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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is free software finally gaining ground in the OS wars? Discuss Linux vs. NT and others in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y "Griffin & Sabine's" letters go digital The 21st Challenge No. 15 Results Martin Luther, meet Linus Torvalds Is there such a thing as a software monopoly? Let's Get This Straight - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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| - - - - - - - - - - Soweto is not online. Four hours later, as I'm sipping a glass of Castle lager in a Soweto shebeen, the words still ring in my head, incongruous and intriguing. The shebeen, a private drinking establishment run out of the living room of a house just down the block from Max's home, is the last stop on today's tour -- Max likes ensuring that tourist money gets poured directly into the local economy. The lukewarm beers, plucked from a cooler in the front hall by Max's assistant Adolph, are a welcome balm after the morning circuit. Soweto isn't unremittingly poor and bleak: Winnie Mandela, Nelson's estranged wife, lives in a nice neighborhood full of manicured green lawns and painstakingly kept homes. But there's no avoiding the brute contrast that Soweto offers to Sandton City. Over the course of the morning, we have been led by foot through a shantytown neighborhood that houses 70,000 people in square boxes made out of corrugated steel -- each barely larger than my hotel room's bathroom. We have been informed that there are 60 toilets serving this community, and 10 water taps. We've driven past the massive hostels built to house the millions of workers who came to Johannesburg to work in the South African gold mines. We've walked through the museum that has been made out of Nelson Mandela's tiny house, and have spent an hour or so contemplating the exhibit of photographs at the memorial for Hector Peterson, an 11-year-old boy shot to death by South African police during a 1976 student uprising. Such a tour has a sobering effect, and conversation in the shebeen is subdued at first. I stare at my beer, thinking that I've never seen a country where first and third world squeeze up next to each other so intimately. And despite Max's cybercafe enthusiasm, I'm still wondering what good the Internet really can do here. So I ask Adolph, what does he think about Max's plan? Without a hitch, he switches discourse in midstream -- clearly, the Internet has been discussed around this table before. With all the enthusiasm of a committed info-junkie, he trots out a well-worn digital age mantra: What the Net does best, says Adolph, is "access to information." Libraries in Soweto, Adolph notes, are scarce, and those that do exist don't have very many books. One Internet-connected computer, he observes, can lead you to everything that is on the Web, anywhere. It makes a lot of sense, he thinks, to make the Web available even in the most impoverished areas. At this point, an older black man who has been sitting and drinking at the shebeen since before we arrived and who has been jovially silent up until now, leans forward. "What's the difference," he asks Adolph, "between the Internet and the Web?" It's a good question, and by now I've fully succumbed to the surreal, ready to dismiss my nagging feeling that Internet mania down here on the other side of the world is just a new form of colonialism. Fueled by the warm glow of a few midday glasses of lager, it suddenly seems utterly normal that I'm discussing the intricacies of Net topology in a Sowetan shebeen -- in a room where the politics of insurrection and institutionalized racism used to be the hot topics of the day. I mention this seeming irony and Adolph shrugs. In Soweto, he says, people don't talk about politics as much as they used to. The Afrikaner-dominated National Party that once terrorized this country is just another splinter party these days. Now, the African National Congress sets the agenda. Soweto, in fact, is the only place in South Africa where the people I meet don't feel obligated to inform me with nearly their first breath that Johannesburg has the highest murder rate in the world, or that carjacking is a favorite national pastime. Sure, there's plenty of crime in Soweto, says Adolph -- and he's already pointed out to us a couple of Sowetan chop shops, where parts stripped from carjacked vehicles are lined up in vast rows. But, he says, "I feel safe here." Safe enough to want to talk more about the Internet than the necessity for armed rebellion, at the very least. But there is a political struggle in the telecom business that affects whether Soweto will get online. And, like virtually everything in the "new South Africa," issues of race, poverty and power are at the nub. After returning from Soweto to Sandton City, I have dinner with a white South African journalist named Arrie Rossouw. Rossouw, once chief political correspondent for Bield, South Africa's largest Afrikaans-language daily newspaper, is now the publisher of a news-oriented Web site that is a key part of the expansion plans of Naspers, one of South Africa's largest media conglomerates. I had met Rossouw at my conference, and we had agreed to have drinks. Now fueled by the heady pleasures of delicious South African red wine, I find myself becoming exuberant over the possibilities that new technologies might offer to impoverished millions of South Africans. I have reconsidered the question of whether a cybercafe makes sense in a place like Soweto. Perhaps this is precisely the kind of place where