I don’t know if it’s a factor of age or experience – I consider them mutually exclusive – but when I saw a job opening for an Open Source Consultant here in Trinidad and Tobago, I thought back to how things were and how they have changed in the last 20 years since the FLOS Caribbean conference.
The short answer is that nothing has really changed.
It wasn’t long after that conference that the University of the West Indies was said to have signed an agreement with Microsoft. I imagine the Government of Trinidad and Tobago is paying Microsoft Office 365 subscription fees rather than using LibreOffice, and every time I get a hint of the back end of the results of government contracts related to technology, I see .Net. These are not good or bad things, but they are things that I think Trinidad and Tobago and other nations across the world spend money on rather than building their own experience pool.
That has been, and always will be, the most important aspect of open source software when it comes to a national economy. Sure, you can buy things off the shelf now from other nations, using your foreign exchange for that, but you can also develop the intellectual capital within a nation to meet those same needs. For reasons I do not pretend to understand, this hasn’t been considered a ‘good’ choice over the years in Trinidad and Tobago. Personally, I found my experiences in culture, ICT and open source to be of worth, but we are always measured by the values of others.
I applied for the consultancy position. It might be nice to get a nice 6 month stretch of helping the government save money in the long term while building something sturdy and of value, though I do worry that as a consultant advice will be ignored. That’s the trouble of being a consultant, and it’s also the blessing of being a consultant as well – you can advise your best with a clear conscience and let the chips fall where they may.
There may be hope that Trinidad and Tobago is ready to get serious about technology and innovation, and this could bode well as we have entered the age of large language models and promises of general Artificial Intelligence. It could also be just a position advertised so some Minister’s relative gets a gig to get paid to give crappy advice.
Time will tell.
I do stay in touch with folks from all the conferences that we had, some even sponsored by governments within the Caribbean, and we’ve all pushed ahead in our own ways. I haven’t seen the new generation, though.
When I wrote about the recent internet outage in Trinidad and Tobago, I was waiting to find out what the actual cause was so I could follow up. As usual, the talking heads did not have anything of worth to say.
In fact, what they had to say seemed pretty insulting to me.
What TSTT did manage to do was give people free mobile data for the day, which certainly helped those who were using their mobile data, but did nothing for the people who were subscribing to TSTT/bmobile/Amplia for internet access that wasn’t mobile.
But the explanation explained nothing.
…In a recording attached to the release, CEO Lisa Agard apologised for the disruption and its impact on customers.
“To demonstrate our regret, we have decided that all customers will be given free data until midnight.”
She explained, “The disruption was triggered by an unexpected circumstance which regrettably persisted until 11 am.”…
“The disruption was triggered by unexpected circumstance” is the equivalent of a 5 year old explaining something as, “Fall down go BOOM!”.
I’d like a better answer, but I’m used to non-answers by politicians and their corporate cousins, CEOs, who are politicians as well.
To balance that observation, I’ll point out that she has said very smart things too – such as here:
After comparing how much Big Tech – Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, TikTok, Amazon and Microsoft – pays in other countries, CEO of the Telecommunications Services of TT (TSTT) Lisa Agard said Trinidad and Tobago earns only two per cent, since they already pay in South Korea, Australia and the US.
Speaking at Canto’s 38th annual conference and trade exhibition at JW Marriott Turnberry, Miami on Tuesday, Agard said, “We are in an existential crisis, and the crisis is driven by Big Tech operators generating a considerable amount of traffic on our networks.”
She said Big Tech is responsible for 67 per cent of the total internet traffic in the Caribbean, but offers no network investment…
I’m not saying that the two are related. Trinidad and Tobago is rarely known for project efficiency, and TSTT suffers ownership by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago which is certainly not known to citizenry for efficiency. That being said, TSTT has a pretty good track record. I use Amplia presently, which was bought by TSTT, and I’d say that the service overall is world class.
What I’m saying is that they could be indirectly related.
However, what is interesting, and a bit refreshing, is that a data driven approach is presented in the latter quote, where the case is made that 67% of traffic in the Caribbean goes to the big technology companies. It begs the question about how much internet traffic the Caribbean gets on the global scale. It’s hard to say, since the amount of traffic hides in how one defines the Caribbean.
