A burgeoning Baghdad subculture of computer gamers? Who knew? Not most Americans, according to Samaraie. “They think they are the only civilized nation on earth,” he says. “I play chess on the Internet, and when I tell them I’m in Iraq, they’re like, ‘Amazing. We didn’t know Iraq had computers.’ "
Oh, but it does. And Iraq, at once liberated and occupied, is just a dramatic example of the way information technology is bringing hope and excitement–as well as anger and resentment–to young people in parts of the world that seemed to have missed the information revolution. In Rio and Cairo, Delhi and Dakar, kids are making the most of whatever innovations they can get their hands on. They’ve created a swashbuckling culture built on pirated software, games and movies played on computers cobbled together from pieces bought in the bazaar. And they aren’t biding their time waiting for the next big thing. They’re using last year’s technology to meet their needs today. “For the first time, kids who grow up in remote areas, even with poor connections and old technology… have the potential to see and learn and speak –and share information with people in faraway places,” says Teresa Peters, one of the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders for Tomorrow. “They’re going to have a world view that no generation before them has ever been able to have.”
Even in stable democracies, unfettered technology can be a double-edged sword: it has the power to educate and enlighten, as well as to incite and mislead. In places ravaged by poverty, war, oppression, tyranny and fanaticism, the duality is only magnified. Some of technology’s most frightening political and religious uses in the developing world are well known. The 9/11 hijackers trained using flight-simulation games on home computers. Kashmiri separatists use Internet chat rooms to enlist Indian Muslims in their cause. In Lebanon, Hizbullah has even produced a videogame of its own, called SpecialForce, to romanticize its fight against Israel. In the training phase the “recruit” shoots cutouts of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other members of his government.
The social and political impact of the developing world’s spontaneously adapted technologies is unpredictable. The video CD, rarely seen in the United States, has become the poor man’s DVD, used both to spread Western culture and to fight it. A pirated copy of “Terminator 3” costs less than $2 to buy and about 25 cents to rent in many countries. “I’ve been watching pirated CDs since 1997,” says Wissam Mohamed, 26, who runs a computer shop in the teeming electronics souk on Baghdad’s Industry Street. “We get them really quickly. You know the second ‘Lord of the Rings’? Two weeks after it came out, we had it here–and translated into Arabic.”
The VCD, so cheap and easy to burn on a home computer, is also the medium of choice among revolutionary firebrands. From street-corner vendors near mosques all over the Islamic world, you can buy VCDs of Osama bin Laden’s TV appearances, replays of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and gruesome footage of atrocities supposedly carried out against good Muslims by evil Westerners. There’s no good way to monitor such VCDs, and no way to stop them. Even the Web can’t make that claim.
Other media are easier for leaders to control. Saddam Hussein, like many dictators, tried for years to isolate his subjects from the Internet and satellite television. No one was allowed Internet access in any form until the very late 1990s, and satellite dishes were banned until, oh, about April 9, 2003. Then, when the statue of Saddam was toppled (live, on satellite), dishes suddenly started sprouting like aluminum mushrooms all over Baghdad’s rooftops–and banners advertising Internet cafes dangle from storefronts all over the city.
Such information avalanches touch everyone. Adults in traditional societies often try to resist IT, but kids quickly accept the rush of technology. In the Cairo slum of Mansheyet Naser recently, elementary-school children and teenagers were crowded into a sweltering basement room that billed itself as the Phantom Video Games Club. All it had to offer was a battered Sony PlayStation, but the kids swarmed around it. “The minute I sit down I forget even my mother’s name,” says 17-year-old Mahmoud. “It’s like taking a drug that kills your worries and gives you the power to do things you can’t do in real life, like flying, hitting, killing whom you hate.”
Immersion in violent, graphic fantasies worries some who are fighting to span the technology gap between developing societies and the West. “Games that are designed to capture the imagination of children in the United States aren’t necessarily welcome in other parts of the world,” says Peters, of the World Economic Forum. Yet in places like Morro do Timbau, a hillside favela in one of Rio’s most notorious cocaine corridors, even the bloodiest animation looks benign next to reality. “These kids are much more likely to grow up with a gun than a mouse in their hand,” says Wladimir Aguiar, a communications engineer who set up an arcade in the slum last May. The favorite game among the kids there is a homegrown product: terrorists and cops battle each other in an uncanny digital reproduction of the favelas themselves. “Thirty kids playing computer games is 30 fewer kids in the hands of drug traffickers,” argues Aguiar. “Some kids came here barely knowing how to read. In no time they know how to use the mouse and even read some rudimentary English.” As they battle through the digital maze, there’s no telling where the information revolution will take them next.
