The New Digital Age

by Jared Cohen

  Technology will help protect property rights, safeguarding virtual records of real assets so that those assets can be quickly reclaimed when stability returns. Investors are not likely to put their money into a country where they feel insecure about the safety and ownership of their property. In post-invasion Iraq, three commissions were created to allow local people and returning exiles to reclaim or receive compensation for property seized during Saddam Hussein’s regime. A parallel authority was set up to resolve disputes. These were important steps in the reconstruction of Iraq, serving as a moderating factor to the exploitation of post-conflict instability and instances of claiming property by force. But despite their good intentions (more than 160,000 claims were received by 2011), these commissions were hampered by certain bureaucratic restrictions that trapped many claims in complicated litigation. In the future, states will learn from this Iraqi model that a more transparent and secure form of protection for property rights can forestall such hassles in the event of conflict. By creating online cadastral systems (i.e., online records systems of land values and boundaries) with mobile-enabled mapping software, governments will make it possible for citizens to visualize all public and private land and even submit minor disputes, like a fence boundary, to a sanctioned online arbiter.

  In the future, people won’t just back up their data; they’ll back up their government. In the emerging reconstruction prototype, virtual institutions will exist in parallel with their physical counterparts and serve as a backup in times of need. Instead of having a physical building for a ministry, where all records are kept and services rendered, that information will be digitized and stored in the cloud, and many government functions will be conducted on online platforms. If a tsunami destroys a city, all ministries will continue to function with some competence virtually while they are reconstituted physically.

  Virtual institutions will allow new or shell-shocked governments to maintain much of their effectiveness in the delivery of services, as well as keep those governments an integral part of all reconstruction efforts. Virtual institutions won’t be able to do everything that they might otherwise do, but they will be of enormous help. The department of social services, charged with allocating shelter, still needs physical outposts to interact with the population, but with more data it will be able to allocate beds efficiently and keep track of the resources available, among other things. A virtual military can’t instill the rule of law, but it can ensure that the military and police are paid, which will assuage some fears. While governments will still be somewhat wary of entrusting their data to cloud providers, the peace of mind that backed-up institutions ensure will still be enough to justify their creation.

  These institutions will offer a safety net for the population too, guaranteeing that records are preserved, employers can pay salaries, and databases of citizens both in the country and in the diaspora will be maintained. All of this will accelerate local ownership of the reconstruction process and help limit the waste and corruption that typically follow a disaster or conflict. Governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure, but virtual institutions will survive.

  Governments in exile will be capable of functioning far differently from the Polish, Belgian and French governments that were forced to operate from London during World War II. Given how well virtual institutions will function, future governments will operate remotely with a level of efficiency and reach that is unprecedented. This will be a move born of necessity, because of either a natural disaster or something more prolonged, like civil war. Imagine if Mogadishu suddenly became inoperably hostile for the beleaguered Somali government, perhaps because al-Shabaab insurgents captured the city or because clan warfare rendered the environment uninhabitable. With virtual institutions in place, government officials could relocate temporarily, inside or outside the country, and retain some semblance of control over the civil administration of the state. At a minimum, they could maintain a level of credibility with the population by arranging for salaries to be paid, coordinating with aid organizations and foreign donors, and communicating with the public in a transparent manner. Of course, virtual governance done remotely would never be anything but a last resort (surely, the distance would alter how accountable and credible the government would appear to its citizens), and certain preconditions must be in place for such a system to work, including fast, reliable and secure networks; sophisticated platforms; and a fully connected population. No state would be ready to do this today—Somalia least of all—but if countries can begin building such systems now, they will be ready when they are needed.

  The potential for remote virtual governance might well affect political exiles. Whereas public figures living outside their homelands once had to rely on back channels to stay connected—the Ayatollah Khomeini famously relied on audiocassette tapes recorded in Paris and smuggled into Iran to spread his message in the 1970s—there are a range of faster, safer and more effective alternatives today. In the future, political exiles will have the ability to form powerful and competent virtual institutions, and thus entire shadow governments, that could interact with and meet the needs of the population at home.

  It’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. Thanks to connectivity, exiles will be far less estranged from the population than their predecessors. Acutely attuned to the trends and moods at home, they’ll be able to expand their reach and influence among the population with targeted messaging on simple, popular devices and platforms. Exile leaders won’t need to be concentrated in one place to form a party or movement; the differences between them that matter will be ideological, not geographic. And when these exiles have a coherent platform and vision for the country, they’ll be able to transmit their plans to the population at home without ever stepping foot inside the country, quickly, securely and in so many million copies that the official government will be unable to stop the flow.

