David Weinberger‘s new book “Too Big To Know” (#2B2K – be sure to pick book titles that make good hash tags…) launched last night at Harvard Law School with a talk entitled “Unsettling Knowledge”. If you know David’s work, it’s obvious that the title is a pun. And David’s new book is a wonderfully unsettling piece – it challenges our notion of what knowledge is, and introduces the uncomfortable question of how we navigate this new space.

Knowledge as we know it is coming apart, David tells us. The bastions of knowledge, the physical emblems of knowledge, like encyclopedias, newspapers and libraries are undergoing radical transformation. We know we’re heading into a future that’s deeply different, though we don’t know quite how. The manifestations of knowledge are at risk, and all it took was the touch of a hyperlink.

How did these institutions fall apart so quickly? It’s an impossible question to answer, but he offers one path through the thicket. He starts with a famous quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who tells us “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, not his own facts.” This is the promise of knowledge: that if we all got together and had an honest conversation, we can eventually come to an agreement. There is knowledge and it can bring us together.

We tend to assume that knowledge gives us an accurate picture of the world, built up bit by bit, fact by fact. In acquiring knowledge, we nail down each piece with certainty. And we see knowledge as a product of filtering and winnowing – we move from perception to true perception, from a mob of opinion to true belief. Knowledge is about finding gold within the flux.

We’ve always had to filter, based on the fact that the world is way bigger than what fits in our skills. There’s too much to know (quoting Anne Blair’s book “Too Much to Know“) and the world is too big to know.

Traditionally, we’ve handled this by breaking off a brain-sized chunk of the world and getting an expert to understand it. Once we’ve got that expert, we can stop asking questions: we simply ask the expert. Experts, and the credentials that create them, are stopping points. They’re points beyond which we don’t need to look any further.

But that’s how knowledge works on paper. Books, for all their magnificence, are a disconnected medium. They are contained within covers, they are shelved apart, they don’t naturally connect to one another. The author’s job is to put everything she knows on a topic between two covers. The arguments move in sequence, from the beginning to the conclusion. And because the book is an essentially limited medium, good writers ruthlessly cast things aside, deciding what it put in the book and what is excluded. Books are born of long-form arguments, moving us forward step by step, brick by brick.

Links are a new form of punctuation. They give you a means of continuing. In the print world, to follow a footnote in a book, you need to get on a bus and go to the library. That’s why we don’t generally follow footnotes. But now we can jump from one book to the next. It’s a magic map – touch a place on the map and you go there.

The internet is an environment that’s all about connection and our knowledge is picking up properties of the medium. Knowledge in this space is characterized by the fact that it’s “too much, messy, unsettled, and unstructured”.

Clay Shirky suggests that there’s no such thing as information overload, only filter failure. This is a very modern response to an older question. Futurist Alvin Toffler warned us about information overload, popularizing the phrase. It’s an extension of the idea of sensory overload, the idea that too much input could overwhelm and paralyze you. This is based on the faulty assumption that brains are information processing machines, and that we can overwhelm and crash them.

This line of thinking led marketers to conclude that choosing between 16 brands would be overwhelming to an American housewife and that fewer choices needed to be offered. But we’re now headed to a point where there’s an exabyte of genomic information available, and that number doesn’t lead us to paralysis, but to fascination. We’ve redefined the term “information overload” through how we use it.

We’re less overwhelmed because we’re learning different ways to filter. When we filtered in the print world, we did so in a way that prevented us from seeing the dregs. We saw only the books that our local library chose to buy, and only the books the publisher chose to print. The manuscripts filtered out of that process were invisible to retrieve through ordinary means.

Now, in a digital age, we filter forward, not filter out. All that information – some of it very low quality – is out there somewhere on the internet. We could curate and try to delete the stuff that’s wrong, hurtful, harmful or hateful. But it’s expensive to exclude information and cheaper to include everything. When you curate, you’re making decisions about what is interesting to your users, and no one can accurately predict what might be useful to a researcher in the future. Filter out all the gossip and crap from new media and you harm the scholar who wants to study celebrity behavior. You couldn’t have predicted the high level of interest in notes from a committee meeting in Wasilla, Alaska in 2008 until Sara Palin became a public figure.

The web has worked by developing tools that include all content and filter when we retrieve it. As recently as a decade ago, information retrieval experts told us that ordinary users would never use tools this complicated. But now we use them everyday, because we have to. And we’re seeing much better tools, like Shelflife, the tool Harvard’s Library Lab has created to allow users to browse the vast set of information in Harvard’s library systems.

We don’t just have a lot of information – the information is very messy. We like order – David shows a slide of zoological specimens, beetles mounted on pins – and we’re very good at establishing it. We understand where everything fits in a tree of species, based on similarities and differences. To know where a species fit into this tree was to know how the world works – to not know it was to be adrift.

In the physical world, there’s only one way to sort manifestations of information. You might want to sort your CDs by artist, while your partner might want them sorted by genre. There’s only one possible they can be stacked on the shelf, because no two things can be in the same place at the same time. In a digital age, we simply make playlists. We end up with a mess of information, but it’s a rich and fertile mess.

Figuring out where things fit in the natural order of things was an essential piece of being human. Human beings saw ourselves as “the knowers. But there’s multiple orders and multiple ways of categorizing, through tags, playlists and other ways to sort information. Messiness is an essential feature of how we scale meaning. But, David warns, we still tend to think of knowledge in the ways we did when books had to sit on a single place on the shelf, when knowledge had a single, possible, right form, rather than multiple forms.

Knowledge is too big, messy and wildly unsettled, just like the internet. “For every fact on the internet, there is an equal and opposite fact.” David warns that there is nothing we all agree on – you can find someone willing to argue that 2+2 is not 4 (and, indeed, a quick Google search shows this to be true.) We don’t agree about anything, and David warns, we never will. “This doesn’t mean there are no facts – but it does mean that people are going to insist on being wrong.”

