Technology, telephones and the Two Mangoes

Technology, telephones and the Two Mangoes

This week, in the kinky booted tradition of Star Trek's
Captain Kirk, I decided to boldly venture forth into the future
and checkout what cool, high-tech items are available in
Jakarta's increasingly techno savvy marketplace.

The first stop was West Jakarta's Roxy Mas Plaza which
contains about eight floors dedicated entirely to mobile phones.
I guess to some of you that might conjure up hellish images of
hundreds of thousands of massed ring tones simultaneously
chirping away but it's a pleasant enough Plaza although it is
slightly strange that every shop is identical. My quest for a new
battery and headphone thingy for my Motorola was thankfully
successful and my mobile phone/camera/MP3 player was back in
action.

These phones are getting increasingly sophisticated of course
and apparently Sony Ericsson are just about to release the first
phone to bear the Walkman logo on it. In the future they say your
mobile phone will function as a phone, camera and Walkman as well
as your house keys, car keys, global positioning system, ATM
card, biometric sensor and plenty more besides I shouldn't
wonder. Your life will quite literally be in your hand. Then of
course you really will be buggered when you leave the thing in
the back of a taxi.

Speaking of taxis I proceeded to leave Roxy's handphone
heaven, jumped a Bluebird and headed for Jakarta's number one
techno mecca, namely Mangga Dua Plaza in Kota. However, trapped
in Mangga Dua's interminable gridlock in a seemingly vain attempt
to reach the Plaza itself, I couldn't help but reflect on the
downside of human progress and technology and how advances meant
to free humanity end up emasculating us. Twentieth-century
thinkers from Marx to Sartre have ruminated upon how we end up
alienated and stifled by progress. The Jakarta motorist, for
example, is caught in a series of escalating jams created by the
increasing availability of cars whose original intention was to
enable people to move more freely.

Are human beings increasingly, and with apparent
inevitability, held prisoner by our own creations? Perhaps the
mobile phones at Roxy Mas and the computer hardware available at
Mangga Dua can be viewed in the same way.

The handphone is certainly a double-edged sword in my view.
Sure, it is an essential convenience these days but you try
ignoring a call from someone close to you and then having to
explain where you were, what you were doing during every second
of the day, or coping with your SMS induced tendonitis. Likewise,
the Internet, the instrument of global communication,
paradoxically isolates people behind their monitors and engenders
a state of zombified inertia which is broken only by the mouse
clicking of the right-hand. Perhaps though, Indonesians,
intensely social creatures that they are, feel this sense of
alienation less acutely than my petit bourgeois Western self.

My mood brightened when I finally got inside the Plaza. Mangga
Dua does have the most excellent selection of pirated DVDs and
software available in town. Quite obscure stuff as well, all from
about Rp.10,000 per disc. Various police clampdowns have
thankfully done little to diminish the trade and entrench the
dubious morality of "Intellectual Property Rights" in Indonesia.
The figures that we read in the papers of millions of lost
dollars by the film industry in Asia through piracy assume that
those who buy 10 pirated DVDs from somewhere like Mangga Dua
would buy an equal number of discs at full price if the pirates
were not available. This is absolute garbage of course. As for
Bill Gates, well the fact that he is the richest man in the
history of the world rather disqualifies him from whingeing too
much about lost revenue, if you ask me. Indonesia, of course, has
more pressing issues to deal with than DVD piracy. Malnutrition,
poverty, AIDS and impending environmental doom are perhaps more
significant problems. Keep buying them cheap discs, I say. Why
begrudge Jakarta's poor about the only entertainment that they
can afford (aside from jumping each other's bones, of course).

Mangga Dua Plaza and other local malls such as Ratu Plaza at
the bottom end of Jl. Sudirman are also great places to pick up
pirated software. You may think that you're saving money on
pirated DVDs but that's peanuts compared to buying a US$500
program for Rp 20,000. One locally developed piece of software
that I managed to fish out costs a rather more expensive Rp
500,000. It's called Transtool and amazingly it translates
English text into Indonesian and vice versa at supposedly a 97
percent accuracy rate. Us English teachers had perhaps better
start looking for other jobs. MP3 players are also doing a
roaring trade in Indonesia at the moment and the Apple shop in
Ratu Plaza has hardly any Mac computers in it at all with the
bulk of the display counters being taken up by trendy i-Pods and
their various accessories. A basic MP3 Walkman can now be got for
under Rp 500,000. So it's full steam ahead into the future.

Now all we need is for hover boots to be invented and
Jakarta's traffic woes will be erased at a stroke.

--Simon Pitchforth