"
"six years ago the government realized that modernity was allowing once-poorer neighboring countries to surge ahead, so it began to democratize. Aung San Suu Kyi, a founder of the National League for Democracy, was freed from house arrest in 2010. And in 2014, officials granted licenses to two foreign cell phone companies. Within a year, the price of a SIM card dropped from $250 to $1.50, leading to the fastest rise in mobile phone usage of any country in the last 10 years. Today more than three-quarters of the population have a cell phone, most of them smartphones...
"Even when I went to engineering university in 1980, a telephone was a luxury item. You had to dress up to use it at the post office, and connections were very poor. That was the same year the government brought in TV. At the university hostel, everyone watched the few hours of government programming each day. I saw the development in other nations. I loved the Six Million Dollar Man and James Bond for all their technology. I eventually became the maintenance engineer for the only computer in the country."...
"My father encouraged me to become a computer engineer, even though there are very few women in technology, because he heard about the coming tech boom from friends in Singapore. He paid for me and my sister to attend computer classes after school. At first I didn’t enjoy it. I had to carry my whole computer around—not a laptop, but the CPU and monitor—and because I was small I could barely lift it. But eventually I earned my degree in computer networking."...
"By the time I moved back home in 2007, the government had licensed a few internet cafés. I pooled money with friends to open one. Normally the authorities kept tight control—café owners had to hand over screenshots of what every user did. But I took my cafés underground. People could access Gmail, news websites, and other banned things. A lot of political activists were interested, so I organized the Myanmar Blogger Society."...
"Being able to know the weather in advance is amazing—before, I just had to watch the clouds! And the market information is very important. Before, we would sell our products to the brokers for very low prices, because we had no idea they sold them for higher prices in the city. But in the app I can see what the prices are in the big towns, so I don’t get cheated—especially for ginger and avocados."
https://www.wired.com/story/myanmar-internet-disrupted-society-extremism/
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