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How Technology Could
Help Chiapas—and Mexico City
By David H. Rothman
Expanded from a speech given Feb. 25, 1998, at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey

Chiapas isn’t just a poverty-stricken state in Mexico. It is also a battle cry on the Internet. From Norway to Australia, from Iceland to New Zealand, hundreds of thousands of Web surfers know of the atrocities there. Followers of Subcomandante Marcos are Plugged In; the AltaVista searcher counts several thousand mentions of him at the very least. Any day now, we’ll see a smiling Subcomandante Marcos in an advertisement in a major liberal magazine, where he’ll endorse a politically correct brand of laptop, with, of course, enough ports for a color laser printer, a fax modem, and a 24-hour-a-day satellite connection to the New York Times newspaper.

What I’ve just given you is an example of the hyperbole and humor that may sometimes ensue if a skeptic hears of technology being used in the remote areas of the Third World, whether for revolution or agriculture. Even we believers in the gadgetry may laugh at the seeming absurdities here.

More seriously, in discussing Mexico and the Net, a telecommunications expert named Gary Chapman wrote the following in the Los Angeles Times: “As I contemplated the weathered and earnest faces of the peasants from Chiapas trudging through the Zocalo, it was clear that the Internet and cyberspace are not a solution to their problems.” And to a great extent Gary Chapman was right about the limits of technology. Modems by themselves cannot grow more nutritious maize. And the most precise spreadsheets in the world cannot guarantee equality in the distribution of land. Nor can chips and printed circuit boards reincarnate the slaughtered children, the pregnant women, and the other dead from the Acteal Massacre. Clearly, technology is not the solution.

But as I’ll show, technology can be part of the solution if government, business, nonprofits, universities, and unions work together to use it well. It can mean more food, more learning, more health, more money, and, yes, in a divided country, more peace. Today I’ll talk about two ideas, the Electronic Peace Corps and TeleRead, both of which I promise to explain later in this speech. I have written about them at length on the Web, but I am leery of all-purpose visions, and I’ve tried to adapt the ideas as best I could for Mexico. And even then, I would ask you simply to extrapolate from what I say, rather than think: “Aha! David Rothman’s expecting us to do it exactly this way.” Let me be a Yankee know-it-all, but only within limits.

In smugly conveying my favorite do’s and don’ts for the planners and doers of Mexico’s electronic future, I’ll inflict on you some examples from the States. My views reflect some old Yankee values. I am neither a socialist nor a government-hating libertarian. Rather I believe that governments have an important role to play in communications and in the transmission of knowledge. Benjamin Franklin, the Revolutionary War figure, established the United States Post Office, which eventually would bestow special rates on newspapers to foster the spread of literacy. Others in the States went on to found public colleges to train citizens in agriculture and other productive pursuits. And of course, we have our public libraries. They existed even before a Scotsman named Andrew Carnegie grew rich and guilty in the United States and lavished millions on library buildings to help enlighten the populace in the States and elsewhere. As much as this robber baron believed in private philanthropy, he realized that public libraries had a major educational mission. In fact, Carnegie would not finance a library for a town unless he knew that its citizens would support it after the carpenters had driven in the last nail. He had the gall to champion the cause of free knowledge. In the opinion of this steel-mill owner, a library should be a university for the poor; and now, as I myself see it, the Internet should truly be the same. Without a very conscious effort by government and the rest of society, the Net may widen the gap between the well-off and others. The Internet cannot alchemize all the world’s farmworkers into billionaires or oil executives, but it can serve as one potential conduit to the middle class, just as Carnegie wanted libraries to be.

Certain U.S. policymakers, alas, have also developed amnesia in some respects when it comes to the role of the government in transmitting knowledge for free or at very low cost. A few years back, Washington started mapping out the National Information Infrastructure of the future. That’s gobbledygook for the networks and related gadgetry and people. I was ecstatic. We here in the States would carefully plan rather than leaving everything to the marketplace. Then the White House appointed an NII Advisory Council with more than 30 members. It included only one professional librarian and one professional teacher. Many of the others came from such universities as the CBS, Walt Disney, MCA Music Entertainment Group, and the Motion Picture Association of America. It was a little as if the White House were planning the National Entertainment Infrastructure.

Granted, I see an important role on the Internet for entertainment, even if it is not every citizen’s inalienable right to enjoy the latest blood-and-guts picture for free; we need to set priorities. And I applaud Washington’s official and unofficial efforts to bring low-cost Net service to schools and libraries. This is important, not a passing detail. Thanks in part to Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the poorest schoolchild in my city can walk into the library and see educational Web pages pop up on the screen at many times the speed of the usual 28.8K modem. Over the years the American government on the whole has done the Net much more good than harm. In fact, if it were not for Washington, there would not be an Internet; it is an accidental outgrow of Pentagon research dating back to the most chilling part of the Cold War when Moscow and Washington were so close to blowing themselves up, and when scientists wanted the computer connections to be more resilient than we humans would have been. As for use of the Net to promote commerce and Hollywood, this desire is hardly Satanic. But along the way the Clinton-Gore Administration has been distracted and has yet to give us a good, long-range plan for adapting the technology and arranging financing so that contemporary books will be on the Internet for free in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie.

