Virtual Hemispheres: The political economy of development in the global network economy

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately, about cloud computing. Or rather about how cloud computing may foster development in developing parts of the world like Africa. Some of this thinking has been prompted by ambitious research into the subject being carried out by organizations with which I am affiliated. But a good deal of it emanates from my own close proximity to the “cloud” as a social phenomenon.

You see, I spend most of waking hours fine-tuning our model that hopes to give all buyers of medicine the option to query remote databases for critical information on their purchases using a basic mobile phone, in order to avoid dangerous imitations.

Centralisation of computing resources turn out to be a firm prerequisite for this kind of technology-driven social venture to be practicable at all. Connectivity, “social software”, and tele-presence are the other principles required to validate the model as a viable path to the resolution of the knock-off medicines crisis. So you see I actually need a cloud to do my work, and to do it well.

What I have said before should be enough for now to define the crucial characteristics of clouds, and I don’t intend to get bogged down in any definitional goo. Assume for the purposes of the upcoming discussion that any centralized set of resources in our global information ecosystem – Google’s Palo Alto farm, Amazon’s shiny fortress, the CIA central database, etc etc – which allows folks with rather simple tools to benefit from complexity they would otherwise be unable to manage and harness on their own, while sharing the costs of said complexity with others of similar standing or predicament.

Tolerating my description above allows us to move on to some very interesting insights about the coming and ongoing reordering of the “political economy of the new cyberspace”.

In true cloud fashion, our mPedigree model relies on the centralized resources of giant telecom companies in Africa and India, the intermediating support of less massive but equally impressive resource banks of global technology providers, and very soon the distributed infrastructure of another equally gargantuan tech corp. Much of the “massively parallel processing” goes on elsewhere other than in our humble regional backyard. Our measly gadgets in Ghana, and the even more scrawny devices of our end-users, are to these bastions as meteorites are to stars in their prime.

And yet no one could sanely mumble “digital divide” in this context.

And why not? Very simply because the distribution of power and the alignments of the benefits of power are of such a nature as to inspire a new level of thinking about what we mean by “inequity” or “inequality” in the emerging global network economy.

I prefer to refer to the situation by the term, “Virtual Hemispheres”. This is in acknowledgment of, and to concede, the point that when you look hard enough certain geographical realities persist. When IBM wanted to build its first cloud hosting center in Africa, it chose, very boringly, South Africa, not Rwanda, Kenya or Ghana.

Local dynamics can also be thoroughly and unpredictably destabilizing than new lightweight configurations can handle. For many years, internet cafes have acted as a bulwark against poor broadband policies, while allowing the urban poor access to global information resources. Yet, when the electricity corporation of Ghana begun compelling most of its clients to adopt its prepaid meter billing system, many of them found out that they could not provide air-conditioning for the comfort of their clients. Anecdotally, this has in no small measure contributed to declining patronage and growing equipment malfunctions. Eventually it shall touch the bottom-line of these smalltime gateways to the cloud. So granted, building castles on clouds should not become the pastime of the bored. We are still talking about pushing technology in some of the most deprived localities of the world; it is not for the fainthearted.

But there is a sense too in which a geographical lens, along with the attendant prisms of old diplomatic sways, would be massively distorting when appreciating a world in which an African innovator in Nigeria can bypass the virtual absence of grid power by throwing in her lot with enthusiastic mediators in Europe, and also because said mediators are probably more likely to be in Slovenia than in Germany.

Centers of productivity in the emergent global network economy may tend towards multi-polarity in a manner inconsistent with the paths of pluralism we are more familiar with in pre-cloud political economy, even while producing new axes of power distribution.

Look at it carefully; an mPedigree would not necessarily emerge in every territorial context. There are institutional issues to take into consideration, matters of competence across civil society, major market actors, and the technocracy, in that prospective African country, and as sure as night follows day, not every African state will ultimately make the cut.

In much the same vein, not every Rwanda will live up to its full promise. The power of the cloud will not hold against all the forces of anti-innovation and retrogression. These are matters we must understand deeply.

That is why I am beginning this series of posts in order to delve more deeply into the subject from as many angles as I can.