What this persistence of disagreement means is that the promise of knowledge Moynihan offers – that we can agree on a set of facts and then argue our opinions – is not going to be fulfilled. As it turns out, we don’t even know whether Moynihan said “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, not his own facts” or whether that’s exactly what he said.

The good news is that we’re rapidly developing ways of dealing with difference and disagreement. YouTube has a crummy commenting system, as is well documented and well established. David shows us a threat of comments on a recent Batman movie trailer. Somewhere deep in this comment thread is an impassioned argument about circumcision. It would have been great if YouTube supported forking of conversations. Forking is a powerful way to deal with disagreement. It’s very hard to do in the real world without social consequences – if we decide to move away from the dinner party to our own table where we talk about circumcision, it makes people uncomfortable – but it’s very easy to do this on the web.

In the 19th century, it was very challenging to classify the platypus. There was one space in a taxonomy for warm-blooded animals, and another for animals that produce eggs. Scientists thought the platypus must be a hoax, because it didn’t fit within existing categories. Even when presented with a specimen from Tasmania with eggs intact, they fought the platypus “hoax” as something that didn’t work within existing categories.

Now we can solve problems of overly rigid taxonomies by using linked namespaces. We can create a database of names, and a database of taxonomies. We can deal with the platypus and the water mole, and map scientific and colloquial names onto different possible structures. “Pick your name, pick your taxonomy and get on with your life. So what if we disagree? Yay for difference!”

David is actually quite concerned about difference, and just how much difference we can tolerate and still interact and function. He acknowledges that there’s a human tendency towards homophily, flocking together in groups united by race, gender, belief, socioeconomic status, etc. This can lead to a serious challenge to public discourse – echo chambers that can solidify beliefs, making them more extreme and polarized. But David worries that posing issues this way relies on an unquestioned assumption: that conversations are between people who disagree deeply and looking for solutions and common ground by trying to get to the facts. This analysis misses the social role of conversation. We need so much context and so much agreement to even have a conversation. “To have a good conversation, you need to have 99% similarity and 1% difference.” He suggests that some of the work Yochai Benkler and I have been doing may help us find productive paths towards including difference, but reminds us that the high level of disagreement and the difficulty of finding common ground is likely a core feature of the internet and knowledge in an internet age.

Finally, knowledge in this new paradigm is unstructured. We’re used to the idea that knowledge has a basic structure. We have grown used to long form arguments that take us from A to Z, and we’re particularly fond of arguments that take us from A to Z in an orderly path, where Z is an unexpected place to end up. “This is a magnificent form of thought, but the long form argument is losing it’s preeminence.”

We might think of Darwin as a leading proponent of the long form argument. And his argument certainly led somewhere unfamiliar. But he wouldn’t have analyzed data for years and released a massive book if he were working today. He would publish online. And even if he didn’t, the conversation about his work would be based online. Whether or not we imagine Darwin tweeting from The Beagle, the web is where the thinking about and reacting to Darwin’s work would take place, and collectively, it will have more value that Darwin’s long form work taken alone. Moving forward, we will not just see these long form works, but the webs that precede and follow them.

Michael Nielsen has recently written about scholarly community reaction to results at CERN that offer evidence for faster than light neutrinos. As these results came in, they were posted to arXiv.org, a journal preprint site. They stirred up a firestorm of interest and reactions. Some of those reactions are brilliant, some are stupid and wrong. But that welter of discussion is where knowledge is – it’s taking place outside of printed peer review journals.

Darwin spent seven years studying and dissecting barnacles before working on The Origin of Species. His two volume work on barnacles includes countless facts, and his hard work to discover and pin them down was an act of nobility. But science doesn’t work quite like that anymore. We work with clouds of data about genetics, astronomy, and other topics. These data clouds are fundamentally different than facts. When data.gov released sets of government information, they didn’t clean or normalize it ahead of time – they released raw data. They concluded that it was better to put the data out there than to constrain themselves to information that was consistent and known, for the simple reason that this constraint would have slowed them down badly. Darwin would not have agreed – he spent seven years on one fact.

There’s value in getting the data out quickly, David argues. It may be the one approach that’s scaleable – releasing raw data and letting individuals and groups clean, analyze and share what they find. Peer review scientific journals don’t scale, but perhaps peer to peer peer review might. We’re seeing growth in the Open Access journal field, particularly in spaces of repository where data is released, not peer reviewed.

One way we can start making sense of these new data sets is through the magic of linked data, a format suggested by Tim Berners-Lee, father of the web. We organize information in triples:

the platypus | lives in | Tasmania
Watermoles | lay | eggs

When we link triples to a central reference, we can resolve our platipae to water moles and link our triples together. Facts, which used to look like bricks, now look like links.

David closes by returning to his original question: why were old knowledge systems so fragile? These systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world.

“Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” He closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: “What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.”

I’ve followed David’s work for a long time, and had the pleasure of watching him work through the ideas behind this book – David and I are both part of a group at Berkman that helps colleagues explore book-length projects. While I’m familiar with this line of David’s though, it was exciting and unsettling to hear him work through these ideas covering the whole arc of the book. I think this may be the most unsettling and radical book David’s put forth. On the one hand, it’s not a surprise that people will disagree on any concievable fact. But David’s suggestion that we give up on achieving an impossible consensus and proceed with the hard work of getting on with our lives strikes me as challenging and liberating, a very different path than I hear from most activists and advocates. I’m enjoying wrestling with the ideas David puts forth both in this talk and in the paper and hope lots of readers will take up the challenge as well.