The chance increases that multimedia glitz from Hollywood, or two-way TV among ordinary people, will distract the populace from books and the sustained thought that they encourage. If we are not careful, pay-per-read books on the Net will be a tax on curiosity and only worsen the problem. Alas, even Bill Gates, the richest man in the United States, has not truly come forward to fill in the gap. The newspapers have praised him as Carnegie II, but he has spent just a speck of his 40-billion-dollar fortune on public libraries, and the Gates Library Foundation is doing more at this point to promote computer software and CD-ROMs than electronic library books for the Net—the favorite medium of millions of students. Never confuse marketing with pure philanthropy. Based on what I have seen so far, Washington just cannot rely on Gates to put electronic books on the Net for free in the same massive way that Andrew Carnegie would have tried to do.

Bringing up other deficiencies and gaps in U.S. information policy, let me also say that Washington has not been as vigilant as it could be in protecting the privacy and dignity of wired citizens. In fact, the White House has even tried to discourage the use of encryption programs that police agencies cannot unscramble—a policy that would harm both individuals and businesses if the electronic keys fell into the wrong hands. For another thing, marketers in the States are still collecting the most personal of information on Web surfers based on their viewing habits. Nor has the government intervened sufficiently to prevent credit bureaus from using the Net and other means to profit off invasions of privacy. Furthermore, under present law, marketers can easily clog our mailboxes with sleazy junk mail, which promotes everything from stock scams to pornographic Web sites. At the same time members of Congress have fought for anti-porn laws that many fear could turn the whole Net into the equivalent of a children’s reading room in a library.

So there you have it, a series of positives and negatives which your Informatics Development Program and your business community might keep in mind rather than blindly imitate the States. What’s more, Washington has been working not only on a National Information Infrastructure but also on a Global Information Infrastructure, one more reason to study us closely.

Both challenges and opportunities will abound as you expand your own networks and wire up your own schools and libraries here in Mexico. First, the challenges. Rural Mexico is not exactly Silicon Valley in the number of Net connections it enjoys. Millions of ordinary Mexicans cannot pick up any phone, cellular or tethered, and call a doctor or get other help through electronic means. In the States nearly all people have telephones; in Mexico, most do not. Yet another obstacle, a problem that the Net itself could help mitigate somewhat, is that poor regions of Mexico suffer high rates of illiteracy. And your middle class, today’s real market for technology, is minuscule compared to its size in the States. You are caught in what programmers might call an endless loop. The peasants of Chiapas and the people of the barrios in Mexico City are not going to buy the newest Pentiums and 56Kbps modems and laser printers if the boxes cost many times their monthly earnings. Even the less wealthy members of the middle class cannot afford the latest versions of these items; they would consider them to be about as buyable as 200-foot yachts. Prices of the technology will eventually fall; but meanwhile, millions of Mexican children are growing up without the technical skills that could help them more confidently greet the future. Caught in the endless loop, more than a few try to flee their homeland for the United States. We all know of the dogs, guards, and fences of Nogales and other border towns; and for both countries they are an NII of a different kind, a National Ignorance Infrastructure, a monument to the seeming intractability of the problems.

And yet, oddly, in the some of the same horrific facts that I’ve just recited, I see hope. Yes, even in the smaller number of telephone lines; for Mexico can carry out the digital, cellular, and fiber optic revolutions and not worry so much about a gigantic investment in old-fashioned copper wiring. Imagine the promise of combining cellular radio with fixed stations that could send and receive via satellite.

By being a leader in deregulation of telecommunications, not deregulation for deregulation’s sake’s but deregulation to encourage development, you can control your own destiny in the very best way. Mexico has already enjoyed a boom in cellular telephones. Today a man on horseback in lucky areas of your country can press a few buttons and hook up to Paris or Melbourne or send faxes or e-mail to Rome. No longer must Third World countries rely quite so heavily on technological hand-me-downs from Europe or the United States. You can enjoy the boxes and the wires, or lack of wires, on your own terms.

