Girls interrupted: Afghanistan

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half the price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.

Yeah.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy. Taxes and fees extra.

See mintmobile.com hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month.

Now you don't even need to wrap it.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes. If network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm John Fassman and from London, I'm Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Virtual reality is one of those technologies that has seemed just around the corner for years, but its moment may at last be arriving along with that of its cousin, augmented reality. We'll take you inside the battle of the headsets.

And you may not remember a time when a gigabyte of memory or data seemed like an impossibly big number. For many, it was the first encounter with the prefix giga. Now it's everywhere. We take a look at the linguistic inflation that technology brings. But first, In Afghanistan's Bamyan Province, the fate of female protesters reportedly detained by the Taliban is in question. On April 4, they disrupted a rally held in support of the Taliban, tearing down banners to the sound of cheers and demanding that schools for girls be reopened. This week, Heather Barr of the Women's Rights division at Human Rights Watch expressed concern for the protesters and recalled recent instances when women were held by the Taliban for weeks in abusive conditions. On Tuesday, America's Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled the State Department's annual country reports on human rights.

The Taliban's takeover precipitated a humanitarian crisis and has resulted in A serious erosion.

Of human rights, from arbitrary detentions of.

Women protesters and journalists, to reprisals against security forces, from the former government, to growing restrictions on where women and girls.

Can study or work.

Since Western troops left the country last August, a humanitarian crisis has grown and grown as the Taliban regime has failed to deliver on every front. Many Afghans are out of work or aren't getting paid, and more than half the population is suffering from acute food insecurity. But it's the country's women who are suffering the most from the Taliban's return.

So when the Taliban came to power, there was a lot of hope that the new Taliban would be different to the group that ran Afghanistan in the 90s.

Avatika Chilcotti is an international correspondent for the Economist.

They seem to be doing a balancing act. On one hand, they were already very brutal. They were murdering civil servants in areas they controlled. They were ordering families to hand over single women to marry their troops. But there were also signs that they weren't going to be the sort of bigots they were before. Taliban officials were interviewed by female journalists on television, which sort of seemed unimaginable 20 years ago. And in press conferences, their spokespeople were saying that women would be active in an Afghan society. But we've seen a lot of that modernizing basically fall by the wayside.

How so? What's changed?

So in recent weeks, we've seen the clock turning back in Afghanistan. There's new rules that ban women from doing everyday things without a male chaperone going into a government office or taking a taxi getting on an airplane. They need a brother or a husband to do simple things like going to a hospital. I interviewed a surgeon in Kabul who said that Taliban officials had visited several times, warning him not to see female patients who turned up alone.

All of things suddenly changed 100%. They applied all of the harsh harassment or all of bad law which they have in the previous government of Taliban. Twenty years ago, he was just one.

Of a number of people that suggested to me that the regime was going back to its regressive roots. And it's not just adult women who are suffering. Actually, girls are really suffering too.

In what ways? How are they suffering?

At the end of March, it was meant to be the date that girls were allowed back into schools, and thousands of Afghan girls turned up at school. But the Taliban decided that they weren't going to let girls back into secondary school, and within hours they were back at home in tears. It seemed like a very last minute backtracking and There was all of these excuses about figuring out modest uniforms, figuring out segregation, but really girls education has been the litmus test for the Taliban. It's what external voices, donors, analysts, everyone has been looking to, and closing the door to girls even after they'd actually turned up, really was very telling about the Taliban itself.

What do you read into that last minute change of heart?

A lot of the analysts I spoke to were most interested in just how chaotic this was. Lots of NGOs were saying up till the night before, up till the morning that girls were expected back at school. They had been given no indication that there was going to be a U turn. Many teachers and headteachers said that they were only told hours into the school day. And what that suggests is that there has been wrangling within the Taliban, that this was a decision that reflects the spirit split between the progressive sort of maybe pragmatic factions and the very traditional groups. Even over the last few months, there have been some provinces, particularly in the north of the country, where girls have been allowed to return to school. It seems very piecemeal. There isn't a clear direction and that's very telling about the internal organization of the group.

And so what effects are these changes, piecemeal as they may be having on women in the country?

