With over a month’s time since the conclusion of the 2009 Ars Electronica Symposium on Cloud Intelligence we can now look back at the day’s discussions – both online and in Linz – and examine what conclusions were reached, and what points of contention remain.

All of the talks and roundtable discussions have been posted on the blog. You can subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes, or via our RSS feed.

Among the questions to which we sought answers:

• Does cloud computing represent a significant shift in infrastructure, or is it merely the latest fashionable name for the same old internet?
• What is the intellectual history of collective intelligence, and does cloud computing re-shape our understanding of it?
• Are cloud technologies forging a global, cosmopolitan society, or are we mistakenly lured into believing that a space without geography must be a space without social boundaries?
• Does online activism using server-based tools lead to offline social change, or to increased apathy?
• How are activists using the cloud to influence development, environmentalism, education, creativity and culture?

According to Gartner’s market research, cloud computing was at the summit of the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” when we prepared for the symposium.

Indeed, several major articles and conferences praising the opportunities and warning about the risks of cloud computing were published and announced in the lead-up to the symposium. And while the boom in augmented reality apps is increasingly taking up a larger patch of real estate in the tech blogosphere, cloud computing remains an important topic; especially with the further related investments by major players like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. An article in The Economist this week claims that “the rise of cloud computing is not just shifting Microsoft’s centre of gravity. It is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry.” Responding to concerns about data portability in the cloud, Google launched The Data Liberation Front, “whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.” Still, many critics of cloud computing remain unsatisfied, and point to the data loss by T-Mobile’s Sidekick users as evidence of the danger of hosting your data on corporate server farms. “Sidekick Disaster Shows Data’s Not Safe in the Cloud” reads a headline at ABC News, while more thoughtful and thorough tech analysts search to find who and what was responsible for the failure.

What we can be sure of is that the momentum of cloud computing pushes forward even as critics trumpet their warnings louder and louder. “Not everything will move into the cloud,” writes Nicholas Carr, one of cloud computing’s most vocal critics, “but the cloud will move into everything.”

So what can we learn from the discussions that took place at the Cloud Intelligence Symposium? Let’s briefly look at a summary of the various speaker’s main arguments to better understand where there is agreement and difference.

What is Cloud Intelligence?

I began the day with an introduction to the concept of “cloud intelligence.” (The last thing I wanted to do was apply a new term for an old theory – that is, collective intelligence in the age of cloud computing – but what is an art festival symposium without a neologism?) I argued that we are entering the third stage of computing after the mainstream and then personal computer; that cloud-based tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s many products, have had a large impact on society, and that the impact will continue to grow as cloud computing matures and internet connectivity expands. Finally, I argued that a social symbiosis between humans and computers is strengthening as cloud-based computer programs (including Google’s search) rely on human intelligence, and humans rely on cloud-based programs to function in an increasingly fast-pased, information-saturated world.

Stephen Downes then followed, adding a layer of depth and complexity to the metaphor that internet users are like social neurons of a global brain. Downes warns that this metaphor treats each neuron as identical; the internet as a network of sameness. In fact, both the brain and the internet depend on a diversity of inputs and outputs. Each neuron is connected to a different network from every other neuron, even if collectively they all belong to one, larger network. “A city is not a group of people directed to create one goal,” says Downes, “but each seeking their own goals.” As Ethan Zuckerman puts it in his summary of Downes’ talk:

What we need to understand about the cloud is that each entity works based on its own internal needs and drives. In a cloud, there’s an equality of opportunity, the ability for each entity or neuron to connect to the network as a whole. What we’re going to see is a diversity of perspectives, not a shared understanding. But through the interdependence of entities, we expect interaction, truth and knowledge to be emergent properties of this network.

Ethan Zuckerman then takes the stage and builds on Downes’ emphasis that connectivity, participation, and social capital are not distributed evenly across the network. He points to the Kremvax Hoax from 1984 as an early indicator that the seeming intimacy of the internet can easily convince us that we are in fact more globally connected than we really are.

Usenet gave users a very real experience of a larger, more connected world. It made it possible to imagine a world one step more connected, where a online space would permit encounters between cold war rivals. It made it possible to imagine a form of cosmopolitanism not yet present in the physical world.

But, in reality, imagination was all that the users were left with. They weren’t actually in direct conversation with their Soviet peers (though that did happen two years earlier via satellite connection). Zuckerman fears that this same tendency – to imagine global interaction rather than practice it – still holds true today, surrounded as we are by countless communication tools that in theory can put us in touch with cellphone-toting Tibetan monks, but in practice never do.

I fear that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll discover that the flow of ideas through the Cloud isn’t as frictionless and global as we might hope. The steep, sheer barriers of language render much of what’s posted online incomprehensible to us, the Chinese blog posts and the Spanish-language videos. On a polyglot internet, there’s more to read everyday, but less each of us, individually can understand.