Beth Kolko is the sort of academic who follows her muse from one fascinating topic to another. Colin Maclay traces some of her past work from a doctorate in English through research on use of technology in the developing world, through her current research on human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. For the past couple of years, Beth has been focused on research for a book on hackers and makers. This is a project that comes from her daily life, where she’s spent the last six years participating in hacking and making events in the Seattle area – she’s now considering the implications of hacking for academia and larger questions of how the DIY movement could impact civic engagement and educational reform.

There are three major areas her talk – titled “Hackademia” – focuses on. She’s interested in how hackers, makers and students, especially undergrad students, can work as innovators. She’s starting to identify patterns within non-expert communities that allow hackers and makers to innovate. And she’s interested in how we “make more of this ‘stuff’” – as society and as educators, how to we scaffold and maximize these contributions?

The key to understanding hacking and making, she suggests, is imagination: looking at people as creative problem-solvers. While there’s lots of research on how corporate and university researchers solve problems, there’s less research on how people without credentials solve problems. She’s specifically interested in rulebreakers, people who either break the rules of the academy or laws to innovate. Rulebreaking, she argues, is a type of power play: it’s a way ot fighting against the cultural and economic power of “being technical”, finding ways to be technical outside of an existing ruleset.

The people Beth studies are functional, rather than accredited engineers. She confesses, “I don’t really care about formal STEM (science, tech, education and math) education – okay, I care a little. But there are lots of studies on getting people to work in those fields. Instead, I’m trying to get people to be STEM literate and facile.”

Beth tells us about an experiment in group learning she participated in. A group is given a task – from three feet away, collaboratively find a way for the group to touch each card in a set of cards in order. While it’s a simple task, the challenge is to execute it collaboratively, and she reports that her group took a long time to discuss what ways would be sufficiently participatory, while another group never completed the task. When we’re faced with new sets of rules, we are forced to think through tacit assumptions that define our behavior, bringing those internalized constraints to the surface.

She tells us about an independent inventor in Detroit, who created a novel flash heating process for steel. It saves energy, and makes steel that’s 7% stronger than through conventional processes. While his research was independent and uncredited, it’s now being analyzed within metallurgy schools to verify the success of the process. One of the people verifying observes that, “Steel is a mature science”. We tend to assume that all that could be done has been done, but that’s not true.

For an example that’s even further from the academic community, she points us to a YouTube video of a fun parlor trick – removing a cork from a wine bottle without harming cork or bottle. The key is to insert a plastic bag, snare the cork, partially inflate the bag and then pull the apparatus out. An auto mechanic – Jorge Odon – was watching YouTube videos in his native Argentina, and thought this was a cool trick. He wondered if it would work for babies. And it does – the Odon device is now in trials as part of birth kits for the developing world.

There’s innovating from hacking as well. She points to wardriving, a technique developed to compromise networks, which now is part of business processes to ensure corporate networks are locked down. And she suggests that password testing tools have emerged almost exclusively from the hacking community. Security techniques designed to compromise networks become part of standard business practices.

Some of Beth’s recent work has focused on non-expert innovation from students, specifically work on a low-cost portable ultrasound kit. A colleague at the University of Washington working in radiology reached out to Beth for help with user interfaces for ultrasound systems used by midwives in Kampala, Uganda. The goal of the project was to train midwives to identify the three conditions that most contribute to maternal mortality and send affected women to hospitals, rather than giving birth at home.

As Beth and her students worked on the project, they discovered that one major problem was that midwives were trained for 2-6 weeks, while ultrasound readers in the US train for two years before being certified. Even the technicians who train for two years don’t use all the functions of a commercial ultrasound machine – in US ultrasound practice, the complex machines are heavily marked with signs created by the technicians warning not to use certain buttons or to use only certain ranges of frequencies.

Can we make this technology simpler for technicians with less training? This makes sense, as the Ugandan technicians are only trying to diagnose three conditions. The solution Beth and her team found was to move back to an older, cheaper technology and to marry those wands with simple netbooks, then focus on making the user interface as easy as possible.

Through ethnography with midwives and mothers, they discovered that the use of ultrasound is utterly different in Uganda than in US clinical practice. In the US, the technician can pass any ambiguous results to a support structure of doctors. Midwives in Uganda are generally all on their own – they need to give answers to mothers directly. So she and her students built a help system for the ultrasound device that was a learning system about maternal health, not just a manual for the tool.

“Not understanding the boundaries of the problem space allows innovation – including a help and learning system into the product was something my students did not know was prohibited.”

Beth’s insights in this field come from studying creativity around technology in the developing world, as well as US hackerspaces, makerspaces, hacker cons, and makerfaires. Extrapolating from both types of sites, she observes three characteristics:

- The importance of actual space in bringing communities together
- Systems of apprenticeship or scaffolded learning, including workshops that show people what they need to know to join a community
- Contests and other systems for building reputations, like the “black badges” issued to winners of capture the flag contests at Defcon, or the badges people win on instructables.com

She’s interested in the possible overlaps between university research, industry labs and independent researchers. Her goal is not to map the actual Venn diagram of the space, but to understand how independent researchers work in this space. She believes that independent researchers are particularly important for building disruptive technology. Academics have a disincentive to build highly disruptive systems – they’re hard to get academic funding for, and hard for PhD students to pitch dissertations around. It’s hard to disrupt in the corporate community, especially when disruptive tech is cheaper, as those sorts of innovations tend not to fit within existing sales structures. Independent researchers may be immune to these restrictions and especially capable of pushing forward disruptive innovations.

The structural constraints suggest that independent researchers may not be able to do fundamental research – it’s hard to investigate the deep structure of matter without strong funding. What independent researchers excel at is technological remix. She shows photos of makers building a panoramic camera designed to take photos from near space. There’s not much novel tech development involved with the project, but lots of remix of existing photographic technology.

Beth’s “Hackademia” project has attempted to learn from these general observations. She invited six undergraduate students to meet regularly in a physical space, equipped with desks and chairs and salvaged gear to hack with, including Arduino controllers. She asks the students to learn and keep track of how they learn. She offers no formal instruction, but lots of pointers to places her students can find learning materials.

