The bus is not here yet. Has it broken down? Did the driver fail to wake up? The fact is the primary means of public transport which drives down to the biggest technological project in Russia experienced a bug that morning. Code name: Skolkovo. In Russian: Сколково.
Skolkovo wants to be a ‘smart city’, an intelligent and digital city. Like Konza City in Kenya, Porto Digital in Brazil, or like Israel which built, on the scale of an entire country, a real start-up nation. Four examples which illustrate the influence of Silicon Valley, as well as the difficulties of reproducing the model.
‘We don’t know what happened to the bus,’ says the director general of the Skolkovo technopark, Sergey Kurilov, apologetically, when I arrive. I am only 30 kilometres from the centre of Moscow, but I had to manage on my own for two hours, to get here. ‘In two or three years, there will be two metro stations here,’ he adds, reassuringly. In his office, Kurilov, thirty-four, has a Soviet poster ‘Don’t Talk’ (meant literally) and a picture of Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB and short-lived president of the USSR (which is ironic). On his table: an iPad and a MacBook Air.
Sergey Kurilov embodies the nouveau riche—or at least the nouveau Russian. The business oligarch is a philistine who takes pride in cultural history. ‘I believe that we will succeed in constructing buildings, roads and a metro. And people will come and live here. But will things gel well? I am not 100 per cent sure, urbanization is not an exact science. It will depend on the atmosphere, people’s willingness to live here, the bio-economy, smart grids, the open data and the “cool” factor,’ allows Kurilov. What is he talking of? Of Sputnik? The Russian countryside? Or the Berezina?
Skolkovo is, for now, the name of a small village in the tundra. It is also the code name of the flagship project of President Vladimir Putin and his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev: create here, out of thin air, a digital town. A smart city.
A single-lane road. A military checkpoint. A barrier. The Russian flag. This is the entrance to Skolkovo. Once you pass through the checkpoint, the city is still just a huge field as far as the eyes can see. Some shrubs, ferns and lichen. For the moment, the only permanent inhabitants are the jackrabbits—and their does. In the daytime though, there are workers. Several hundred now, soon to be thousands. All sporting orange helmets, they are working hard to build the first building of the new digital town. The site managers are Serbs—the lower-rung workers mostly from former Soviet republics: Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Georgians, Armenians and those whom everybody here calls ‘Blacks’, who are, paradoxically,‘Caucasians’. But nobody is from Azerbaijan, a country ‘too rich to provide manual labour for construction’, says the spokesperson for Skolkovo, who accompanies me. In many ways, this is a striking summary of the many strata of Russia today, with its hierarchies, immigrants from within and without and its social classes.
In the midst of the cranes: The Cube. It is the first finished building. It was inaugurated with great pomp in the autumn of 2012. Many services have already been coexisting here, such as the office for copyright protection, and near that, the council for the modernization of Russia is soon to be opened.
Further away, a giant hole. ‘Here, we are going to establish the Skolkovo Business School, and it will be at the heart of the city,’ adds my guide. The aim of this school of commerce: find a way for the most innovative ideas to find their business model. A great ambition. In the planning stage, a little further away, hardly marked out on the dry grass: The Sphere. This will be the star building, made by Japanese architects—an enormous ball of glass with, on the inside, Californian microclimate. Highly symbolic. In winter, the temperature here drops below minus 30°C.
Skolkovo is under American influence and nobody can miss it. A few kilometres down, the ‘real’ Skolkovo is yet a small, peaceful village. ‘It will soon be Palo Alto,’ says my guide, delightfully, who knows his index cards by heart. A highway, a light metro, some malls, cinemas and sports fields are in the pipeline. Cars will be banned in Skolkovo. This would be an eco-friendly, green city, totally connected. ‘People will move around on bicycles, in small electric cars, or on a rapid light train. It will be Cupertino 2,’ one hopes. (Cupertino, where the headquarters of Apple is located, is situated in the Silicon Valley.)
Everywhere I see enclosures and mesh fencing. Water and electricity are coming, very slowly. ‘There is Wi-Fi here already, thanks to a mobile station mounted on a truck,’ they tell me. I see, as a matter of fact, the cattle truck and its parabolic antenna but, for now, they drive me across the 400 hectares of Skolkovo in a 4x4 vehicle in the sludge. Eventually, this Russian city of innovation will have five clusters of technology of the future centred on the five sector-specific priorities which are meant to assure the modernization of the country: energy efficiency, biomedicine, nuclear technologies, space and telecommunications, and finally, information and communication technologies. More than 1,000 companies of these different sectors have already ‘virtually’ established themselves in this special economic zone. It is still a theoretical involvement, but they may already be benefitting from grants ($150,000 on an average) and enjoying, in the last ten years, attractive tax benefits—exemption from VAT and no taxation on profits. To this, the government decided to add a reduction of 50 per cent in social security charges and facilities in terms of customs rights and visas to attract investors (however, there will be limits and ceilings, and foreign companies can’t enjoy this generosity, unless they create a local branch based on Russian laws). Administratively, the Skolkovo region will be integrated with Moscow—the Duma just voted for this annexation. The smart city will be equally accessible from the three airports of the Russian capital. ‘We don’t want to reproduce the Silicon Valley,’ says Katia Gaika, who works for the foundation financing the Skolkovo project. ‘They are calling it “Cupertino 2”, but that’s a joke. We are going to invent something else. At the same time, it is true that we started off with the Californian model, also that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston and the smart city in Singapore. We think it necessary to create a setting where start-ups, research, investors and universities are mixed together.’ Two thousand students in the masters and doctorate programmes had enrolled in 2015 at SKTech, the university on the Skolkovo campus. For imagining it, Russia poached at a high price a few personalities from MIT. When he launched the project, the Russian president talked of attracting the American ‘eggheads’, but the amount of money shelled out to receive these egghead intellectuals for a few weeks a year is not known.
For the detractors, Skolkovo is a pipe dream. The project falls in the line of Soviet scientific cities, the ‘Naukograd’ planned in the Kremlin, as they existed during the cold war. An authoritarian model inherited from the epoch of communist dictatorship when the gulag prisoners built Gorki, Sarov, Snezhinsk and Zheleznogorsk, far from everything, stretching as far as Siberia, cities removed from all maps and all access to them strictly prohibited. ‘The major difference with the Soviet cities is that this would be very open-minded,’ promises Katia Gaika, about the Skolkovo foundation. Open, but to which point? ‘Actually, one should look at Skolkovo not as a new city, but as a new part of Moscow,’ says Conor Lenihan, vice-president of Skolkovo, with a perfect Irish accent. Lenihan is not Russian. He was for a long-time a minister in Ireland, in charge of science, technology and invention, and later, intergration and human rights. He chose, after the defeat of his party, to live here for a few years, far from Dublin, in a central-right republican and conservative act. This adopted Skolkovian, differing from the norm, is in charge of development and partnership. ‘Russian law obliges all the big companies to invest 7 per cent of their budget in Skolkovo—it is Kremlin’s decision,’ says Lenihan, without raising an eyebrow at this authoritarianism of a bygone era. Too busy with his multiple meetings, Lenihan receives me very quickly. Does he see any limits to the project? He admits that there is a ‘lack of the spirit of collaboration in Russians and making people work together is a challenge.’ Another challenge, according to him, is development. ‘The Russians are very innovative, scientifically very good, and the start-ups are numerous. But they have difficulty in going from research to market. They do experiments which don’t always lead to viable projects. Luckily, things are moving. The biography of Steve Jobs was a veritable best-seller in Russia. He has become a model for a lot of young people here.’
