FORTNIGHT JOURNAL :: Documenting the Promise of the Millennial Generation

LIFE BEFORE WIKI

YOUNG ADULTS TODAY RECALL DIGITAL HISTORY. ANH-THU TRACKS OUR UNIQUE PASSAGE FROM NOVEL TO OBSOLETE.

My grade school library was stocked with 35-year-old encyclopedias. Some of its books speculated about how, one day, we’d get to the moon. Every book report I wrote those days was created on the presumption that, if it was still in print, it must be true.

Before web browsers, the only people who used the internet were techno-hippies, military brats and “baller” nerds who had $3,000 Tandy desktop computers running DOS, and an extra phone line to hook up their 14.4k modem. I was taught “computer programming skills” at age twelve on computers that pre-dated my birth by about two years. My teacher had to turn on the machine for me. Since I had no learned typing skills, the recreational value of the bright blue screen came from playing CD-ROM games of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and rendering crude palm trees in MS Paint. To me, this World Wide Web had nothing on leather books with gold-plated spines.

II

On January 15, 2011—approximately one decade after I became a full-blown internet junkie—Wikipedia turns 10. Now a de-facto research tool, Wikipedia boasts a cult of eagle-eyed editors who stand ready to edit inaccuracies into oblivion (at least for subjects in my vocation;

law). Targeted primary source search inevitably turns into random learning. I once looked up Audrey Hepburn and found myself, hours later, dwelling on spouses of British fascist leaders and the American funeral industry in the mid-twentieth century.

Targeted primary source search inevitably turns into random learning.

Only a week before this birthday, Facebook was given a 50 billion dollar valuation based on the financing it received from Goldman Sachs. A little more than a month earlier, Wikileaks dumped an online trove consisting of hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. This move sparked a diplomatic crisis that still resonates. To say that a lot has happened in the past 10 years is more than beside the point. A lot has happened simply in the past month.

Splashy leaks and communication modalities aside, the internet is emerging as the world’s biggest information archive. What once could only be gained through months of combing through research institutions, or waiting for government FOIA requests, is now instantly downloadable as a torrent or PDF. And once online, it’s hard to redact, be it a public domain book, Latin scholarly text or declassified

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government document. Block a website with unfavorable information and twenty mirrors appear in its place. The internet is a hoarder’s dream come true (without the disadvantages of an unlivable, rat-infested space).

We can no longer burn down the Library of Alexandria.

If archaeologists 5,000 years from now relied on Facebook archives alone, they would know what 500 million or so people were up to between the years 2004 and 2010. That’s a bigger archive on humans compiled in the last six years than may ever have existed; one that covers our way of life, what we watch and what we are (maybe) reading. We can no longer burn down the Library of Alexandria.

III

Newly arrived to college, my technological deflowering commenced. I learn the joys of Ethernet, AIM chatting and music piracy. Napster was at its short-lived apex, and my roommates skipped class just to trawl through this everlasting fount. Until the RIAA came and ruined everyone’s fun, we compulsively collected necessities from a cappella renditions of the

school’s fight song, to the Russian version of the Gummi Bears theme.

We had tasted of the internet and we wanted more. Constant access to information as students made us all more obsessive and insomniac. By sophomore year, my friends we discussing the crazy idea of a free, collective online encyclopedia where one could just go and plug in information.

“That’s stupid,” I thought. “Everything on this site is going to be completely fake, written by bored goons like me.” Meanwhile, a music review website called Pitchfork began targeting those of us snobs who once proudly lugged 200-CD carrying cases to class. With my new total referential access to sound files, I started listening to genres like art-punk and Berlin minimalist techno. Banished were my provincial loves of euro-trance, industrial music and Florida-based pop-punk acts. I was learning how to be a classy lady.

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Though internet-savvy, I was still leery of cellular phones, thinking these the province of the rich and spoiled. No one in his or her right mind would pay over $30 for a telephone bound by an exorbitant service contract that limited your

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calling minutes. I’d stick to my landline, thank you very much—what with its answering machines, call waiting and 300-foot range on a cordless phone.

My new life partner, the Blackberry, was stolen. For a few hours, that old thought rushed back to me like an avalanche.

Then I moved to Spain, and found out that cellular phones (of the pay-as-you-go variety) had their uses. I didn’t have to wait at home by the phone anymore, and would get text messages telling me if plans were changed while en route! Back in the U.S., I finally caved in and bought one. Later, visiting friends in Japan, I found out that people did all sorts of things with cell phones. People were scanning them at vending machines to buy drinks, using them to pay bills, watching videos and listening to music on them, taking photos of themselves and their friends, saving important personal information and contacts on them and even using them for banking purposes. I thought to myself, Dude, if I had a phone like that, my life would be over if I ever lost it.

And lo and behold—about five years, and several crappy phones later—my new life partner, the Blackberry, was stolen. For a few hours, that old

thought rushed back to me like an avalanche.