Next up is Anders Sandberg from the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Sandberg begins by observing that, collectively, Austria has around 821,000,000 IQ points, but that most contemporary research ignores the potential of group cognition and rather focuses on business-related scenarios of how relatively small teams complete particular tasks. For Sandberg, increased communication is key to increasing intelligence. “The best cognitive drug gives you a 20% advantage on certain tests,” he says, “but asking a set of your friends to help you out might make you much better.” Communication is also key in preserving both culture and new technologies. Sandberg suggests that Tasmanians lost key technologies around 1500 B.C. simply because not enough people knew about them. People tend to imitate rather than innovate, and through innovation new technologies and techniques spread across society. This is happening faster today than ever before via the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and other online communication networks. Finally, Sandberg observes that “information can substitute for smarts,” and points to 80 Million Tiny Images as an example of how information produced by humans (in this case photos) can help train computers to see.

How to Turn Intelligence into Action?

With an introduction to the basic idea of “cloud intelligence” – and its shortcomings – in place, Isaac Mao asks how aggregated intelligence is being employed to improve offline society. He stresses the importance of connecting concept and vision with action and implementation.

Isaac introduces Hamid Tehrani, the Persian Language Editor for Global Voices and a frequent commentator on the Iranian blogosphere. Tehrani examines the myths and realities of the impact of social media tools on the recent post-election Iranian protests. He believes that the Iranian protests proved the power of citizen media, with many people risking their lives to post videos and messages to the internet, but that the use of these tools was often misunderstood by the mainstream media. As early as 2006 Iranians were using blogs to coordinate and publicize protests. YouTube videos stirred major protests over a sexual harassment scandal at Zanjan University and corruption charges against senior ayatollahs.

Iran has a long history of web censorship, but election candidates grew reliant on social media during their campaigns and so, Tehrani believes, the Iranian government stopped blocking access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube three months before voters went to the polls. Social media played an important role in 1.) keeping protesters informed and 2.) creating a two-way bridge of communication between Iranian citizens and the outside world. Tehrani criticizes western media for its over-emphasis on technology and its under-emphasis on the Iranian people. He points to headlines like “tweeting the revolution”, “the tweeted revolution”, and “a Nobel Peace Prize for Twitter?” as examples of misguided western coverage. In fact, he argues, Twitter was not used to organize demonstrations and often caused misinformation, as in the case when one tweeting protester claimed that 700,000 people were at a rally when in fact there were less than 5,000. He concludes by noting that westerners tend to think of the Iranian blogosphere as a face of reformist progressivism when in fact the conservative blogging community is both substantial and expanding.

Xiao Qiang, the founder and chief editor of China Digital Times explores how Chinese dissidents are using cloud-based tools to challenge their government’s legitimacy. He begins by noting that his emphasis is less on technology and more about “the human experience.” He points to memes of resistance that are spreading across China’s growing network of cell phones, blogs, and portals. The “River Crab” phenomenon – and, more recently, the Song of the Grass Mud Horse – show the growing Chinese awakening to the fact that, as Qiang puts it, “censorship is a form of violence against the human spirit.” He ends by pointing to Chinese artist and blogger Ai Weiwei’s attempts to uncover the names of the thousands of students who were killed by poorly constructed buildings in last year’s Sichuan earthquake. Ai Weiwei was beaten by police so badly in August that he needed brain surgery, which he is now recovering from in Germany. The power of using online tools to make information public, Qiang notes, is leading Chinese authorities to react in ways that may ultimately harm their reputation, control, and power.

Evgeny Morozov then joins the discussion via Skype to challenge the premise that increased communication and the sharing of information leads to either democratization or effective political activism. “As someone who studies how the Internet affects global politics,” he begins, “I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of numerous digital activism campaigns that attempt to change the world through Facebook and Twitter.” Morozov tells the anecdote of an experiment by Danish psychologist Anders Colding-Jørgensen to see how far and how quickly false information is spread on Twitter. He sees online activism campaigns, such as coloring one’s Twitter avatar green in support of Iranian protesters, acts of slacktivism, “where our digital effort make us feel very useful and important but have zero social impact.” He cites Max Ringelmann’s “social loafing” theory to explain “why a million people working together may be less effective than one person working alone.” Morozov concludes by offering three tips to campaign organizers to avoid slacktivism: 1) don’t merit accomplishment until activists have really proved their worth; 2) create diverse, distinctive, and non-trivial tasks; and 3) don’t rely too heavily on the Wikipedia model of crowdsourcing.

Case Studies: Food, Development, Education, Creativity, and Environmentalism

We saw a healthy range of opinions regarding whether or not cloud-based tools lead to effective offline activism and social progress, or simply distract us while authoritarian powers retain their control. In the afternoon a line-up of dedicated and tech-savvy activists demonstrated how they and their peers are using the cloud to shape how we engage with our food, the classroom, home countries, creativity, and environmentalism.

The first half of the day featured mostly academics and researchers who are observing macro changes from the desks of their university offices. The second half of the day put us in direct communication with those who are out in the field implementing new technologies and practices.

