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THE LIST, 2020 EDITIONAuthor(s): EVGENY MOROZOVSource: Foreign Policy, No. 176, 100 TOP GLOBAL THINKERS OF 2009 (Special December 2009),p. 77Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684963 .

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THE USI,

2020 BOTIMI

Thought leaders for the Internet era. BYEVGENYMOROZOV

The worlds next great thinkers may well be just as brilliant as the ones on this list, but they're likely to come to our notice in very different ways. Take

William Kamkwamba, a 22-year-old from Malawi who already exemplifies

a new generation of global leaders. A few years ago, he came upon an illustration of a windmill in an old textbook in a language (English) he barely understood and built one for his family so their house could have electricity. Soon he was think ing of ways to mass-produce his invention for distribution as ready-made kits.

Twenty years ago, Kamkwamba's story might have stayed local. But

instead he had the fortune of colliding with today's Web-enabled global structure of intellectual intermediaries. In 2006, an innovation-focused

blog called Hacktivate stumbled upon a write-up about Kamkwamba's

windmill in a Malawian newspaper. It took only a few months for a network

of global thinkers and entrepreneurs called TED (full disclosure: I am a

TED fellow) to pick up the story. In 2007, Kamkwamba spoke at a TED con

ference in Tanzania, where he mingled with Bono and Jane Goodall, and in

2009 he cowrote a best-selling book about his experience called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

Will Kamkwamba be the next Sergey Brin? We don't know yet. But his

story suggests just how dramatically the Internet era has transformed

the very process of becoming a global thinker?that is, the process of

learning to get smart and heard at the same time?and how much those

changes are for the better.

In the old, pre-lnternet model, aspiring thought leaders and idea entre

preneurs had to establish residence either in one of the big cultural

metropolises or, failing that, a college town with a decent library. Now,

however, the very prospect of living in an "intellectual metropolis" has

become nearly obsolete. As Harper's Bill Wasik pointed out recently,

"[The Internet is] a place that courses with all the raw ambition and

creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New

York." As long as you pay your Internet bill, you might as well live in

Skjolden, Norway, or in a hut next to Waiden Pond.

The Internet is also democratizing education, making overspecialized and prohibitively expensive graduate schools ever harder to justify. With

the Kindle, printable e-books, and now potentially Google's scanned world

library, the price of books is rapidly approaching zero. Just as the invention

of the printing press allowed books to be mass-produced for the first time,

making them readily available for the middle class, the new economics of the Web make books freely available to anyone with access to a computer. And

English, the lingua franca of today's intellectual world, is easier and cheaper than ever to learn, with millions

of potential tutors just a Skype call away.

Many leading American universities are also pub

lishing content from their best professors online.

Now anyone can watch historian Donald Kagan's lectures about ancient Greece on Yale University's

website or match wits with Paul Krugman's old

economics exams at MIT.edu. Harvard University

philosopher Michael Sandel is releasing online

video lectures of his oversubscribed course on

justice, supplementing them with online discussion auides. A cursorv look at oeer-to-oeer networks

like Demonoid or even the infamous Pirate Bay?most commonly used for

file-sharing?reveals that much of the content swapped on them is educa

tional, from 1970s BBC documentaries to the eclectic courses produced by the Teaching Company. Judging by the comments on the file-sharing sites,

many of their customers are in the developing world.

The world's next crop of thought leaders will also have superior tools

of transmission at their fingertips. Getting your piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times or an essay into the New York Review of Books is no longer the only way to credential yourself as a serious thinker. Starting your own blog, contributing to a site like the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast, writing a Web column for a newspaper, or penning an occasional

guest post somewhere online can help to get your name out there much more quickly and, perhaps, even more effectively.

And once you're out there?even if, like William Kamkwamba, you don't

have access to the Internet yourself?the Internet has sprouted a number

of influential intermediaries, aggregators, and bloggers who can take you the next step. TED?and its growing collection of video talks, distributed to

legions of ?Tunes fans around the world?is just one

example. Another is TED's competitor PopTech and For more on jts Socja, |nnovation Fellows program. how the Internet .... , 4. . . , is changing big

This revolution in access to knowledge means

think, visit that in 10 to 15 years, the global landscape of ideas Net Effect on will look completely different. It will no longer ForeignPolicy.com. be centralized in the West because schooling in

everything from the classics to windmill construc

tion to modern art will be available to people in

any country without leaving home. The ability to work from anywhere also makes the life of the mind a good deal cheaper. The new genera tion of public intellectuals, though still cosmopolitan in outlook, will be

much more firmly embedded in their own locales, without the inferiority

complex of old about their Western peers; in other words, expect more

Pankaj Mishra than V.S. Naipaul. Their debates will also be entirely different. A decade from now, instead

of factions of Western (or at least Western-trained) thinkers arguing it

out on the op-ed pages of the Financial Times or the lounges of Davos, we may well see this new generation of intellectuals from the developing world, home-educated but globally minded, speaking publicly and force

fully from blogs, columns, and their own intellectual reviews. The debate on climate change would no longer be dominated by a Danish economist

fighting a former U.S. vice president, but instead might feature a Chinese

environmental blogger and a promising Indian scientist. The Internet may not turn us into a global village, but a global intel

lectual salon it already is. E39

Evgeny Morozov is Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University.

December 2009 77

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