Skolkovo is a city that emerged from the mind of Medvedev—not from the brain of Steve Jobs. That is the problem. The project is proof of Russian ambition and attests to the fact that the country wants to play the digital card. It also shows the bureaucratic and planning limitations in the post-Soviet system. Besides, Medvedev himself presides over the board of directors of Skolkovo. ‘Today, it is the most important project in Russia,’ says Seda Pumpyanskaya, the vice-president of Skolkovo, in charge of international relations. ‘It is a voluntarist public project, like during the time of the Sputnik,’ points out, ironically, Adrien Henri, editor-in-chief of the information site of the Russian digital sector (he refers to the Soviet programmes of the 1950s which led to the competition for space between the USA and the USSR). The project would be completed by 2030. But the work has already met with unnecessary delay. For example: the G8 summit which was to be held in Skolkovo in 2014 was moved to Sochi (before being cancelled). And the opening of the smart city was pushed to 2016. ‘We don’t pretend to solve all the problems in Russia with Skolkovo,’ admits Pumpyanskaya, wisely.
Unavoidably, Skolkovo is a confirmation of the ambitions and limitations of the country. Faced with the vagaries of national production and the world market price of petrol and gas, the Russians chose to diversify their economy by opening themselves to the service and digital sector. Faced with the brain drain that leads the most brilliant researches to leave for North America and Europe, Russians hope to make Skolkovo a success story that will attract them and make them stay in the country—and even help bring them back. This is what one might call the Sergey Brin syndrome, named after the co-founder of Google, being born in Russia, leaving for the United States and unwilling to return to the country. ‘Skolkovo could have been called Sergey Brin City, it would have been more suitable,’ says Tanya Lokshina, ironically.
Coming from an Ashkenazi family but of Orthodox religion, Tanya Lokshina is an indefatigable militant for human rights in Russia. Her red hair and raspy voice give her a unique presence. She talks to me with the irrefutable tone of authority in her office at the headquarters of Human Rights Watch, on Armyanski Street in Moscow. It is at this address that she constantly receives death threats due to her work of field survey. ‘Russia is taking a very bad direction,’ she cuts short. From the Pussy Riot affairs to the arrests of political opponents and law that pretends to protect minors from the gay ‘propaganda’, the Russia of Putin and Medvedev—and of Medvedev and Putin when they had inverted their titles—remains authoritarian, centralized and anti-internet by nature. Sagacious and groggy at the same time, Lokshina is astonished by the sudden passion for digital where internet is controlled to such a degree and sometimes censored by the regime.
‘Here, we have a lot of liberty in our private life. We can freely read papers of our choice and freely browse online. One can travel. The dissenter scene is very rich. It is not the Soviet Union. However, the rule of law does not exist. They torture activists in northern Caucasus. The television channels are all in the hands of the regime. The Orthodox Church has an abnormally strong influence on the politics in Kremlin. Justice is not impartial,’ comments the militant, saddened. She knows better than everybody that Putin made his start in the Russian secret service and that the Kremlin now enacts his orders and especially his ukases. From time to time, an opposition channel is prohibited; a journalist is assassinated; the car of an activist is dynamited. She herself fears for her security. One can understand, given the circumstances, that this new Russian digital passion seems to her to be anachronistic at best, dubious at worst, in the cynical and corrupt system of Vladimir Putin—vodka, petrol oligarchs, Botox and nuclear code.
The internet censor in Russia, undescribed still, and even so, disproportionate to that implemented in China and Iran, is as efficient as it is skilful. The Kremlin uses ‘admissible’ arguments to the general public, such as a fight against child pornography, drugs or the ‘propaganda’ in favour of homosexuality, to affirm its control over the sites. The law, very restrictive, puts great pressure on the internet service providers, without hesitating to resort to a number of non-public security clauses (according to the information communicated to me by the CEO of a famous Russian site). Thus, the Russian Google, Yandex, is otherwise censored, or at least ‘filtered’, according to Vlad Toupikine’s word. Toupikine is a famous anti-Putin blogger whom I meet at Memorial, an association dedicated to the victims of the Moscow Gulag. (Memorial was financed by the Ford Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development [USAID], an American diplomatic cultural agency.) ‘The system is subtle: the censor plays on the indexation and the search results of the sites. Officially, the ranking is automatic, but in reality it is subject to manual corrections. Some articles are brought forward before the others. At the end, the unwanted articles remain online but they are invisible for a majority of simple searches. There is an evident manipulation of search results,’ resumes Toupikine. Another monitoring technique which has proven itself, as paradoxical as it may seem in Russia, is the arm of capitalism.
The regime becomes a shareholder of the sensitive sites or gets investment for its accomplices, with or without corruption. Already, the important websites belong to the close friends of the Kremlin, like the group mail.ru, a kind of Russian Yahoo that regroups thirty other sites, from messaging to social networking and online games. Behind these methods, many heads I spoke to in Moscow, the question is that of ‘the administration of the president’, a bureaucratic technique associated with the Kremlin, which has considerable financial means and imposes its diktats on the sites and search engines. And if necessary, its tender offers. ‘It’s clear that the government controls Yandex and mail.ru and that the sites are censored,’ confirms for her part, Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch. Conversely, the Russian web specialist, Adrien Henri, is more doubtful, ‘It is necessary to de-ideologize the question of Russian internet—the sector bows down, above all, to commercial logic. The majority of the big actors are local, except Wikipedia and Twitter. The brutal censor of a site is rare.’ Today, the anti-Putin opposition is, and this is true, largely withdrawn into the internet. There is a blogosphere that is extremely lively that even democracies would be envious of. ‘The term blogosphere is not at all appropriate to the Russian contestation. Today, they are too big to be blogs. It’s Facebook, it’s VKontakte.ru (the Russian Facebook), it’s Twitter or a platform like LiveJournal. It is the multiple media online like gazeta.ru or slon.ru, human rights NGOs or still, the think tanks. It takes place everywhere and firstly on the social network,’ says Vlad Toupikine. The civil society, atomized and initially restricted to the large cities of the country, now spreads rapidly on the internet. But, by becoming more popular, it is also subjected to more control and intimidation. Until now, the regime was not worried about the Muscovite counterculture—all capital cities have their rebelling bourgeoisie, their crazy lesbians and their punk movement. But when the spirit of revolt spreads to the middle class and the rural areas, it is a different matter. One must then take action. Now, it is not rare that the big names in opposition or the voices heard on the internet are victims of unexpected fiscal controls or expropriation of their housing, under legal guise. The famous activist and hero of the blogosphere Alexei Navalny, known for his anti-corruption campaign has experienced this—he received five years of imprisonment in 2013 for ‘fraud’ and ‘misuse of public money’, phantasmagoric accusations probably teleguided by the Kremlin.
Finally released on a conditional sentence and placed under judicial control, this indefatigable anti-Putin blogger was still allowed to appear at the municipalities of Moscow where he came in second against a candidate from the Kremlin who profited from the means of the city council and what the Russians call ‘administrative resources’. Moreover, before these local elections, the main opposition sites were mysteriously paralysed by many cyber attacks. Such is the paradox of the system where shelves in Moscow bookstores overflow with anti-Putin books while the opponents are ‘legally’ harassed. The appearance is unblemished.