Should Big Tech be paying for infrastructure upgrades in the Caribbean? Now there’s a ripe question. Honestly, my opinion is that there should be investment – but without knowing how much the Caribbean internet traffic accounts for on a global scale, it’s hard to say how much.
It does fit, though. The Caribbean is a region of kickbacks, and Big Tech isn’t good with kickbacks. They spend most of their money lobbying. Done in the interests of the majority, kickbacks are not corruption.
When I read the image to the left from over at Classics of Fiction about the New Prehistory, I was surprised that I didn’t know about the lack of science fiction roots in Hispanic countries. It opened a door. Science fiction fires the imagination for applying science and technology to issues, so this is important.
At the first CARDICIS, way back when, I thought I’d been invited by mistake. Suddenly I found myself in St. Lucia at a conference about ICT (or in Spanish, TIC) and culture. There was, for the first time as they said, real time translation allowing people from the Caribbean and South American region to speak to each other.
The core of this was wrapped around the metaphor of cooking, and food is certainly something that we all share around the world since we need to eat. It was a great conference, and I learned a lot about the region, barring US and UK territories and the Bahamas.
The Caribbean is poorly defined any way you look at it, and one can argue it’s by design. European territories were never designed to be independent, and it shows even now. CARICOM members include nations from the South American continent (Suriname, Guyana and Belize), and those nations all have something in common: They don’t speak Spanish. I don’t know how that happened, but it happened.
Geographically, the countries considered in the Caribbean are not the same, and within the Caribbean itself there are islands of isolation in language. By land mass or population, though, the majority of nations in the Caribbean speak Spanish, French, English and Dutch in descending order, and these islands come from the European influences which, to this day, define who does what with who.
After CARDICIS, I spent a lot of time in South America and the Caribbean in places where English was not the native language. I even became conversational in Spanish during that time, though I fear that part of my brain goes on vacation now and then. I enjoyed getting to understand how people lived throughout the region, and yet here’s this gaping hole in my knowledge that I knew nothing about.
It was never a question, so I never sought an answer. So I started digging in.
Science Fiction in Latin America
Science fiction (SF) is not a literary form native to the region, but many Latin American writers have utilized its creative freedom to reflect local settings and concerns. The definition of science fiction is particularly fluid in Latin America, where it overlaps considerably with horror, mystery, fantasy, and other genres…
I had no clue, but in the books I read in Spanish I never did read any science fiction. Thinking back to when I picked them up in my travels, availability could have been a factor, though my focus at the time was trying to understand how people lived.
“La gente real” is a common enough phrase but one I picked up in Nicaragua. The real people. Not what you see in the tourist brochures, the news, or what your friend who visited that all inclusive hotel thinks about the people who made their stay comfortable.
So this was a new thing to research, and since I’m procrastinating about a particular part of what I’m writing, I drilled in this morning. The thing about science fiction is that there’s science involved. It’s not exactly a big secret with the name being stuck in the title of the genre, but science and technology are not that far apart. In fact, technology is best described as science practically applied. So science fiction would go hand in hand with ICT.
I recalled conversations I had over the years with many of my Spanish speaking friends, and not once did we really cover common ground in science fiction aside from stale Star Trek and Star Wars stuff. Those are so ubiquitous that a billion years from now errant signals will reach a planet with intelligent life who will think Yoda is a demi-god and that Captain Kirk is a reason to bolster their planetary defenses. They may eventually get here and find some plastic light sabers and phasers to help prop up that mythos in their culture. There’s a book idea.
And then I remembered using the word, “Grok” to one of my friends in Costa Rica, who was (and probably still is) an Argentinean Penguinista, steeped in the Linux command line. She didn’t know what it meant, and I attributed that to language. I do recall explaining the origin from Stranger in a Strange Land and Robert Heinlein, but she had not read that book and I thought little of it.
Latin America has it’s own science fiction, and I had somehow completely missed that.