Before lunch Kristen Taylor announced a “food hacking” competition similar to the most excellent fast food hacks at FancyFastFood.com. Christian Stiebitzhofer collected the most votes with his “CloudWurst“:

Following lunch Taylor takes to the podium and, in one of the most memorable quotes of the day, confesses that she is a food pornographer. She quotes Renato Sardo from a July New York Times article on urban homesteading:

“We’ve become so disconnected from everything,” said Sardo, who is 40 and who has been busy finding tenants for the 70,000 square feet of food retail space in the nearby Jack London Market. “We need to reconnect with something, some material. And food is the thing you do most.”

Taylor references Clay Shirky’s idea that the internet is built on love, but she points out that food online is mostly associated with lust. She wants to examine the social future of food. How does the culture of cooking and caring about food spread across the cloud? The idea of co-operation, after all, has existed in food for a long time; think about food co-ops.

For Taylor, honey bees are a model to think about the future of social food. Honey bee populations worldwide are currently in decline because of what some researchers have dubbed “colony collapse disorder.” Though there is some debate about (and a $1.5 million prize to prove) the reason for the decline in honeybees, Taylor points to one popular explanation, which is that local breeds of honey bees are exported en masse to other countries rather than being raised locally.

She shows a picture of an abandoned bee hive and notes that we see the same trend in online communities – the sense of cooperation and the process of co-production die out as our limited attention is distributed across more and more networks and communities. Among the online communities that she sees as important nodes in the network of food creativity are TasteSpotting, Yes, We Can Food, and Fallen Fruit. She ends with a photo of layered cake and asks us to think about the petabytes of information which are being stored on server farms as layers of ourselves. But what is the use of all of that information that we are archiving, she asks, if it doesn’t lead to action?

Next up is Teddy Ruge, a Ugandan-born photographer and activist now living in Texas, and the co-founder of Project Diaspora, which aims to mobilize the African diaspora in the social, economic, and cultural development of the African continent. Ruge says that Project Diaspora’s specific focus is to use new communication technologies to make more effective the $40 billion in remittances sent to Africa each year by its diaspora living all around the world. He believes that rather than being sent to individuals or families, remittances should be used for community-based development, such as Project Diaspora’s own “Women of Kireka” project.

Residents of Kireka, Uganda

Ruge already sees early signs of the effectiveness of new media in giving a voice to the African diaspora. Dambisa Moyo became the first African-born critic of aid-based development to be taken seriously in the international community largely, Ruge argues, because of her mastery of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Today the African diaspora stays in closer communication with their homeland than ever before because of their active involvement in MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Ruge says that he uses Twitter more than any other tool to communicate and coordinate with fellow activists across the African diaspora.

In April of this year Ruge wrote a highly cited post about Ashton Kutcher’s “burst of insecurity” in which he challenged CNN to a race to a million followers. The winner was to buy 10,000 malaria nets for Africans. For Ruge, Kutcher’s media gimmick was representative of the frequent “paternalism in which the western media uses the plight of Africa to further their own agenda.”

Wouldn’t it be better to invest money into indigenous companies that can make the nets, therefore maintaining a sustainable business selling bed nets? Or investing in the agricultural sector so farmers are more able to meet demand for crops like Artemesia annua and pyrethrum, easily-grown botanical ingredients in anti-malarial drugs?

Ruge thought he would just be ranting to a small readership, but his message spread far and wide and Malaria No More ended up responding on their own blog. Previously, an everyday member of the African diaspora would have not had so much influence, he notes. Ruge ends his presentation with the sobering reminder that there are over 900 million people in Africa, but only 65 million are online. The good news is that eventually all Africans will be able to lend their voice to the cloud. Connectivity has expanded exponentially in the past year in Africa, but how will this connectivity be used? For upload or download? For active participation or passive consumption?

Pablo Flores, a professor of engineering at Uruguay’s University of the Republic, then takes the stage. Flores has been involved in Plan Ceibal, the OLPC project in Uruguay, since the very beginning and he wants to look at how Uruguayan children are connecting to the cloud with their lime green laptops to transform education. Plan Ceibal has just delivered the last of their laptops to all 362,000 pupils and 18,000 teachers in Uruguay. In order for students to participate effectively online Flores says that all children require 1) health, nutrition, shelter; 2) literacy, a functioning home life and educational system; and 3) access to devices and internet access. Plan Ceibal has been able to more or less successfully provide the third element, but there are many other development challenges in Uruguay that still demand attention.

