Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur say that Silicon Valley can’t save the world:
The tech gurus, like so many evangelists of earlier eras, are wildly overoptimistic about what their gadgets can accomplish in the world’s poorest places. In this they share a rich history of failure. No less than Marx and Engels were sure the locomotive was going to unite the proletariat into a national force for social revolution, and the world would be a worker’s paradise in short order as a result. More recently, in the midst of the Arab Spring protests, columnist Thomas Friedman and many fellow pundits gushed about the power of tools like Twitter and Facebook to overthrow dictators and promote democracy. The Internet, declared the State Department’s in-house tech guru, Alec Ross, had become “the Che Guevara of the 21st century.” (Given that Che failed in three of the four revolutions in which he participated, that might actually be about right.)
Not only that, but Joshua Keating flags a study in Africa correlating cell phone expansion with violent conflict:
[Researches] found that from 2007 to 2009, areas with 2G network coverage were 50 percent more likely to have experienced incidents of armed conflict than those without. The clearest overlaps between cell coverage and violence were observed in Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
The authors think that improved cell-phone coverage helps insurgent leaders overcome what’s called the “collective-action problem” — that people are reluctant to join group endeavors when there’s a high level of personal risk. But better communication helps leaders recruit reluctant followers, whether they’re demonstrating for higher wages or killing people in the next town.
The Dish 