a cybercafe does make economic sense. Perhaps it is a perfect example of how a new technology can leapfrog a community across generations of technological deprivation. Arrie has already told me that South Africa has one of the healthiest markets in the entire world for cellular phones. Forget about those old, corroded copper telephone lines lying in the ground, with their degraded data capacity. The time has come for a cellular phone in every hovel! Wireless Internet access for the people! Not so fast, says Arrie. The South African telecom scene is completely dominated by Telkom, a mostly state-owned monopoly. Like the other white South Africans I've met at the conference, Arrie has few good things to say about Telkom. Even Telkom employees gripe about its bureaucratic infighting, the new management team put into place after the change in government and its sluggish approach to exploiting new business opportunities. Arrie thinks that the telecommunications environment in South Africa should be deregulated. If AT&T and British Telecom and MCI/Worldcom were let into the market, then, he argues, competition would breed progress. The deployment of new technologies would spread rapidly over all of South Africa's townships and vast rural areas. When I protest about the unlikelihood that poor South Africans would benefit from competition between the likes of BT and AT&T, suggesting that such corporations would just be fighting over the right to sell services to the top 1 percent of the country, Arrie demurs. According to Arrie, the two major cellular phone franchises in South Africa basically give away cell phones to anyone who wants one. Profit is made from phone calls, not from hardware sales. And people can pay for their phone calls, even on a cellular phone, with cheap phone cards that can be slid through a slot in the phone itself. The technology cuts across class lines, says Arrie. "You'd be surprised at how easily someone can find 10 rand [about 2 dollars] to make a few phone calls," he says. The Mandela government sees the situation differently. As Jay Naidoo, minister of telecommunications, wrote in an article published in a local magazine, "It has become fashionable in certain circles to criticize the monopoly in voice telephony [given] to Telkom. This premise ignores the historical context in the most developed Western capitalist countries that it was precisely this monopoly given to telecommunications companies that has guaranteed universal services in these countries ... we have a mandate from the vast majority of the poorest of the poor to deliver a better quality of life to them. If this does not satisfy the affluent minority who happily sip their cappuccinos as they surf the Internet in their cozy cybercafes, we will make no apology for that." I spent my last afternoon in South Africa in just such a cozy cybercafe, in Pretoria, the seat of government. Traditionally an Afrikaner bastion, Pretoria is, so far, relatively immune to the urban decay that has swept over Johannesburg in the past decade. With peaceful streets lined by a profusion of purple-blooming jacaranda trees, Pretoria reeks of power and privilege. Arrie and a friend of his, Jan, who runs a Web site called Pretoria Online, have taken me here so I can check my Yahoo mail. At first, it is Naidoo's words that ring in my head here, rather than Max's. It's hard to visit Pretoria and not think about how the few once utterly dominated the many in South Africa on the basis of skin color. The color line in the cybercafe is dramatic: On one side, near the bar, a group of black South Africans watch a rugby game on television. When the game is over, they leave, all at once. On the other side of the room, at the computers, white South Africans are gazing at monitors and fiddling with mice. It all seems very black and white. If the Net really is just a plaything for rich whites, then surely universal service -- getting phone lines to everyone -- should be the primary goal in a country where there are only 5 million telephone lines for 40 million people. Why let a bunch of self-interested multinationals have free rein? But maybe it's not that simple. Yes, Telkom has a mandate from the government to double the number of phone lines in South Africa in the next five years. Naidoo is also on record as stating that Internet access is a key technology for South Africa. But what's to ensure that Telkom will succeed without the incentive of true competition? And who knows whether physical phone lines are actually the right answer for spreading phone and Internet access? After all, Max and Adolph both have cellular phones, as does nearly everyone else, black or white, who I've encountered in my brief visit. There are, it seems, ways in which new technologies can cut across class lines and create new markets even in impoverished sectors of society, providing "access to information" to the data-deprived. It isn't just the affluent minority -- or visiting tourists -- who hunger for their e-mail. Adolph loves e-mail -- he told me he frequently gets messages, care of Max, from people he has led through the streets of Soweto. Perhaps it makes him feel connected to a world that includes more than the shantytowns that stretch for miles just a few blocks away from Max's home. I hope Max gets his modem replaced, and that some day soon his cybercafe is up and running. No matter whether the drink of choice there is a cozy cappuccino or home-brewed Sowetan beer. In the post-apartheid era, Soweto is very much a part of this world, and the Internet can only bring it closer.
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