Hello World, I'm Tom Sino. This is SolarPunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss SolarPunk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the SolarPunk story prompt, adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations. If this is your first time here, I'd like to recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what SolarPunk is, why you should care, and why the series came into being.
Tonight our prompt is about the Global South on a mission north. It's called The Expedition. A group of doctors and engineers from a global south country are sent on a mission in the north, helping the specialists there live in the world after the great internet collapse, where the AIs will no longer make suggestions and the clouds can't calculate the load bearing strength of a pillar. The concept of the Global South and Global North are not strictly geographical.
Indeed, a large portion of the Global South is above the equator. Instead, the terms refer to a grouping of countries along a socio -economic and political boundary. The Global South usually refers to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The term came about as an alternative to Third World, which doesn't devalue those it speaks of. The Global North then usually refers to North America, Europe, Australia, and Russia. It sometimes is used in place of developed countries.
Over the last 30 years, the Global South has been on the rise politically, you economically and technologically. Some of that has been due to the migration of manufacturing and production, but there have also been major independent cultural shifts across the globe. It's very difficult to make broad claims about the state of the Global South despite the term being designed to do just that.
The digital divide is a key metric used to separate the two, yet internet use in Asia far exceeds many plays in the Global North. The term Global South itself had its origins in the late 60s in the context of Vietnam. The dominance of the North over the Global South was the phrase referring to the long history of colonialism between the regions. Culturally, the South holds the vast majority of Indigenous peoples, the dominant religious bases, and the lesser share of money.
Former West German Chancellor Rili Brandt created a visual line quite squiggly. across the world dividing it into wealthy north and poor south. In summary, being categorized as part of the north implies development as opposed to belonging to the south, which implies a lack thereof. It is exactly that concept that has taught the global south how to live and work around instability in their infrastructure, whether that be political, economic, or technological.
It is a mentality that simply doesn't exist in the north, as evidenced by the runaway march toward total digital economic dependence. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change wrote an article in 2019 on the state of the economic infrastructure in the European economic area, stating, Internet infrastructure services are both widespread and critical to business's core functions, with significant volumes of economic activity dependent on them.
It continues, some infrastructure services, such as payments or cloud storage, can be thought of as critical infrastructure. Any significant or prolonged failure of one of these could undermine the business's ability to carry out its activities to a potentially existential degree, while possibly triggering a domino effect throughout the rest of the economy.
It is also important to note that many infrastructure businesses higher up in the stack are themselves dependent on infrastructure businesses lower down the stack. This is the main problem the global north faces in our prompt. A rich developed society run with fundamental infrastructure built online collapsing under the cascade of failures when that internet access disappears. Picture a world only 10 years in our future.
Machine learning has advanced, AI has infiltrated many jobs, it may support a surgeon in their work providing real -time data in the heat of the moment, or it may be used in mechanical or civil engineering, providing simulation data to tests and retests, the safety of bridges, pipes, or waterways. Students entering the field are taught to work with these systems and learn to rely on them. Perhaps they'd learn the theory in school, but in practice, you work with the standard tools of the trade.
What's left is a gap of functionality. Either you have the tools or you regress to the basics, and practice with the in -between is lost. Who can you turn to? Who would have the skills that you need? Who could help? The experts growing up in the global south were forced to learn how to fix their own equipment, and to do so without expensive manufacturer services. They hack, break, hot fix. They do what they need to make things work, whether it's with the technology or around it.
This type of free -form problem solving is a daily practice. There's far more experience with make -it -work attitudes. Like Jugaad in India, the creative, inexpensive solution is the most effective, because it keeps you moving forward despite your barriers. This isn't to say that the Global South has no access to knowledge or modern technology.
On the contrary, they not only need to know how to use these things, but deeply understand their functioning so they can be patched and maintained with parts never meant for the purpose. This may mean knowing how to strip out DRM or Digital Rights Management, because a system was designed by people that only ever thought of it being used in the United States. They may need to bypass this or that check or make a system work somewhere it wasn't intended.
Is it any wonder that SolarPunk found its start in the Global South? Let's be clear, we're talking about self -sufficiency here, not primitiveness. Let's look at an example. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuba established a program to send its medical personnel overseas, particularly to Latin America, Africa, and Oceania, and to bring medical students and patients to Cuba for training and treatment respectively.
This program became the backbone of what's been called Cuba's soft diplomacy, or doctor diplomacy. It's so successful that these traveling Cuban doctors have their own Wikipedia page. But seriously, in 2015 Cuba had more than 50 ,000 health personnel in 103 different countries. That's more medical personnel than all of the G8 countries combined. Their work is focused on long -term sustainable care in the most underserved populations around the world.
Imagine the life of a doctor from the Global South. This isn't her first time in the field, heading to someplace desperate for her help. Her people call her a salvager, dragging out what healing she can from hard hit places. She knows what she's walking into. She knows it's trouble. This will be hard. For every person who will cry for her help, there is another she'll have to convince. We're just here to help. She'll repeat it. Conditions will be terrible.
They'll lack everything she needs, but she knows what to do to make do. That's her expertise, her experience. So what might collapse look like in your story? Imagine all the public -facing internet failing. Yeah, some hackers can still get a local network going, maybe a server for a building, but there's no Facebook, no Amazon. A lot of doctors will say, no problem, most of our records are still on paper. And then they'll laugh until they realize their equipment.
is all IoT. It won't work without a manufacturer server running somewhere. There is no more cloud, there's no more Google search. If that surgeon had become reliant on the AI assistant, well, it's back to the basics again. Perhaps that's not so bad now, but in 10 years, in 20, when these practices become as commonplace as Excel in an office, do you manually tallying columns and checking your math again and again? How quickly the knowledge of the old ways fade? Then remember the domino effect.
One system may be the basis for server more. Our economies are integrated, mixed things. Small disruptions can have major effects. How much worse would a major internet outage be? Once it went from days to weeks, how many businesses would still survive? And without those functioning, what about food? What about heating? How far down the line do you really need to look before there is a total collapse? But the internet couldn't really be disrupted, right? That's an extreme example for fiction.
Is it believable? Well, we already see events today that mimic the same result. ransomware attacks, disabled hospitals around the world, and it's not just the registration systems, these attacks also affect the machines themselves. Thanks to IoT and global north thinking, MRIs, tomographs, even dialysis machines can all stop working when they can't get online. When an attack like this hits, sometimes patients need to be transferred to another hospital. Now imagine it happened to all of them.
How can we approach these situations with fiction? The setting of the collapsing north is dramatic and will give plenty of impetus for the action. The team being sent to aid them is clearly our community protagonist. honest, that's the easy part. How can we level that up? Let's lean into the misconceptions to illustrate how painfully wrong they are. The Northern leaders, professors, or administrators may be offended at the idea that these vagrants have been sent to save them.
It may not be vicious or mean either. These could be well -meaning, well -intending people who lack intercultural literacy. Now we have extra tension on top of the infrastructure. Hospitals need to operate. The metro needs to go, even if it hasn't been serviced in a month. The conditions are terrible, and the people aren't even grateful for their help. Can you feel the struggle there? Just imagine waking up into that reality. How strong must your personal sense of ethics be to withstand it?
To weather that storm time and time again? How strong are your ideals? Until next time, I'm Tomasino. I hope you'll join me for the next SolarPunk prompt. Music in this recording is Esoteric Eye by Solar. From Global Patterns Compilation, SolarPunk. A brighter perspective. you