What follows are a series of diary entries and notes culled from our interviews. The interview teams were composed of three or four people: a translator, a photographer, a notetaker, and sometimes a facilitator.

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Farmer #1

Our first farmer! Thirty-eight years old. Owns fifteen acres of paddy. Has a great head of hair and an 8-year-old daughter. We’re seated atop a raised platform in a makeshift shed in the middle of one of his rice fields. It’s only late morning but the sun outside burns atomic hot. Even the shade is unbearable. Everyone is drenched in sweat. Everything around us is bathed in a golden glow of light reflecting off unharvested paddy.​​​

Okekan is a town northwest of Yangon. The drive takes three to six hours, mostly on the wrong side of pockmarked roads. It’s just big enough for a half-kilometer strip of restaurants and shops, a small market, and a tiny hotel. There are rice fields in every direction. Our first farmer’s village is on the edge of town.

The farmer brought his nephews. They arrive to our shed on 50cc motorbikes. Our arrival is clearly an event. Smiles and hospitality abound. They hand us bottles of water and I feel a relief that maybe our interview request isn’t quite as burdensome as imagined.

Everyone has a smartphone. One Samsung, one from a mysterious company called “Honor,” two Huawei. (We’ll later realize: Honor is owned by Huawei.) Apple simply doesn’t exist in the fields of Myanmar. China dominates. Samsung comes in second to those who can afford to splurge on the brand as a premium. But the more we probe, the less justifiable the Samsung premium becomes. The Chinese phones are cheap but capable. I wonder if this makes Negroponte happy. His one laptop-per-child dream was never fully realized but one smartphone-per-human—far more capable and sensible than a laptop, in many ways—has most certainly arrived. I take notes. We photograph. Get in close, have them pose with their phones. They’re proud. All the phones clock in under the equivalent of one hundred U.S. dollars.​

We ask about data. It’s much cheaper now than a year ago, they say. The telcos operate on pre-paid systems. Nobody has a credit card. Everyone buys top-up from top-up shops, scratches off complex serial numbers printed in a small font, types them with special network codes into their phone dialers in a way that feels steampunkish, like they’re divining data. They feel each megabyte. For about 10 U.S. cents you can purchase 25MB of data. If you buy in bulk (although almost nobody does) you can get 2GB of data for 11,900 Myanmar Kyat or about $9.20 USD. Most farmers grab data on their scratch cards in 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 Kyat chunks. How long it lasts depends on the user. For some 3,000 Kyats gets them through the month. For others, it lasts only a few days.