“The man could feel his eyes filling with tears. Before him stood a spaceship, a gigantic metallic disk that seemed to be made of two immense plates joined at the edges.” These first words of Argentine Eduardo Goligorsky’s “The Last Refuge” could open any American or European science fiction story. However, the rest of the story largely deviates from Western models of sci-fi in its overt treatment of political themes, as “The Last Refuge” quite openly critiques authoritarianism. The story’s protagonist, Guillermo Maidana, must escape an authoritarian society that proclaims itself as the “the last refuge of Western civilization,” directly referencing Argentine dictator Juan Carlos Onganía’s paternalistic crusade against communism. Maidana’s crime? Possessing a photo album of historic technological and scientific achievements…
…Despite its clear relevance to political themes across the region, Latin American sci-fi does not receive the credit it is due inside or outside Latin America. Historically, the literary establishment across Latin American has not taken sci-fi seriously. In Mexico, literary contests and publications “did not think it was sufficiently literary, so it was frowned upon,” said Schaffler. Likewise, the Argentine cultural establishment looked down on Argentine scientists in general. “Scientists’ opinion has as much weight as that of rock stars or sports idols,” Capanna explained. Even when sci-fi did enter the mainstream, popular audiences often believed that imported sci-fi was somehow “purer.”…”
There’s a lot of text between the elipses in this last quote, and I encourage people to go read the article if they’re interested in this topic. I had no idea about all of this.
Science fiction in many ways drives technology. Technology today emulates science fiction of yesteryear. Many people won’t remember Dick Tracy’s watch where he could video chat with people. Many more people don’t even know who Dick Tracy is. Somewhere on this planet, right now, someone’s trying to build a light saber. Tricorders and tablets, artificial intelligences and those presented in science fiction…
The last article gives a big hint about the difference in focuses, and it likely has to do with the situations in Latin America itself, which are painfully political as we see here in Trinidad and Tobago. With an influx of Venezuelans taking the jobs nobody in Trinidad and Tobago seemed to want, Venezuelans are making their way into Trinidad and Tobago culture. It’s a drum that people beat every now and then about the Venezuelan influx, but Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela have a long standing relationship – enough so that 1920s calypsonian King Radio sang Matilda long before Belafonte recorded anything.
There’s certainly a lot of space to think about this, but I sadly have not read any Latin American science fiction. The intentionality, be it “make the world a better place through science” or “get rid of authoritarian society” all drives the imagination that drives technology… and is something maybe we should be paying a little more attention to.
I’ve been looking into self-publishing, and other ways to write the things that I want and make a bit of cash on the side. Certainly, it’s not a way to get rich since we all can’t be bestselling authors, but it’s a way to do what I enjoy and derive some income. I know people who are on Substack, who are on Medium, etc, but all of those sites are dependent on Stripe.com, which doesn’t work well with being in the Caribbean unless you start incorporate in the United States. That seems like a ridiculous step, really. And given Stripe.com is the default for WordPress.com for accepting revenue, and my sites are on WordPress.com, it’s even sillier. Not that PayPal is much better. They are good enough in countries they support, but really, they suck outside of them, and with the issues I have had in PayPal in the past with them just deciding to lock an account for no reason and then unlock it without explanation… well, you can see how that would be a problem.
The Caribbean has had many writers of value out there, published, etc, so the problem is not the content in the Caribbean. It’s that the Caribbean is not getting a fair shake.
I am not ashamed to say that the acquaintances I have on social media do not seem to read, or share. Facebook algorithms presently have me in account restriction because I had uploaded a parody video that got their algorithm hot and sweaty, which in turn means my posts there aren’t highlighted at the top.
What does one do? Well, I’m not sure yet, but I know I’ll keep writing and working on the book. Maybe I’ll just self-publish and let the public sandpaper it into shape.
Still, it makes one think about the disparity caused by the way that the entire Internet socioeconomic ecosystem works, and what feeds the artificial intelligences that they are training online. That isn’t too far from technocolonialism.
Thus, a challenge. Something I’ll continue working on.
This comes in the way of an apology to readers outside of Trinidad and Tobago: I’ve written more in the past week about Trinidad and Tobago than I typically do and the reason behind that is simple: I felt it needed to be written. And in that, there is no real apology.
There are lessons here, though, when we look at the planet not as we see it, but for what it is – a complex network of networks that has existed before mankind and that will continue after mankind.
We live in an odd alien landscape that our senses can barely discern. We have gotten better at it, and through trial and error – arguably disastrous error – we have learned new things. If Clair Cammerson Patterson hadn’t tried to estimate the age of the Earth, he wouldn’t have ended up leading a campaign against lead poisoning, and leaded fuels. So many who don’t know his name have probably had their lives saved. That’s just one example.
There have been people doing similar things around the world, opening up new perspectives on the planet by daring to look, to ask questions rather than accepting… and we take them for granted. Many of us don’t understand what they do, which makes sense, but many of us don’t try to understand.
