beaming signals through the atmosphere, allows me to check weather reports and traffic cams, chat to my grandmother in Sydney, broadcast live to a television studio and pay my bills. Smartphones are getting so clever and human-responsive that they will soon be our personal dashboard, telling us how much exercise we do, monitoring our calorie and vitamin intake, our sleep pattern, heart rate, stress levels, cholesterol and so on. Further into the Anthropocene, some researchers believe, we will increasingly think of our smartphone as a partner – even in emotional terms.1
In East Africa, I saw how mobile money services, such as M-Pesa, are enabling phone users to transfer cash and pay for goods with the speed and convenience of an SMS text message.2 A customer pays cash to his local corner-shop agent, who then tops up his mobile money account using a special kind of secure SMS. He can then transfer money to another person or pay for something by sending a text to the recipient’s mobile phone account, which transfers the money straightaway. Even people without mobile money accounts can receive payments in the form of a text code, which can be exchanged for cash by their local corner-shop agent. For the millions of Africans who don’t meet the criteria for a bank account, or who live too far from a branch, mobile money presents an opportunity to save securely for the first time. Kenya’s M-Pesa is now used by over two-thirds of the adult population (more than 17 million people) to pay for everything from school fees to grocery and utility bills, taxi fares to airline tickets. It allows people in remote, rural areas to trade their wares in markets thousands of kilometres away, urban migrants to send money rapidly to their families in their home village, and for the government and aid agencies to distribute timely emergency cash to starving people living in slums.
Mobile phones aren’t just bringing access to money, though. A Nepali peasant with a smartphone on Google, now has more access to information than the president of the United States did fifteen years ago.3 In the Philippines most communications between the government and citizens take place by SMS texting. In Malaysia, flood warnings are sent by text message, and across the world, from quake-struck Haiti to the famines of East Africa, evacuations and relief for natural disasters are coordinated by SMS. In India, tribal groups are using mobile phones for ‘citizen journalism’, spreading information and giving voice to disenfranchised groups.
During the Arab Spring of 2011, citizens organised themselves to fight oppressive regimes using mobile phones, even bypassing government Internet and network clampdowns by accessing social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook through apps and proxy servers. Across Africa, voting in national elections with a smartphone can cut election fraud by 60%.4 In Afghanistan, the police receive their government salaries through mobile phone banking because it cuts down on fraud. Into the Anthropocene, mobile phones could even start to democratise markets. Enterprising individuals using crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter have a way to access markets that have been the exclusive domain of big corporations since the days of the East India Company.
It’s no wonder that the way our species communicates globally has become fundamentally different in the Anthropocene. In 2012, the UN telecoms agency predicted that by 2014 cellphones will outnumber people on this planet, with 70% of new phone subscriptions coming from the developing world; by 2017, there will be over 10 billion networked mobile devices around the world, carrying 130 exabytes of data a year. Up until 2003, humans had created 5 billion gigabytes of digital information. In 2010, the same amount of information was created every two days; by 2013, it was every ten minutes. By 2020, 5 billion people are expected to have access to the Internet via mobile devices, an extent of connectivity that governments and development organisations couldn’t have dreamed of just twenty years ago.5
This is made up of users in the poor world becoming part of the collective human conversation, where they can have influence beyond the restrictions of wealth, geography, caste, gender or other ways people have traditionally been stifled. The human species in the Anthropocene is a changed, networked animal. With this technology we have exceeded the limitations not just of our human body but of our hive – we’ve become a global community. The secret of our enormous planetary influence is our cooperation as a species, and our technological exploitation of our atmosphere-based communications system takes this cooperation to a new level. It is an accelerator of humanity’s impact, and as such can be used to increase our destructive traits, or it could prove our salvation: a tool that enables development and human progress, showing us in real time how we are affecting other humans and the rest of the biosphere.
Mahabir well understood the opportunities that communications technology could bring to remote villages when he set about transforming Nangi.
At the end of a line of regular-looking computer hardware, I spot something a little different – a couple of wooden boxes housing circuit boards. ‘Ah, these are the first computers that I built with recycled parts donated from old computers, because we couldn’t afford new ones,’ Mahabir explains. In 1997, Australian students donated the four adjacent computers, and the rest were sent over subsequent years by people in the US and Europe. Without a telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realised that to bring twenty-first-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to be imaginative. In 2001, he wrote to a BBC World Service radio show asking for help in using the recently developed home Wi-Fi technology to connect his village to the Internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.
Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to destroy it. By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station using television antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak – and from there sent the signal more than twenty kilometres away to Pokhara which had a cable-optic connection to the capital Kathmandu. Nangi was on the Internet.
‘I used a home Wi-Fi kit from America that was recommended for use within a radius of four metres,’ he says. ‘I emailed the company and told them that I had done twenty-two kilometres with it – I was hoping they might donate some equipment, but they didn’t believe what I told them.’
One of the advantages of Wi-Fi is that it doesn’t require costly and resource-intensive infrastructure – mile upon mile of cables and copper wires do not have to be laid over complicated terrain. Development in the Anthropocene need not be as dirty and as invasive of the natural world as it has been to date. More than forty other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now been networked and connected to the Internet by Mahabir and his stream of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline. ‘The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] phones,’ he says. ‘And they can talk for free within the village network using the local VoIP system.’ I realise that Mahabir and the kids have been using VoIP for longer than me. Having always had access to a landline phone, I’ve only started using VoIP – Skype – within the past couple of years to make cheaper overseas calls, whereas the village adopted the technology a decade ago.
Teachers are a rare commodity in this part of the world, but the children are no longer being taught by barely literate soldiers. The Wi-Fi network means that a teacher, based here or even in Kathmandu, can teach classes across many villages, face to face with students via the monitors, answer questions and receive and mark homework. Mahabir’s ‘tele-teaching’ network also allows the few good teachers in the region to train others. He is also developing an e-library of educational resources in Nepali that will be free to use, and working with the One-Laptop-One-Child organisation, which he hopes will provide laptops to children in the region. Thanks to Mahabir’s work, a generation of children that would otherwise miss out on an education until the country gets around to training some teachers, instead have unprecedented opportunities to learn and discover a world beyond the dreams of their parents – it’s a good definition of development.
But