What’s more, the right blend of education and technology could indeed turn the children of the jungles and barrios into Java programmers, network administrators, marketers. Compared to the United States, Mexico is a much younger nation, full of new brains to soak up new knowledge that the older brains may not so easily absorb. Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has observed: “Almost half of the populations of developing nations are under 20, in contrast to less than a third in developed countries.” Not every young person will show an passion for Java or C+, but imagine the benefits if even a fraction do, and if the others can learn to apply the new technology to their own fields. Even artists can thrive in cyberspace. Researching this speech, I beheld the beauty of many Web sites from Mexico; I saw fetching flashes of color, of Mexican cyber-Moderno, that I might never have found on Web sites from Boston or Seattle. Art for online galleries, or for directories or electronic stores, is but one kind of electronic canvass. Beauty and elegance will count even more in the design of clothes and other merchandise that someday will be marketed through the Net, and then actually produced through robot-style tools that will be in or near the customers’ homes. Less and less will location itself matter for you. Recently a real estate woman in Nevada liked my Web sites and asked if I’d help her put togther one to advertise some land in Arizona; it meant nothing that I lived in Virginia thousand of miles away from her. I could even talk to her on a tollfree number. For better or worse, and it will be “worse” if sweatshop wages are the rule even in advanced countries, tasks like Web design and programming can hop across mountains and oceans. Ambitious graduates of ITESM will enjoy more and more opportunities to defy geography and prosper in their own hometowns.

In our rush to thrive in cyberspace, however, let us not forget about earth itself. The Internet could reduce and maybe even reverse the environmentally and socially destructive migration from the rural areas to Mexico City. More than a quarter of your 96 million people live in the capital, and the air pollution has reached the point where you can’t drive on a certain day if your license plate does not end in the right digit. Simon Calder, a writer for the Independent newspaper, has conjured up some rather Dali-esque images for travelers who fly into the world’s largest capital city, amid “a smoldering blood-orange glow” that “drapes over the whole vast arena.” I quote: “Before you come down to earth, take deep breath. Mostly, Mexico City hides in a volcanic hollow beneath a blanket of smog—hence the smoldering glow that greets incoming planes.” Calder observes that “Humanity can become too intense. Today Mexico City has perhaps 25 million citizens. Tomorrow 3,000 more citizens will join them as the capital hurtles toward the demographic equivalent of terminal velocity. Get there soon, before the city reaches its inevitable conclusion.”

But what if we could use technology to halt this “terminal velocity” and maybe even see some residents of Mexico City climb out of their volcanic hollow and eagerly return to their families in the villages whence they came? Suppose the job opportunities were there in the middle of the jungles and the deserts. And what if it were possible for more and more people to do their jobs at home with computers, so they would not have to sully the air with filth from their automobiles?

That is not science fiction to some Mexican executives who have been downsized out of their jobs and have reincarnated themselves as independent business people—hooked up to the Net at home. Nor is it science fiction to thousands of U.S. executives in similar situations. Or to my wife who works full-time for a well-wired educational association near Washington, D.C., and who deals with the group’s members from home. Carly is not even at a desk on most days; she works from her favorite reclining chair, and she deftly types away on a Toshiba color laptop, talking each month to hundreds of people, some of them halfway around the planet, and almost all of them unaware that she sits in her own living room. A sacrifice in efficiency? Not at all. Members of the educational association cannot stop praising my wife for the superior service that she delivers. Though Carly is not a programmer, she often uses her knowledge of the Net to come up with information that the members could never find on their own. She works hard, but is not in an electronic sweatshop. In fact, she has amassed enough toward her retirement so that in between work breaks, she may turn on her color television and watch the stock-market reports with more than an academic interest. The electronic future has already come to Carly. Now let it reach the masses of Chiapas and Mexico City

So how do you gradually bring the future to the jungles of Chiapas and the barrios of the metropolises? First off, in terms of income, you cannot turn campesino women into Carlys without first bridging the gap between civic activism and business. Some of your most ambitious entrepreneurs are passionately detached from government-related activities and Life in general, and at least a few have retreated from Mexican reality into their internationalized electronic cottages. The political scientist Jorge G. Castaneda has written that the “‘new’ businessmen are more and more indifferent to the actual performance of the economy; they sell abroad, borrow and raise capital abroad, get their accounts tabulated abroad, insure themselves abroad and, every now and then, live and die abroad.”

In the era of the Internet, then, some Mexican businessmen may already be virtual inhabitants of the United States. And without good planning, the possibilities will only get worse. Today my wife and I do almost all almost our banking over the Internet, just like hundreds of thousands of other middle-class people in our country; and as business grows more internationalized, it is not that hard to envision more of a flow of personal capital from Mexico to the United States and Europe, bureaucratic regulations notwithstanding. The era of electronic cash, of money wending through the ether in the form of encrypted bits and bytes, will only make this easier and easier. But are Gestapo-strict currency controls really the answer? Hardly, given the growing ease of circumvention. Instead both business and government, along with the educational establishment, nonprofit groups and labor, should work in harmony to develop Mexico for Mexicans so that domestic money as a matter of course will flow to Chiapas in a way that benefits the campesinos. Your country’s true prosperity lies in the expansion of a middle-class. That is the way for the industrial elite to find a market for refrigerators and TV sets and computers and modems and, in time, virtual reality machines.

