[AfrICANN-discuss] Thought leaders for the Internet era.

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

 The List, 2020 Edition
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/29/the_list_2020_edition?page=0,1
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/29/the_list_2020_edition?page=0,1>Thought
leaders for the Internet era. BY EVGENY MOROZOV | DECEMBER
2009<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issues/176/contents/>

The world’s next great thinkers may well be just as brilliant as the ones
on this list<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers>,
but they’re likely to come to our notice in very different ways. Take
William Kamkwamba, a 22-year-old from Malawi who already exemplifies a new
generation of global leaders. A few years ago, he came upon an illustration
of a windmill in an old textbook in a language (English) he barely
understood and built one for his family so their house could have
electricity. Soon he was thinking of ways to mass-produce his invention for
distribution as ready-made kits.

Twenty years ago, Kamkwamba’s story might have stayed local. But instead he
had the fortune of colliding with today’s Web-enabled global structure of
intellectual intermediaries. In 2006, an innovation-focused blog called
Hacktivate stumbled upon a write-up about Kamkwamba’s windmill in a Malawian
newspaper. It took only a few months for a network of global thinkers and
entrepreneurs calledTED <http://www.ted.com/> (full disclosure: I am a TED
fellow) to pick up the story. In 2007, Kamkwamba spoke at a TED conference
in Tanzania<http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_windmill.html>,
where he mingled with Bono and Jane Goodall, and in 2009 he cowrote a
best-selling book about his experience called *The Boy Who Harnessed the
Wind<http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Harnessed-Wind-Electricity/dp/0061730327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259519131&sr=8-1>
*.

Will Kamkwamba be the next Sergey Brin? We don’t know yet. But his story
suggests just how dramatically the Internet era has transformed the very
process of becoming a global thinker -- that is, the process of learning to
get smart and heard at the same time -- and how much those changes are for
the better.

In the old, pre-Internet model, aspiring thought leaders and idea
entrepreneurs had to establish residence either in one of the big cultural
metropolises or, failing that, a college town with a decent library. Now,
however, the very prospect of living in an “intellectual metropolis” has
become nearly obsolete. As Harper’s Bill Wasik pointed out recently, “[The
Internet is] a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative
energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York.” As long as
you pay your Internet bill, you might as well live in Skjolden, Norway, or
in a hut next to Walden Pond.

The Internet is also democratizing education, making overspecialized and
prohibitively expensive graduate schools ever harder to justify. With the
Kindle, printable e-books, and now potentially Google’s scanned world
library, the price of books is rapidly approaching zero. Just as the
invention of the printing press allowed books to be mass-produced for the
first time, making them readily available for the middle class, the new
economics of the Web make books freely available to anyone with access to a
computer. And English, the lingua franca of today’s intellectual world, is
easier and cheaper than ever to learn, with millions of potential tutors
just a Skype call away.

Many leading American universities are also publishing content from their
best professors online. Now anyone can watch historian Donald Kagan’s
lectures about ancient Greece on Yale University’s Web
site<http://www.yale.edu/> or
match wits with Paul Krugman’s old economics exams at mit.edu. Harvard
University philosopher Michael Sandel is releasing online video lectures of
his oversubscribed course on justice, supplementing them with online
discussion guides. A cursory look at peer-to-peer networks like Demonoid or
even the infamous Pirate Bay <http://thepiratebay.org/> -- most commonly
used for file-sharing -- reveals that much of the content swapped on them is
educational, from 1970s BBC documentaries to the eclectic courses produced
by the Teaching Company. Judging by the comments on the file-sharing sites,
many of their customers are in the developing world.

The world’s next crop of thought leaders will also have superior tools of
transmission at their fingertips. Getting your piece on the op-ed page of
the *New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/>* or an essay into the *New
York Review of Books <http://www.nybooks.com/>* is no longer the only way to
credential yourself as a serious thinker. Starting your own blog,
contributing to a site like the *Huffington
Post*<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/> or
the *Daily Beast* <http://www.thedailybeast.com/>, writing a Web column for
a newspaper, or penning an occasional guest post somewhere online can help
to get your name out there much more quickly and, perhaps, even more
effectively.

And once you’re out there -- even if, like William Kamkwamba, you don’t have
access to the Internet yourself -- the Internet has sprouted a number of
influential intermediaries, aggregators, and bloggers who can take you the
next step. TED -- and its growing collection of video talks, distributed to
legions of iTunes fans around the world—is just one example. Another is
TED’s competitor PopTech <http://www.poptech.org/> and its Social Innovation
Fellows program.

This revolution in access to knowledge means that in 10 to 15 years, the
global landscape of ideas will look completely different. It will no longer
be centralized in the West because schooling in everything from the classics
to windmill construction to modern art will be available to people in any
country without leaving home. The ability to work from anywhere also makes
the life of the mind a good deal cheaper. The new generation of public
intellectuals, though still cosmopolitan in outlook, will be much more
firmly embedded in their own locales, without the inferiority complex of old
about their Western peers; in other words, expect more Pankaj Mishra than
V.S. Naipaul.

Their debates will also be entirely different. A decade from now, instead of
factions of Western (or at least Western-trained) thinkers arguing it out on
the op-ed pages of the *Financial Times* or the lounges of Davos, we may
well see this new generation of intellectuals from the developing world,
home-educated but globally minded, speaking publicly and forcefully from
blogs, columns, and their own intellectual reviews. The debate on climate
change would no longer be dominated by a Danish economist fighting a former
U.S. vice president, but instead might feature a Chinese environmental
blogger and a promising Indian scientist.

The Internet may not turn us into a global village, but a global
intellectual salon it already is.
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Flickr user Erik (HASH) Hersman under a Creative Commons license


Evgeny Morozov is Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University.
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