One of the projects the Hackademia team took on was assembling a makerbot, a 3D printer that comes as a kit. Very seasoned engineers have been able to assemble the product in seven hours – her team took it slowly and took weeks. But they got it together, and developed some intense technical skills in the process. One student, who had been worried about touching any pieces of the kit for fear of breaking them, found herself some weeks later slapping Beth’s had when she tried to assemble something for her. This student had thought of herself as “non-technical”, Beth tells us. “But that notion of technical and non-technical broke down for them.”

Why Hackademia? Because there are few mechanisms at the university to allow non-science students to gain technical skills. It’s very hard for someone not on an engineering track to learn how to solder. But Beth’s work isn’t designed to create more professional engineers – it’s to get people to functional technical literacy. “We’re creating functional engineers one blinky LED at a time.”

Interventions like Hacakdemia, Beth hopes, can address at least six issues:

- self-efficacy – considering yourself capable of engaging in technical acts
- material technical practice – gaining concrete technical skills
- identity formation – identifying personally and socially as a technically competent person
- conception – understanding the scope and practice of technical knowledge
- motivation – articulating possible future selves
- social capital and sustainable participation – understanding how to seek out expert knowledge when necessary

On this last point, Seattle is a particularly sustainable place to build this sort of interventions, as it’s filled with hacker spaces and expert communities who can support this form of experimentation.

Beth’s new effort is Shiftlabs, an engineering and manufacturing company that works only with hackers. The company focuses on the engineering of low cost devices in the global health space, using R&D from independent researchers. Why a company and not a book? Beth explains that she’d never intended for this space to be the main locus of her research – it’s the product of taking a close look at something she’s become fascinated with in her personal life that’s turned into an academic and professional focus.

I’ve been working with friend (and boss) Joi Ito to help the Media Lab put up a statement about our collective opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Joi and I are both posting this piece on our personal blogs, and a shorter piece from the Media Lab site leads to both these posts. As we get ready to post, it seems like the tide in the battle is turning, and major concessions are being offered by bill sponsors. That’s good news, but SOPA and PIPA are still worth our close attention – there are powerful forces advocating for their passage, and as we try to document below, the harms of the legislation would be serious and pervasive.

SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act – and a sister bill, PIPA – the Protect IP Act – seek to minimize the dissemination of copyrighted material online by targeting sites that promote and enable the sharing of copyright-protected material, like The Pirate Bay. While this goal may be laudable, entrepreneurs, legal scholars and free speech activists are worried about the consequences of these bills for the architecture of the Internet. At the MIT Media Lab, we share those concerns, and we oppose SOPA and PIPA as threats to innovation on the Internet.

To limit access to rogue sites, SOPA and PIPA would:

- supersede the “notice and takedown” method of policing for copyrighted material on Internet services and require service providers to police content uploaded by users or prevent users from uploading copyrighted content
- require Internet Service Providers to change their DNS servers and block resolution of the domain names of websites in other countries that host illegal copies of content
- require search engines to modify their search results to exclude foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted material
- order payment processors like PayPal and ad services like Google AdSense to cease doing business with foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted content

Major internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, oppose SOPA and PIPA because it changes the liability rules around copyright infringement. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, companies are protected from charges of “contributory infringement” on content uploaded by users, so long as the company follows a procedure and remove infringing content when an alert process is followed. SOPA substantially alters this system, and internet companies worry that without protection from contributory infringement, user-generated content sites like YouTube and Twitter would not have come into existence. The burden of reviewing user-submitted content – every blog post, every video, every image – would be impossible for a company to manage, and companies would have likely stuck with the Web 1.0 model of publishing edited, vetted content instead of moving to a Web 2.0 model where users create the content. Several internet companies took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to express their concerns about SOPA and PIPA.

Free speech advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worry that SOPA may provide powerful new tools to silence online speech. Confronted with uncomfortable political speech, repressive governments often seek to silence dissent by reporting content as defamatory, slanderous or copyright infringing, hoping the companies hosting the speech will remove the content. SOPA accelerates the process of copyright removal, with a mechanism that permits copyright holders to obtain court orders against sites hosting copyrighted materials and have those sites rapidly blocked. Scholars of online censorship, like Rebecca MacKinnon at the New America Foundation, worry that SOPA may be popular with the Chinese government as with the copyright holders who are lobbying for the bill.

US law already permits the seizure of domestic domain names that are used for piracy, and the US seized 150 domains in November. SOPA is an attempt to enforce copyright provisions across international borders by prohibiting American internet users from accessing certain foreign websites, like The Pirate Bay. In effect, it would create a firewall to prevent users from accessing prohibited intellectual property, much as China’s “great firewall” limits access to politically sensitive information.

Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe believes that SOPA is likely unconstitutional, as it can remove constitutionally protected speech without a hearing, a form of “prior restraint”. In a memo sent to members of Congress, he points out that SOPA proposes a system where a single instance of prohibited material could lead to the blocking of thousands of unrelated pieces of content.

Internet experts have observed that, beyond being dangerous to innovation, harmful to speech and potentially unconstitutional, SOPA and PIPA are unlikely to work. Countries that block access to prohibited websites by altering the domain name system – as Vietnam does in blocking access to Facebook – find that millions of users are able to circumvent this form of censorship. Millions of Vietnamese users have become Facebook users by entering that site’s IP address into their browsers, or configuring their computers to use an uncensored DNS server. It’s likely that dedicated US users of The Pirate Bay and other sites will do likewise. Effectively blocking access to sites like The Pirate Bay might require US ISPs to install powerful and expensive “deep packet inspection” software, a cost that would inevitably be passed onto their users.