So for girls in particular, an entire generation is falling behind. You have some underground schools that have been in operation now for a while, and girls and their female teachers are risking their lives to attend these underground schools. For those that are stuck at home, a lot of them are teenagers. And there's a massive risk of sexual violence, of early marriages that will set these women behind for life. This is not just an impact for this generation, it's an impact for future generations. There's a huge amount of research that shows that an educated mother is able to look after the health and education of her own children much better. And for the adult women in Afghanistan, not being allowed to go back to work is really causing a lot of economic problems. I spoke to one 24 year old woman, Kamarul Banat Qureshi, who had a really good job till August, but employers now are turning away female candidates and she can't find work. What was rumored that the Taliban had changed, it's not true. And now that much more Afghan women don't allow to be their work, they have faced financial problems. I can see that every single woman is in that situation. She's frantically searching for work, her savings have run dry, her debts, now they're.

Mounting and presumably taking half the population out of the labor market has even bigger impacts.

Yep. So this decision is part of what is decimating this economy. The UN reckons that keeping women out of work costs Afghanistan up to a billion dollars, which is 5% of GDP. And the country really can't afford this. It's in the middle of a huge liquidity crisis. When the Taliban took over, there was sanctions. So the flow of cash into the country really stabbed, stopped very abruptly as a result. Just everyday life there is very difficult. An ordinary Afghan can't withdraw all of their savings from a local bank. Lots of them who were lucky enough to still be in work have gone unpaid for months.

So given that there are these splits within the Taliban and the costs are becoming clear of these kinds of policies, do you see things changing?

So what has definitely changed over the last 20 years of the American BAT government is that there's a generation of Afghan women who've had a measure of freedom and whose voice has been heard. There was lots of problems under the previous administration, but women had 30% of civil service jobs. They were going to university, they were going to school. As a result. What you're seeing in reaction to these recent repressive policies is that very brave young girls and women have been on the streets of Kabul in protest, waving their books and chanting for schools to be reopened. And you've had activists on local television speaking out against these decisions. And even some Afghan men, they object to losing their wives income. It's a hassle to have to accompany female relatives everywhere they go.

And in this situation, is there now a role for the international community to help? What can other countries do?

It's a really tricky situation for international donors and for other governments. They face this balancing act between helping this population of 40 million, most of whom now are living in extreme poverty, and not being seen to prop up a brutal regime. Whatever aid and money you send into this country, there will be leakages and some will go into the wrong hands. But all you can do is continue putting pressure on the Taliban. You need to send the signal. Humanitarian assistance is one thing, but non emergency assistance and diplomatic recognition of any sort of the Taliban needs to be withheld until women have basic rights in the country. There's lots of evidence that countries that oppress women are likelier to be poor and violent and unstable. There's clearly groups within the Taliban that know this and I guess this argument has to be one within the regime in the end.

Thanks very much for joining us, Avantika.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Hi, this is Christy from back to the bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why I love Noom. Makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at $99 and it's delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at noom.com that's n o o m.com Noom micro changes big results average weight loss 8 pounds in first month meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

I loved the first Tron film. And even more than that, I love the arcade game. It inspired. Ever since then, I've been really intrigued by the concept of virtual worlds. And it wasn't just me either. The idea of being transported into a computer to experience a whole new reality inspired a generation of kids. Forty years later, those sorts of visions, science fiction visions from the past like Tron, are guiding the science of today. And the world's biggest tech companies are hoping to capitalize on the dream of an exciting extended reality.

Right now, pretty much every big tech firm in Silicon Valley is building a virtual reality or augmented reality headset.

Tom Wainwright is the economist, technology and media editor.

It's the next big craze, and the bet that these companies are making is that this could be not just a big hardware market, but the next big tech platform.

Virtual reality, augmented reality. Our listeners have probably heard these terms before, at least one of them take us back into the real world. What exactly do they mean, virtual reality?

Most people probably know, but it's where you wear a fully enclosed headset and you look typically through a pair of lenses at a small video screen, which makes you feel as if you're in another world. You could be anywhere. You could be in the middle of a game, you could be at a concert. You could be in a virtual office. With ar, it's slightly different. With an AR headset, you typically look through a pair of transparent lenses and so you can see the world around you. You know, your office, your room, wherever you are. And computer imagery. Computer graphics are overlaid on top of the real world. So you could video conference with a person who is in effect, kind of transported into the room that you're in. You could be walking around and see directions overlaid on the street in front of you, you could see your messages flash up right in front of your eyes as if they're floating before you. So whereas virtual reality is a fully immersive experience, augmented reality brings the computer graphics to real life.