Even once those basic needs are met, Flores notes that there are three other cultural obstacles to creating an ecosystem of pro-active online participation. First, citizens must understand the utility of the devices. Flores and his team did research in Uruguay which found that parents who were not aware of how they could specifically benefit from the laptops would leave them closed and unused an a bookshelf. Once they were shown the basic utility of the laptops, they invested more time to learn how to better use them. Second, in a society that is accustomed to passively listening to leaders, it can be difficult to encourage a culture of sharing knowledge. Technology also lends power to those who are most easily able to master it, which can lead to awkward power struggles between teachers and students. Finally, Flores says he feels it is important to resist against what he calls “block boxes”, technological tools that function, but without letting us understand how they function. This is why Plan Ceibal advocates open source technology, and why a team of volunteer programmers are developing open source applications to meet the local needs of Uruguayan students, teachers, and parents. University students from Montevideo have formed “Flor de Ceibo” to give workshops across the country about the technical features of the laptops, but also about the culture of sharing which the internet enables. Apparently they have already had some success: Flores ends his talk by pointing to a classroom of young Uruguayan students who are using blogs to learn about Brazilian culture and to improve their Portuguese by communicating directly with a classroom of Brazilian students.

Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a PhD student and Bradesco Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. He shares Flores’ belief in the importance of playing and tinkering with open systems. Since he arrived to MIT Monroy-Hernández has been working on Scratch, a programming environment that enables young students to easily code simple programs for their computers. Specifically he has been responsible for the development of the Scratch online community, which enables young people to share, re-mix, and build on the programs they create. There are now there are 320,000 registered members – most between 12 and 14 – who’ve posted 500,000 programs and 12 million scripts. Unlike most programming environments, Scratch allows its users to work and collaborate in their own native language. He shows the same sample program in both Chinese and Spanish. This cross-language collaboration means that even if youth don’t speak the same language, they can still work together on the same program.

Monroy-Hernández wanted Scratch to be more social and more fun. He walks the audience through the online community, which he envisioned as a “YouTube for Scratch projects.” One of the half million programs that has been shared on Scratch is “Obama v. McCain” in which “whiteblur” grabbed images from the web and created a fun game where users can play either as Obama or McCain. I tried my hand as Obama, but McCain beat me 10-9.

While Scratch has clear educational applications and benefits, most users are homeschool students, or students who play after school on their own. We are shown a map of site visits from Google Analytics which shows that most users come from the United States and Europe, but that there is also considerable usage in South America, South Asia, and East Asia. Defying all stereotypes about programming and internet usage in general, there are more female registered users than male. (54% compared to 46%).

Monroy-Hernández concludes by pointing to a real world impact of the Scratch community. Gray Bear Productions is a software company founded by three scratch programmers who at the time were eight, thirteen, and fifteen years old. They now have 18 members who live in different time zones and have collectively designed six games in just three months. For Monroy-Hernández, Scratch shows the potential of democratizing the cloud so that all users are able to build tools to suit their own purposes.

Juliana Rotich, a Kenyan blogger and environmentalist, ends the afternoon of case studies by looking at how African activists are using “the cloud as a hub for environmental change.” While most North Americans learn about environmental degradation on the news, she says, for Africans it is right in front of their eyes. As Ethan Zuckerman writes in his useful summary of her talk:

She shows us photos of the Mau Forest in Kenya. The forest has historically acted as a “water tower” for a large region of Kenya, where condensation of moisture around trees has led to increased rainfall and expanded water supplies. But the destruction of thousands of acres of forest is leading to Lake Elementita drying up. Droughts in Kenya are becoming so severe that pastoralists are bringing their cows into cities, seeking water. There are now traffic jams in Nairobi from cows crossing the street. She shows us photos of cyclones in Madagascar and the impact of air pollution in African cities.

When the mainstream international media cover African countries, they rarely focus on environmental issues. Fortunately, environmental activists on the ground in Africa are beginning to use new media themselves to spread awareness and coordinate action. Rotich cites Corneille Ewango, a former poacher, turned conservationist, as an example. In Uganda conservationists used text messages and blogs to stop a major development project planned at Mabira Forest. In Egypt blogger and activist Tamer Mabrook published photos of “Trust Chemical Industries” polluting Lake Manzala. (The company was later acquired by the Indian-owned Sanmar group, which likely cleaned up their practices, but first Mabrook was sued by the original company and forced to pay around $7,000 in fines.) In South Africa Urban Sprout is pointing tourists who come to the country for next year’s World Cup to environmentally sustainable businesses. In Kenya Friends of the Lembus Forest are organizing outreach activities to stop destruction and restoring the Lembus Forest.

Looking toward the future of cloud-based environmental activism in Africa, Rotich points to the maps from CarbonSmart and envisions a mobile phone-accessible system which integrates microlending, emissions trading, and tree planting so that, as Zuckerman writes, those who are most affected by environmental change are able to participate in market-based solutions to mitigate the destructive impact.

Finally, Isaac Mao takes to the podium again to conclude the day and look to the future of cloud intelligence. He emphasized that cloud technologies have also changed how the Ars Electronica symposium is organized. In addition to the speakers and audience, participants from around the world also added to the content and diversity of the discussion. For Isaac, the idea of “cloud intelligence” unites the fields of art, science, sociology, and activism by bridging the gaps between them. He considers what a symposium on cloud intelligence will look like ten years from now. Only time will tell – the cloud is still young, and is advancing faster than even the most attentive tech bloggers are able to keep up with. Isaac also points to a lack of sustainable business models, and poor filtering technologies to avoid information overload as obstacles and opportunities for all of us who participate in the cloud

Forty years after the invention of the Internet, and 20 years since the dawn of the World Wide Web, this year’s symposium offered a helpful survey of how the world’s largest network, the Internet, has evolved and what impact on global society it has had. We thank all of the day’s speakers and participants – both in Linz and in the cloud – for their help composing a one-day snapshot of where we have come to, of what we must overcome, and where we might be heading.