The progress of the bills was slowed in late 2011 by widespread online activism opposing SOPA and PIPA. Hearings are likely to resume early in 2012, and opponents of the bills are facing off against organized lobbying campaigns by the music and film industries who support the legislation. On November 16, 2011, participatory media company Tumblr took strong online action against SOPA, redirecting requests for content on the site to a page that urged users to call US representatives and oppose the bill – their daylong campaign generated more than 87,000 calls to Congress. Internet community site Reddit plans a site-wide “blackout” on January 18th to inform users of the potential harms of SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia is considering doing the same.

In the spirit of these protests, the MIT Media Lab has linked this blogpost to all our site pages, encouraging anyone interested in the work we do to learn more about SOPA and PIPA. More information and resources follow below. We believe that SOPA and PIPA would make it harder for Media Lab students, researchers and faculty to do what we do best: create innovative technologies that anticipate the future by creating it. We hope you’ll join with us in opposing these bills and, if you are a US citizen, in letting your representatives know your concerns about this legislation.

- Joi Ito, director, MIT Media Lab

Selected resources on SOPA and PIPA

Liz Dwyer, “Why SOPA Could Kill the Open Educational Resource Movement“, Good Magazine

Julian Sanchez, “SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship“, Cato Institute

Dan Rowinsky, “What You Need to Know about SOPA in 2012“, ReadWriteWeb

“Internet Blacklist Legislation“, Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF’s email campaign against the legislation and EFF guide to meeting with your representatives.

Some notes from day 2 of the Microsoft Research Social Media Symposium:

My attempts to transcribe Wael Abbas’s talk about media and protest in Egypt prior to the Arab Spring.

Becky Hurwitz has been active in the Occupy movement in New York City, and offered reflections on how Occupy is developing and testing technology for protest. She invites us to use the people’s mic, a technology created to ensure that participants in Occupy General Assemblies can hear speakers, despite police bans on amplification. We dutifully echo her in a mic check and in repeating a few words of her talk, one three word phrase at a time.

The people’s mic is effective and accessible – anybody can use it, regardless of whether you have technical expertise or money. It’s a rhetorical leveler – when you need to speak in three word phrases, you can’t dazzle people with complex arguments. It’s an empathic technology, she argues: you are asked to repeat things even when you disagree with them. And it allows processes to be collectively enforced – people who speak out of turn will cause the mic to fizzle out, as people refuse to amplify their statements.

Attempts to use different forms of amplification to share General Assemblies were often less successful than this simple, low-tech solution. A system allowed GAs to be simulcast in Spanish, and Becky tells us that it was useful, but was rented, expensive and ended up being discontinued once funding ran out. Attempts to broadcast proceedings on low-power FM were technically successful, but required a three person team to manage mics and transmitters. Attempts to stream via smartphone failed when it became many people didn’t have smart phones, didn’t want to listen to streamed audio for hours, and disliked the latency of streaming systems.

Other technologies have experienced stumbling blocks as well. The Tech Ops group at Wall Street has tracked media streams coming out of a thousand other Occupy movements. There are at least seven aggregators of these feeds, but they’re not very popular. It’s hard to follow the conversations taking place in other movements, and other than the effect of showing how widespread a movement is, it’s unclear that an aggregator is the best way to share this data.

She closes by examining technology developed to help people when they get arrested. Several smartphone applications have been designed to provide a “panic button” which sends a pre-programmed SMS when someone triggers the alert. The idea is that a person is supposed to press the button just before they are arrested, so allies can provide legal services. These systems have been obsoleted, Becky argues, by lawyers and sharpies. Lawyers shared the phone number of the National Legal Guild, and people wrote the numbers on their hands so they could call the service when they were put under arrest. And it turns out that yelling your name and birthdate to a lawyer standing by as you are arrested is really helpful, as those lawyers can act as witnesses to your arrest and testify in hopes of getting you released.

Development of technologies in a need-based space instead of a commercial space can follow an interesting trajectory – an idea that fails to get traction dies rapidly. In a commercial setting, you’d likely iterate and try to improve on a failed project. In non-commercial space, you rarely do. Becky wonders, “how do you commit to ideas without commercial reasons to explore and refine them?” Occupy raises other interesting questions as well: “How do you create end products that users can control, like the people’s mic, where people can turn off their amplifier when people defy process? How does occupy become a loud voice on existing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and people’s email inboxes?”

Zeynep Tufekci believes we’re seeing electronic communications usher in a moment where old power and new power are coming together. This syncretic power is complex and hard to understand, but we can think of it in terms of understanding who controls the power of attention.

In the Arab Spring, which she’s been studying closely, understanding the power of attention means looking at traditional media like Al Jazeera and the New York Times, at the algorithmic power of Twitter trending topics, at networked activists and their sympathizers, at new media curators and bridge figures, and at the network power of governments and political powers.

If we want to understand attention, we need to understand focusers, people capable of transferring lots of attention. We should look at the most linked users of Weibo, the thousands of followers of Wael Abbas’s Twitter account. These are some of the building blocks of a new filtering system. We’ve needed filters to cope with the massive amount of information created from well before the Internet. While Clay Shirky’s observation that we don’t have information overload, just filter failure, is legitimate, events like the Arab Spring give us a chance to better understand what’s powering these filters and how they work.

Zeynep tells us the story of Rami Jarrar, a Syrian dissident who tweeted under the pseudonym “AlexanderPageSY”. He’s a Syrian businessman who lived in Damascus and was educated in Britain. He writes about Syria in beautiful English, and under his pseudonym, became something of a spokesman for the anti-Assad movement in Syria. Zeynep identifies him as a bridge figure, but notes that he chose to tweet only in English, translating a great deal of Arabic content into English for non-Syrian audiences.

Somehow, his real identity was discovered. He got a phone call from someone sympathetic within the Assad government who warned him to flee immediately. He left within an hour with his wife and six-month old daughter, heading first to Lebanon and then to Cairo. He was likely one step ahead of arrest or death, Zeynep tells us, given the experience of other activists arrested by the regime.