It is not an impossible task, this bringing together of business with the rest of Mexican society for the prosperity of all; in fact your own university is itself an embodiment of the promises here. In the 1940s some wise industrialists helped found your school while obviously aware of the correlation between knowledge and prosperity. Fittingly ITESM was the first Mexican school with a true hookup with the Internet, and today it has thousands of computers, along with satellite connections to 25 affiliated campuses.

But how can ITESM expand on past accomplishments and truly popularize the technology? And so I come here today with my Electric Peace Corps and TeleRead proposals, both of which could benefit from cooperation among leaders of education, government, business, labor, and nonprofits.

The phrase Peace Corps may not be known to all. Bizarre things happen when words travel through the synapses of even intelligent people who are not born into a language. No, Peace Corps does not mean “Peace Corpse” or “Peace Body.” Instead it’s “Corps” as in “Marine Corps,” except that here we are talking peace instead of war. President John F. Kennedy started the Peace Corps in the 1960s to encourage young citizens to go abroad, learn new cultures, and befriend people in developing countries, while helping them dig more sanitary wells, grow more food and better educate their children. The Peace Corps still exists and hasn’t just helped developing countries; it has also helped its members develop as teachers, as managers, as humans..

I had similar goals for a U.S. Electronic Peace Corps when I proposed the idea about a decade and a half ago. Back then, while researching my book The Silicon Jungle, I helped Arthur C. Clarke and director-writer Peter Hyams put together a trans-Pacific computer link for the writing of the script to the movie 2010. The connection between Los Angeles and Sri Lanka enabled the two to accomplish far, far more than if they had been at the mercy of expensive Telex—even in those ancient days of 300-baud modems. Much more easily than on the phone they could dwell on the details. And what is technology but the same, details? I published the Electronic Peace Corps idea in Computerworld, InfoWorld, the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the Washington Post and a number of other newspapers, and I heard from a Jerome Glenn, who had been a consultant for the U.S. Peace Crops and who told me that he had already been using a computer terminal to pipe knowledge into Port Au Prince, Haiti. Later I discovered that at least one other development expert was online at the time from the field—in this case, remote Pacific islands—to the States. The dream was reasonable and in a very small way had already become a reality.

A former Peace Corps training director named Roger Nicholson liked my Electronic Peace Corps proposal, and William F. Buckley, Jr., a prominent conservative columnist, wrote several excellent columns about the idea and even helped me get it into his National Review. What’s more, I had the satisfaction of reading or hearing of other people’s “Electronic Peace Corps” after I proposed mine. Similar brainstorms have come to the futurist George Gilder, a stray computer executive or two, a luminary in the Internet Society, Nicholas Negroponte himself (under the name “School Corps”), even a ex-CIA man—though I appear to have been the first, and almost surely the first to reach print. No plagiarism charged. The words “Electronic Peace Corps” must be genetically imprinted on half the brains of the planet, and I’m less interested in claiming credit than in seeing a real, live Corps come into existence.

Meanwhile I’ve been refining my own vision. Early on Jerry Glenn reminded me that Washington should not only start its own Electronic Peace Corps, but encourage Third World countries to band together and start a corps of their own. And today I’ll go a step beyond and suggest that Mexico lead the way for the rest of the planet and establish a domestic Electronic Peace Corps that, if successful, could also offer help to other countries and someday work with an International or United Nations Electronic Peace Corps. Let Washington catch up with Mexico City. The sooner Mexico starts its own Electronic Peace Corps, the more easily I can persuade the United States to establish one.

That I’m at ITESM to discuss the idea is entirely fitting. Quite a few of members of the Mexican Electronic Peace Corps would be graduates of ITESM and other Mexican universities, or maybe students taking breaks from their regular studies. Older people could participate, too. In fact, many of the Corps members could be telephone workers taking time off from their regular jobs to gain new technical and business skills.

What’s more, some of the carefully chosen members might come from United States and other countries. A number of them, in fact, might remain in their home towns and electronically join Mexicans on the scene in offering help to remote villages. Take Patrick and Jacqueline Duffy-Saenz, a couple who served in Uruguay with the U.S. Peace Corps. With great satisfaction they tell me how they hooked up Uruguayan schools to the Internet, and now they would love to be able to use the Net to share with rural Mexico their expertise in education. Returned Peace Corps people, working full or part time, would be naturals for the Mexican Electronic Peace Corps. You might coordinate some activities with the U.S. Peace Corps and maybe an Electronic Peace Corps agency working within or alongside the regular Peace Corps. Also, I can see a Mexican Electric Peace Corps and a U.S. counterpart as a way to help carry out the environmental, safety and labor laws that accompanied the North American Free Trade Agreement. Not surprisingly, an official in a branch of the U.S. government dealing with food safety took a strong interest in the Electronic Peace Corps concept when I discussed it on a mailing list started by the White House. He and Mexican counterparts could more easily follow each other’s activities and swap technical advice.