One can assume that Putin’s authoritarian regime will continue to toughen vis-à-vis internet sites and bloggers as internet penetration goes beyond the wealthy urban classes (a blacklist of sites blocked without legal decision was updated in early 2014 during the Sochi Olympic Games). Around 50 per cent of the Russian population now has internet access at home, which represents more than seventy million people. The television is no more the only medium of information as the Kremlin believed until the last elections. Here on, sites, blogs and social networking must be taken seriously. The Twitter account @KermlinRussia is, for example, an efficient parody of @KremlinRussia, the official account of Vladimir Putin. Its young managers nicknamed Sasha and Masha mock the tackiness of the president and his vain attempts to portray the authoritarian and corrupted system as a radiant one.
In 2015, the situation deteriorated further. The opponent Boris Nemtsov, the notorious adversary of President Putin, and a much-heard voice on the internet, was shot dead in front of the Kremlin. His posts on VKontakte were widely read and contributed to many anti-Putin protests. In parallel, a new law took effect, which sought to relocate the data of Russian netizens to servers which were exclusively national. Finally, the Putin “Administration”, through investment tactics and questionable increase of share capital, managed to take control of VKontakte, hastening the exit of its founder, Pavel Durov, who has since lived in exile in Europe, Asia and America, like a “digital nomad”.
It is in this general context that one must place the Russian digital ecosystem and in particular the Skolkovo project. Russian web specialists estimate that the smart city conceived by Medvedev has little chance of being a success if it does not lean on the civil society and its blogosphere. The counterculture of the 1960s, the participative democracy, the transgressions, the Castro and the hashish—freedom in all its forms—were, they feel, indispensable for the dawn of the Silicon Valley. But these same people know that if Skolkovo embraced this rebellious state of mind, the regime would immediately discontinue with the experiment. ‘Opening a Starbucks café and a gay bar in Skolkovo, everybody tells me to do this,’ laughs Sergey Kurilov, the director general of the smart city. In search of the winning formula and very conscious of the fact that he is trying to square the circle, he nonetheless points out other problems. At the forefront of these problems, he places the question of intellectual property. Trademarks, patents, domain names and cultural and journalistic content have little protection in Russia. Most of the entrepreneurs register their trademark in Europe to be sure of better legal security.
‘Here, everybody is scared of having their inventions stolen. A start-up in the United States would mean five people and many offshore services. In Russia, it’s 100 people because we don’t outsource anything—we are too afraid of losing the intellectual property rights of our project,’ says Kurilov.
The other frailty of Skolkovo is geographical. What if it is too complicated to work? Are they enabling the construction of a new Silicon Valley or simply an umpteenth ‘office park’? Would it not have been wiser, and more useful, to help start-ups develop in Moscow, which is already teeming with them, than creating this neo-Soviet project? Many think so.
‘There is a fascinating ecosystem for start-ups here. There are incubators, public or private investment funds and a very innovative network. It is found almost everywhere in Moscow and it is working. It is anti-Skolkovo,’ says Adrien Henri. Presented with this argument and critique, Sergey Kurilov concedes, ‘Was it necessary to physically build a real city or just build a Cloud city? That can also be the debate.’
However, the best argument in favour of Skolkovo is given to me by Conor Lenihan, the former Irish minister who became the vice-president for the project, ‘They needed to make this smart city and build it from the scratch, because that’s only how it can work in Russia. It must be centralized and managed by the state.’
With these tendencies which are more nationalist than communist, the authoritarian and paranoid regime of Putin is characterized today by one ambition: revive with proper Russian pride, the Cyrillic and Slav worlds, and if possible, with Great Russia. It is in this setting with its chauvinistic, anti-Western and anti-American ideology that one must look at the Skolkovo project, according to the many Russians who were interviewed. ‘It is an autocratic project which is perfectly in keeping with the Soviet planning system. It is too close to Moscow and too far. Nobody is going to want to work there, let alone live there, in the arctic cold of the Russian countryside! It’s not going to work,’ says, for example, the CEO of one of the main websites in the country (who requested to be cited anonymously, due to the frequent contact he has to maintain with the Kremlin).
More prudently, Elena Kolmanovskaya, one of the founders of the giant Yandex, the Russian Google, tells me, in conclusion: ‘We will not go and set up in Skolkovo because we are not a start-up. That is the only reason.’ She knows that the project brings to the open the contradictions of the regime and though she criticizes with extreme prudence Skolkovo which is still, according to her, in its ‘Powerpoint presentation stage’, she concedes with malice, ‘it would be nice if this smart city one day saw the light’.
Africa under way
Giraffes, ostriches, antelopes, zebras. And buffaloes too. ‘Here is Konza Techno City,’ says Kennedy Ogala. As far as the eye can see—the savannah. Semi-arid land. Unmerciful ground. Bushes. This will be a smart city, but also an animal-friendly city, stresses Ogala. No doubt animals are loved here. But a city?
Compared to the frostiness of the Skolkovo model, this digital city project in the warmth of the savannah seems to be an antithesis. But looking at it up close, the resemblances are striking.
To get to Konza City, an hour and a half to the south-east of Nairobi in Kenya, one needs to experience the African road. Thousands of trucks overtaking in all directions. Matatus (minibuses) stand about 10 metres tall with dozens of packets stacked on top. Herds of cows crossing the road. And due to the lack of sufficient public transport, people, thousands of them, who go on foot ‘on the road’, at any given time during the day and night. Trade, omnipresent, takes place at the edge of the Mombasa Road, fruits and vegetables everywhere, and vendors selling tyres and used toys, bits of furniture, old books and clothes. A permanent flea market. A bazaar. An Africa under way.
Kennedy Ogala is an economist and works for the Ministry of Information and Communication. Here, in the middle of the savannah, he is supervising the creation of the first digital town of Kenya. ‘I work for the government. It is here that they’ve decided to create Konza City. And today, as you can see it, we are in the process of drilling with my team, to take stock of the land and the water depth.’ The man sweats profusely in his suit. He takes me with him in his 4x4 jeep and we drive across a territory known as Konza Ranch. ‘Here, in a few years, there will be a real “smart city” with 500,000 inhabitants and the best technological companies in the country,’ adds Ogala. For now, on the 2,000 hectares reserved for the purpose, only one stone was laid, during the inauguration in January 2013 by Uhuru Kenyatta, president of the Kenyan republic. (He is currently indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity).
In the office of Bitange Ndemo, the director general of the Ministry of Information and Communication in Nairobi, I see a gigantic mock-up of the future Konza Techno City. A superfast express train would link it to the Kenyan capital in twenty minutes and a new highway of four lanes would also be provided. At the heart of the intended city, three campuses are planned: an IT Park that would regroup all the start-ups and digital enterprises; a Science Park for scientific and academic research; and an International Centre for conferences. Around the technological buildings, a huge shopping mall will be constructed, with all the necessary products, and also hotels, schools, a stadium and a hospital. ‘We want this city to be alive. It shouldn’t just be a place where people are happy to work, they must also be able to live here, eat here and have fun here.’
For the umpteenth time during our interview, Ndemo is interrupted and he responds to one of the six landlines which are on his table (not counting his two cellphones). Apparently, he is under pressure from the parliament which is in session. ‘Some bad people,’ he tells me, enigmatically, referring to the elected members, who are visibly trying to pick fights with him. Ndemo now takes a pen and draws up the list of advantages that this smart city would bring to Kenya. He talks of ‘finance’, ‘tourism’, ‘business process outsourcing’, ‘IT-enabled services’, ‘value-added services’ and ‘customer relationship management’. This display of English consultant catchphrases seems to me to be distant from what I saw on the field.
