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In the panic over the infamous Y2K or millennium bug two decades ago, poorly paid Indian computer coders became the outsourcing miracle that staved off chaos as they toiled to correct the software error that had made the world’s computers incapable of shifting into the dates of a new millennium. Because their work resembled dull clerical labour, few in the West — even among the highly-educated and well-travelled — understood the implications of this labour pool’s existence. They could not see that it was only the unimpressive (if mission-critical) end of far deeper technological expertise and potential. It was impossible to convince them that India would ever be capable of much more than providing hives of software coolies — even though Bill Gates, still at Microsoft’s helm at the time, said that it would be extremely difficult to run his company without its Chinese and Indian software engineers.
Twenty years later, Microsoft and Google are being run by chief executives born in India and mostly educated there.
There remain sceptics who refuse to acknowledge that Asia could soon be more than a match for the U.S. and other leading Western nations in virtually all the most significant technologies. It is hard to see how they can explain away — for instance — this passage in ‘China gains the upper hand over Germany,’ a report by Wolfgang Münchau published in The Financial Times on 3 March:
The two countries do have a lot in common. [ … ] But Germany’s economic strategy is not nearly as consistent. The German political preference is to reduce public debt. Yet the country’s biggest problem is falling behind in the technological race. Excessive fiscal consolidation has been the main cause of under-investment in roads, telecoms networks, and other new technologies.
What he says there fits what frequent intercontinental flyers have been remarking on for at least fifteen years — that Asia has been overtaking the West in updating infrastructure, especially airports and roads, even if large segments of the Chinese and Indian populations continue to live in primitive housing and can lack facilities as basic as toilets. Technological progress and modernising infrastructure are apparently part of the same feedback loop, as much a fact of life in those countries as dire poverty.
This paradoxical reality accounts for the experts’ inability to agree on whether or not the world is on the brink of a so-called ‘Asian century’ — in which the continent on which India and China coexist replaces the West as the world’s economic powerhouse, on its way to military and cultural dominance. If the facts truly support a headline in the same newspaper last week — ‘The Asian century is about to begin’ — the future tense will soon no longer serve for discussions of this topic. A London School of Economics conference on it at the start of this month was timed to coincide with the launch of The Future is Asian, a book by an Indian-American public intellectual, Parag Khanna. The counter-arguments in older books, such as The Rise and Decline of the Asian Century: False Starts on the Path to the Global Millennium, published in 1998, have been eclipsed by strong, recent economic trends.
What does any of that have to do with this web site’s focus on translating the digital revolution into the redesign of the legal system and courts? Just this: it cannot be a mere coincidence that here, too, the leaders are the Asian giants, China and India, and not the West — with the notable exception of Britain, in spite the monumental distractions of Brexit.
A country’s legal system is crucial in the social counterpart of the physical infrastructure that holds it together.
Monitoring and delving into the progress of the litigation revolution across the world was never the purpose of this site. Through a single, fully substantiated case study, COTIN is intended to demonstrate how genuinely open or ‘transparent’ legal proceedings accessible by anyone would almost certainly have made the lamentable markers of this case inconceivable — a judge wholly unqualified and struggling, by her own admission, to adjudicate in a branch of law in which she had no experience whatsoever, in a trial skewed blatantly for the benefit of a colleague on the bench.
Questions about whether and when digital communication and broadcasting would be deployed by courts in California and the rest of America to achieve that transparency have led to discovering that they are laggards in this transformation. Entries on this site about courts at the forefront of change — in faraway countries — are based on woefully incomplete information, but they should encourage American media with the large long-distance travel budgets that this subject deserves to fill in the blanks. They include:
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Is China leading the world in developing cyber-courts conducting trials online?
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COTIN 