Clearly, in many respects, the Mexican Electronic Peace Corps could be an international effort. But Mexican citizens would comprise most of this Electric Peace Corps and set its goals. And along the way, help might go in both directions. Villagers familiar with folk remedies just might lead U.S. pharmaceutical researchers to new drugs, and social workers in Mexico just might have the solution to problems in Los Angeles or New York.

Wherever the members of the Mexican Peace Corps came from, they would be like their counterparts in the U.S. Peace Corps—among the brightest, hardest-working and most dedicated of their generation. The Mexican Peace Corps would build up gradually rather than risk lower standards.

A small demonstration project could start here at ITEMS and be a cross-disciplinary effort of the business and electrical engineering departments, with a healthy dose of assistance from the other departments and other schools as needed. Perhaps after receiving some cultural preparation—for instance, advice in working with indigenous peoples—Corps members would go to rural regions and help locals start small telecommunications companies that would be highly responsive to needs in areas such as education, agriculture, business, public health.

Your Electronic Peace Corps could build on existing good works with high-technology here and in other countries. Luis Federico Higgins Guerra, M.D., has collaborated with colleagues to start the Mexican Anesthesiology Network, about which he has written in The Internet Journal of Anesthesiology. Even within the States, our practices in anesthesiology could be better. I can imagine what the situation is like in small Mexican villages. But thanks to the good work of Dr. Guerra and others, doctors in the field can dial in to the best knowledge from specialists in Mexico and elsewhere. As of 1996, according to Dr. Guerra, just three percent of your country’s doctors were on the Internet. Think how useful an Electronic Peace Corps would be in getting more physicians online.

In other ways, too, we are talking about saving lives here. The better the communications system, for example, the easier it is that public health researchers can track AIDS-style diseases. Or give people the most efficacious cures for other killers. In Zambia, for instance, a doctor saved a man from a rare form of malaria because the physician could e-mail London for the treatment information.

Medical benefits are not the only ones that would accrue from an Electronic Peace Corps. Small telecom companies nurtured by the Corps would offer public phones, not just private ones, as well as low-cost or free Net access via community centers—rural cybercafes with not only telephones and computers but also food and drink. Call them “munytels” and weave them into the lives of the people. Small farmers in rural regions, for instance, could use these community centers to track commodity prices abroad and more comfortably switch from growing staples to growing crops for which there is international demand. Farmers and others could get micro loans through the munytels—small loans that representatives of banks could administer more easily from afar because of the efficiencies of computers and networks. And the children of illiterate parents could go to the munytels and boot up PCs and type letters for mothers and fathers, just as they are doing in some villages in Africa today. What a combination: technology and education. Imagine the new incentives for learning how to read—and the new opportunities for young literacy instructors in isolated villages to communicate with each other and improve their professional techniques. Machine by themselves are not enough to triumph over the endless loop that sends the ambitious poor to Mexico City and to the Rio Grande. Nor are people working in isolation. But together they just might be invincible.

Repeated over a generation, these efforts would help employees and employers alike, and entrepreneurs, too, find new opportunities in places like Chiapas. And ironically this would reinforce old ways. No longer would poverty split as many families and force the more ambitious to flee to Mexico City or Los Angeles; more fathers could remain at home to see their children grow up and to comfort parents in old age. The benefits, as you’ve seen, could extend beyond programmers—to artists, marketers, crafts people, and others who could more easily sell to customers both within and outside Mexico. Not only that, the enlarged professional classes in the rural areas would have more need for enterprises such as restaurants and banks, further increasing employment opportunities. That is what Mexico could foster with an Electronic Peace Corps and with the encouragement of small, locally oriented telephone companies, instead of carrying out deregulation pell-mell without an accompanying sensitivity to the needs of society.

The Corps would take advantage of the profit motive but within bounds. The local phone companies would be set up as sustainable businesses that eventually would earn profits. Perhaps Telmex and the like would hold large minority interests in order to make this approach attractive to existing phone companies, which could help pay for the services of the Corps members. The big phone companies would benefit from the marketing along with the research and development. But local needs above all would set the directions of the small local companies. For one thing, the companies as much as possible might emphasize employee ownership, with workers gradually accumulating it based on seniority, and with ample incentives for keeping the stock rather than selling it to the rich.¹

At the same time the Corps members and their future employers would also come out ahead. The members would develop technical and business skills and would get mentoring from older volunteers, via phone and computer networks. Acquainted with real-world needs, the members would be more valuable as corporate employees and as entrepreneurs later on. Large corporations, Mexican and foreign, would enjoy benefits of their own— in ways that built up the technical careers of the Corps members. The Corps could experiment in the hinterlands with new technologies, everything from cellular to TCP/IP-transmitted voice.