All tourists cherish an illusion, of which no amount of experience can ever completely cure them: they imagine that they will find time, in the course of their travels, to do a lot of reading. They see themselves, at the end of a day’s sightseeing or motoring, or while they are sitting in the train, studiously turning over the pages of all the vast and serious works which, at ordinary seasons, they never find time to read. [...] But that does not prevent them from taking just as many books the next time they set out on their travels.

Long experience has taught me to reduce in some slight measure the dimensions of my traveling library. But even now I am far too optimistic about my powers of reading while on a journey. Along with the books which I know it is possible to read, I still continue to put in a few impossible volumes in the pious hope that some day, somehow, they will get read. Thick tomes have traveled with me for thousands of kilometers across the face of Europe and have returned with their secrets unviolated.

That was written in Italy in 1924 by Aldous Huxley when he was about my same age, before he published Brave New World, before he moved to California, before he took a fatty hit of LSD while on his deathbed (President John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis died on the same day). I know all of this thanks to the Summer 2009 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly on Travel. (Juan is also a fan – no surprise there.) CB was kind enough to bring it over to me during our own bit of traveling through Slovenia. At that time I was accompanied by what Mr. Huxley would likely consider a traveling library of ridiculous dimensions. Half the weight of my suitcase was surely appropriated by the printed page. This, of course, in addition to the thousands of words waiting for my ever-contracting attention span in my ever-expanding email inbox, RSS reader, and “read this now!” desktop folder.

It was a perfect morning in Kyiv to curl up with my Lapham’s Quarterly and morning cup of coffee.

Still, somehow, someway, I have managed to get through a considerable chunk of the to-read shelf of my traveling library. Were it not for Babak who just left me a lengthy tome on the history of Christianity in Europe, I would be out of books by the week’s end. So, what to do? Normally I would look for an English-language bookstore and, once again, despite the dictums of rational behavior, purchase more books than I could possibly read over the next few months. (I once lugged Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day through Greece, Turkey, Spain, and the Netherlands without ever getting past the Stoics.)

But now there is a tempting 21st century alternative to shouldering the burden of gravity plus the printed book, and that is the e-book reader. With just one (nearly patented no less) click, I am able to fill my iPhone with – yet again – more books than I could possibly read. On my Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone I am currently reading Shop Class as Soulcraft. On Stanza (best app ever!) I am just getting started on Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk. Currently I have 13 unread books waiting for me in Stanza and three in on my Kindle app. The ease, weightlessness, and affordability of maintaining the traveler’s cherished illusion of “studiously turning over the pages of all the vast and serious works which, at ordinary seasons, we never find time to read” has never been so manageable.

It has been a difficult few weeks for me – one of those times where I wish I could just skip ahead to the next chapter. But life doesn’t work that way. No skipping allowed. So while I’d like to be exploring the streets of Kyiv, taking photographs, reading books in its many fine cafes, and writing down my reflections, instead I toil away at all the reports, proposals, accounting, and conference calls that never seem to do anything and yet drag our spirits mercilessly through the minutes and hours of time, from the first cup of coffee to late nights with lonely laptops.

One very bright light throughout all this Sisyphean disgruntlement has been getting to know Veronica Khokhlova, the once mysterious Central and Eastern European Editor for Global Voices. (No one had met Veronica and there were vicious rumors that she was in fact a cyborg replicant planted by Google to demonstrate that a few good scripts could curate the world’s online conversations even better than humble human beings.)

Veronica has always been one of my favorite bloggers. It has to do with authenticity. You could call hers a “bridge blog” or a “window into Ukraine”, but really what makes it so appealing is that it is a portrait of her life. Of life – in a particular region, at a particular time – through her eyes. I love her photo walks through Kyiv, Moscow, and Istanbul. Like this one of satellite dishes. Often what seems to be a very simple photograph:

… actually has a much larger backstory. (I think it would be fascinating to compare the controversy over changing street names in Russia today to the 2007 controversy in Durban, South Africa.)

I have yet to meet her daughter, Marta, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to this weekend before they take off for Moscow. It’s a shame I won’t be able to understand any of her improvised poems and fairy tales, which apparently involve “fallen trees, bespectacled people and napkins.”

It is a telling sign that Wikipedia has no entry on media development. Rather, the search results suggest that perhaps you are looking for “ICT for development“. Indeed, what is the future of media development when we’re still unsure about the future of media in general? And, for that matter, where should funders invest their money to ensure that the same social benefits associated with traditional media (a sense of community, good governance, an informed citizenry) remain while journalism increasingly moves beyond broadcast, and beyond financial sustainability.