The planet doesn’t care about our effective collective apathy.
That we are given pause to consider such things is not enough, that we use the pause for introspection is still not enough. The world doesn’t care about our bureaucracies, or democracies, or our economies.
Humanity, to survive, needs to be more agile in it’s adaptation to the world. The increased population certainly doesn’t help; more humans means more agriculture and farming which we clear more natural land for without truly understanding all the implications. It means increased use of all the nasty -icides we use, it means more transportation using things that cough pollutants. Our medical technology assures we live longer, our business technology allows us to profit or lose from it more rapidly, and the person who works in the hope of retiring finds themselves working longer to retire because of socioeconomic circumstance.
The planet’s governments were not designed for this level of change. They don’t scale as fast as we procreate, a problem that China was quick to deal with, making people shudder at the implementation. In this way, perhaps, the Chinese ‘solution’ kept the population growth to a speed where the governance could adapt fast enough.
I don’t know, and really, I don’t think anyone does. There are opinions, I’m sure, but I’m not sure anyone actually knows. It’s apparent that there are at least some Chinese people who are not pleased with the way things are. In time, history books will tell us the ones that survived were right.
What we do know is that we can see events in our spheres faster than we could have 20 years ago, or 40 years ago. The world is awash with would-be citizen journalists documenting themselves and what they see, interpreting their world on the fly without a few moments introspection.
Governments around the world can’t keep pace with all of this. Trinidad and Tobago, since I have been writing about Trinidad and Tobago, is slow to adapt and change. It didn’t diversify it’s economy when it could have while oil revenues were high. It had brain-drain as oligarchal systems kept people from pushing things forward, forcing them to other places to become what they would become. Corruption that paid well came from such things, creating it’s own sub-economy while effectively stalling progress.
In this, there are parallels with other developing nations. There is nothing significantly different in the corruption aspects of developing nations, but where Trinidad and Tobago is different is that it could have been developed much further along with the oil revenues it once had. Instead, politics divided and conquered as politics typically does.
Whenever administrations change, we get reorganization. Reorganization within the same cavern of methodologies doesn’t actually change as much as politicians would have people believe, largely because politicians aren’t systems thinkers outside of politics.
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
– Charlton Ogburn, Jr. (1911-1998), in Harper’s Magazine, “Merrill’s Marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure” (Jan 1957)
So how do we get real change? It’s simple, really – we stop playing politics. We push on fixing the things we need to – foresight – rather than getting wrapped up in a blame game that politicians play so that they can be elected or re-elected.
And when they fail, we criticize by creating.
Many individuals have thoughts on how to do things. Being an expert on something limits what can be thought of within a narrow field when all too often innovation comes from intersections across fields.
Stop wasting time on politicians. Start using time productively toward solutions. When someone has an idea, challenge it – and if it passes, share it so others can challenge it and better shape a solution.
Or you can go on depending on politics. How’s that working for you?
In Part I related to the 2018 flooding in Trinidad and Tobago, I was very upbeat about how the community was handling things, and here, now, I will be less upbeat – but not as a matter of politics. The government response is a symptom of a lack of preparedness for a disaster at this scale.
When I write of ‘this scale’, too, this is not as large a disaster as we have seen in the past internationally with earthquakes or hurricanes or tsunamis or typhoons or… and yet, the reality is that for anyone affected or responding to any disaster, it’s huge. It’s emotional, it’s frustrating, and well intentioned people want to do more and expect governments to do more.
In essence, a flood of aid might be wasted, and the sane thing to do is to hold off on asking for assistance until what is needed is actually identified. This is common sense, but it’s common sense that leaves people when they are flooded with imagery of homes underwater, of people who have lost all but the love of their brothers and sisters.
In the end, while unpopular, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago was honest about the capacity of government to handle the situation – something which has been neglected for decades. People have been uttering, “God is a Trini” for as long as I can remember, a testament to faith that Trinidad and Tobago alone had some form of relationship with a superior being. God simply doesn’t handle logistics when the… water… hits the fan.
Flash flood on the highway near Couva, Trinidad, 2008
It’s getting worse – scientists agree on climate change though politicians do not; the complexity of climate change is lost on many. Sea levels are rising. We’ve been seeing increased rainfall in parts of the world, droughts in others.