What’s more, the Electronic Peace Corps would help address a problem described in the book Telecommunications and Economic Development (a World Bank Publication from The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). The three authors tell of the difficulties that developing countries may experience in carrying out large telecommunications projects and raising the level of technology. The economies of scale may be balanced out by the challenges of managing large projects and responding to the needs of individual communities. By combining a locally oriented approach with funding from Telmex-size companies, the Electronic Peace Corps could help overcome the paradoxes described by Robert J. Saunders, Jerey J. Warford, and Björn Wellenius. I hope, by the way, that a third edition of their book will be forthcoming, and that it will document the economic benefits wrought by Internet-enhanced telecommunications networks. In the existing volume the authors make the case that returns on investment from telcom projects supported by the World Bank may reach as high as 40 percent in some cases if you consider not just the revenue from the phone systems but also the benefits to transportation, tourism, banking and other endeavors. Imagine, then, all the prosperity that an Electronic Peace Corps could help Mexico enjoy with the Internet technology in the hands of the masses as well as the business community. The Corps wouldn’t blithely parachute telephones, computers, and modems into little villages or urban barrios—volunteers could patiently show how to use them to improve lives.

That is not even to mention another benefit. In keeping with the name, an Electronic Peace Corps could indeed encourage domestic peace. Such an organization could encourage better communication between the campesinos, Mexico City, and the world at large, and make it easier for indigenous peoples and others to report threats to their personal safety. President Zedillo has posted to his official Web site a statement condemning the Acteal massacre. And his supporting an Electronic Peace Corps would among the ways to demonstrate his concern, beyond the fact that it would reaffirm the interest that he showed in rural areas while he was Secretary of Public Education. He might even want to encourage the use of international observers to certify that the dispersal of technological aid did not favor one party or ideology over another. Mexicans, in turn, might guarantee similar results in other countries with Electronic Peace Corps. Those are just friendly suggestions to address concerns that might come up in the States; please do not take them the wrong way.

I can also foresee yet another objection. Shouldn’t Mexico finish up a thorough knowledge assessment and jump through all the other hoops before starting a Mexican Electronic Peace Corps? My answer would be this: Finish any assessments that you might have underway. But the government should look beyond what people are doing with information now and try to educate itself and average Mexicans about fresh possibilities. Let me give you an example. For decades and decades I survived without a Web-based translation program. And why not? I could not even envision my need for it, and I was too cheap to buy translation software. Then, while surfing around, my wired wife discovered the free AltaVista translation service that magically turned small passages of Spanish into English. And suddenly I had more tool to use in researching this speech. Obviously I’d have never considered this possibility if an interviewer for a government agency had simply asked, “OK, Señor Rothman, what are your information needs?” So, while knowledge assessments have a place, it is important to try out new technology and programs even before all the studies are done.

No, I haven’t even gotten to the main objection. Just who would pay for a Mexican Electronic Peace Corps? This isn’t exactly the kind of activity that the World Bank might provide seed money for, is it? Wrong. Unofficially a staffer with the World Bank tells me that a small demonstration project at ITESM would appear to fall within the guidelines of the InfoDev program. Log on the World Bank mailing lists. Why not benefit from the accumulated wisdom of others interested in telcom for development, including those already who have caught the Bank’s eye? No guarantees. You’ll be competing with other projects that meet the guidelines. But the Bank seems most enlightened on these matters. Besides the World Bank, there are many other possibilities ranging from the U.S. Agency for International Development to foundations like Rockefeller or Carnegie or philanthropists like the George Soros or Ted Turner—or even Bill Gates, as long as you can keep in check his primeval instinct to Window-ize the entire cosmos and help empty his CD-ROM warehouses (no prejudice here: I used Microsoft FrontPage to adapt this speech for the Web). And at home? Carlos Slim, the biggest shareholder within Telmex, could work with his company and with the communications workers union and use his $6 billion to help change the face of Mexico. He might even make a few extra pesos. After all, the local phone companies could be sustainable businesses with sizable investments from Telmex and other communications giants; we are talking less about handouts than about startup money and future returns on investments. Moreover, although a Mexican Electronic Peace Corps could experiment with new technology, it could save money when old 386 machines and the like would suffice. U.S. corporations these days are giving away thousands of machines to nonprofit groups and might be interested in sending similar hardware to Mexico if the right tax breaks were there. Even now, here in the States, a 386 machine capable of Web access costs can less than $100 if you know where to look. Moreover, many young people in rural areas might want to learn about the hardware first-hand by building it themselves, just as some have in the states. So the computers themselves would not have to be as pricey as many would suppose. It’s amazing what the frugal can do with following-edge technology.

Add in all those factors, and the “Who’ll pay?” and “How much?” questions won’t be quite as scary as they might otherwise.

