Stay home, put out the red light

Aside from corrupt authority figures and prostitution fueled by poverty, a common theme explored in Filipino films is the suffering of families supported by OFWs. Breadwinners, working abroad for their children’s sake, return home and find that living away for so long has ostracized them from their loved ones.

Imagine a Philippines where we apply technology — primarily the Internet — to keep Filipinos in the Philippines, provide more opportunities so that women don’t sell their bodies, and promote genuine transparency that makes graft virtually impossible.

I’ve always wondered: what if the Philippines educates an Internet-savvy workforce, one that specializes in securing employment opportunities online? While at the same, improving the connections of the country to the rest of the Internet of course.

Instead of relocating to foreign countries, and sacrifice quality time with the family, the Internet-fluent could just secure work through popular freelance sites like oDesk and Amazon Mechanical Turk (yes, the same Amazon known for selling books and other products online). They can even create their own opportunities, because executing a great business idea can be much easier online.

Of course, they wouldn’t end up earning nearly as much as they would abroad — especially as more contractors realize that they can save a lot when they outsource work to online freelancers. There’s also the expense of running a home office, even if it’s just a cheap laptop and a reliable Internet connection.

Yet many people leave the Philippines because they genuinely feel that their hard work will find no reward here. However, based on my experience, I know that a lot is possible (from a financial and fulfillment point of view) for those who explore the endless work opportunities on the Internet.

And who knows? As more Filipinos start tapping opportunities online, maybe less would enter the admittedly lucrative local prostitution industry. Just like working abroad, commoditizing your sexual experiences can net you a lot of money. But again, if you could earn decent money from the comfort of your own home, or make good money in exchange for a significant sacrifice, which option would you choose?

I’d like to think the former, just how I believe that eliminating graft and corruption is a simple matter of setting up a special team to maintain a special website. I wrote about the complete details in a previous column (“How the Internet makes corruption harder”), but I forgot to include a key benefit: maintaining a website, even a high-traffic one, costs much less than maintaining a print publishing empire.

At the same time, information on potential corruption is always compelling. Traditional media channels would pick it up and distribute it to less Internet-savvy areas of the country anyway.

Technology alone won’t solve all the problems the Philippines faces. If you think about it, the solutions are always straightforward. What really matters is the execution, the implementation. Before we can even consider anything I’ve written here, something has to change in the way we think, act, and expect as a society — at least before we can maximize technology as a tool for our benefit.