Mobile phones in Haiti

Telecoms Sans Frontiers was one of the first crisis aid groups to reach Haiti. They work to restore telecommunications. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution for linking to this story.

Mr. PAUL MARGIE (Representative, Telecom Without Borders): They would go and they carried a satphone with them. And again and again, the people wanted access to that satellite phone even more than the clothes or the food that they were bringing. And so they changed and they said, let's make an organization that focuses on the communication.

The traditional argument against transhumanist solutions to speed uneven development is that those people need clean water, nutritious food and economic development, and only no-life tech nerds could suggest that geek toys like mobile phones matter. However, communication is very basic human need and also important to those who live for a few dollars a day. The quoted story about how the founders of Telecoms Sans Frotiers discovered the need for their organization illustrates that.

In Hyderabad, we had local mobile phone SIMs (they worked more reliably and were much cheaper). They were prepaid SIMs. We loaded time by visiting a phone shop. The shops also logged the bought balance to written books (no idea why), and there you could see how people had bought talk time a few euros at a time. Mobile phone operators have strong incentives to run their profitable business also in countries where average incomes are extremely low. For this reason, mobile phone service is available in many areas where no foreign aid group has ever visited.

The top 4 roadside ad categories I remember where construction cement, apartments, IT courses and mobile phone operators.

Mobile phones are as close to transhumanist technology as we have today - the only reason we are not amazed by telepathic ability to talk with anyone anytime is that we have lived with the technology for 15 years, and we had fixed lines before that. Privacy is the only reason they don't implement clairvoyance, where you input a GPS coordinate and see an image stream from the closest observation camera.

People in the developing world also grow from genetic blueprints, so transhumanist solutions are going to play new roles in the future.

Shooting sprees are good for Finland, because we are now more recognized.

According to a Haitian consul in Brazil, the earthquake was good for Haiti, as it made their country more recognized. Finland is more developed country also in this respect, we can make global headlines by killing just 6 people rather than 60000.

He also blamed the ills of his country on the fact that every place where there are Africans is fucked.

The last frog that leaped from his mouth, that the practise of macumba and muti and other witchcraft has brought a curse on Africans, is actually an excellent metaphor for the fact that no matter where they go and no matter how much development aid they get, they still can't build a civilized country.

As long as we exclude imperialism - importing enough smart fraction from outside to keep the countries out of trouble - no one has the social technology and knowledge to solve their problems. So it is anything but a joke to talk about illiterate goat herders at the same time as benevolent superintelligences and uplifting and genetic engineering - transcendental technology really is needed before their societies can organize themselves to provide what we consider basic human rights.

To cut the consul some slack, most of his relatives live in Haiti and he hasn't heard about them since the earthquake, and he thought he was talking off record. Who wouldn't be out of his mind in such situation.

In Haiti, a recently failed state is setting new standards in just how dysfunctional a government can be in the face of a crisis. Based on HS reports they don't seem to be doing much anything.

Functional states have an institution called army which is supposed to be a master of logistics in hostile terrain. Not in Haiti. They are not getting excavators to collapsed buildings. They are not getting injured people from streets to faraway cities with free hospital beds. Nor can rescue aid squads get transported to needed locations - HS reported that only 6 out of 27 squads had actually reached Haiti.

Fortunately, civil society is stepping in to maintain order - but not by rule of law but by rule of gun for the few minutes it takes to grab the valuables and run.

HS follows a crisis relief squad which carries a few Finns. They expect a few Haitian soldiers to join them in the border to protect against threat of robbing, which has happened to some food convoys. In some other country, those soldiers would be doing crisis relief by themselves.

My father visited Dominican Republic some years ago, and also Haiti for one day. He said that there were security guards with shotguns at every corner of the public enterprises, indicating very low trust and very low rule of law.