If you need a 15-minute introduction to what will soon become Evgeny’s first book, his TED talk is a good place to start. Basically, Evgeny used to do pretty much what I do nowadays: work with activists and journalists to teach them how to use new media tools to further their work. Back in April 2007, when his bloodstream was still polluted with a few drops of idealism, he wrote an article arguing that the internet is the new frontier of human rights activism. (So happy he is that the article is locked behind a subscriber-only wall.)

But then Evgeny rightly learned that you don’t get paid much and you don’t get much attention when you work toward social progress. If you want fame and money, ’tis better to complain about what’s wrong than to work toward making it right. (Many a web pundit and “internet researcher” have discovered this truth.)

So now he manages to publish an article in mainstream media or give a televised interview almost every single day about how the internet is bad, bad, bad. This of course is a compelling message because so many of us (hand raised) spend too much time online and by the end of the day we feel that the internet is bad, bad, bad.

But, back to the topic at hand:

Earlier this month Russians went to the polls across the country to elect their local representatives. The pro-Kremlin United Russia party (I admit to liking their iconic bear mascot) led by Vladimir Putin got 66% of the vote and 32 of the 35 open legislative seats. (The only other party to win a legislative seat was the Communist Party.) As Veronica notes on her Global Voices article, Russian bloggers immediately began to question the results. Official returns at the polls didn’t match up with the observations of election monitors. At polling station #192 the Yabloko party didn’t receive a single vote even though there are photographs of Yabloko candidate Sergei Mitrokhin and his family casting their votes there. The Russian mass media for the most part weren’t covering the allegations of fraud, but according to Igor Yakovlev, “on blogs this has been one of the most discussed topics of the past three days.”

So why then did all this discussion about electoral fraud in Russia not lead to the same internal discontent that we saw in Iran (or, for that matter, in Ukraine in 2004), or the sort of external, international pressure that led to a recount and a run-off in Afghanistan? That is the very question to which Clifford Levy sought an answer in this past Sunday New York Times.

For Levy the answer lies in Russians’ passive apathy when it comes to political participation – only 36 percent of registered voters went to the polls in Moscow; some estimate “that the true figure was 22 percent, with the extra votes improperly assigned to United Russia.” Levy cites (without a link of course) one opinion poll which showed that 94 percent of respondents believed that they could not influence events in Russia, and another which found that 62 percent did not think that elections reflect the people’s will.

Those findings seem to support Evgeny’s thesis that the internet “may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography.” But I am less interested in explanations and more interested in solutions. Russia offers an excellent case study: despite initial expectations, democracy there does not seem to be advancing. The one-party central government is gaining more control and the people seem apathetic. So, for those of us who care about public participation in the political process, how do we move forward? Evgeny’s proposal is to think “about ways in which we can empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs, and then the members of civil society.” (Though he doesn’t offer any ideas … apparently just thinking about it is enough.) If only Russian intellectuals had more power, the thinking goes, then democracy in Russia might stand a chance. But as a 1998 article in Le Monde makes clear, Russian intellectuals – when not spending their time battling the church’s growing influence – have traditionally been more concerned about their reputation abroad than social change at home:

In short, Russia’s intellectuals, particularly its writers, were often behaving in some disconcerting ways. As the country sank into poverty, with its economy becoming increasingly “dollarised”, its intellectuals looked for ways to make up for the mixture of privileges and constraints to which they had been subject during the Soviet period. They appeared to have a blind faith in the free market economy and its potential benefits for the world of culture. Particularly because the end of the old regime was bringing Russia back into fashion. Now they could enjoy foreign travel, sign juicy contracts, travel about like stars, open bank accounts in Paris and Munich and feel themselves on an equal footing with Europe’s elites. And a number of literary figures who had been kept in the shadows by the state machine now emerged into the light – albeit not bringing much by way of revelation with them.

This is perhaps a bit of a low blow, but in essence, Russian intellectuals during the fall of the Soviet Union did exactly what Evgeny has done over the past couple years: moved to the West, became fashionable speakers to eager English-speaking audiences, and more or less forgot about their home countries.

Back to Veronica’s post on Global Voices. She translates a post from the LiveJournal blog Notes of a Misanthrope, which compares the reach and influence of samizdat – in which Soviet dissidents hand-copied censored texts and underground protest pamphlets – with the reach of today’s opposition blogs. One of those dissidents was Natalya Gorbanevskaya who began publishing the Chronicle of Current Events to monitor human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. In 1969 she was dragged away from her typewriter by KGB agents and jailed in a psychiatric prison until 1972. She emigrated to Paris three years later and Joan Baez released a song in 1976 in her honor.

Did Natalya Gorbanevskaya bring down the Berlin Wall? Probably not. Notes of a Misanthrope estimates that the total circulation of the Chronicle of Current Events was between 30 and 50 (people). Today Natalya’s blog on LiveJournal is read by thousands and Andrey Malgin’s post on election fraud favoring United Russia was read by 45,000 people. It didn’t lead to a recount. It didn’t even lead to protests in the streets, but if you ask me, it is a step in the right direction.