Besides the Electronic Peace Corps, Mexico might consider another program in the informatics realm, a national digital library full of books that any schoolchild could read for free, or at least at much less cost than if such a library did not exist. Under TeleRead, as I’ve called it, books would be on the Internet or available through CD-ROM and similar technologies. It is urgent for Mexico and other countries to wrestle now with the intellectual property issues, rather than seeing the “pay-per-read” ethos reign unchecked. We cannot get everything online for free. But with books, especially, we should try as best we can; for they encourage sustained thought—a prerequisite for the growth of meaningful democracy, not to mention the full development of the workforce.

In today’s era of paper, a serious shortage of books exists, and not just in Mexico. Patrick and Jacqueline Duffy-Saenz recall their Peace Corps days in Uruguay, where “a teacher earned about $90 a month, a book cost over $100, and teachers had no idea how to use the Net other than to send and receive electronic mail.” Up in the United States, books aren’t such luxuries, but in one recent year, the Shasta County library system in the state of California was spending 25 cents per year per citizen in tax money on books and other intellectual property. Meanwhile in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Hills, the library system has spent as much as $34 per citizen, or more than 100 times as much as Shasta did. The answer is not to take away books from Beverly Hills or the elite sections of Mexico City, but to put them online for all students to share simultaneously—whether their parents drive Mercedes or donkey carts. The screen technology for electronic books is improving, and new equipment prices are falling; eventually computers will cost no more than radios. Besides, there are ways around blurry screens if the need for books is great enough. Librarians in rural areas, for example, could scour a TeleRead library for books on topics of local interest and print them out (on inexpensive dot-matrix machines using recyclable ribbons and the least expensive paper) to be passed around from reader to reader. The elite may care about packaging, about leather-bound editions; the masses if need be could do quite well with just the words, thank you. Child respond best to books on topics about which they most care. The right book just might make the difference between a reader and nonreader.

Yes, TeleRead-style national libraries would also benefit academia. Funding woes have beset university libraries throughout the world. Even in the United States and Canada, some universities are cutting back on the number of subscriptions to scholarly publications because publishers are charging them excessively. Some scholars are publishing directly on the Web, of course. But, as much as I love the Web, it is not a substitute for a library. The right information can be hard to find, and in most cases there are not the usual mechanisms for evaluating the quality of the information. Beyond that, links on the Web come and go. My father died a little over a year ago, and I linked to the electronic obituary from the Washington Post—only to see the article vanish. These missing links may seem ever so trivial. But they are not. Missing links are a serious impediment to those of us who would like to link to the rest of the world from our home pages and also encourage our civic groups to do the same; they interfere with our wish to keep the Net a “many-to-many” medium. And within the world of scholarship, the damage is even more severe. Scholars often develop new knowledge because they can explore material outside their usual domains and benefit from serendipitous discoveries. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly of July 1945, the scientist Vannevar Bush called for technology to help consolidate knowledge: “Mendel’s concept of the law of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.”

Beyond that, consider the benefits that TeleRead-style libraries could offer to the corporate world. It is no coincidence that some pro-business conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., are the among the most vigorous proponents of TeleRead. Researchers and entrepreneurs, the very ones most likely to pave the way for a new cancer drug or a practical optical computer, would fare better with a wider selection of books and articles.

Just who would choose the books for inclusion in a TeleRead library, though? Many librarians in many cities, as well as librarians at universities and elite research libraries, would designate those eligible for royalties. And commercial writers and publishers could gamble money up front to qualify for royalties on books, or to increase the amount of money that individual titles could earn in the future. Payment would be by the number of dialups, just as the present system rewards popularity; let us avoid a Soviet-style cultural bureaucracy. What’s more, a TeleRead-style library would not force publishers to participate and they could publish the usual paper books or engage in pay-per-read. In most cases, however, they eventually would also want to be in the TeleRead collections; that’s where the real market would be. TeleRead could even rely on some of the same pay-per-read tracking mechanisms that publishers are developing for tracking sales of individual titles, except that the a national digital library, not the individual readers, would pay for the the books.

Properly enlightened, many publishers might actually support such an idea. Despite all the excitement over online book-sellers like Amazon.com, books are not faring well these days under the current system, even in the United States. The number of hardback adult-level books sold in the U.S. has actually declined, what with all the competition from other activities, including, yes, the Internet to a small extent. This distraction will only grow in the future.

Even without the Net in widespread use in Mexico, your own writers and publishers of books have suffered. Writing in the Los Angeles Times of September 19, 1997, a Mexican publisher named Rafael Perez Gay observes: “In the golden year of 1976, for every book printed in Mexico, two were printed in Spain; today, for every book published in Mexico, Spain publishes more than 20.” The Net, however, could eventually change the economics of publishing and help writers in Mexico and other developing countries find audiences at home. Even in the United States, writers must struggle. All the writers in my country earn maybe $6 billion a year from domestic book royalties, or around a third of the amount by which Bill Gates’ wealth grew in less than 12 months through his own activities in the intellectual property area. When it comes to compensating the typical writer, even my country is still one big sweatshop. An author earns less than 10 or 15 percent of the cover price of a book, on an advance that may be only $5,000 or even less—even though he or she may have worked on the project for years. Might it not be wise to refine the technology so readers didn’t have to pay for cardboard, ink, transportation, and marketing bureaucracies that consume most of the cover price? Which isn’t to be anti-publisher. The good ones would add value to the works of writers, though intelligent editing and other services, and so they would both survive and thrive.

