A Wired Future Breaks From A Tired Past
by Rodolpho Carrasco
Saturday, August 21, 1999 in Pasadena Star News
[Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif. Check out more articles by Rodolpho Carrasco here.)
Reports this summer on America's digital divide lent statistical weight to the call for increased technological investment among the disadvantaged.
Anyone purporting to prepare young people for the future or help unemployed people find work has been working overtime to understand these reports. It,s been dizzying, especially when we encounter further evidence that grasping Internet-related economic opportunities is not an option.
September's issue of WIRED magazine, for example, speculates on what life will be like when the DOW Jones Industrial Index, already driven to unprecedented heights by internet stocks, hits 30,000 sometime this coming decade. Not many believed the DOW would ever reach 10,000, but now top economists predict a three-fold rise, accompanied by increased wealth throughout the nation.
W. Michael Cox, chief economist of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, told Wired that the major problem in this wealthier future is the labor force. "We need people to work this economy. We need to relax the immigration laws.... let the old folks go back to work without a 40 percent to 90 percent tax over $15,500, [and] we need to get people off the welfare rolls, says Cox.
We all know about the hope of transitioning people off of welfare into tech jobs. But relaxing immigration laws? Bringing elderly folks back in to the work force?
Cox sounds like some kind of social radical, but he's not. He's just a banker who understands that the internet economy isn't just an opportunity for people looking for work. The Internet economy needs these people to work.
News like this is exciting, but it also wears me out. After an entire summer of tracking digital trends to understand how urban young people might benefit, I looked forward to a recent trip to Mexico for time away from the pressure of the Internet's economic potential. But what I found south of the border were more people tracking the same breaking information.
Zacatepec is a sleepy little town about 40 miles south of Cuernavaca and two hours from Mexico City. There is no Valle de Silicon in Zacatepec, no compelling reason for an investor to steer a rental down the town's main street. But the men of Sinai Presbyterian Church on the west side of town have plans for a web-site business that touches all of Latin America.
One man programs in C (a computer language). Another has maintained computer networks for a government office. A third is receiving certification in Microsoft Office. What they lack - computer equipment, Internet access, web page creation skills, and marketing saavy - they are pursuing with all due haste. Their leader, the church pastor, recently visited the United States and successfully solicited computer donations and volunteers to come south and teach Internet skills.
The Internet's potential is clearly understood by this group. They know that web work can be done by anyone in the world for anyone on the planet. They look forward to finding work elsewhere, an all-too-common Mexican experience, without actually leaving home, until now an absurd fantasy.
The men of Zacatepec are not just an aberration in Latin America. An entire wave of Latin Americans is taking hold of the web with both hands. According to Internet World magazine, the number of Internet users in Latin America will rise from 10 million in 1998 to 30 million by the end of 2000.
Already there are large, Amazon.com type companies duking it out for these Latin Internet users and their dollars.
Starmedia.com's web site contains content in both Spanish and Portuguese and targets 19 distinct markets. Competitors include Infosel Olé, with a distinctly Mexican focus, and Ole.com, the most Yahoo!-looking site that promises visitors "un mundo en tu idioma - a world in your language.
The Internet has so thoroughly pushed into Latin America that the only thing I detected missing was advertisements by Web companies at major sporting events. In the United States it is now common to see a scoreboard sponsored by a search engine or a field-level billboard urging you to visit a web site. But inside Mexico City's cavernous Estadio Azteca, as Mexico beat Brazil in front of 115,000 raucous soccer fans earlier this month, the only advertiser in sight was Budweiser.
The Latin American rush to the Internet is driven by the same force driving our own: the creation of wealth. The latest predictions about the Internet's wealth potential seem downright insane. According to Wired writer Kevin Kelly, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office expects to retire the national debt by 2009. Kelly then quotes Matthew Miller, a senior fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, who says, "This means guns and butter: ballistic missile defense, universal health coverage, hefty tax cuts, and a Marshall Plan for Kosovo."
Unbelievable stuff. Makes one dizzy just to think about it. But it's for real, here in the U.S., in Latin America, all over the world. If you have not already woken up to the fact that economic growth driven by the Internet might provide the economic opportunities we have long desired, it's time to quit hitting the snooze button.
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