(Evgeny would argue that it is a step in the wrong direction; that by reading the blog post those 45,000 people feel like they are contributing to change when in fact they are only increasing their awareness. For me, increasing awareness is a major accomplishment in itself … even greater than protesting in the streets.)

Last week I was at a bar with Veronica and some of her friends here in Kyiv. The walls are lined with yellowed sheet music and scratched records with Cyrillic labels. The air is all smoke and nicotine, the speakers all classic rock and blues, the voices loud, drunk and raspy from too much drink and too many cigarettes.

Veronica’s friend sits next to me. It is his voice you hear when a report is filed from Ukraine on NPR. “You know, they say that this bar is where the Orange Revolution began,” he tells me.

And I look at him unresponsive, half-stumped. Had it never occurred to me before that a so-called revolution … begins … somewhere? Right here, in this bar. Two, three, ten people decide that they have had enough, that they want to start a revolution. And the rest is history?

Is this what happened in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 and Mexico in 1910?

Probably not. Most of these struggles are years, if not decades, in the making. We like to simplify the story and pretend that social change is the result of spontaneity rather than careful strategy. (The legend of Rosa Parks embodies this myth perhaps more than any other.) We have yet to see the real social or political impact of the participatory internet because it simply hasn’t existed for long enough. I am quite sure that when the Gutenberg printing press spread throughout Europe the pundits of the day argued over whether it would lead to social progress or an opiated masses reading comic books. Maybe some visionary thinkers even anticipated that comic books would become a form of political protest and an important tool for development agencies.

All that we can be sure of now is that we can be sure of little. But I’d much rather spend my days trying than spend them complaining.

Note: I consider Evgeny a friend and we spend a considerable amount of time passing almost-witty notes back and forth via direct message. I’d be happy to share an abode with him if circumstance ever puts us in the same city. I’m also just as happy to continue pointing out our differing perspectives.

“He has very American eyes,” she told me. I let out a little chuckle, not quite sure what very American eyes are. “They are very big,” she explained, “and they are always staring at you. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Now I was laughing. I knew what she was talking about. Lots of cultures are ok with eye contact, but Americans are the only ones I know who so actively seek it out.

Perhaps encouraged by my laughter she went on: “He has a very American smile as well.”

“An American smile, huh? And what is that?”

“It is a smile that is always ready to smile. And it is always the same smile.”

Again, I was laughing. Most stereotypes I hear about Americans (and I hear a lot) ring hollow. The archetypical blonde bimbo with constant high rising terminal does surely exist, but (s)he is much more likely to be on a TV sitcom than in an international hostel. These two descriptions, though – the trigger-happy smile and the wide-eyed stare – I can picture perfectly. I don’t think that they are just WASP characteristics either. White, brown, or black … just about every American I know who has traveled for long enough comes to the same realization: that we’re actually much more American than we had ever expected.

Update: Via Lauren I came across this most sensible question from Olivia Judson: “do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces?” Does American English pre-dispose us to smiling faces? (And, one might wonder, does the New York accent produce facial expressions of constant irritation?)

Two or three posts are published each day which poke fun at life in the former Soviet Union. They are mostly photographs, with a few captions of less-than-perfect English to give some context. Yesterday a post about drug addicts living in St. Petersburg included some photographs that looked familiar. The post was tagged “Funny, Photos, Russian, People Children, Drugs, Junkies.”

One foreign lady photographer went down to the bottom of society of St. Petersburg Russia, where she has met children, junkies, prostitutes or often all together in one and made all those photos. Sniffing poisonous glues inducing hallucinations seems to be one of the main fun for those kids.

The foreign lady photographer happens to be Lorena Ros, a well known Spanish human rights photojournalist living in Brooklyn. She was funded by Open Society Institute – the same program that funds our health-related work at Rising Voices – to fly to St. Petersburg, spend some time with drug addicts, and photograph them. It is precisely the type of human rights campaign project that I was criticizing earlier this year at a conference in Berkeley.

The photographs are compelling; there is no doubt about that. Just like all the ruin porn that came out of Detroit this year, they show the beauty of destruction; in this case, people destroying their own lives. But what does this type of photography actually achieve? What ends up changing in the lives of those who are photographed?

I would argue that two things happen. First, human rights organizations in Manhattan and Washington D.C. have nice photographs to hang in their hallways and shock visitors with explicit high definition exotica of all the terrible things in the world. If the organizations are lucky the photos might pull at the heart-strings of wealthy visitors who pull out their checkbooks.

The second thing that happens is that the local residents of cities where these drug addicts actually live grow resentful with wealthy funders who send over professional photographers to highlight what the embarrassed residents feel are the worst aspects of their society. The photographs don’t convince them to get involved in addressing the actual problem; they just grow angry with how the image of their community is portrayed. It becomes a debate about branding, not about the shared goals toward social progress.

