Many technotopian scenarios can be described as “the geek will inherit the earth”. The most recent example of two rich white men wearing heavy-rimmed glasses pontificating about how indispensable they’re going to be after the apocalypse recently appeared on boingboing and worldchanging – two sites which have a lot to recommend them but also have a vastly inflated idea of their own importance. I’m going to quote a big chunk, because I like making myself angry.
What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.1
Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good at adaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.
Yeah, just imagine! Actually reading about how development works2 would reveal that what they’re describing is one of Doctorow’s barely-readable novels rather than the real world. The model of sending out experts to tell the ignorant masses how to do things right (which the ignorant masses welcome with open arms, if they know what’s good for them, etc, etc) has been almost completely discredited as a vehicle for meaningful development since the early 1990s, making it deeply ironic that they would project their their self-aggrandising futurism onto such a retrograde screen.
- This is a really uninspired, inaccurate and embarrassing title. [↩]
- They could start with Duncan Green’s excellent From Poverty to Power, which is as good an overview of mainstream development thinking as you’ll find. [↩]