used to be in Seoul, the capital. Now it's in Daejeon, which is a city about two hours south of Seoul. And so his idea was this. Let's build the internet in Korea. And this is the 1980s. This is when the internet is still a relatively new thing. It's this kind of obscure computer science project.
17:41
There's only a few internet nodes that exist, I think, probably by the 80s. I'm guessing that there was something like on the order of hundreds or thousands of nodes spread around North America, Europe, other parts of the world. And so he said, OK, well, we need to build our own network. And we need to build our own computers and our own stuff.
18:01
And so he had this idea of making this network to connect, he was basically replicating the ARPANET, right? And this was kind of his own pet project. And so he, as a professor, he had graduate students. And these graduate students in the 1980s, they became this kind of dream team.
18:22
And because of his experience in Japan and in the US, and knowing what he wanted to do, he wanted to create something new in Korea that had never been there before, which was to say the internet and technology. He told them, I don't want you to be professors. I don't want you to be academics.
18:41
I don't want you to do what I did. I want you to be entrepreneurs. I want you to be leaders of industry. I want you to develop this country through the means of technology. And so what he would do is, it was almost like a startup, right? These students of his, they would wake up at 9, 10 in the
19:02
morning, they would code, they would hack, they would build, they were building routers, they were trying to make this stuff work. And then, and they would work till midnight, 1, 2 in the morning, whatever. But then on the weekends, he would, and this is my favorite part, he would make them go rock climbing.
19:20
He would make them go hiking. He would make them go skiing. It was very kind of regimented. And he would tell them, he would kind of instill into them this idea of pride and of duty to the country. These were young computer scientists in their early mid-20s. They were exempted from military service. They were given full scholarships. All the doors were opened for them.
19:42
And he was saying, look, you guys have to take this seriously, and I will work you doing stuff during the week. And then you will have to work physically, because I want you to be able to not only solve these problems, but to be healthy so you can work on this project. But so what happened was, so they did build it.
20:01
They built this network. It did connect to the internet. I believe it was the first non-US project that was kind of independently developed to connect to the internet. And he got what he wanted, which was that these students of his, they came out of this program doing exactly that.
20:20
Jin Ho-hoor is a Korean entrepreneur now, and he launched the first private Korean internet service provider in 1998. The first broadband service was launched in Korea, and the person who was kind of in charge of that part of the company was also one of Jeon Kil-nam's students. And through that, because it was so disruptive in the
20:41
Korean market at that time, there were other companies that came on, and there was major, major price wars. And that was really what developed, what kicked off this kind of high, very pervasive broadband across Korea. Also in 1998, a guy by the name of Jake Song, he wrote a
21:01
program called Lineage. This was a really, really big MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role playing game, well before World of Warcraft and all the rest, again, developed by one of his students. And Lineage actually really pushed into the Korean Esports Players Association, that slide that I showed earlier with the guys, that guy in that pod playing
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Starcraft, right? This is this group that does this, Kespa. And so it really kind of snowballed into that direction. And so I think that this is, again, if you want a lot more details, there's more stuff in my book.
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But I would say that this combination of high levels of education, of nationalism, of duty, of pride, of these kinds of things, really kind of pushed Korea into this direction. And they viewed the internet as a means to getting to development. Obviously, they did a lot of other stuff, too. And by 2007, they had hit 90% broadband penetration.
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I don't think that my home country of the United States has that high of broadband penetration. So let's move on to Senegal. And OK, so in Senegal, I write about this guy, Amadou Topp, he is now also a entrepreneur and developer and activist guy in Senegal.
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While I was researching Senegal, and I actually lived in Senegal as a student for about half a year in 2002, 2003. 1946, IBM actually shows up in French colonial Senegal. And they were hired to build the IT systems or the proto-IT systems of the Senegalese National Railway and a few
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other big government projects. And they thought that they could make money just like they had in other French colonies, like in French Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, those kinds of areas, Morocco, other places like that. And this was kind of the, I guess, early IT environment
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that Amadou Topp was born in. He grew up as a kid under colonial Senegal, of course occupied by France. And then Senegal became independent in 1960. By the end of the 60s, he won a logic and mathematics competition that was held by IBM. He later went on to work at IBM.
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And he kind of rose through the ranks of IBM. He lived in France for a little while and really benefited from being exposed to various types of technology and development and things like that. By 1995, he had left IBM and he started his own company in Senegal.
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And then he attended CES for the first time. And 1995 was, I probably, I would guess, maybe some of the more geeky, hackery people in the room probably were using the internet earlier or the web a little earlier. But I know for myself, that was around the time when I first got exposed to the internet and to the web.