The next chapter of Rami’s story came when he tried to travel to Doha, Qatar to attend a conference. On entering the country, the border guard decided that Rami’s passport was out of order and decided to deport him. Deportation doesn’t send you back to where you’d flown in from – Cairo – but to your home country. Rami tweeted about his predicament – he was about to be deported “home” to a country where he would likely be arrested, disappeared or killed due to an inflexible bureaucracy.

A 21st century network of concerned Twitter followers emerged to address the Kafkaesque 20th century problem of bureaucracy. But the solution was ultimately a 17th century one – A Syrian living in Lebanon, who tweets as @LeShaque, knew a sheik and was able to get him up in the middle of the night to intervene in the solution. “We needed a 17th century solution – a sheik – so we used a 21st century solution to get one.” This seems ironic. “We had mobilized Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Arabic, media people around the world, but the only guy who could actually get him out was a sheik.” Fortunately, the network found someone with the connections and the guts to call a Qatari sheik in the middle of the night and got him to intervene.

“The 21st century network worked until the last mile, but then we needed to reach old powers.” Media activism, Zeynep speculates, is most powerful when it hacks the system and contacts the old powers. She offers the similar example of Mona El Tahawy, arrested in Egypt. She tweeted about her arrest and activated a network, but ultimately, she was released from custody (where she’d been beaten and injured) because the Twitter network reached Anne Marie Slaughter, who contacted friends in the US State Department who intervened on her behalf.

We’re seeing the emergence of micro-celebrity citizen journalist activists, like “Angry Arabiya”, know to her parents as Zainab Al-Khawaja. She’s been a brave and outspoken critic of the government in Bahrain, facing arrest and abuse. Recently, she helped stop the movement of riot police into a Manama neighborhood by appearing in an abaya (which Zeynep identifies as giving female activists an interesting new form of power, exercising the image of being conservative and observant) and blocking the procession of police vehicles. She resisted arrest, and the police weren’t initially able to arrest her, as they lacked enough female officers to detain her. Bahraini officials, Zeynep tells us, debated arresting her and concluded that they didn’t want the pictures of her being dragged off to appear in the New York Times.

Microcelebrities are learning how to exert their power, to stop the movement of troops and to help counter torture when they’re in custody. It’s far from the power to end police states, but it’s an interesting new capability and a sign of things to come.

Danny O’Brien of Committee to Protect Journalists titles his talk “Public Private Secret Alone”. He suggests that, contrary to many people’s view of lessening privacy, we may be entering a golden age of privacy. We’re starting to codify what should be public and what should be private, what’s shareable and what’s sacrosanct. This is at least as much a social process as a technical one, and Danny thinks that we’re all now learning to use the right “register” in speaking in online spaces.

Putting his tongue firmly in cheek, Danny declares that he’s likely the first person to have thought of the distinctions between personal and public speech, blogging on the topic in 2004. “As a blogger, I looked at the literature on Technorati, and it seemed to be an open space. I assume I was probably the first person to write about this.” As many have observed, we speak differently in public and private spaces, employing different registers. In a private register, you might say, “I think that guy’s a dick”. In public, “I respectfully disagree that guy” and people map it backwards to say “I guess Danny thinks that guy’s a dick.”

The privacy embarrassments we’ve all been seing come from having private online speech lifted out of context and brought to the public. When sources ask journalists to go off the record, they’re not saying “You can’t report any of this” – they’re saying “I’m going to speak in a private register, and you must translate into public register before repeating this.”

As television becomes more all-pervasive, Danny speculates, people are learning how to drop into public register very fluently. Turn on a camera, and they speak like spokespeople. Of course, what makes reality TV work is broadcasting the private register, which is still transgressive and exciting.

Eight years ago, Danny tells us he predicted that the private register would gain a new foothold. Of course, a few months later, thefacebook.com came into being.

Systems like Facebook have the potential to bring private conversations into public, but there are technical and social protections. Friends understand that there should be rules for sharing. Oddly, though, we trust these very personal conversations to a corporate entity we have no personal relationship with.

What’s common to many of these tools is that they’re terrible at search. It’s very difficult to cut through the waves of data on Twitter and Facebook and search for something specific. Ask the people who engineer technology for these companies and they’ll feign embarrassment about the quality of search, but it’s a conscious decision: they want to preserve the context of conversations and make it harder to yank statements out of context. (He offers a strange aside on David Bowie’s teeth. If you see David Bowie perform, and you’re used to slick nightclub singers, all you can focus on are his teeth and how awful they are… or were, as he finally jad them fixed. Search is David Bowie’s terrible teeth when you look at Twitter or Facebook…)

Danny declares Twitter as the most successful at letting people speak in private voice in public space. It’s become quite common for celebrities to swear on Twitter. It creates the idea of intimacy with celebrities in the conversation, and people appear not to be shocked by the tone of the speech.

The rise of commentariat, the people who comment on published documents, forces another clash of registers. The quality of newspaper comments is often discussed in terms of the values of real names versus anonymity versus pseudonymity – Danny suggests that it’s a clash of registers. When people talk about the nastiness of online comments, part of what they’re commenting on is on hearing private register in public spaces. Fortunately, some newspapers are learning where to draw firm lines – fortunately, the New York Times doesn’t allow commentaries on obituaries, for example.

Moving into the realm of the secret: Danny observes that high school teachers realize they’re sufficiently public figures that they take most conversations offline, rather than risk recontextualization and register clash. Yes, there’s the danger of the private becoming very public, as in hacker attacks where Lulzboat took Stratfor’s corporate communication public. But in some ways, what’s even more uncomfortable is the information we thought was purely ours alone, like our online purchasing behavior, becoming public, as in situations like Facebook Beacon.