Victor Kyalo, the chairman of Kenya ICT Board is yet more enthusiastic. ‘What we want to build already has a name: the Silicon Savannah. We have the trademark, the concept, it only remains to build the city,’ he tells me, on the twentieth floor of the famous Teleposta Towers, at the centre of Nairobi. He is also coordinating the Konza City project and is already proud of having found his slogan, ‘Silicon Savannah’, which could be used to ‘sell’ the new, modern city, ‘smart’ and completely connected by fibre optics. ‘For now, we are beginning at zero,’ he admits. Starting on a new leaf, everything is possible. ‘The new city will help’, dares hope Kyalo, ‘to decongest Nairobi, to be ecological, to create jobs, urbanize the country, etc.’ Is that the end of the matatu? And of poverty in Africa? And AIDS? And ghettos like Kibera in the middle of Nairobi? I ask Kyalo if Kenya has the means to achieve such an ambition. His answer: ‘It is a question of priorities.’ But what madness could have sprouted in the head of the Kenyan government? Is it a need to jump on the bandwagon and create a smart city?
‘In late 2000, making smart cities was in vogue,’ adds Mickael Ghossein, the head of the telecommunications operator Orange in Kenya, a Lebanese who for a long time worked in telecoms in Jordan. ‘I remember, in Amman, we wanted to create a digital town. The Saudi Arabians too, at Jeddah. The Egyptians did too. We all had the Dubai model of Internet City in mind, but nobody really succeeded in replicating it. The Jordan Media City (JMC), for which I worked really hard, is not doing great. And the last time I was in Jeddah, there was still nothing. Konza City is a beautiful project on paper, but in reality, who will go there? The risk is that this city might be a mirage.’
What then would be the alternative? ‘That’s the solution,’ says Mickael Ghossein, showing me a planisphere of underwater cables. I have often seen this map stuck to walls during my survey. It exists in a number of versions, printed by cable operators, equipment manufacturers and by telecom companies. But when we look at it in an interactive way on the internet (on submarinecablemap.com, for example), it is even more stupendous. Each cable has a name: Africa Coast to Europe, Aphrodite 2, Apollo, Lion 2, Sirius, Taiwan Strait Express, Ulysses or just simply Yellow. There are a few hundred cables of the kind and one can follow their route, from one country to another and one continent to another. For example, TEAMS (The East African Marine System) is the name of the cable that links the United Arab Emirates to the coastal city of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, in Kenya. It was inaugurated in 2009 and is one of the five cables that allows internet to reach the country. ‘The solution for Kenya is to get better connections to the internet. If people have connections at work and in offices, and gradually at home, there would be no need for smart cities!’ says the head of Orange who speaks in favour of his interests as he manages three underwater cables, including TEAMS, which connects Kenya to the internet. These infrastructures are nevertheless expensive (between €100 and 200 million per cable, and require great technical means to be put in the high seas, sometimes 5 kilometres deep, not counting the cost of maintenance as ‘on an average each cable gets cut once every year’. The reason: ‘The cable can rub against coral or be cut by the anchor of a ship or be cut due to malice; but the main danger is near the coast, where the cable enters the land, where a simple shovel can cut the cable.’ ‘The cost of repairing a cable oscillates,’ he says, ‘between €1 and 2 million and takes up to four weeks to repair.’ On the wall, in the office of Mickael Ghossein, I see written in fat characters, the word ‘Karibu’. It is the slogan of Orange in Kenya and in Swahili, it simply means ‘Welcome’.
Mickael Ghossein is not alone in his doubts about the smart city of Konza City. Under cover of anonymity, as they are working in Kenya and interact with the government, many people I spoke to consider this digital town a ‘madness worthy of an African dictatorship’. Away from the microphone, the critics are severe, sometimes vehement. These Kenyan businessmen or heads of Western multinationals however believe in internet and even in smart cities. But they question the construction of a gigantic project in the middle of the savannah which nobody wants. Everybody favours another approach. Instead of wasting millions of dollars on a utopian smart city, they think that an ecosystem for start-ups should be encouraged in Nairobi. An ecosystem that is astoundingly vibrant.
On the wall, a map of the matatu buses. At the centre of the open space, a foosball table. iHub is the headquarters of start-ups in Kenya. On the fourth and the last floor of a modern building on Ngong Road (pronounced Gong Road), to the east of Nairobi, the digital community has found a home. They can connect to the Wi-Fi for free (the password that they give me is ‘ihubnairobi’), borrow books on computer sciences and, especially, go to the famous Pete’s Coffee in a casual manner for a professional rendezvous. Here you can order a tea latte, biscuits and laki laki, a liquid yoghurt made in Nairobi of milk produced from organic agriculture. The foosball table is the main focus of attention. To play it, one must take off his shoes and get on top of a small carpeted dais. Four engineers begin an intense game, they bicker loudly in Swahili and everybody watches them. On the baby-foot: stickers of global digital brands (Google, Apple, Mozilla, Google Africa, Angry Birds and Global Voices) and local start-ups (MedAfrica, Ushahidi, eLimu, iCow). A few slogans: ‘Dare not to be square’, ‘Empathy happens’ or catchphrases in favour of equitable commerce: ‘Show your love to Africa, buy Fair’. One would think one was in the Silicon Valley.
‘We are not an incubator, we are a community. Everybody can come to this open space, on condition that they work in the “tech” sector. We are open all seven days,’ explains Jimmy Gitonga, the manager of iHub. The start-ups that have a business model, those that interact with others and those that can create employment are favoured. Samsung, Microsoft and Nokia keep a close watch: the foreign giants observe the innovations and finance the most promising initiatives.
eLimu is a start-up specializing in e-learning through an application for tablets. ‘The word elimu means education in Swahili. So we select training manuals, with the consent of the publisher and in accordance with all government programmes, and we illustrate them with images and videos so that children like the content,’ explains Nivi Mukherjee, the founder of eLimu. In Kenya, the price of tablets, especially Chinese ones, are already below $100. ‘It remains inaccessible to most people in Africa,’ she adds, ‘even if it is cheaper than computers. We give them out for free in primary schools. It is a pilot project that we are testing.’ The eLimu application is financed by a big American telecom equipment company (Qualcomm) and foresees belonging in the private sector. ‘If we wait for the government in Kenya, it wouldn’t work. It’s the market that will allow us to grow,’ says Nivi, in a listless tone.
Another application, developed near iHub, is called MPrep. This has more than 600 different quizzes of five questions each, meant for children, in order to test their general knowledge. This is a paid service (3 Kenyan shillings per quiz which is around $0.03) and works via SMS.
As for M-Farm, it is an application for farmers which allows them to anticipate, five days in advance, the selling price of fruits and vegetables. ‘Having access to information, the farmers are capable of negotiating better prices with the wholesalers,’ tells me one of the spokespersons of M-Farm, Justus K. Mbaluka. The application only works on Android and it is financed by Samsung. Tested on site in the Testing Mobile Phone Room, an impressive little room with a great number of gadgets connected to the internet, it is vital for start-ups to verify the correct functioning and compatibility of their innovations on numerable models of phones.
Fun sites and applications are even more numerous. One such site is Ma3Racer.com, a video game which challenges the user to safely drive a matatu on chaotic African roads without crashing into pedestrians: matatu, meaning ‘bus’ in Swahili, is a minibus with fourteen seats, and a true symbol of East Africa in general and Kenya in particular. The application essentially available on Nokia phones (as the company has a partnership with Nokia) was downloaded 840,000 times in 150 days. Ultimately, iHub can be a place that may be a perfect fit for globalizing, and the map showcasing the matatu routes of Nairobi and the video games that it inspires shows that internet usage remains very local.
