The young sister watched enviously as her brother looked at his phone

Boy looking at his phone — Siblings playing in an alley

To speak of “cities on Java” as if they all shared a single rhythm is to misunderstand the island entirely. Jakarta, with its sprawling metropolitan area of more than thirty million people, is less a city than a gravitational field. The next largest, Surabaya, has perhaps a tenth of that population. Even as Indonesia’s second city, it feels almost modest when set beside Jakarta’s restless, overgrown enormity.

With that in mind, it becomes dangerous to treat anything you see in Jakarta as a national truth. If anything, Jakarta is the outlier—a future prototype running ahead of the rest of the archipelago, blinking impatiently while other cities decide whether to follow.

On Jakarta’s streets, it’s perfectly ordinary to see clusters of Gojek and Grab riders waiting for a notification to buzz. But in Cirebon, also on Java, I didn’t spot a single one. And while it’s unremarkable in Jakarta to find a small boy glued to a smartphone—like the one in my photograph—in Cirebon even many adults get by without one. The digital divide here is not a statistic; it’s a landscape.

And yet, for all those differences, some dynamics are wonderfully universal. If an older brother is having fun, a younger sister will inevitably want in. The boy in Jakarta stood absorbed in his screen, shoulders hunched in that familiar posture of childhood concentration. Beside him, his sister hovered with a look of pure envy—part curiosity, part indignation—watching as if willing the phone out of his hands.

Big city or small town, Java or anywhere else: sibling politics, at least, require no translation.

Jakarta on Google Map

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