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And Amadou Topp was the same thing. He saw an early demo version of Netscape while he was at CES in Las Vegas. And he just thought, man, this is really cool. We've got pictures. We've got text. We've got all this stuff. That would be great for Senegal, but he was worried about it being expensive and stuff like that, which is
24:21
definitely an issue in sub-Saharan Africa. But the kind of seed was planted in his head. And he went on to really encourage the government. And he kind of ingratiated himself to various government officials and really tried to push the government to use more websites and for people to use the internet in a
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better way. One of the issues that also happens in Senegal, or not just in Senegal, but in sub-Saharan Africa, is this idea of demonopolization and privatization of the telecom. So Germany, I think, went through this in the 80s with Deutsche Telekom, and it's private now. The US had the same thing with AT&T, France Telecom, other big telecoms around the world.
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In Senegal, the telecom company, the incumbent monopoly, is this company called Sonotel. And they privatized in 1995. However, France Telecom bought 42% of the company. And a lot of people, including Abdu Thap, were very upset about this because they felt that it kind of reeked of
25:20
colonialism. And it wasn't very democratic in the way that they did it, but whatever. By 1998, Abdu Thap advised the government to put on election rolls in the Senegalese presidential elections. So what that means is people weren't sure who was eligible
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to vote and who had been officially registered. And this general had been put in charge of this project, and the general, General Cisse, went to Abdu Thap and he said, what can we do? How can we make people trust that they are actually registered to vote? And he said, well, just put them on the internet. And so he did, and people did that.
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There was little problems. He had some personal information up there that people probably shouldn't have access to. Their mother's first names, which can be used as a personal identifier in Senegal. But it was a neat idea, even though at that time, 1998, very, very, very few people in Senegal had access to the internet, but it was starting to come.
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And the government was buying into this as well, and there were all kinds of projects. And this is kind of what I'm talking about, is that there were a number of projects, both from within Senegal and coming from other places, that started and then fell apart. One of the first ones was this program by the Senegalese singer Youssindoor. Any Youssindoor fans out there?
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Anyone? Couple? All right. So he's this famous Senegalese singer, very cool guy, he plays in Europe and Senegal, of course, and all kinds of stuff. He's like a UNESCO, UN, like cultural ambassador or something, very charismatic guy. And he had this idea of founding these Joko clubs. And Joko is a well-off word, it's a local language
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in Senegal, and it means connection or link. And the idea was to build kind of cyber centers, cyber clubs, community centers, places where people could go, kids could go and use the internet and stuff. And HP Hewlett-Packard was involved, and they were putting up all kinds of money. There was a big speech about it, I believe, at Davos during
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this time, and everybody was really excited. But it kind of fell apart, because it relied on a big American company, or a big company, to keep bankrolling this project. And the project fell apart by 2002. By 2003, the American government got involved, and they had something called the Digital Freedom Initiative.
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Anyone heard of the Digital Freedom Initiative? Anyone? All right, one person. So this was a project that was started by the American government under the Bush administration. The idea was to bring better internet access, better connectivity to various places around the world, and to teach entrepreneurs and people, again, as a
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development project. And the first country they picked was Senegal. And so there were all kinds of committees. There were American and Senegalese advisors that were trying to figure out how to make the internet work better in Senegal. They established a cyber cafe in the middle of one of the biggest markets in downtown Dakar.
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But again, the project was funded for three years. It kind of fell apart after two years. That cyber cafe that they built is still there, at least it was when I was last in Senegal four years ago. And it feels like every other cyber cafe. And this was also around the same time when lots and lots of private cyber cafes were opening up all over Senegal.
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So again, that one didn't really go anywhere. I mentioned earlier, I just wanted to show this is a cable map of Africa. And so for those of you who may not know where Senegal is, if you can see on the map there, there's the westernmost point in the north where that little text on purple and orange. Senegal is just north of that, because that's Capo Verde So Senegal is kind of the westernmost point in Africa.
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And like I said, Senegal is geographically well placed. You can see these massive data cables running down the coast of Africa. And their landing stations are in Senegal. And actually, the landlocked countries that are next to Senegal, like Mali and some of these other places, actually have to rely on data access from Senegal
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because of the cables. And I actually just saw a tweet this morning that Nigeria, I think it was Nigeria, since some of these newer cables that you can see there on the diagram, like the orange and the purple ones, Nigeria internet traffic is up like 400% since one of these new cables
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was turned on. And as you can see, East Africa is really deficient in terms of connectivity as well. Anyway, so the Digital Freedom Initiative didn't really go anywhere. By December 2003, the president of Senegal, this guy, Abdoulaye Wade, had his own idea, which was to create something called digital solidarity.