And have you experimented with both of these types of headsets? And if so, what's it like?

I've spent the past couple of weeks playing around with various gadgets, so I was having a go with Meta's Quest 2 VR headset. They've sold, I think, something like 10 million units. For people who haven't tried it before, I think VR now is at a pretty kind of impressive stage where it just works pretty effectively and also is cheap. Meta is selling these things people believe at a loss for about $300 in the US it does give you a real sense of presence in whatever virtual environment you're in. If you want to do something totally immersive, like gaming or maybe like professional training, people use them for sometimes I. That could work really well. So that's VR. And then ar. I was having a go with a prototype headset made by Snap, which is better known for the Snapchat social media app. They've made these things called Spectacles. They look pretty different from a VR headset. They weigh about twice as much as a pair of sunglasses, so they're kind of bulky, but much slimmer than a VR headset. And the lenses are clear. And they project computer imagery in front of you, as it were, into the room around you. And so I went to try these things on, and I was looking at a holographic model of the solar system that was projected in the room around me. So AR is a much earlier stage in its development, and fitting all this technology into a small pair of glasses is really tough. The battery life on Snap Spectacles is only about 30 minutes. And an even bigger problem is heat dissipation, because if you think of the amount of processing that these things are doing, imagine how hot your computer gets. And now imagine if the surface area is just the size of a pair of specs, much, much harder to get rid of the heat. People seem to think that these processors are going to get smaller and more efficient, and the experience of an AI headset will eventually become both slicker and cheaper.

You mentioned that Meta was selling Oculus at a loss. They must clearly see a huge potential market. Do they think this becomes the next smartphone?

Well, that's the best case scenario for them. I mean, the smartphone's been a phenomenon. The first iPhone came out 15 years ago. And in that time, it's overtaken the desktop and the laptop combined as being, you know, the single biggest selling type of home computer, which, you know, it kind of is. But smartphone sales have been declining. The peak was, I believe, 2016. And so everybody's looking for what the next big platform could be. And for a company like Meta, it would be great, as far as they're concerned, if people slowly shifted away from smartphones and onto something else, because it doesn't run the smartphone platform. And they've found themselves in this very difficult position where they're the tenants of companies like Apple and Google, which control the smartphone platform. And that means that anytime those companies want to tax app store purchases or change advertising rules, anything like that, it makes life very difficult for companies like Facebook, as far as Meta is concerned. If they can capture what could be this new platform, they can change their role from tenants to landlords, as it were, which puts them in a much stronger position. And their strategy at the moment seems to be very much about advertising, which you'd expect. Obviously, Facebook's business is advertising. They're rolling out these headsets as fast as they can, selling them at what most people believe is a loss in a bid to try and increase the scale of the audience to a level that attracts advertisers.

What is the use case for ar? What do companies see in that technology?

Imagine trying to think back in the year 2000 or thereabouts about the use cases for a smartphone. You probably would have thought of web browsing and email, but you probably wouldn't have thought that by now everybody would be doing their navigation, their social networking, their banking, their video viewing on a tiny screen. You know, I certainly back then found it hard to imagine that I'd be watching TV shows on a phone and. Or reading the Economist on a phone or listening to a podcast on a phone. So use cases take time to be developed. But the promise of ar, as opposed to VR, is that it would allow you to experience this overlaid computing on the world in a way that is more compatible with the rest of your life. So if you're in VR, you're very much not in the real world. If you're in ar, then I guess, for instance, you know, you could wear a pair of AR glasses and a virtual monitor could be suspended in space in front of you. You could have facial recognition so that every time you came to a conference and didn't recognize people around you, everybody could have their own little name tag that no one else would be able to see, but it would be hovering in front of you and through your AR glasses. There are loads of things that you could do. Arkansas is the thing that I think if anything is going to replace the smartphone, I think it's more likely to be AR than VR at this stage.

You've been very eloquent about what it could do if you had to make the bet that they're making. Do you think that these things will replace smartphones or become just as ubiquitous as smartphones?