Returning to the Ministry of Information and Communication, at the heart of Nairobi, I question my speakers about the paradox of creating a smart city such as Konza City, far from town, where they have such a dynamic ecosystem for start-ups.
Proud of their Silicon Savannah, these bureaucrats don’t appreciate my reservations about it. Bitange Ndemo, the director general, who coordinates the Ministry of Communication and Victor Kyalo, the president of Kenya ICT Board, two artisans of the smart city, insist again on the merits of the project. To them, it is not in contradiction with the dynamism of start-ups in Nairobi. Besides, to kill two birds with one stone, they intend to move everybody to Konza City: the start-ups, the iHub, their companies and all the incubators in the city. Leaving the floor of the ministry, troubled and stunned by this authoritarianism, I discover an anti-corruption suggestion box: STOP corruption, Anticorruption Suggestion Box. And, wanting to descend from the twentieth floor of this prestigious building, I find all the lifts out of order.
‘It’s true that Brazil is advancing too fast’
At the entrance to the lift, a board reads: ‘Before entering, make sure the cabin is there’. For, that day, the doors of lift A are not closing. As for lift B, it is also out of order. Welcome to Porto Digital. So we take the stairs. To the sixteenth floor. At a distance of 8,000 kilometres, from Kenya to Brazil, from one smart city to the other, moving around in elevators can have the same problems. But the similarities end there. Porto Digital is the digital neighbourhood of Recife, in the north-eastern part of Brazil. And, unlike Skolkovo and Konza City, it is already very active. ‘In the eighteenth century, this port was one of the most important ones in Latin America. Recife was a world capital, especially for its sugar cane industry and later for cereals and maize. Until the Second World War, it was a very rich area. There was tramway, and an unbelievable economic vitality and even hot-air balloons, memories of which are perpetuated by picture postcards. And then, this port became dead!’ recounts Francisco Saboya, known as ‘Chico’, as we climb the floors of the Porto Digital Tower.
From Chico’s office, perched on top, one can well see, with a 360 degree view, the two islands upon which the port was built and which are linked to the city of Recife by a dozen bridges. Spread on a few hundred hectares are blue, red or yellow industrial buildings, discoloured now, reflecting a splendour of the years gone by. I also see empty warehouses, closed down, and a favela, a Brazilian shanty town, at the tip of the smallest island, where only a thousand people live, the only real inhabitants of Porto Digital. There were also many churches and a synagogue—the first one in the Americas, before being destroyed and reconstructed in the same image in the Jewish street (renamed since by the Catholics, no kidding, as Père-du-Bon-Jésus street). Here and there, on the avenues, we can still identify the railways, unused today, but indispensable back then for the functioning of the port. Chico shows me a building, which being in the middle of the main square, blocks his view of the sea: ‘They are going to tear this building down, and do it real soon,’ he says, making a gesture with his hand to indicate an explosion. Facing the harbour, one can well see the natural pier, which serves as breakwater and wave barrier. Seen from high up, the harbour, thus protected and doubly isolated by the pier and its own insularity, has something sublime about it. And, from the sixteenth floor, I can hear a Julio Iglesias song coming up to me from a bodega down below. In the early years of the millennium, local communities and agencies in charge of new technology in the Brazilian Ministry of Innovation thought of revitalizing the Recife harbour by giving it a new name and a second life. Thus, ‘Porto Digital’ was born, literally the digital port.
‘The most important thing was the place,’ insists Chico, teacher of economics to entrepreneurs, now named the president of Porto Digital. ‘It was necessary that we are linked to a history. The digital should start with a concrete connection. Here we truly believe in the notion of place. So we wanted to connect Recife with its past. Very soon, the idea that the port should become digital made sense. Today, Recife is again linked to the world by its port, not for commodity exchange like in the industrial age, but for service exchanges in the current digital age.’ In a dozen years, the project took shape. Fifty thousand square metres of warehouses were restored and the two historic islands at the heart of Recife once again found their reason for existence. Life, more importantly, is beginning to start again.
Today, there are thirty-five restaurants, three cultural centres, a museum and of course, a university. More than 200 start-ups have established themselves here with around 7,000 employees, making Porto Digital the most important smart city in Brazil. Twenty-five kilometres of fibre optics have been rolled out across town. ‘By 2020, we hope to have 20,000 employees. But there is no hurry. We do things at our own pace,’ says Chico. The start-ups hope to give, like everywhere, some financial incentives, and their founders are also qualified and ‘baby-sat’. This means that they are in touch with investors. ‘And more importantly,’ adds Chico, ‘they are given eighteen months in which to prove themselves. A smaller incubation period wouldn’t make any sense, beyond that would not be necessary either, and besides, only around 25 per cent succeed.’ The other aspect of the project is the revitalization of the port. ‘We pre-empt and buy buildings that are shut one after the other and then we restore them. A smart city is not a simple solution for simple problems. It is an ensemble of complex solutions for complex problems.’
Porto Digital is anti-Skolkovo. Walking on the streets of Porto Digital at nightfall, I understand what history can bring to a future city. On the closed warehouses I read, half-erased, the names of the maritime companies which were undoubtedly well known before the war. And close by, on the restored old buildings, brand new logos of Accenture, IBM, Ogilvy, Microsoft, HP, Samsung and Motorola. Porto Digital was one of the first digital cities conceived on the economic model known as the Triple Helix model. The concept was developed in the 1990s by an English academic Henry Etzkowitz.
According to this scholar, innovation depends on the interaction between three independent spheres: the academic world, industry and the state. Instead of focusing on only the public power, or conversely, on the omnipotence of the market, Etzkowitz stressed on the interactions between the public and private sector, reinforced also by academic research. The economist made Porto Digital an example to be followed as none of the three spheres dominates the other. The equilibrium and separation of the sectors, according to him, are the keys of the model. He also underlines the urban dimension of the project which helps start-ups function at the heart of the city, that is, in a pleasant, urban ecosystem, and not in the Russian country or the savannah. ‘The question we asked ourselves is this: What is the importance of a place? And I think that today the most important thing when you build a smart city, is to build an identity. We live here in Recife. Our emotions, relationships, experiences are here. We meet at cafés and restaurants which are here. The art here is very rich: we have more than eighteen different styles of music in Recife, all of which have an impact on the Brazilian cultural life. There is even a gay bar that just opened! All of this creates a social link.’
Walking on the streets with Chico, I pass Venda, a small deli open on the harbour at night. ‘Boa noite’, ‘Olá’, ‘Obrigado’, he greets the keeper of the nearby mini market, who thanks him. Before us, I see police on horse patrolling calmly and I tell myself that this should be a rule: all smart cities must have horse patrol. Chico says, ‘This would have made no sense if we had wanted this city in the Amazon forest. Here, we are reviving the original city, with the port and the past. What matters is the place where we are. It is the territory that is very important.’ Porto Digital has become a model for Brazil. President Lula came to Recife to see this smart city, concluding his visit by saying that ‘Porto Digital is the key for the development of Brazil’.
‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ says Chico, ‘putting things in perspective. It is like the lifts. We already bought four new Otis machines. They have come, but there are no labourers to install them! You know, the number of victims of elevator accidents are very high in this country, among the highest in the world. It’s been three months that we are waiting for the company to install them. Brazil is developing so fast that the infrastructure can’t keep up.’