He closes with his predictions for 2012:

- more swearing
- panicked actions to defend the secret and unrevealed
- growing fluency in negotiating the public register
- more suicides

On this last point, he notes that South Korea – which often precedes the US in online behavior – closed down internet freedom in the wake of pop stars committing suicide over online disclosures of speech. If Rebecca Black committed suicide over what people say about her online, he speculates, we’d see a chill on online speech in the US.

Wael Abbas himself to the crowd at Microsoft’s Social Media Symposium saying, “I’m just a blogger.” Yeah, and Clay Shirky, who introduces him, is just some bald dude. Here’s my attempt to transcribe Wael’s talk.

I want to talk about social media in Egypt from 2004 through the revolution and why we needed to use social media. In our country where we’re told we have freedom of speech, where they’ve convinced us we have independent media, we weren’t being told the whole truth. The media is not covering everything.

In 2004, we started seeing movements calling for change in Egypt like Kefaya calling for Mubarak to be impeached, for Gamal, his son, not to follow his father. They were getting coverage in foreign media – BBC, Al Jazeera – but not in the domestic media. That foreign coverage wasn’t reaching ordinary people.

I was blogging in Arabic slang because I wanted to reach Egyptian youth. I believeed that these guys were the ones who would make a change. So I used language they would understand… including lots of profanity. I avoided the language of journalists and scholars and I was reaching a good audience.

Before 2004, I was anonymous, posting to newsgroups. But with the rise of Kefaya, I picked up my camera and was photographing movements and talking about how big these demonstrations were, beyond the three lines a demonstration would get in domestic media.

Wael shows us pictures of a demonstration against the Gaza war in 2006 to show the size and impact of these movements. “The police were using techniques including plainclothes operators. Foreign media thinks that protesters are clashing with one another, but it’s actually protesters clashing with police.”

One of the biggest movements asking for change in Egypt were the judges, who were calling for judicial independence. Bloggers were great supporters of the judges, as were the Muslim Brotherhood. (We see a video where police use force to control a demonstration.)

(Video footage of the Kefaya movement in 2005 – “At that time, you did not see things like this on TV”.)

It wasn’t only about the activists or politicians – we covered workers’ strikes because we believe strikes and sit ins play a big role for change in Egypt. (Footage of a demonstration by garbage collectors.) In Egypt, no one would care about covering garbage collectors on strike.

Maybe you heard about the Mahana general strike of 2008? (A video that shows the living conditions of a Mahana worker.) Video like this helps people realize why people are protesting and why they have those demands.

Bloggers were part of the movements, starting movements on their on or reporting on movements for change. Here’s a demonstration that was very unexpected – it was a flash mob. The organizers didn’t trust the media to cover it, but alerted the bloggers so they could cover the events.)

When the border opened with Gaza, I was able to get in with a camera and document the living conditions there, including people warming themselves with open fires. When the borders opened, we used social media to document the smuggling of essential goods.

Bloggers even covered the US presidential elections. (A video of a Mexican-American immigrant to Egypt who’s happy about Obama’s candidacy.) This taxi driver was happy because his children would be able to run for president in America.

Bloggers organized demonstrations as well, including one for Christian/Muslim unity in Egypt – no other political groups did this. I guess that’s when they realized bloggers were dangerous: when we started organizing protests instead of drinking Nescafe in our pajamas.

You may think the first Tahrir Square protests were January 25, 2011, but here are photos of the sit in in Tahrir we organized in 2006. They used firehoses to prevent us from sitting on the ground, and turned off the lights, but we slept for the night in the garden. This was a movement organized entirely by the bloggers.

We made fun of them, too. It’s a traditional song, it talks about how sitting on the floor is lovely and sitting on chairs is not healthy. I used it to make fun of President Mubarak, because it was forbidden to talk about Mubarak’s health – journalists were sent to prison for writing about Mubarak’s health. I made the song about Mubarak being unhealthy because he’d been sitting too long.

They used to scare us back then, saying talking about the President’s health was affecting the stock exchange and the economy, and we shouldn’t talk about it.

Using video meant that television stations could take our video and borrow it – here’s video shown on Al Hurra, the American-backed TV station, using video from bloggers. Bloggers became a source of information for international news agencies and television channels. Some borrowed our material and others just stole it. (Video of an Al Jazeera video, retitled “Al Jazeera stole my video.”)

Other people started bringing us video. Here’s footage of a train crash, shot by a bystander – he brought it to me so a wider audience could see it. This happened before CNN iReport, when the network started asking people to contribute their footage.

Some of the videos were of taboo nature, and could not be aired on traditional media. People shared the video because they saw a problem that needed to be solved. (Video of women being sexually harassed.) People shared this video with us because they wanted people to pay attention to this issue and look for solutions.

We had video on rigging of elections. No matter how powerful a blogger is, he can’t be all over the country to watch the polls. But people would send us footage. Here’s a video of someone taking ballots and throwing them out, unaware that someone was taking video of him.

In Egypt, we all talked about torture taking place in police stations. We made fun of it. But you can imagine the shock people felt when they saw video of it. (A video of police torture.) People were very uncomfortable when we started showing videos. It coincided with videos and photos leaked from Iraq of Abu Ghraib. But in these videos, it was Egyptians torturing Egyptians, so people started asking questions. These videos had been available for years, but they were of a taboo nation and no one wanted to get in fights with the authorities.

We started getting videos from other countries – here’s a video of torture from a police station in Kuwait. Here’s an Indian worker in Kuwait being humiliated in a police station. Thank god, we were able to break this taboo in Egypt and were able to put an officer on trial for the first time. Here’s an officer who sodomized a bus driver who’d been taking into a police station and video’d it.

He was only sentenced for three years, but it set a new precedent. Wael started receiving threats via the phone that he would be sodomized like the man in the police station. Egyptian politicians began publicly accusing Abbas of crimes, of converting to Christianity, of being homosexual. I was able to fight back on my blog.

