卦Trigram 2.0

There’s a story I read once, although I forget now the name of the book. It’s from Russia in the early 20th century. There was a village, deep, deep in the countryside; let’s call it Porechye (though that wasn’t the name in the story – I’ve forgotten that). In Porechye there was a small church nestling in a clearing in the forest. There was a village pond, where the ducks swam. There was a girl named Masha, who had beautiful blue eyes and beautiful golden hair. In Porechye there was also a young man, who was in love with Masha. One day, recruiters from the Tsar’s army came to Porechye. They told the young man that it was his sacred duty to join the army and fight on behalf of the Tsar and Mother Russia against the Germans.

The young man loved his country, and did his duty. He joined the army, and was taken on trucks and railways to the far-away battlefront. He fought bravely against the Germans. One day, the news came that the war was over. The soldiers were happy, but they didn’t know what to do. No lorries came to take them home from the battlefront. Eventually, they threw away their rifles, and began to return to their homes as best they could.

The young man was passed by a truck, who asked him where he was going. He said, “I am going to Porechye, where the church nestles in a clearing in the forest and the ducks swim on the village pond, and there is a beautiful girl called Masha who has beautiful blue eyes and beautiful blonde hair. Do you know it?”. And the men on the truck said “Yes, yes, we know it. We are going far, and Porechye is on the way. Come with us, and we will take you there!”.

So the young man got onto the truck, and he travelled with them for many, many days, that turned into many weeks. They had many adventures together, and eventually they reached the village of Porechye. His friends cried “here you are, back at your home, but we have far to go still, and must leave you here with our best wishes!” And the young man waved farewell until the truck was a distant spek, and then he walked into Porechye.

He found that there was a church nestling in a grove in the forest, but it was a different church, and indeed a different grove. There was a village pond, but it was not the village pond of his Porechye, and the ducks were of a different kind. There was even a girl called Masha, who had beautiful blue eyes and beautiful blonde hair – but it was not his Masha. For Russia is very, very large, and there are many villages named Porechye, with churches in groves and village ponds and beautiful girls called Masha, and the young man had not thought, before he left for the army, to ask how to get back. And so he buttoned his coat and hitched up his pack, and set off to find his Porechye, wherever it was.

The book, alas, did not say whether he ever found it. Perhaps he is still searching. I’m not sure why I’m even telling you this story, but I suspect it has something to do with roots, and where we’re from, and the globalized world, and how we sustain communities when the big world outside is rocked by great change. I suspect that this is where this blog is going in future.

Are we heading for a global recession? All of the signs are that the US economy is now in recession. The next thing we find out is how much knock-on damage this will cause in developing markets. Are the Asian markets sufficiently decoupled from the US economy for India-China trade to keep everyone here afloat? We’ll find out in the next few months.

This recession, which was sparked off by the US housing bubble and compounded by bankers’ recklessness, has been a long time coming. Steven Roach at Morgan Stanley was warning about it even before I took my MBA, so it’s not as if we haven’t seen it coming.

What has come up swiftly and without much warning, and may yet bite us hard, is the shortage of food staples – rice, especially. With a number of media sources warning of food riots and social instability as a consequence, this is likely to be tough all around.

The people who are going to suffer the most are the ones Niti is investigating at the bottom of the pyramid – and this is going to be very different from anything we’ve seen before.

I remember, as a child, seeing the pictures of the famine in Cambodia, and the appeals for public donations. I helped to organize a Blue Peter Bring & Buy sale at my primary school to contribute. Soon afterwards, the focus shifted to Ethiopia. Here I oversimplify horribly, of course, but in essence the famine victims here had to be essentially passive, waiting for external food aid to arrive.

In a lesser case of food shortage, citizens in the old Soviet Union had to opportunistically join queues as soon as they saw one forming, hoping it meant that a delivery of food or other scarce goods had just arrived – even when (famously) they often didn’t know what they were waiting for until they reached the head of the queue. This would just be luck of the draw.

What difference will it make when the poor, who are most desperately affected by food shortages, all have mobile phones? Will governments and aid agencies use it to inform people of deliveries, and in this way alleviate anxiety? Will be see spontaneous, SMS-directed “hunger mobs” flash-forming on the rumour of food availability (either delivery, storage or hoarding)? And what will it mean for us when instead of seeing appeals for donations on TV, the hungry millions are calling us for help personally?

Mao Zedong’s famous dictum says that “the guerrilla lives amongst the people like a fish lives in water”. Without the people, the guerrilla cannot live.

To survive, a large-scale guerrilla movement, or insurgency, must have a message, a purpose, that resonates to at least some degree with the feelings and beliefs of the population in which it exists. There must be enough people who are broadly sympathetic, in order to supply recruits, shelter, and material support.

What does it take to turn the people against the guerrilla?

The people of Afghanistan know what the Taliban are like. The Taliban used to rule the country, and their treatment of women, their bans on popular culture, their public executions, and so on, were not enough to make the people turn against them and stand up to them.

After the American-led invasion, the Taliban were forced to retreat to their heartlands, and the areas of Pakistan where they had deep support. And yet, people there are suddenly prepared to stand up to the Taliban, with force if need be.

What happened?

The Taliban destroyed mobile phone masts.

Claiming that the Pakistani military, and Western armed forces, were tracking militants by locating their phones, the Taliban opted to take down the network – and provoked an immediate and forceful backlash from the ordinary people, for whom the mobile phone has been a life-changing technology. Even the Taliban’s own fighters are angry.

According to Afghanistan’s Minister of Telecommunications:

“The people said please … repair the infrastructure and we will guarantee the security of the tower,” Sangin said. “We believe that if the Taliban continue with these kinds of activities the hatred will increase against them, and as a result we are awaiting a change in their policy.”

Of course, mobile phones are no panacea. We’ve seen plenty of examples of their use to enable terror and death. However, this example clearly shows how the mobile phone is successfully improving the lives of impoverished communities in developing countries, and bringing them the benefits of integration with the wider world.

A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.

Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now – especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.

Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:

• a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
• mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything

I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work – constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy – are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were – to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!

So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…