IV

In rural parts of southeast Asia, you are hard-pressed to find a car owner. The chances that any given area is on an electrical grid is about 70/30. But you can quickly run into market vendors wielding cell phones and selling pirated DVDs of movies just released in U.S. theatres. Individual households aren’t wired to the same extent as households in the U.S., but internet cafes are ubiquitous. Spend the better part of the day at any internet café and you’ll find yourself sitting next to students, monks, and children, all checking email accounts or making international calls using Skype.

In Somalia—which hasn’t even had a functioning government for two decades—the mobile telecommunications sector is booming. Customers use cell phones to keep track of loved ones, do banking or transfer money. Military leaders have been known to order attacks via text message, and pirates use cell phones to call in ransom demands. You might be hard pressed to get any number of things in this sort of environment, but getting your hands on a cell phone with a cheap calling card in Mogadishu appears to be easier than getting a kebab from a street cart in New York.

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Activists, too, now use the power of mobile technology to bridge the global digital divide. Platforms like Ushahidi use cell phones to “crowdsource” crisis information on an online map. Meanwhile, nongovernmental organizations are learning to build specific programs that use online dissemination to further their goals of government transparency, access to information and the democratization of societies. If the Wikileaks document dump is any indicator, there’s good reason to believe that these goals may yet gain traction. Government opposition is an issue; China is doing it best to outsmart hackers, and some other governments, like Vietnam, are looking to China as a model. But despite the threat of monitoring, the only valid excuse to not have a Facebook profile at this point is if you’re a nomadic herder in rural Mauritania.

If the internet is the pretty girl of our generation, then mobile technology is the most accommodating one.

That nomadic herder, though, is more than likely to have a cell phone. If the internet is the pretty girl of our generation, then mobile technology is the most accommodating one. As of the end of 2010, there is an estimated 5.3 billion mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide, and access to mobile networks is available to 90% of the world

population and 80% of those living in rural areas. In comparison, the number of internet users worldwide is somewhere around 2 billion, with around 1.6 billion having internet access at home. Considering that I didn’t have internet in my own house until late 1998, and that I didn’t even think of getting a cell phone until 2003 (I wasn’t an early adopter, but neither was I a late adopter), both of these figures are staggering. This is especially the case with the saturation levels of mobile phone coverage.

After all, it was only in 1999 that then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan postulated that half the world’s population had neither made nor received a phone call.

V

In less than 10 years, we’ve witnessed the widespread adoption of various technologies that at the time might have come across as one-off novelties. These innovations have rendered stalwart technologies obsolete in a breathtakingly complete way. Empty storefronts where Blockbusters and various music chains like the Virgin Megastores once stood testify to this shift. You can still buy a beautiful print version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it clocks in at over a thousand dollars, and is guaranteed to be out-of-date the moment that you get your copy.

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After losing my phone, I realized that I had not bothered to memorize anyone’s phone number after 2003, with the exception of my mother’s and my own cell phone number.

It reminded me of when I was living in Washington, DC during the 9/11 attacks. Telecommunications networks were overloaded and went down.

Paradoxically, the only way for me to successfully communicate and find information to report my missing phone was through the internet—both to find lost contacts, and to get in touch with service providers and authorities. It reminded me of when I was living in Washington, DC during the 9/11 attacks. Telecommunications networks were overloaded and went down. That day, via email and chat, the internet came into its own for me as a communication tool.

It’s not until you have access to something like it that you realize how limited you were without it. Though 85% of everything that I normally engage in on the internet is crap, and probably can be duplicated in real life (shopping for clothes, say, or watching videos about cats), the other 15% has made my life change irrevocably, especially as an international legal practitioner and co-founder of a nonprofit online microloan trade portal. It’s

made global collegial networks possible, and critically lowered barriers to access for start-up ventures and established businesses alike.

It’s also allowing guys in internet cafes in Nigeria to scam people in the United States. It’s allowing you to download the entire last season of True Blood before it’s even available on DVD. Truly, it’s creating a new world—brave or not, we’re barreling into it at full speed ahead. How did I even live before this past decade? Sometimes, I feel like a time traveler when I meet high schoolers or even college students who cannot even recall a time when they did not have internet access. There is a Wikipedia entry for “library catalog.”

How can I be so young, but already so old?

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Anh-Thu is an Vietnamese-American lawyer who worked at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia. Anh-Thu studied at Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and received her J.D. from the University of Texas. Her entries in Fortnight are essays about her experience in human rights law, growing up in a family of immigrants, and living a frugal life during an economic recession. Since publishing with Fortnight, Anh-Thu started and received incubation support for her own non-profit, Ahkun, a marketing platform for micro-loan textile goods made by formerly-trafficked women artisans in Southeast Asia.

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FORTNIGHT IS

A MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTARY PROJECT ON THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION: THE LAST GENERATION TO REMEMBER A TIME WITHOUT THE INTERNET.