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Tuesday 7 August 2012

It is in the developing world where the limitations of TED’s techno-humanitarian mentality are most pronounced. In TED world, problems of aid and development are no longer seen as problems of weak and corrupt institutions; they are recast as problems of inadequate connectivity or an insufficiency of gadgets. According to the Khannas, “centuries of colonialism and decades of aid haven’t lifted Africa’s fortunes the way technology can.” Hence the latest urge to bombard Africa with tablets and Kindles—even when an average African kid would find it impossible to repair a damaged Kindle. And the gadgets do drop from the sky—Nicholas Negroponte, having spectacularly failed in his One Laptop Per Child quest, now wants to drop his own tablets from helicopters, which would make it harder for the African savages to say “no” to MIT’s (and TED’s) civilization. This is la mission civilatrice 2.0. It is hardly surprising that the Khannas’ deep admiration of Singapore’s technocratic authoritarianism is well-received by the TEDdies—after all, they prefer to fix broken countries as if they are broken start-ups. That solving any of their favorite global problems would require political solutions—if only to ensure that nobody’s rights and interests are violated or overlooked in the process— is not something that the TED elite, with its aversion to conventional instruments of power and its inebriated can-do attitude, likes to hear. Politics slows things down; but technology speeds things up. TED’s techno-humanitarians—that brigade of what the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole has dubbed “The White Savior Industrial Complex”—would defer to China’s “technocrats with term limits” and have them bulldoze entire villages in order to build another Foxconn plant rather than bother with the slow progress of political reform. The Khannas are on to something when they write that “the Hybrid Age … might also become a Pax Technologica,” but there are pitifully few reasons to believe that a Pax Technologica would do much good for the world. Techno-humanitarianism is much more techno than humanitarian. The Naked and the TED

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