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Anyone heard of this? The Digital Solidarity Fund? No? OK. So yeah, so this was this idea. He proposed it in the WSIS conference, the World Summit on the Information Society that was in Geneva. And he said that, look, part of the reason why
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Senegalese people and other people in the developing world don't have access to the internet or don't have as much access as we would like is that stuff is too expensive, right? So what I want to do is I want to create a program where people at the point of sale in, let's say, Berlin, you walk into a shop. You're like, hi, I want to buy a laptop. It's 1,000 euros. Would you like to donate 10 euros to this Digital
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Solidarity Fund that would then go to people in other countries? This didn't go anywhere at all. They created a foundation in France and another one in Switzerland. And this also didn't go anywhere. In the meantime, Sonitel is raking in the cash. I'm pretty sure Sonitel is the most profitable company
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in Senegal. In 2007, they had a profit of $310 million. Pretty good. And still, Senegalese internet penetration remains kind of low. And this is what I say when Senegal might be. There are probably some other ones that would fit this category as well. Might be one of the best, least connected countries.
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And that's what I'm saying is that, and I think part of it has to do with education. Part of it has to do with level of economic activity. Only 40% of Senegalese people can even read. So already, 60% of people can't use the internet because they can't read. So yeah, that's the story of Senegal, basically, in a
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nutshell. Moving on to Estonia, one of my favorite places. I am really obsessed with Estonia. I could talk for hours just about Estonia. I had never been to Estonia. Never even heard of it. I'd barely heard of Estonia until about six years ago when I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor that said that Estonia had declared internet access as a human right.
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And that just blew my mind. And I started reading up on Estonia, and I discovered that Skype had come from there, and all this kind of stuff. And that was pretty amazing. Again, a little bit of history. The Nazis. So Estonia, I didn't know as I was reading about it. For those of you who may not know, Estonia is way up in the north of Europe, not that far from here, up by Helsinki and
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Russia, and they were invaded over the last 1,000 years by basically all of their neighboring countries at various points. The Baltic Germans were very active in the 19th century in Estonia. Poland, Denmark, Sweden, all kinds of other countries came and went in Estonia. By the 1940s, the Nazis were up in there, hanging out
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for a couple of years. Then the Soviets came in, right? And the Soviets, they said, OK, Estonia, we don't want you to learn about liberal arts and social sciences and stuff. We want you to be technological. We want you to be scientific. So what did they do? They established in 1960 the Institute for Cybernetics, and they established it right in Tallinn, Estonia, and they
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were doing exactly what it sounds like, cybernetic research and stuff like that, which I think is pretty cool. In 1967, this guy, Velio Hamer, was born. For those of you who've been to Estonia, you'll know, as I said, there's free Wi-Fi all over the place. You can thank this guy for doing that. Velio Hamer has become this kind of Wi-Fi evangelist, just kind of preaching how great free Wi-Fi is.
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And so, as a result, there's free Wi-Fi in the airport, in the port, in the bus station, in farm houses, in all kinds of places all over the country. Estonia became independent, of course, at the end of the Soviet period, 1991. And Estonia kind of woke up, as best as I can tell.
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And kind of rebooted itself, if you will. And so there were all these ideas coming around. And one of them was this Tiger Leap project, or Tigrihupa in Estonian. And the idea was, let's wire the entire country. Let's put the internet access in every school in all of Estonia.
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Estonia is not that big of a country, 1.3 million people. As somebody said earlier, I think that's the size of a decent-sized German city. In American terms, that would be like San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley put together. Anyway, so they went on this ambitious project. And they connected all the schools. And they spent a lot of money.
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And there was this idea that, again, that we can kind of leap forward into the future. There were other ideas, too, like the Digital Signatures Act and the Digital ID Card Act that created these digital ID cards, eParliament, the system where if you were a Estonian government, as best as I understand it, they have
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a cabinet of ministers. And they propose bills on anything, transport, defense, economics, whatever. And they discuss it. And then once they agree, then that bill gets sent to the Estonian Parliament. And then they vote on it, and it becomes law. But so they said, well, it's stupid that we're printing out all these bills, and we've got all these stacks of paper. So why don't we all do this online? So if you go to Tallinn, you'll see there's this
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kind of online interface. And they said, OK, we're going to put all the bills online, and if the ministers don't discuss them online before the physical in-person meeting, then the bill passes. The idea was that if it's not worth discussing online, it's not worth discussing in person.