But how would Mexico would pay for a TeleRead-style national library? It could start very small and grow as more tax money became available and as it cost-justified itself.

For years I have been proposing the refinement and use of tablet-shaped, sharp-screened machines with pen interfaces that would be good not only for reading books but also for filling out forms for electronic commerce. By tapping the screen with an electronic stylus, you could move from place to place with a book, for example, and to write you could use voice recognition of a plug-in keyboard (with the machine held up at a comfortable height by way of a retractable wire stand). With the same stylist or voice recognition, you could fill out tax forms. You could use such computers on couch or on the kitchen table, rather than having to go to your den and boot up your computer every time you wanted to go shopping to transfer funds electronically.

The potential benefits to business and government are huge, and over the long run they would easily cost-justify TeleRead in the end. Consider a bank. Electronic transactions cost but a fraction of those done the old-fashioned way—so that banks could spend less on paperwork and pass the savings on to customers. Smart forms, capable of flagging or eliminating erroneous entries, would reduce the number of mistakes on mortgage applications or income tax documents. Build your economy around automated customers, not just automated bureaucracies and corporations, and the savings over the years will reach well into the billions. Governments, perhaps acting jointly, could hasten the process with a carrot to Silicon Valley and computer manufacturers in other countries besides the U.S. They could promise to fund libraries to buy TeleReader computers to assure a core market. Just about all TeleReaders, though, would end up being privately owned—since the library machines would pique the interest of consumers who borrowed them, and they would go out and buy their own. That would mean higher sales and, in turn, lower prices. And, of course, as TeleRead libraries grew in sizes, the usefulness and popularity of these devices would increase, giving yet another boost to commerce online.

Meanwhile, to help start a Mexican TeleRead-style library and ensure the very widest selection of titles, some enlightened private philanthropy would be a godsend. Perhaps Carlos Slim will be able to out-Carnegie our Bill Gates. Of course, if Gates wants to be a more generous Gates, either in the United States or Mexico or both, I have no problem.

Still another question is whether to work toward a true world library or a series of national libraries. I myself would prefer at least to start with national libraries, given the challenges of overcoming cultural and political differences. Via master catalogues, interested readers truly could eventually do worldwide searches for literature of interest to them from different national libraries. But the actual financing of the books would be handled on a country-by-country basis, so that, for example, Iraqis wouldn’t be continually at odds with U.S. librarians over books about the Middle East. Of there might be a system under which readers could directly purchase individual books from other countries’ libraries—or from foreign publishers—or maybe avail themselves of inexpensive subscriptions.
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You now have my thoughts on “How Technology Could Help Chiapas—and Mexico City.” I am not an expert on your own informatics policies, but virtually all of the above would appear to be consistent with President Zedillo’s goals as given by way of the World Wide Web. His planners call for the public sector to inspire “new informatics development in other sectors through the automation of its services and the introduction of innovative technologies and new applications.” And similarly the Zedillo government wants to “stimulate the use of technology and access to information services by means of networks in the social sector organizations as well as in the population in general.” The Electronic Peace Corps and TeleRead would do both, and I hope that the Zedillo Administration and the Mexican Congress will keep open minds. Meanwhile please feel free to follow up with questions in person or via e-mail to dr@teleread.org. What’s more, you can see an expanded, English-language version of this speech, and the accompanying Web links, at http://www.teleread.org/mextech.htm. May the day come when AltaVista contains more references to the Electronic Peace Corps and similar Mexican projects than to the tragedies of Chiapas, not because we should forget the massacres, but because there is so much work to be done to mitigate the conditions that led to the strife and the killings. Thank you.

¹Other business models might be user-owned cooperatives—or else employee-owned companies or user-owned coops in partnerships with existing phone companies. Models could vary according to local needs, the most important consideration here. In the United States, the cooperative model greatly speeded up rural electrification during the Great Depression of the 1930s and afterwards. Return to main text.

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David H. Rothman (dr@teleread.org) is author of NetWorld! (Prima Publishing, 1996) and other tech-related books as well as a contributor to Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (The MIT Press and the American Society for Information Science, 1996) and the author of Copyright and K-12: Who Pays in the Network Era?, an online essay published by the U.S. Department of Education. The opinions here are his own and not necessarily those of any other person or any organization. He wishes to credit Douglas J. Kennett for the photograph of the waterside huts in Chiapas—and that inimitable green line. Rothman encourages others to link to this page and to make printed or electronic reproductions. No permission needed for noncommercial use. Original material for this page © 1998 by David H. Rothman.

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