Start-up nation Skolkovo, Konza City, Porto Digital: three models of emerging smart cities. The first two want to recreate a Silicon Valley in the frigid conditions of the Russian countryside and in the great heat of the African savannah, respectively; the latter is within a particular local ecosystem. Other examples that I also visited: the JMC of Amman, Dubai Internet City established in the desert, the Media City of Cairo, the cluster of Santa Fe in Mexico, the Tech City of London in the old area of Shoreditch, the technopark of Lausanne around the École Polytechnique Fédérale, the Silicon Alley of New York and the technology cluster of Hong Kong. In Santiago in Chile, I visited the ‘Chilicon Valley’, whose funny name should not overshadow the dynamism of ‘Start-up Chile’, a semi-public, semi-private ecosystem which combines ‘accelerators’ and ‘incubators’. Its originality resides in welcoming international entrepreneurs trained in the US but who no longer have an American visa after their MBA in Stanford or their PhD in Berkeley. ‘There are 900 entrepreneurs who have been through “start-up Chile”,’ says Diego Morales, the head, with whom I spoke in Santiago. In London, I went to the private incubator-accelerator, Level39, on the top floor of the Canary Wharf tower in East London, where around 200 start-ups operate alongside a few internet giants, such as the European seat of the Chinese giant Alibaba.
In Zaragoza, Spain, I visited the Milla Digital project, a ‘digital kilometre’ conceived by the municipality to accommodate the Spanish offices of internet giants, start-ups, theme parks and the incubator Etopia, very close to the Alta Velocidad Espan~ola (AVE) station with the superfast trains. In Finland, one can find the technological area of Otaniemi in Espoo, near Helsinki, where, amid fjords and forests of birch, are dozens of multinationals, including Nokia and Rovio Entertainment which developed the Angry Birds game. In Buenos Aires, the smart city was named Palermo Valley. ‘It is firstly to put Argentina on the map of digital innovation. Palermo Valley is a cool name. Even if there is no valley here … ,’ explained Danilo Durazzo, one of the directors of the project. I also met the heads of the project Mediapolis in Singapore who explained to me that they wanted to build ‘a digital media hub of a new genre’. Fifteen kilometres from the city centre, in a suburb known under the name of One North, to the west of the city, this smart city of nineteen hectares should be finished by 2020. ‘We are counting on our technological advancements, on our economy comprised of very dynamic creative industries, our universities of scientific excellence which are already in this suburb. Our another asset is our good use of languages, including English, which is official here, and our multicultural model that works. We are currently planning a kind of “Singapore Media Fusion”,’ says Kenneth Tan, the director of the Media Development Authority in Singapore. ‘Media fusion’—I found the expression quite amusing and very true.
There are so many other smart city projects that I did not visit, like the Songdo Techno Park (South Korea), the digital port of Genoa, and project Cyberjaya in Malaysia (a digital city expected to crop up in the jungle). To an extent, these are projects commissioned by the government, of top-down nature, in a decentralized and authoritarian fashion. This dimension has existed in the Silicon Valley or Route 128 in Boston, when the American federal state, which financed military and scientific research, increased investment in highways or invested in an airport. But in many cases in the United States, these ‘technopoles’, ‘edge cities’, ‘tech cities’, ‘clusters’, to use a few of the many names that they are given, are not planned. They are developed in an autonomous, even archaic, way between highways, shopping malls, ‘office parks’, at the far edges of great cities—the zones that have no centre, that are often called ‘exurbs’ in America. In a way, Skolkovo, Konza City and many other smart city projects which are cropping up like mushrooms everywhere in the world are often a part of an approach that is directly opposed to the bottom-up model of the Silicon Valley. Centralization is favoured, while the Californian cluster was decentralized. The government is trusted to pilot these projects, while the market was the guide in the United States. They want to direct it and they mean to, without saying it, place it under ‘guardianship’ whereas nobody ever has run the Silicon Valley.
Of course, there are different models. Porto Digital, a project anchored in a territory and a history, unique and profoundly Brazilian, appears to be a good counter-example to American clusters. The digital ecosystem of Bengaluru also seems efficient in that it is a part of the singularity of India. But one can doubt, elsewhere, the efficiency of smart cities when they are cut away from the realities of the country or when they are locally created from a superficial vision of the Californian model. The finance injected in them will change nothing. And neither would fantasies of elected leaders who see in these projects a miraculous solution to all the problems of their city. These smart cities risk becoming, in many ways, what they say in English, white elephants—legends, projects that inherently, like white elephants, run the risk of never really existing. Unless they gave birth to a veritable ‘start-up nation’. And, unless, instead of creating a smart city from scratch, they thought of making existing cities smarter.
‘Start-up nation’. The expression is famous and now associated with Israel. In this small country of hardly eight million people, they take a more thorough census of start-ups than any other developed country: Canada, the UK, France, Germany, China, India or Japan. The number of per capita start-ups here is even higher than in the United States, and Israel comes in at second position when it comes to the number of companies listed on Nasdaq. How can one explain this Israeli ‘miracle’? The Rothschild Boulevard, in the middle of Tel Aviv, offers a full-scale illustration of this ‘start-up nation’ (an expression rendered popular in 2009 by an essay titled in the book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle). A historic artery of the city with its Bauhaus-style houses from the 1930s, Rothschild became the best example of Bohemian life with its trendy restaurants and gay-friendly cafés. Everything here is fluid, mobile, and the Wi-Fi systematically free. When one lifts his eyes from the street, one sees ultra-modern glass buildings—this is where around 600 start-ups have taken up residence (according to the site mappedinIsrael.com which takes their census). ‘This is a phenomenon that can’t be explained. Israel is a country which has few natural resources, where everything has to be invented by us. Innovation and entrepreneurship are conditions for survival. Then, there is the army that has played a determining role in the technological ecosystem. Lastly, here is our link to America: everybody wants his start-up to be bought by the United States,’ says Benny Ziffer, editor-in-chief of Haaretz, the principal Israeli daily, whom I meet at the Arcaffe coffee shop on Rothschild Boulevard.
A reputed Israeli writer, Ziffer heads the literary supplement of the newspaper and he also has a popular blog on TV. In 2013, Waze (pronounced Ways), an innovative Israeli application which generates a geo-localized road map updated by netizens (who themselves provide details on traffic, station service, radar, police and accidents) was bought by Google for more than a billion dollars. The same year, Facebook got its hands on the start-up Onayo, specializing in managing the cost of data transmission on mobile phones. In 2012, Face, a face recognizing software was also bought by Facebook for an estimated sum of $60 million. These three beautiful Israeli success stories, among many others, illustrate the degree of innovation in the country and the dynamism of its high-end technological industries which represent 40 per cent of its economy.
In 2014, Yahoo acquired RayV, a young company specializing in online circulation of videos. In 2015, it was Amazon’s turn to acquire Annapurna Labs, a strategic start-up manufacturing microchips for cloud.
‘The start-ups that developed Waze, the first ICQ messaging, or GetTaxi are from Israel. That is the Israeli model and success, the Startup nation,’ says Nitzan Horowitz delightedly, when I meet him at the famous restaurant Brasserie at the Yitzhak Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, two feet from the spot where the former prime minister was assassinated. He can add to his list Viber, Outbrain, Conduit, YNet and even Google Suggest, the semi-automatic input function of Google, which were also conceived in Israel.
