Joshua Kauffman and Gwendolyn Floyd Of Necessity and Humanity: What Cuba Can Teach Us About Ourselves and Our Own Technology O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2008 Wednesday, March 5, 2008 Marriott Marina, San Diego, CA Notes by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- What can a people without emerging technology teach us about our own technology? The recent history of Cuba starts with the Special Period, that dark decade or so after the Soviet Union collapsed. Technology, energy, and other subsidies that kept the Cuban economy afloat instantly disappeared, causing the country to contract by a third. Fossil fuels for industry and transportation, expertise for education and enterprise, food for people; it all vanished overnight. The Special Period was extremely hard on the Cuban people, and echoes of it are still felt today. The entire country, built for Soviet material and energy inputs, had to adapt indigenous resources and ideas to run or evolve the infrastructure left behind. The survival of the Cuban people in this time of terrifying necessity rested on their incredible ingenuity and humanity. What emerged was a series of deliberate and accidental technological revelations, spanning organic and sustainable agriculture, demand-responsive transportation, and a very quirky and effective ‘energy revolution’ that continues today. In the last years Cuba has undergone a change in leadership, welcomed substantial foreign investment, and has precipitated rising hemispheric influence through the discovery of coveted natural resources, and the growth of strategic alliances with Venezuela, China, and others. All the while, barely 1 in 1000 people have access to the Internet in a form recognizable to the average connected person. Mobile phones are nearly as absent from the technological mix. In Trinidad de Cuba, one hustler proudly showed off his mobile phone to us, though it didn’t even have a service provider. In its peculiar and unconventional emergence, Cuba and its people provide an important model for an expanded discussion on emerging technology. In addition to the feats of technological improvisation, Cubans display early analogues to the social technologies that are prominent today, and uncover the tension that drives our technological innovation and curiosity. What happens when inventive people hack and play with limited technological ingredients to make best with what they have? What will happen when a cultured, literate, hyper-social people get access to the Internet for the first time? How will their virgin experiences and experimentation impact the rest of the world? Cubans teach us to strip away layers of plastic, metal, and code to the root of what technology is, and what it has always been. From a people that have been greatly anticipating the future—any future—we’ll be left with clues for the promising technologies of our own near future by looking at recent progress and universal lessons in the Cuba of today. -- Most of this information has never been shared out of Cuba -- please don't podcast, want to be sure you don't incriminate our sources We're "Regional" -- researchers and designers, recently back from China, en route to Brazil -- Cuba is a case-study of the walled garden -- it's got low-permeability borders and tightly choreographed information systems Cubans are master hackers who build collective intelligence to make more of less Cuba: Tools enhance life -- Castro is stepping down, next gov't will follow his lead For the first time since the revoltuion, Raul Castro will come public about shortcomings * Activist Alarcon has challenged problems in congress -- no Internet, no foreign travel, a first * Video of the complaint leaked, exposed top domestic politico as incompetent * Massive popularity lead to activist's arrests and his staged recanting, shivering on TV -- How unique is the Alarcon video? * Took 11 years for video of Berlin wall to reach Cubans * Took one week of the Alarcon video to reach them -- Cuban caloric intake down 30% since Soviets left * Encouragement of entrepreneurship, US dollars legalized * Bill Clinton: liberty will spread by cellphone and computer modem * Cuba interpreted internet as "terrorism," "invasion" -- 1994 * 50k people starved * Riots led to mass migration of 20,000 rafters to Miami in 2 weeks * Gov't changed tune: "Perfection of socialism" -- Cuba looking for increased stability * Doing deals with China, Venezuala and US * Social characteristics of Cubans come from years of living under propaganda and control * Castro used embargo as fictional excuse for gov't shortcomings * People believe that they are only partially informed, use gossip to determine what's going on * Intricate national surveillance permeated every corner of society -- committee for revolution permeates whole society * Gov't has constitutionalized right to interpret any act as a threat to the state: inviting people to home, having a library * Cubans can't predict what's illegal, undermines social trust * Journo was imprisoned for 20 years * Security apparat tolerates grey economy * The state only provides 5% of the income required for high quality of life, the rest is fulfilled by grey economy * Nothing is allowed, nothing is prohibited * Quineteros are fixers who locate resources for a cost, even PlayStations * Wealth comes from foreigners * Only Cuban ecommerce -- a mall where foreigners from outside of Cuba buy goods from abroad, send them to the mall, where they can be bought * Grey economy is P2P and decentralized * Gov't allows grey economy to flourish as testbed for capitalism and release valve -- Tech emerges from Grey Market * Resolver: excuse to be illegal to make ends meet * Buying PC parts out of the back door of a gov't facility, assemble PC, sell back to gov't * In Cuba all goods constantly circulate * Inventar: improvise from limited resources * Everything is misc and modular * New means new config of existing parts * A cinderblock house can be built ina week -- what's what's "new" * Barter: * Man wants wood for a raft for Miami, traded laptop -- political freedom for national freedom * Piracy: * Castro says it's a legit response to embargo * Political act -- Mobile phones: * Payphones -- Cubans aren't allowed to have mobiles * Cubans befriend foreigners to get phones with their passports * In dev world phones are massive transformation tools * In Cuba, they're for talking and texting -- TV: * Initially important for propaganda * Now for socializing * Sat TV is illegal, but is principal alternative media * 100 houses will share a single sat connection at incredible risk * State cracks down when sats yield tangible changes in social structure * E.g. behavior learned from satellites * When sat receivers are confiscated, so are VCRs, DVD players, game consoles etc -- Intranet * Closed information ecosystem * Digitized ideology * Internet is blocked * Few thousand pages viewed as acceptable as Cuban, most hosted on Cuban servers * Email is back-channel, but monitored * People use email as "public forum" talking to spies who read it * No internet allowed at home * Some workplaces have Internet * Employees have to sign contract promising not to look for "anti-Cuban" material * Black-market in selling unused increments in the time left over from employees at these firms -- Experiment offering free Internet in artist's house in Havana * People were too fearful to use it * Warned them they'd get in trouble * Forced them to take the sign down -- Totalitarian hacking * Exerting control over scarcity * Cuba achieved energy efficiency by forcing adoption of modern appliances and high-efficiency bulbs * Gov't confiscated big US fridges and replaced with Chinese bar-fridges * Turned unused urban land into gardens * Didn't do this for ideology -- did it for necessity * Green living doesn't come from individual choice, but from policy -- Hacking * Titan scrambler to interfere with US radio * Hackers defend Cuban Internet from US spies * Fill bandwidth with bureaucratic PowerPoints * Intimidate national bloggers, like Generacion Y -- Blogging * Banning would cause outcry * Conditions make it nearly impossible * Bloggers face continuous concerted attacks * Bloggers use embassy sat connections * Embassy security has been breached through hacking and big magnets * Anti-blogging brigades harass them with spam and jam * Supposedly spontaneous, but must come from gov't since there's no citizen internet access * Founded anti-counterrevolutionary blog in Spain and used it to attack Cuban blog -- University of Information Scientists * Former spy center * Newest buildings in Havana * IT is the future of Cuba * Students aren't let out and no one is let in * Develop telemedicine tools for Cuban doctors * Use OSS code and pirated code * Mysterious hardware arrives from abroad without software * Hackers reverse engineer and make their own code * PCs supposed to last for 20 years * Seen as a way to avoid dependence of first world -- Software development * Espionage and control * Remote surveillance of moods, gestures and activities in meeting places * Used to generate cash to bring wealth to university * Mobile phone lab used to develop games and ringtones marketed by Sony Ericsson -- even though mobiles are illegal for Cubans -- Cuban Social Web * Informal cabs are a source of candid dialog and gossip * Outdoor spaces are popular as a place to ascertain truth * Mobilization based on collective information is impossible * Flash drives spread video at a ratio of 20 people for every PC * PCs in Cuba are very sparse -- you only get to see it if you know someone with a PC, vast majority learn from word of mouth -- Value of free info * Higher political awareness * Information has large impact on closed system * How to design to spread a larger amount of information in the future? -- Liberate flash-drives from PC * Need a stand-alone Flash-drive copies * Creates a mesh-net of information exchange made of f2f meetings * Flash-drive to TV interface * Turns every living room into a space for debate * Would be massively transformational -- Flash drives * Currently widely used for pirated latinamerican soap-operas * Already in use * Would mimic the impact of mobile phones elsewhere -- Not proposing to destabilize Cuba * But this would be cool for other reasons * The last 50 years of the revolution destroyed self-actualization and individual change * This offers an alternative to think about a new reality * A platform to exchange economics to knowledge sharing