Systems do not change quickly. When I wrote about Brett last year in Trinidad and Tobago, I didn’t expect an immediate change – but I did expect at least a few things to change. The ODPM still has a useless app, it’s still ponderously slow to respond for such a small organization in a small country… it’s a bit like a mouse that lacks agility, slamming into walls with the precision of a meteorite. And it’s a symptom of larger issues that plague Trinidad and Tobago.
So no, the government of Trinidad and Tobago doesn’t get a free pass, but the present government needs to turn decades of lack of exercise of this arm of government to deal with things – as well as other things, which I’ll get to in a later post.
The global economy isn’t waiting for Trinidad and Tobago.
Usain Bolt with NX300-4, courtesy SamSung, Belgium. Some Rights Reserved (through Image Link)
From Richard Branson’s comment on his post – thank you – here is his response with what countries are on the list:
“Hi Taran – the countries already signed up are: Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, Jamaica, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos, St. Kitts & Nevis, Antigua & Barbuda, US Virgin Islands, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Belize, Barbados, Bahamas, Guyana, Suriname, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire, St Vincent & The Grenadines, Panama, Haiti, Mexico, Honduras. I hope to see more join the list!?”
I knew nothing about it. Here I am, in Trinidad and Tobago – a part of the Caribbean – and I’m getting this news from Richard Branson on LinkedIn. That’s peculiar, isn’t it? So I dug in, particularly interested in aspects related to Trinidad and Tobago. Short answer: Nothing specific about any country, really.
In spending about an hour doing some research on it this morning, I saw no particular references to Trinidad and Tobago related to the ‘Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator‘. The name alone is a mouthful, distills to an unwieldy acronym, and doesn’t actually get into much detail. It’s boiler-plate NGO/Government communications, the message diluted for the people who probably should know more about it.
Over the next five years, the accelerator will create the right environment for private and public funds to flow into investments in clean energy, building resilience and climate-smart cities and healthy oceans.
Oh. And it mentions something rather interesting as well – that US $200 million is earmarked for this. Hidden in plain sight.
The deadly havoc that was caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 posed huge challenges to many Caribbean countries. While the Caribbean has historically been vulnerable to natural disasters, climate change is exacerbating these risks and is threatening the region’s quest for sustainable development. Unless confronted with substantial resources, the economic impact for the region could exceed US$22 billion per year by 2050, or about ten percent of current GDP. Speaking at an event, Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group said:“Our goal is ambitious and bold: we are creating the world’s first climate-smart zone. We have a vision of the Caribbean which is greener, stronger and more resilient than ever before – built on innovation, powered by clean, sustainable energy and accelerated by public and private investment”.
And this, apparently, has been a thing since at least December, 2017, as this World Bank article demonstrates.
And yet, there are claims of all these ‘Caribbean countries’ being involved, but no real list of them. I found nothing about Trinidad and Tobago in there. When we write, “Caribbean Countries”, it’s a nebulous thing.
So, I’m not sure about much of this – I’ll be paying more attention to it, but there needs to be more detail in what they send out.
The people of the Caribbean certainly would be interested in this, if only there were usable information… which is always the problem with such things.
If only he had a military medical background with an idea of how things really work – and don’t – on the ground.
If only CARICOM had put such a system in place; if only when this alleged person was approached by Roosevelt King they hadn’t said they needed to spend a few hundred thousand US dollars to get it done.
If only he hadn’t told them that they could have developed the system from scratch starting at about $10K U.S., with development costs, circa 2006. That was too cheap and would employ local developers. That would be no good.
If only there was someone who had found himself working with such systems at ECN, and worked to troubleshoot existing systems, design new ones and see what goes wrong – plus document it all. If only those systems included NOAA! If only when he returned to Trinidad and Tobago, he tried connecting with people in Digicel and TSTT and met silence.
If only such a person existed. If he did, he’d probably be a farmer by now after having tried to chase a vision no one else wanted. Hypothetically, 12 years is a long time by human standards. 1/6th or 1/7th of a decent lifespan, really.
Ahh, well. If only we had that experience. Too bad.
I’ve been looking into self-publishing, and other ways to write the things that I want and make a bit of cash on the side. Certainly, it’s not a way to get rich since we all can’t be bestselling authors, but it’s a way to do what I enjoy and derive some income. I know people who are on 
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