WEAPONS OF THE WEAK
BY SIMON PITCHFORTH

CITY LIMITS
TECHNESIA
BY SIMON PITCHFORTH

This month, in the space booted tradition of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, I decided to boldly venture forth into the future and check out 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.
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.7000 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 have bought 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 whining 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 popular places in which 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. All highly illegal of course and yet these places are all operating quite brazenly and openly out of the city’s shopping malls.

So it’s full steam ahead into Indonesia’s wired future. Now all we need is for hover boots to be invented and Jakarta’s traffic woes will be erased at a stroke.

My quest for a new battery and headphone set for my Nokia was successful and my mobile device was soon back in action. These so called smartphones are getting increasingly sophisticated of course and in the future they say your hand held friend will not only function as a phone, camera, music player, web browser and global positioning system, but also as your house keys, car keys, 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 stuffed when you leave the thing in the back of a taxi.

Blackberries are all the rage at the moment and there are now over one million of the things in Indonesia currently having their too small buttons pumped by semi-autistic tech fashionistas, a quite astonishing statistic. In fact, from January 2009 to June 2009, mobile ad requests on Blackberry phones increased by a whopping 842%. At the other end of the spectrum, a basic Chinese made MP3 player can now be got for just a couple of hundred thousand rupiah. They’re virtually giving the things away these days.
I left Roxy’s infinity of mobile phones, jumped in 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. 20th century thinkers from Marx to Sartre have ruminated upon how we end up alienated and stifled by progress. The Jakartan motorist, for example, is caught in a series of escalating jams created by the growing availability of cars whose original intention was to enable people to move more freely.

Are human beings increasingly, and with apparent inevitability, being held prisoner by their 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 mobile phone 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 text message 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.
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JAKARTAJAVAKINI DECEMBER2009