Yesterday afternoon I had coffee with a drug addict. It was the most natural thing in the world. We each ordered espresso, we talked about the benefits and the frustrations of technology, the potential and pitfalls of blogging … you know, the normal stuff we all banter on about these days. We also made a little movie:

I would never have met Pavel, and never have come to care about his life, were it not for his blog. It requires that you invest some time, empathy, and understanding. But if you do, you will actually come to understand more about his life and his motivations. Reading Pavel’s blog requires more work than looking at a framed photograph of someone pushing a syringe into her skin under perfect lighting. But, unlike the photograph, Pavel offers some concrete suggestions on how to integrate drug addicts into society and lessen the health risks associated with injection drug use.

You can learn more about Pavel Kutsev and read English translations of his blog posts on Rising Voices.

The Road is the most majestic verbal portrayal of ashen barrenness I’ve ever read. The beauty of devastation, of stripping everything away, of forests after fires, life after collapse. I have tried before to make sense of the western enchantment with decay, destruction, and death. Perhaps it has to do with the persistent lure of the apocalypse or our recognition of the ultimate futility in measuring our lives by the materials that surround us.

Despite McCarthy’s transcendent style of writing, The Road still fits firmly within the genre of apocalyptic fiction. We are not told what causes the apocalypse, but a bright pink flash lights up the sky and several years later only a few survivors remain. Father and son – bound by the love of each other – take to the road in search of food, supplies, community, life. What they find are the sick, the enslaved, the roaming bands of bloodthirsty, barbarous gangs. Just like all other apocalyptic works, The Road relies on the assumption that a scarcity of material goods creates a scarcity of empathy.

He could see the tracks of the truck through the wet ash, faint and washed out, but there. He thought that he could smell them. The boy was pulling at his coat. Papa, he said.
What?
I’m afraid for that little boy
I know. But he’ll be all right.
We should go get him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. We could take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat.
We can’t.
And I’d give that little boy half of my food.
Stop it. We can’t.
He was crying again. What about the little boy? he sobbed. What about the little boy?

I hear two common explanations for moral behavior. The first strikes me as more secular: that we treat others well with the hope that they will do the same in the future; moral investment as a type of social insurance. This reasoning is used as an explanation for why small town folk are friendlier, and why cities wear a constant frown. The second worldview sees moral behavior as a result of human nature – something we are born with – and this is often tied to religion; the idea that a greater power has endowed humans with a unique, innate sense of ethical justice.

It is clear that Cormac McCarthy subscribes to the latter worldview. The boy is one of the youngest survivors on earth. (He was born just months after the apocalyptic flash.) Yet he is also the emblem of compassion. In a world of death, destruction and distrust, the boy shows constant concern and compassion for every creature they come across. At times the religious symbolism is over the top. There is constant reference to the boy “carrying the fire” (”a binding, metaphysical and ubiquitous power” is how Wikipedia describes The Force), and he is repeatedly described as a prophet and god. For me, all of the biblical allusions took away from the stripped down elegance of the prose.

What is this mysterious “fire” that the boy is carrying? Perhaps it is moral truth, or justice, or even the holy spirit. Or maybe it is simply the will to live. And maybe the will to live depends on believing that there is something – some decency, some inherent value other than selfishness – worth saving.

Like a delicious dessert eaten too quickly, it is difficult to slow down while reading The Road and savor the way it is written. But despite its beauty, I still question its assumption: that the world at large would go to hell without material abundance and that there exist special Jesus-like individuals who live on a higher moral plane than the rest of us. Frans de Waal has shown that there is nothing uniquely modern, or even human, about empathy. Perhaps what I perceive as an expansion of moral rights is actually just better communication of a very basic idea: that we are happier in complementary cooperation than in antagonistic conflict.

Update – Extremely related: New Normal?

What disappointed me most about the meeting of funders, however, was the almost obsessive focus on metrics and the complete lack of attention on projects or people. I was frequently under the impression that many of the funders are not even aware of the work their grantees are doing. It was just all about finding the right measurements to justify their work. This leads me to three recommended relevant links. I’d write more about each, but I need to hop on a 12-hour train journey.

GDP and Well-Being

The first is a podcast from American RadioWorks which talks about the myth of GDP as the all-encompassing metric of national well-being. It starts with Joseph Stiglitz’s skepticism about GDP and then gets even more interesting.

Is Bhutan on to something with Gross National Happiness?

Also related to GDP and well being is this podcast from the HowStuffWorks podcast. Everyone refers to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness census, but mostly with grinning condescension. In this podcast they actually dig into the details of it. Highly recommended.

Access Beyond Developmentalism: Technology and the Intellectual Life of the Poor

Lastly: Lawrence Liang’s criticism of the framing of ICT for Development at the Harvard Forum. I disagree with some of what Liang says (and plan on commenting on the post soon), but I still think it’s a very worthwhile critique to read.

Off to the train station.