With his jean shirt, green eyes, Member of Parliament Nitzan Horowitz, forty-nine, embodies the new Left in Israel, still in the making. In 2013, he was the Left candidate in Tel Aviv for the municipal council (and despite his 50,000 likes on Facebook, he lost). Horowitz, born near Tel Aviv in an Ashkenazi family of Polish origin, has a great love for the origins of the state of Israel: the Labour Party of the founder of the nation, David Ben-Gurion, the left wing of Mapam, the great union of Histadrut (in which he is a member). He tells me he is fascinated by the sharing, the solidarity and the sense of community in Israel, which according to him are the embodiment, for example, of the new urban kibboutz which are flourishing in cities today. During lunch, Horowitz boasts to me of the ‘innovative spirit of Israel’, the high-level academic training in Israeli universities such as the Technion, the ‘determining’ importance of internet which is a real ‘El Dorado’ for a small, isolated country. He believes that Israel’s success in new technology is also thanks to the army: ‘It is an unexpected result of our safety constraints. The tragedy of conflict in the Near East forced the country to invest in preserving its military advantage over the neighbour’s army. In such a situation, the army and the civil society are intertwined. Our mission today is to use the new technology and scientific resources coming out of Israel to establish peace,’ underlines the member of parliament.
‘Military service is compulsory in Israel for men as well as women, for three years when they turn eighteen, followed by a month every year as reservists until forty-five years.’ ‘This is the “Army of the People” model of Ben-Gurion. The army and the civil society are inseparable,’ confirms Benny Ziffer. Student-engineers provide service in the technological unit of the army, for example, in the elite unit baptized Talpiot or in the famous Unit 8200, a kind of Israeli NSA specializing in electronic war, cryptography and encryption, virus and anti-virus. (It is suspected that this unit co-developed the Flame and Stuxnet viruses, the latter having damaged Iranian centrifuges.)
Raphael Ouzan spent five years at Unit 8200. This young Israeli does not wish to comment on the rumours about the anti-Iran viruses, nor describe the internal functioning of his secret unit. But he does say that excellent work is being done here. ‘When we are in military service, we don’t think of ourselves. We also take up, at a very young age and very soon, many operational responsibilities. At 19, I managed ten soldiers. There, we acquire some entrepreneurial qualities. One may say that I was well trained, enough to create my own start-up.’ Ouzan met me at the famous Café Noir, one of the hubs of ‘start-up nation’, a few yards from the Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. French by birth, this passionate programmer has some memories of frustration in his college years in Europe: ‘In France, they taught me PowerPoint. Here, in the army, I built robots!’ Upon leaving Unit 8200, which he calls the ‘start-up unit’, Ouzan created his own projects. One of his companies is called BillGuard, specializing in personal finance and safe banking: it already has 1.5 million users. Moreover, Raphael Ouzan cofounded Israel Tech Challenge, an association whose mission is to identify and invite foreign talents. ‘We work in concert with the office of the Prime Minister and we have already imported 150 tech innovators from a dozen countries.’
Sacha Dratwa’s trajectory is also somewhat similar. ‘All the enemies of Israel are on the internet. Therefore, we must be on it too,’ says Dratwa, who until recently was the commander of the social media unit of Tsahal -- the Israeli armed forces. He too met me near the Boulevard Rothschild in a trendy café called Nehama VaHetsi and he spoke for long about the functions of the special and digital units of the army. ‘Social media helps us circulate content with true accounts of what’s happening. We do infographics and publish comments. We can work in five languages, thanks to the new immigrants here, who have joined the military service after their Aliyah,’ he says. Having arrived at 18 from Belgium himself, he has been in Tsahal for many years. ‘Today, after having developed technology for the army, I have chosen to start my own start-up in private,’ continues Sacha Dratwa.
Hackers, geeks and most of the founders of start-ups have been through these Tsahal units—Israeli Army Forces—which thus improves its technological performance. ‘Going through an elite Tsahal unit is a bit like going to Harvard or Stanford,’ says Ziffer. Back to civil society, they create enterprises, having received a very unique computer training. Is it for the country? They enroll. Is it for innovation ? They experiment. Is it an enterprise ? They invest and are keen to win. ‘The army of the people and entrepreneurship, such would be the secret of the Startup nation.’
In Tel Aviv, when I visit the buildings of the different companies on the Rothschild Boulevard, I find an entire ecosystem made up of globalized companies, start-ups supported by public grants for R&D (Research and Development) and a constructive collaboration with excellent research universities.
‘Rothschild is the main area in the city. It is an expensive area but it is also the heart of Silicon Wadi, the Israeli digital hub. Many companies, incubators and investment funds come here,’ says Raphael Ouzan, who points to me, on the floor above Café Noir, the headquarters of ‘Start-Up Nation Central’, a reputed digital cluster.
According to the lawyer Adi Niv-Yagoda, specialist of the digital scene in the field of health, ‘the success of the start-up nation can be explained by the quality of higher education in Israel and more deeply by its roots in the Jewish culture which prioritizes education.’ ‘The lack of natural resources would also play in favour of the country, which would then have no other solution,’ says Niv-Yagoda, than ‘to turn towards human capital, innovation and creativity to develop as soon as possible.’ The advocate also says that there are many children of Russian immigrants in the start-ups on Rothschild Boulevard, among whom many came with the migration wave in the 1990s. ‘The Israeli model is a strange mix of individualism and collective sense, initiative, audacity, inventiveness and the will to succeed,’ resumes Benny Ziffer of Haaretz. Ziffer offers to accompany me to Haifa, and from there to Galilee and Nazareth. We also go to Acre, Jerusalem and Jaffa, and everywhere, I discover with him, from the south to the north of Israel, the vitality of technological enterprises. The model of ‘start-up nation’ can’t be contained to one city, it is a national spirit. Besides they call it, as a general expression that does not apply to any specific area, the ‘Silicon Wadi’—Hebrew for Silicon Valley.
In Haifa, in northern Israel, this spirit is embodied in a university: Israel Institute of Technology, better known as Technion. It is in the research laboratories of Technion that the memory card, instant messaging and the system of aerial and missile defence (named Iron Dome) and even micro-irrigation (drip irrigation to save water in arid zones) were invented. With its 13,000 students, of whom a third are researchers, it is a modern campus that reminds one of MIT and Stanford University, its American models. Like them, Technion is linked by big, high-tech companies, such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo which have offices near the campus. And I am surprised to see in the cafés all these young engineers working on their laptops, dreaming of their future start-up, as if the sleepy little town of Haifa had been awakened by technology. This is what Yona Yahav actually tells me, the Labourite mayor of the city. He is a lieutenant colonel of Tsahal and he assisted the digital development of his city. He admits that Haifa is the ‘technological development driver of the country’ but knows that the start-ups have a tendency to establish themselves elsewhere, on the Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, in the business centre of the Ackerstein Towers in Herzliya, in the city of Be’er Sheva, in the technological park of Har Hotzvim in Jerusalem or around the Google and Microsoft campuses near Tel Aviv. The ‘start-up nation’ confirms that one can innovate everywhere, in a faraway campus, in a kibbutz or in a desert colony, but young entrepreneurs prefer the bourgeois-Bohemian areas of cities. A rule that applies whether in San Francisco or on the Rothschild Boulevard of Tel Aviv. What hits me also in Haifa is immigration. ‘A nation of immigrants is, by definition, a nation of entrepreneurs,’ says writer Sami Michael, who presides the Israeli Human Rights Association, and with whom I dine at a restaurant in Haifa. While most countries want to limit immigration, Israel values it. ‘When the numbers go down during certain years, people get worried,’ explains Michael. With the Sabras—Jews born in Israel—being very high in the high-tech sector, nobody counts any more the start-ups founded by Russian, English or Argentine immigrants. And then, there are the Israeli Arabs who make up 20 per cent of the students in Technion. ‘The Arabs are very dynamic here in Haifa. We owe them a part of the development of the country. We must count them,’ adds Sami Michael. According to my speakers Yona Yahav, Sami Michael and Benny Ziffer, other factors might also explain this Israeli success. There is this quality known as ‘chutzpah’ that one associates with Israelites. This Yiddish term, derived from Hebrew, can be translated as ‘audacious’, ‘courage’ or sometimes ‘impertinence’. ‘It is the idea that one should think beyond the models and here we often say: “thinking out of the box’’,’ the mayor of Haifa tells me. Thus, unconventional ideas, originality, experimentations are encouraged. A non-hierarchic culture, a more informal sense of work relations and a strong tolerance to experimentation and failures are other explanations given by my interlocutors. Others still prefer to think that one of the key qualities is mesugalut, another Hebrew word denoting, says Ziffer, ‘a mix of individual responsibility and entrepreneurship unique to Israelites’. But here again, in Technion in Haifa, the government grants and financing from Israeli armed forces (IDF) are massive. Financial exonerations are numerous for entrepreneurs, and the agency Tamat, which depends on the Ministry of Economy, finances young start-ups. ‘Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invested a lot in digital security and in cyber war,’ concedes Member of Parliament Nitzan Horowitz who, however, is one of his most vocal political opponents. Still, he adds, ‘But if we put this technology to use for peace and reconciliation, not only will it be worthy but also much more economically propitious. The regional potential is huge.’ Instead of stressing on cyber security, Horowitz, who heads the lobby for regional cooperation at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, prefers to think of the economic development of the region. ‘Our neighbours in Jordan, Egypt and especially the Palestinians aspire to participate in this global digital revolution. Israel can play a determining role in this game.’
