卦Trigram 2.0

Do you Twitter? I was converted a year or so ago. It’s one of those things that seems pointless before you join, but once you’re a part of it… it becomes a stream of fascinating comment and insight.

I mention this because I’ve been blogging less and less frequently here. Niti has told me several times to get my act together and start writing again. In fact, I’ve been struggling to have something to say. Every blog needs a focus, and this blog has evolved over time. I talk about technology, social media, virtual worlds, biotech… All things that interest me but, if you’ve read me even intermittently, over the years you’ll see that my main creative motivation has been cyberpunk – simply because if I hadn’t been reading William Gibson and Bruce Sterling twenty years ago, I would never have become involved in either technology or business. Time has passed, though, and the cyberpunk future has arrived, and become our present. Even the cyberpunk giants aren’t writing cyberpunk any more, because where do you go from here? This has really become clear over the last two years, which is the period when my blogging started to peter out… Where to go next?

Which brings me back to Twitter. One of the people whose insights I enjoy the most is Paul Denlinger, author of the China Vortex. He’s been ‘Tweeting’ a lot recently about “Shanzhai”, the huge industry here in China that manufactures fake products… although actually, it’s more complex than that. Here’s what one user on Metafilter had to say about Shanzhai:

In Chinese, Shanzhai (山寨) literally means “mountain stronghold” and connotes a place with limited accessibility — i.e. beyond the reach of authorities. In the past couple of years, it has come to refer to the manufacture of illicit tech gadgets by unauthorized factories: show us your shan zhai ji! But shanzhai can be used more broadly to describe knockoff culture, cheeky brand subversion, grassroots industrial creativity, and a certain DIY ethos. The latter may be best exemplified in these videos of a “Shanzhai Glider” in action.

There are a number of videos on YouTube of “amusing” things from the Chinese hinterland – such as a truck driver imitating “Initial-D” style drift-driving, a farmer who makes robots, a home-made glider… I can’t link to these because at the moment YouTube is blocked in China so I can’t double-check the videos. Take a look, though. The thing is, I don’t watch these and think “Wow, look at those funny Chinese peasants and the weird things they do!”, which seems to be the general attitude on the internet. I think “Wow, look at the talent and innovation that’s untapped, and held back by isolation and poverty. Look at what it can do when given inspiration, using only what’s available!”.

If we take this meaning of ‘shanzhai’, ie “grassroots industrial creativity, and a certain DIY ethos“, then we’re talking about exactly the same thing that Niti saw in India, where it’s called ‘jugaad‘. Niti tried for a while to popularize the phrase as a design concept for bottom of the pyramid marketing; it didn’t really take, but then it didn’t have the economic weight of the Chinese shanzhai industries behind it…

In my case, this takes me back to my cyberpunk roots – because what better example can there be of Gibson’s much-quoted line, “The street finds its own uses for things“?

So, here I am in China, I’m from an internet & knowledge background, and I’m interested in development and green issues. Once I read some of Paul’s ‘shanzhai’ thoughts, I realized – here it is, the new focus: “shanzhai green“. In other words, China’s rural population have tremendous talent, which they can use if given ideas. Shanzhai means implementing innovation with the best tools available – be it traditional knowledge or the latest digital technology. Most often, it will be a mix of both. Shanzhai skills can be used to help rural development. Shanzhai skills can be used to protect the environment. Putting shanzhai skills to use in the pursuit of sustainable development? Let’s call it… “shanzhai green”.

Now I know what I want to blog about….

Sorry, I need to rant a bit here…

I got an email the other day from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. I’d been checking out their website a couple of months ago, and noticed their “Buy one, donate one” scheme, which at that time had yet to commence. It sounded interesting, the offer was affordable, and I was quite interested in getting hold of one of these famous little critters. So I signed up. Of course, I’m in Singapore – and it seems this offer was only available to residents of the USA and Canada. This fact wasn’t at all apparent from the page I read, and the reminder email I received didn’t mention it either. So, no new laptop for me. I’m not sure why this would be – I managed to buy my retro clamshell iBook from Australia without difficulty, so it’s not a logistical problem Could it be… that the Foundation just hadn’t thought about the world outside North America? It wasn’t a good sign.

Another bad sign reminded me of an episode from my childhood. I’m from a small country town, and when I was in my pre- and early teens, lots of residents didn’t really travel much. Once, a travelling theatre group came to perform a play in our community youth centre. I still remember one scene in which the cast stood packed close together, each with one hand raised, swaying rhythmically. I had at that point been to London a couple of times, and knew that they were portraying strap-hanging commuters on the Underground. The whispered questions around me revealed that many in the audience had no idea what was meant to be happening: they’d never seen the real thing. I thought of that episode when I read that Electronic Arts have donated The Sims to be pre-loaded on OLPC computers. Is this really sensible when – correct me if I’ve got this wrong – the laptop is intended for poor rural children in developing countries? Who may perhaps have seen small towns? Are the concepts of the Sims really appropriate, or even comprehensible, for this market?

This reminded me of another childhood lesson. As a boy during the British 1970s, a backward-looking period obsessed with the Second World War, I was saturated with comics, stories, and biographies of that period. I learned the lesson of the tank battles on the Russian front. The Germans built intensively designed, high-precision, finely constructed panzers, which were the match or superior of any other tank in the world – on a one-to-one basis in ideal conditions, when manned by a highly-trained crew. They were extremely expensive to build, maintain, and repair – so there weren’t very many of them, and they often didn’t work very well in the conditions of the Russian winter. The Soviets, in contrast, built crude, but extremely functional T34s, which were ideal for the environment, cheap to build and run, easy to repair, and which could be deployed in large numbers with peasants fresh from the farms at the wheel. We all know who won.

Something similar seems to be happening in the computer market for the developing world. The OLPC computer is being highly- (even over-) designed for a very narrow market, in very specific conditions. It’s not like anything else on the market (read: which everybody else is using). It seems to be aimed at an ideal user, rather than the real people of the poorer regions of the world.

I can’t really talk about the conditions in contemporary Africa, for example. I can see how something of this design might work in the rural African villages I knew in Lesotho twenty years ago. But is this the market we need to worry most about? That could sound callous, I don’t mean it to, but aren’t there vastly more children or others in need of accessible computing in less remote areas, small towns, urban shanty zones, etc – where there is access to electricity, etc?

The OLPC means well, is driving important innovations, and is publicizing an important need – but it’s still the equivalent of those German Panzers. In the campaign to bring affordable computing to rural areas, I suspect they will be swamped by the T34 equivalents, such as the Chinese Longmen computer, or the Sinomanic. I’ve seen these while I was in China: cheap, cheerful, using commodity parts, and cut-down versions of the same software everyone else is using. Specifically aimed at poor students or rural farmers, they will swamp the OLPC – and I wouldn’t be surprised if its these models, or ones like them, that win the day for the developing markets in Africa and elsewhere…

Just-good-enough in large numbers and low price will win out over expensively over-designed, no?