  To buttress their campaign for public support, exiles will use the virtual institutions they control to win the hearts and minds of the population. Imagine a shadow government that pays and deploys an in-country security force comprising various foreign nationals to protect community strongholds, while providing e-health benefits from Paris (independent hospital administrations, coordinating free vaccination campaigns, extending virtual health-insurance plans, coordinating a network of remote doctors available for diagnostic work) and running online schools and universities from London. This government-in-exile could elect its own parliament, with campaigns and voting taking place entirely online, members drawn from several countries and sessions conducted over live-streaming video channels that can be watched by millions around the world. Even the semblance of a functioning shadow government might be enough to sufficiently sway the population at home to transfer their support from the official government to the one built and operated remotely by the exiles.

  The remaining distinguishing feature of a reconstruction prototype will be close engagement with the diaspora communities. Governments-in-exile often draw from the intellectuals in the diaspora, but the role of external communities will not only be political or financial (in the form of remittances). Connectivity means that these groups will be able to work more closely together on a much wider range of issues. The insight and depth of knowledge relevant to reconstruction possessed by members of diaspora communities is invaluable, so with greater access to communication technologies, postcrisis societies will be able to tap into those reserves of human capital in a significant way. We’ve already seen signs of this in some of the world’s recent crises. The Somali diaspora actively used tools like Google Map Maker to identify areas affected by the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa, using their local knowledge and connections to compile more accurate reports than outside actors could.

  In the future, we will see the creation of diaspora reserve corps, with those living abroad organized by trade: doctors, police officers, construction workers, teachers and so on. States will have an incentive to organize their dias
pora communities—assuming those communities are not all political exiles hostile to the state—so that they know who possesses skills that might be required in a country’s time of need.

  Today, several diaspora communities are far more successful than the population living back home (this includes the Iranian, Cuban and Lebanese diasporas, but also smaller groups like the Hmong and Somalis). But only portions of these communities are still connected to their native lands; many have, by choice or as a consequence of time, embraced their adoptive countries for the opportunities, security or quality of life they provide. As connectivity spreads, the gap between diaspora and home communities will shrink, as communication technologies and social media strengthen the bonds of culture, language and perspective that connect these distant groups. And those who leave their country as part of a brain drain will be leaving countries far more connected than today, even if those places are poor, autocratic or short on opportunities. Members of the diaspora, then, will be able to create a knowledge economy in exile that leverages the strong educational institutions, networks and resources of developed countries and channels them back constructively into their home countries.

  Opportunism and Exploitation

  In the aftermath of every major conflict or natural disaster, new actors flood the space: aid workers, journalists, U.N. officials, consultants, businessmen, speculators and tourists. Some come to offer their services, while others are hoping to exploit the crisis environment for political or economic gain. Many do both, and rather effectively so.3

  Even those who don’t seek financial gain have reasons beyond altruism to get involved. A postcrisis country is a great proving ground for nascent NGOs, and a platform for established nonprofit organizations to demonstrate their value to their donors. This rash of new participants—altruists and opportunists alike—can do great good, and tremendous damage. The challenge for reconstruction planners in the future will be finding ways to balance the interests and actions of all these people and groups in a productive manner.

  Generally speaking, connectivity encourages and enables altruistic behavior. People have more insight and visibility into the suffering of others, and they have more opportunities to do something about it. Some scoff at the rise of “slacktivism”—slacker activism, or engaging in social activism with little or no effort—but transnational, forward-thinking organizations like Kiva, Kickstarter and Samasource represent a vision of our connected future. Kiva and Kickstarter are both crowd-funding platforms (Kiva focuses on micro-finance, while Kickstarter focuses mostly on creative pursuits), and Samasource outsources “micro-work” from corporations to people in developing countries over simple online platforms. There are other, less quantifiable ways to contribute to a distant cause than donating money, like creating supportive content or increasing public awareness, both increasingly integral parts of the process.

  As more people become connected around the world, we’ll see a proliferation of potential donors and activists ready to contribute to the next high-profile crisis. With real-time information about conflicts and disasters around the world increasingly accessible and available, spread evenly across different platforms in different languages, a crisis in one country can reverberate across the world instantly. Not everyone receiving the news will be spurred to action, but enough people will so that the scale of participation will rise dramatically.

  Examining the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake once again will give a good indication of what the future holds. The level of destruction near the capital in Haiti, a densely populated and immensely poor country, was overwhelming: homes, hospitals and institutional buildings collapsed; transportation and communications systems were devastated; hundreds of thousands were killed and 1.5 million more made homeless.4 Within hours, neighboring governments sent in emergency-services teams, and within days many countries around the world had pledged or already delivered aid.