These pacifying arguments which seem to have a certain echo in Israel in the recent years, were not sufficient, during the elections of March 2015, in helping the Zionist left to get a majority and come back to power: the right-wing Likud won and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained head of the government. Nitzan Horowitz for his part, took care not to run. The cyber-war had won.
However, there is one other criticism that appears in the Israeli moderate press: ‘The start-up nation would only be a myth, an almost other-worldly phenomenon. Although Israel is capable of innovation and is in second place in terms of R&D, most of its start-ups are soon bought by the Americans, due to lack of funding at home, as soon as they see a bit of success. The Israeli companies would have limited value and few patents (Israel ranks 31st in this sector). Worse, Israeli start-ups would concentrate on short-term profit and will not contribute to the economy of the country. The number of employees in the IT sector, in ten years, went from 10 per cent to 8.9 per cent in 2015. ‘This is the dark side of the start-up nation,’ concludes a long survey by Jerusalem Report in 2015.
There is both a positive side and a negative side to the internet, and a part of the Israeli Left, maybe due to optimism, would like to prioritize the cyber-peace factor over the cyber-war factor. However, ‘the dream of every start-up is to be bought by the Americans’, says Benny Ziffer, thus confirming the inescapable Americanization of Israel. On interviewing many Israeli historians, Barschmuel, Ilan Halevi, Simon Epstein and Tom Segev, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I am convinced that the Hebrew state is in the process of leaving Ben-Gurion’s collective model of the Kibbutz and socialism, and turning more and more towards an Americanized model, with individualistic and practical values. Nowhere is this nearness more visible than in the digital. The two countries seem to be influencing each other. And if one sometimes says, in jest, that Israel is the fifty-first American state, in the digital field, it is true. This is what Gael Pinto, the cultural critic of Haaretz also feels. Pinto, whom I interview at the office of the newspaper in Tel Aviv, says that the Americanization of Israel is practically over and it does not attract any more criticisms. ‘Here, there is no debate on American imperialism or the dominance of the United States: it is a fact. We are so Americanized that it is no more a question of debate’. (Since our interview, Pinto has become a star of Big Brother Israel on TV.) One of his colleagues at Haaretz, the celebrated historian Tom Segev, wrote a book on the cultural Americanization of Israel. This is attested by the fact, he says, that Israel is a ‘start-up nation’ like the United States. The title of Tom Segev’s book, that he gives me, says exactly that: Elvis in Jerusalem.
It is an Israeli colony, like any other, at the heart of the West Bank. Banal, with its checkpoints and the protection of the Tsahal. I come here with Amira Hass, the only Jewish Israeli journalist living in the Palestinian territories, which has earned her many international prizes and praise. Her reports for Haaretz are generally favourable to Palestinians and she specializes in minute decoding, almost scientific, of the Israeli colonization in progress in the territories. However, this Left-winger, radical as she is, has also had many altercations with the Palestinian authorities, whose negligence, muddling and corruption she has often denounced. I notice that the windshield of her car has bullet holes in it on the left. And attached to her rear-view mirror, like a kind of lucky charm, a pendant of Che Guevara. ‘I am also very critical of the Palestinians. We can’t say everything is due to the fault of the Israelis,’ insists Amira Hass, whose softness hides an unscathed rebellion. With her, therefore, I find myself in a Jewish colony, in the middle of Palestine. It is an encampment of Israeli pioneers, which without a doubt calls to mind the times of the first Kibbutz, where the community grew olives, eucalyptus and tomatoes in the desert. An Israeli flag flutters in the wind above the settlement—which one also calls outpost in English. A Caterpillar crane blocks the passage. A Jewish settler receives us and I am struck by his languid virility and his large labourer hands (I will not reveal his name here or that of the little colony because he is one of Amira Hass’s sources and does not wish to be identified). He is a bitzu’ist, a Hebrew worker meaning simultaneously a builder, a pragmatist and a man who can finish his projects.
Around us, there are many fans which make an uninterrupted noise in the office, a dirty book of dead languages and a CB radio station linked to the Israeli army. The man is a Labourite, of the Left, which says that the settlers’ movement is not only the event of ultra-orthodox extreme-right visionaries. Here it would be more like a return to the sources of Zionism. The children of the kibbutz are replaced by the children of the colonies. And, deep down, is Israel not, by nature, a society of immigrants who came taking ‘dunum after dunum’ (step by step) to a land? Today, 550,000 Israelis live in the Palestinian territories (between 2009 and 2013, their numbers went up by 18 per cent). ‘The colony is in the nature of Israel. It is a part of its identity. In the end, it is probably what Israel is,’ Amira Hass would tell me, in a melancholic tone. In this settlement, technology is omnipresent. I see satellite dishes and a very sophisticated Wi-Fi station. Computers are everywhere and people constantly use many internet sites and geo-localized applications such as Waze. They also use Viber. In this Israeli colony, like in the Jewish colony at the heart of Hebron, in the south, that I also visit, I am struck by the spirit of the settlers: a spirit of adventure, genuine optimism, taste for perfection, and confronting nature. Seen from the Israeli side, their reasons are as clear as they appear obscure from the Palestinian side. In adversity, they take risks: they know that they can lose their home—and maybe their lives—but they remain there, on a highly hostile terrain. And the internet, therefore, is appealing to these new zealots—it makes Israel not a territory surrounded by enemies but a land of conquest with its risk-taking start-ups and smart cities. Internet is the new frontier. ‘Internet is a young country, just as young as like internet,’ says the settler to me, giving me a scarcely gentle look. The spirit of the ‘start-up nation’ probably arises out of this, from the very essence of the country. And like the pioneers of the Far West and the Americans of the wild Wild West, it is a mixture of audacity and conquest, personified by people who take every risk and bow down to few scruples in order to follow their ideal. In Israel, as in California, this ‘Wild’ Wild West today is known as the World Wide Web.