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So let's just streamline this process. And so that's what they did. Wi-Fi EE was established. This is Velio's website, and he catalogs all of the Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place. 2003, the first Skype prototype was born, and it was
35:40
actually created in the very first Skype offices. They now have their own offices, but I find it interesting that their very first offices were actually in the Institute of Cybernetics. This is what some of these Wi-Fi hotspots look like. That's actually in a public park, but that logo, that Wi-Fi EE logo, it's very common. You see it just like you would see on a restaurant Visa,
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MasterCard, Euro card, whatever bank card at a bar or a restaurant or something. And then you'll see a little Wi-Fi sticker. And that's what the Estonian ID cards look like. Again, they're about the size of a European bank card,
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and they've got a little chip. And so what you do is you plug that into a USB card reader, you go onto a citizen's portal, and you have access to all kinds of government services, ranging from paying your parking tickets or your speeding tickets or checking your university admissions or paying your taxes or voting in national elections. And that's pretty cool.
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And then I wanted to throw the Skype thing up there, because Skype is from Estonia, too. And when you get to Tallinn Airport, this splash page of Skype comes up, and it says that Skype is sponsoring the Wi-Fi there. Anyway, so yeah, and Estonia kind of progressed in this way as well.
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And I guess you could say that really, I think, kind of one of the moments that Skype kind of arrived onto the world stage or kind of this kind of landmark moment was when President Bush received as a gift a Skype phone from Estonian Prime Minister Anders Ansip when President Bush was visiting Estonia in 2006.
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By 2007, Estonia had started this program of online voting, again, using these digital ID cards. There's digital signatures and encryptions and all this kind of stuff. People, I'm sure anyone who's read anything about Estonia oftentimes, at least in the American press, they call it Eastonia now. In 2007, you might have heard there was a little bit
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of a cyber skirmish, cyber attack, cyber war. It's very scary. There was a statue of a Soviet soldier in Tallinn that was in a park, and the Estonian government had decided to move it to a different park outside of town, and a lot of Russians still living in Estonia got very
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upset, and as a result, a lot of Estonian websites got attacked as a form of political protest. And there were Russian language websites, not like kind of traditional underground hacking kind of websites, but I think we saw kind of a similar thing with anonymous where people kind of made it very easy.
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It was just like, OK, follow these steps, and you too can join the cyber attacks against Estonia because they moved our statue. So government websites were hit. These were DDoS attacks. These were kind of hacktivists like defacing, putting up false statements on the prime minister's website and stuff. And it wasn't very kind of threatening, I don't think.
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The Estonians investigated. They tried to figure out who did this. Of course, everybody in Estonia pretty much believes that the Russian government either implicitly or explicitly was behind it. Only one guy was ever actually, not even
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convicted, he pled guilty. This guy, Dmitry Galushkevich, he is a ethnic Russian, but Estonian citizen living in Estonia. He admitted guilt as to participating in these attacks, and he was fined $1,700 and didn't serve any jail time. And the Estonians basically felt frustrated because their
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Russian counterparts would not give them access to any kind of data or records and stuff. As a result of these cyber attacks, the cooperative cyber defense center of excellence, logo's up there in the top, was established in Tallinn in 2008. This is part of NATO. This is a research center that is devoted to cyber defense and cyber security that they created in the wake
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of these attacks. And in fact, Estonia had actually proposed this idea way back in 2003, but NATO was like, oh, cyber attacks, that'll never happen. And then it did, and then they got their center. And one of the other cool things is that in 2011, this year, you can now use your mobile phone to authenticate
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yourself for online voting. So you can register and you get a special SIM card with some special encryption on it and put it in your phone. And so instead of having to put your ID card into your computer or into a card reader to authenticate your identity when you want to vote, you can now do it by cell phone. You can't vote over your phone, but you can
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authenticate. Anyway, last country, Iran. I wrote about this guy, Omid Memarian. He's an Iranian journalist and blogger. He now lives in San Francisco. He has become part of a group of people, including my own father, who are basically permanent
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exiles from Iran. Germany has a large Iranian community as well. And Iran actually has a really interesting history when it comes to the internet. I think Iran has one of the highest internet penetration rates in all of the Middle East. It's something like 33%, 35%, give or take. And Iran has been on the internet for a pretty long
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time, actually. Way back in 1993, Iran was able to connect to the internet through Austria, through an academic network called CSNET. And it kind of slowly grew. Again, similar story to some of these other places that I mentioned. By 1995, there was 30,000 people online. By 2000, there was a million Iranians online.
