Undercurrents

5Digital DisruptionHow Activists Must Harness New Technologies to Change the World

Some pessimists warn that technology will usher in a dystopian future. Some naïve optimists predict it will create a utopia. The truth lies somewhere in between. Technology is disruptive, and countries need to invest to maximize the positive disruptions and manage the negative ones.

Bill & Melinda Gates, Goalkeepers Report 2019

PICTURE A SMALL OFFICE, about the size of a portable classroom, filled with a long, metal table holding about 10 computers. The walls are lined with small monitors, each displaying data about a disease outbreak trickling in from across an entire country—like a war room, but for combating disease outbreaks. It's not quite what you'd see in a Hollywood movie, but it's still impressive. Some of the monitors flash with population analyses and raw data on numbers of cases. Others use geomapping to forecast the next likely hotspots. Another set analyzes health worker interventions. More dazzling even than the technology is its location, in Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the poorest countries on the planet.

The year was 2019, and I was visiting the DRC's Global Health Security Emergency Operations Center, mission control for confronting Ebola virus. In a year, the country would discharge one of its last Ebola patients from treatment, cautiously hopeful that the deadly outbreak had been quashed. But at the time, the DRC and its health ...