People in the past have said that the tablet is going to be the next thing that replaces the smartphone and the laptop, and it didn't happen. Tablets have been fine, but they're a niche. Apple still makes about seven times more money from iPhones than iPads. I don't know, for what it's worth, I think that VR is so immersive that it will always be a niche, possibly quite a big niche. If you look at the moment at what people are using these things for, something like 90% of spending in the Meta Quest store is on games. But I think if AR is ever anything like what people think it could be like, that to me, ultimately seems irresistible. There's a big question mark about whether we're talking about a few years time or a decade or two, but most people seem to think that we'll get there in the end. And I guess the question for companies now really is do they want to be that pioneer? You know, do they want to try and get the first mover advantage, or is it better to kind of sit back a bit now and wait for other people to do that heavy investment and perhaps try to bring out a product when things are a bit further down the track? Famously, that's what Apple did with the iPhone. It wasn't anything like the first smartphone, but it was the first really good one, and that's what you ultimately want to build.

Tom, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

It seems like everywhere you look these days, you're being bombarded with extremes of the huge or the tiny or the very many. Giga this and Tera that and nano some other thing. Perhaps no one likes the Giga more than Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, who recently opened something evidently bigger than a mere megafactory.

That's why we call it a gigafactory. It's very big.

Technology has a way of expanding the horizons of what's possible. So the language to describe it all has to keep up.

Giga is the prefix in the international system of metric units, meaning a billion of something, but it doesn't originally mean that. It goes back to the old Greek word gigas, meaning giant.

Lane Greene writes Johnson, our column on language.

The first gigafactory was the one announced by Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk in Nevada. That factory was meant to produce huge numbers of batteries, but it has become a prefix that's become cool for lots of other factories as well. Tesla now has four gigafactories. Mr. Musk just cut the ribbon on one. In Berlin. We have tsmc, a great big computer chip maker, talking about its Gigafab. We have Nissan starting a gigafactory in Sunderland in England. The Gigafab or gigafactory thing is out there everywhere, even though not all of these technically make a billion of anything.

So it seems that these prefixes are associated with or at least a rise in technological things.

That's right. I think they've made their way into common speech mostly through computing. If you remember all the way back to the 1980s, a really good computer might have 256 kilobytes of memory. I remember those days. Then the first hard drives with a million bytes of storage came online and that really brought the megabyte as a unit of measure into common parlance. And I remember that was a kind of a jaw dropping number at that time. But Mega was already out there in the language. It was when the billion byte mark was crossed that many people really encountered that giga prefix for the first time. This is the territory opened up by Moore's Law, that rule that the number of circuits you could fit on a silicon chip doubles every couple of years.

Which is to say that other bigger numbers, grander prefixes are surely coming.

There's some debate about whether Moore's Law will continue at the same rate it has in the past. But it is nonetheless the case that computers are still getting more powerful. And so it can only be a matter of time before giga starts to feel ho hum. Kind of like Mega has already an affordable hard drive. Now is a terabyte, that's a trillion bytes. So having run out of terms for big things in Greek, we went for the term monster. In Greek that's what teres means, and that's where the TERA prefix has come from. But it probably won't stop there. It seems pretty inevitable to me that PETA and EXA will make their own debut in the popular consciousness.

PETA and exa, what are they?

PETA and EXA come from Greek as well, and in this case they come from the Greek penta, which means five, and hexa, which means six. Now, you may be wondering why five and six? That's because the petabyte refers to the number 1,000 to the fifth power and exa, from the Greek hexa, refers to 1,000 to the sixth power. And now we have a system that can encompass a one followed by 24 zeros. And in practical terms, most scientists are happy to use exponents for things like this, whether 10 to the 25th. It's not very often that we need to talk about numbers this huge, but nonetheless, some students at the University of California, Davis, started a petition to propose a new prefix, and that is hella for 10 to the 27th power. If you don't know Hella, you're probably not from Northern California. Those who are will know that hella is an adverse. It's derived from hell of as in you can say someone's hella ugly or hella cute. As a prefix in this technological sense, it has started to gain a bit of currency, if only sort of jokingly in the technology press. But if the Hella prefix is adopted officially, it would be the first of the prefixes for huge numbers not to come from the classical languages Latin and Greek. And that's because HEL is a good old fashioned Germanic. It comes to us from Anglo Saxon.

Lane, this has been hella interesting. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell, Kim Gitelson and Chris Impey. And our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Jack Gill and John Jo Devlin. Our US Audio correspondent is Stevie Hertz. Our producers are William Warren, Rory Galloway and Alize Jean Baptiste. And assistant producer Abasoy Osundairo, with extra help this week from Kevin Koenors and Emily Elias. We'll all see you back here on Monday.