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By 2008, that number jumped to, I think, 20, tens of millions, 20 million, something like that. Big number. Again, it's important to understand the history and the politics, I think, because, as I said, this is about what kind of emerges out of these countries. By 1997, a guy by the name of Mohammad Hatemi was
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elected president. He was the president before the current president, Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. Hatemi was president from 1997 to 2005. He was viewed as a moderate, as somewhat of a reformer, as he had spent some time in Europe, actually in Germany.
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And he really pushed for some reforms within the Islamic system. He opened up media. He allowed newspapers to open. He allowed civil society to kind of open up. He allowed for non-profits, non-governmental organizations to open up. There was a few years where there was kind of a moment of
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opening up a little bit of Iranian society. Of course, there were certain, what they call red lines that you couldn't cross. You couldn't say anything bad about the Islamic Republic. You couldn't say anything bad about the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and so forth. And by 2000, as more and more Iranians are getting online,
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we have the first instance of the government pushing back against what's happening on the Iranian internet. There was this guy called Ayatollah Montessori. He was a reformist Ayatollah against the government. He had formerly been really kind of part of the Iranian
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government. He had been closely associated with Ayatollah Khamenei, the But during the 1980s, he kind of fell out of favor. He disagreed with some of the brutal policies that the government imposed during the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s. So he was basically under house arrest for the rest of
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his life from the 1980s until when he passed away just a couple of years ago. In 2000, he posted a memoir on his website, montessori.com. And he posted this memoir, and he described what he had done and what he had seen in his relationships with the government and said all kinds of bad things that the government didn't want to get out.
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And so what did they do? They started their own website. They started montessori.com. So they cyber-squatted him, kind of. And they were trying to fool people into going to the wrong website, and it didn't really work. But I think that that's kind of interesting, that they cared enough to create a fake web page to fool people
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from reading this guy's stuff. By fall 2001, as blogs were starting to come about in the US and in Europe, the first Iranian blogs were coming out too, and I don't know if this is still true, but there was a period when Persian was like the number three or number four language amongst blogs in the
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world, which is kind of surprising given that it's a relatively small language with respect to the whole world. And there was this guy called Hossein Derakshan, also known as Hodor, who published a guide in Persian teaching Persians how to blog in their own language. Blogger.com started supporting Unicode as a way to
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make it easier for people to get online. Various people were arrested, and Sina Montalebi, the first guy to be arrested, was arrested as he had published some articles that were saying some bad things about the
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government as well. He was a journalist, and he was talking about that there were things that the government wasn't doing enough to fight, for example, unemployment, which is a big issue, and other things like that. And he was arrested. And there was a whole series of people, including Omid, who I profile in my book, the guy who's pictured, who were
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arrested at the end of 2004. So for all of you bloggers and Twitterers in the room, which I think is probably most of you, you are in company with President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. They're both blogging and Twittering. Ayatollah Khamenei has a Twitter account here.
45:41
You can go follow him. He tweets in Persian and English. I don't know how good your Persian is, but you can read his stuff there. So yeah, this was a sign that came up during some of the which is, God is with us. Are you filtering him too? Of course, the internet in Iran is filtered and censored and blocked and stuff like that.
46:03
And I'll just move quickly through this so I can finish up and get time for questions. As you know, and I talked a little bit about this earlier, there was this movement to, there were a whole bunch of series of protests, Twitter and Facebook, where people were pushing out videos and things like that. The government was also pushing back.
46:21
I was having conversations with some people earlier about there was this website, girdab.ir, which used these photos, and I don't know if you can see, there's little red circles around people's faces. And on that web page, the government is basically asking people to identify protesters. Yeah. Recently, they had this blogging competition that was
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only open to pro-regime blogs, so that was interesting. And I guess people have been asking me, do you think Iran is different than Egypt and Tunisia and what's going on? And I guess for me, my kind of gut feeling is that it is really different. One of the main reasons that I don't like the term Twitter
47:00
revolution is because revolution implies that things have dramatically changed, but nothing has dramatically changed politically speaking in Iran. The government is still there. Things are going on. Yeah, there's a little bit of protest and stuff. But I think one of the major differences is that the Iranian government has shown that it's been willing to use force.
47:20
It sends out armies of guys on motorcycles with clubs and beats people up. And what's different about that in Egypt is that the Egyptian government, even with all of the people coming to Tahrir Square and all this kind of stuff, the Egyptian army didn't fire on people. And I think that's a really big difference. Same with Tunisia. There wasn't that same kind of use of physical violence
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against people. So I think that that's something that, again, we often lose sight of. Anyway, I'm done.