I’ll have more to say about this topic, I’m sure. There are many ways to approach the future, from despair to cynicism to optimism to outright obliviousness, and I admire those who are willing to look it in the eye and really imagine what lies ahead with as much realism as the human mind can muster. One of those who I believe does is Vinay Gupta, and his current collaborative book project, The Future We Deserve, is in the final days of a Kickstarter funding run. I’m a backer, and to encourage additional support for the book, I’m blogging the piece below, written by Woody Evans, as part of the project’s Blogathon. My comments follow.
Credibility & Calories: A Perspective on Information
(Final draft pending any revelations) (The FWD)
by Woody EvansInformation doesn’t want anything, but people do. People want things like sex and freedom and control and food and community and property.
Information isn’t a kind of perfect thing, it’s not an ideal, it’s not even a value. It’s a tool. And being a tool doesn’t make information good.
Tools are generally considered good if they’re useful. Hammers are used to build houses. And we all know that good tools can be used for bad things.
Information is not essentially good, though it is an essential good. That is to say, it’s a commodity that has value, can be traded, and that can also lose value and degrade over time.
Thought experiment: think of the most valuable discrete item of information you know. How do you assign its particular value relative to other things you know? Is it the most valuable to you personally, to your community, or to the world system as a whole? Maybe you have to use a utilitarian frame to give it value (it’s valuable because it can serve the most number of people the best); maybe you have a particular religious frame (it’s valuable because when someone knows it, that person is enlightened or saved); maybe it’s valuable to you because it can make you a lot of money (or make a poor country rich).
Would it be valuable to the watermelon farmers and field hands near Mize, Mississippi? The land there is woods and small farms, piney, built on loam and clay, and full of fierce folks who spend a lot of time in church. They drink, fuss and fight, try to get degrees at the community college.
If the most valuable information in the world is a simple solar hack (filling plastic bottles with whatever water you’ve got, leaving them in the sun for a full day to make them safe to drink, say), how valuable is it to my rural Mississippi cousins? They have plentiful well water, the Okatoma river easily at hand, and over 50 inches of rainfall per year.
If the most valuable information in the world is a prayer, you’d get them more interested—but it better be a Baptist prayer. You see what I mean. Information is not objectively valuable.
To talk about the information needs of the developing world, we need to talk about what information is and what it is not.
Information is not:
- Salvific.
- More valuable than gauze, iodine, or syringes.
- The key to a floating world of equality or purity or dignity.
So what is information, at its best, for the world’s poor?
Here’s the answer: information is food and health. Anything beyond that, until the basics get ironed out, is lagniappe. We get the information to the people so that they can sustainably clothe, feed, and heal themselves. Your IT initiatives for the burgeoning sub-Saharan mobile “market”? Let it focus on these basics. Dignity, open government, capital ventures—these things may follow only if there’s a well-laid cornerstone to build from.
People need to eat, and when your kid lacks something basic you’ll do a hell of a lot that you never thought you would to get her what she needs. Nothing is more valuable than the bit of information that leads me to food to fill her belly with.
Calories build the credibility of the information technologist.
We build beyond the basics when the luxury presents itself.
Information is only as valuable as the context and the people who use it. Evans’ essay caught my eye among the submissions because of some other reading I’ve been doing about aid work in both developing countries and disaster zones at Tales from the Hood. The aid worker who writes it has strong opinions about the right and wrong way to really help people in desperate situations, and takes particular offense at aid (though well-meaning) that starts from an end of its own and works backward to justify itself. What is missing in such a case is the question, “What do you need?” to those one is trying to help. His imaginative vision of AidMart offers one potential ideal for the future.
I’m not a strict believer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it makes intuitive sense to me that the kind of self-actualization required for “dignity, open government, capital ventures,” the cornerstones of functional society, can’t be established or maintained well without the physical and basic emotional needs of people being met. And though Evans and the unnamed author of Tales from the Hood are both talking more specifically about the developing world, it’s just as sound a principle here in the “First World” as our own sense of security continues to erode. The realities of Katrina, financial collapse, the Gulf spill and nearly 10% unemployment mean that the choices of which level gets satisfied first are plenty real to millions of people in one of the richest countries on Earth.
So the questions I ask myself, are “What now? What information do I have that could be useful, and how can I get it to those who can use it?” I hope this post is worthy as a first answer to that question. If you’re interested in contributing or getting more information about the book, just click the handy widget.
And read Vinay’s summary of the project and what we’re trying to accomplish. How can your voice be part of the conversation?