The Western high-tech elite, being too busy with defining and re-defining what the digital divide is and endlessly trying to compensate it, is definitely missing one the best lessons it could learn. It is a fact that developing countries are low-tech by definition, so they are always struggling to improve their minimal infrastructure by creating and exchanging ideas, rather than by assembling and delivering pricey chunks of electronics. In >>bare-life<< territories, there is a need to develop technological innovations while being aware of technical limitations. The focus here is on their creative exploitation or on slight but effective improvements that enable radical changes. Whereas, in the so-called industrial countries, we feel more and more >>connected<<, perpetually and unavoidably - even in the countryside or on the road - to the invisible communication networks, people not living in G8 countries are in a completely different situation: they have to hack communication systems to get what they need. Mobile phones, for example, have already provided the infrastructure for political movements in these kinds of countries, and have already been successfully used in this context.
One of the most famous historical cases is the >>People Power II<< movement in Manila in 2001, where thousands of people linked by SMS were able to coordinate non-violent demonstrations against President Joseph Estrada and his institutional corruption, finally leading to his impeachment. What made the difference was an efficient distribution structure that allowed the messages suddenly to reach an impressive number of people, reconfiguring the one-to-one message system for a large community. This structure was then enhanced and amplified for emergency conditions, and in the end the new scheme led to success and was permanently adopted.