  The response from the humanitarian community was even more robust. Within days of the earthquake, the Red Cross had raised more than $5 million through an innovative “text to donate” campaign in which mobile users could text “HAITI” to a special short code (90999) to donate $10, automatically charged to their phone bill. In all, some $43 million in aid passed through mobile donation platforms, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, which builds the technical infrastructure many NGOs used. Télécoms Sans Frontières, a humanitarian organization that specializes in emergency telecommunications, deployed on the ground in Haiti one day after the earthquake to establish call centers to allow families to reach loved ones. And just five days after the earthquake, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s AlertNet humanitarian news service set up the Emergency Information Service, the first of its kind, which allowed Haitians free SMS alert messages to help them navigate the disaster’s impact.

  Emergency relief efforts turned into longer-term reconstruction projects, and within months there were tens of thousands of NGOs working on the ground in Haiti. It’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of aid organizations working efficiently—with clear objectives and without redundancy—in any one place, let alone a country as small, crowded and devastated as Haiti. As the months dragged on, unsettling reports about inefficient aid distribution began to surface. Warehouses were full of unused pharmaceuticals left to expire because of poor management. Cholera outbreaks in the sprawling informal settlements threatened to wipe out many of the earthquake survivors. The delivery of funding from institutional donors, mostly governments, was delayed and difficult to keep track of; very little of the funding ever reached the Haitians themselves, having been utilized instead by any number of foreign organizations higher up on the chain. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians were still in unsanitary tent cities a year after the earthquake, because the government and its NGO partners had not yet found a way to otherwise house them. For all the coverage, the fund-raising, the coordination plans and the good intentions, Haitians were not well served in the post-earthquake environment.

  People well qualified to say what transpired in Haiti have examined this fallout with great acumen—including Paul Farmer in his book Haiti After the Earthquake—and the consensus seems to be that this was an unfortunate confluence of factors: extensive devastation meeting bureaucratic inefficiency amid a backdrop of deeply entrenched preexisting challenges. Communication technologies could not have hoped to ameliorate all of Haiti’s woes, but there are many areas where, if correctly and widely utilized, coordinated online platforms can streamline this process so that a future version of the Haitian earthquake will produce more good results and less waste in a faster recovery period. Throughout this section we will present a few of our own ideas, knowing full well that the institutional actors in reconstruction settings—the large NGOs, the foreign government donors and all the rest—may be unwilling to take these steps for fear of failure or loss of influence in the future.

  As we look ahead to the next wave of disasters and conflicts that will occur in a more connected age, we can see a pattern emerging. The mixture of more potential donors and impressive online marketing will create an “NGO bubble” within each postcrisis society, and eventually that bubble will burst, ultimately leading to a greater decentralization of aid and a rash of new experiments.

  Historically, what has differentiated established aid organizations is less their impact than their brand: catchy logos, poignant advertisements and prominent endorsements go much further toward attracting public donations than detailed reports about logistics, antimalarial bed nets or incremental successes. There is perhaps no better recent example of this than the now infamous Kony 2012 video, produced by the nonprofit organization Invisible Children to generate awareness about a multi-decade-long war in northern Uganda. While the NGO’s mission to end atrocities by a Ugandan militant group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was noble, many who were intimately familiar with the conflict—including many Ugandans—found the video misleading, simplistic and, ultimately, self-serving. Yet the video amassed mor
e than 100 million views in under a week (making it the first viral video to do so), largely thanks to endorsements from prominent celebrities with millions of followers on Twitter. Early criticism of the NGO and its operations—like its 70 percent overhead in “production costs” (basically, salaries)—did little to stem the swelling movement, until it was abruptly ended by a very public and bizarre detention of one of the organization’s cofounders after he exposed himself in public.

  As we have already said, we will see a more level playing field for marketing in the digital era. Anyone with a registered NGO or charity (and perhaps not even that) can produce a flashy online platform with high-quality content and cool mobile apps. After all, this is the fastest and easiest way for an individual or group to make its mark. The actual substance of the organization—how robust or competent it is, how it handles finances, how good its programs might or might not be—matters less. Like certain start-up revolutionaries who value style over substance, new participants will find ways to exploit the blind spots of their supporters; in this case, these groups can take advantage of the fact that donors have little real sense of what it’s like on the ground. So when a disaster strikes and NGOs pour into the space, the established ones will find themselves shoulder to shoulder with NGO start-ups, groups that have a strong online presence and starter funds but that are generally untested. Such start-ups will be more targeted in their mission than traditional aid organizations, and they’ll appear equally if not more competent than their established counterparts. They’ll attract attention but they’ll deliver less of what is needed by those they are trying to help; some might be capable but most won’t be, as they will lack the networks, the deep knowledge and the operational skills of professional organizations.