I had a problem with YouTube – YouTube removed some of my torture videos. (CNN report on Wael being silenced by YouTube.) YouTube claimed I was not providing enough context for the videos I was posting, and that the content was not appropriate from the YouTube audience. I got a lot of support from US bloggers, from CNN and from Fox News. People asked, “Why did you post these on YouTube? Why not put them on your own hosting site?” I believe YouTube is a platform where everyone can post everything. According to Ethan’s Cute Cat theory, people go to YouTube to watch funny cats – let’s get their attention and get them to watch something else. On YouTube, these can get a greater audience than on a website specialized about torture. It helps get the attention of people who did not know about these issues.

Anil Dash asks about using titles for videos in English. Wael admits that he used Arabic for some titles, English for others depending on what audience he thought he wanted to reach.

At this point, Clay and Anil begin asking questions about how Wael curated videos – Wael tells us that the videos that received the largest audience were the ones about sexual harassment – Wael speculates that it’s because they were about sex.

The consequence for posting videos was that Wael began to be stopped and searched when he left the country. He was no longer allowed to travel with a laptop, CDs, DVDs or flash drives – he needed to upload presentations and show them online.

It’s clear that Wael could talk for much longer, but the session turns into a Q&A at this point.)

Question: How much did social media matter in the Egyptian revolution.
Wael: Social media is a tool. But revolution is the decision of many people. Once we decided to have a revolution, once people decided to stay in the square, social media was a helpful tool to call for support, ask lawyers for help. I will not give social media all the credit, nor will I take away all the credit from social media.

danah boyd: How will social media help in the elections?
A: We’re not beyond the revolution. We now have a military junta, and people are being shot by armed officers, defending their interests. The army is protecting American, Israeli, Saudi interests in the country. They are protecting their own interests: the military aid from the US. The army is building factories and roads, and they’re not paying taxes, electricity or water. The labor for these projects are soldiers acting as slave labor.
Q: Are there ways to use the technology to increase communications amongst citizens?
A: We’re trying, but now there’s a war in social media itself. Once they realized we were powerful, the authorites took to social media. They are attacking the revolution, asking for stability, security and for the revolution to end. We are also fighting traditional media, which is still central, and in the hands of the regime and pro-regime businessmen. They are all attacking the revolution and our image.

Q: How did you grow an audience for your blog? How did you grow your audience?
A: I never studied the topic – I simply did what I needed to do. I put links in forums, used chat lists on Yahoo, send links to new posts. I began posting on Facebook and Twitter once people started using them.

Gilad Lotan: How dangerous is it for people to support you in Egypt, to connect to your social media or to like your videos?
A: Some people clear their caches, but it’s not really that dangerous – they are after us, not after people watching our material. But they gave orders to cybercafes not to allow people to look at torture videos. But it’s only dangerous when you take to the streets.

After weeks of unseasonable temperatures, western MA finally got some snow yesterday morning, just enough to make me miss my train to New York City. So I was late for Microsoft’s Social Computing Symposium at ITP at NYU, missing my friend Dina Mehta’s talk. So I’ve been thwarted in my ambitions of blogging all the conversations taking place here, and I’ll instead offer some snippets of talks I caught.

Jenna Burrell studies cybercafes in west Africa, particularly in Ghana. So she was very interested when a wave of stories about “the dark side of the information age” reported on corrupt recyclers selling containers of used computers to unscrupulous dealers in Ghana and Nigeria, who dumped the machines into local waste facilities, causing serious environmental harm.

This didn’t read quite right to her, as she’s been studying “the career of the obsolete computer in Ghana”. The computers in most Ghanaian cybercafes are reused computers, Pentium 3 or 4 series. They frequently come with property tags – she shows us a CRT monitor with tags identifying it as the property of the US Environmental Protection Agency. While there’s probably a fascinating story about how that monitor made it from the EPA to an Accra cybercafe, she makes the point that it’s a working monitor – it’s been reused, not recycled. It’s not in a dump, it’s in active use.

There’s not a direct channel from the port to the dump site, she suggests. Second hand computers work their way through the economy. The best used computer dealers identify lots of machines with the same configuration and appearance so they can sell higher quality, tested goods to businesses and cybercafes. Other dealers work on the lower end, selling individual, unmatched computers. The machines that don’t work at all are sold to scrap metal dealers, mostly members of the Dagomba tribe, a northern tribe that tends to be economically disadvantaged in Accra.

Do computers end up in the dump? Yes. But it’s not as simple as the dumping of ewaste in Ghana, where waste is being inflicted on poor people. It’s people’s desire for computers, a legitimate desire, that creates a complex commercial ecosystem.

Samantha Doerr helps us understand what the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit does. The answer: they take down botnets, and they spend a lot of time fighting child sexual exploitation.

In the time before the internet, she tells us, child porn was not very common. You might be a creep, but it’s very hard to find other creeps to share pictures with. While she’s careful not to condemn the Internet, Doerr notes that child porn is getting much more common, as well as more extreme and violent. A man was recently arrested in Seattle for posession of more than a million sexual images of children. It’s becoming more common to find images of infants of toddlers… because they can’t tell anyone about the abuse they’re experiencing.

Doerr’s strategy is to make it more difficult to share child porn. Her chief weapon is Microsoft’s Photo DNA technology. Photo DNA creates a hash of an image that can match other images even when the format changes or the image is being resized. Her team has identified some of the worst child porn images, ones where the children exploited have been identified, are confirmed as being under 13 and are being abused. Microsoft now checks these hash signatures against photos uploaded to Skydrive, indexed on Bing or transmitted by Hotmail, and Facebook is announcing adoption of the same possibility/

Doerr wonders whether we can win against child pornography. Microsoft recognizes the complexity of the challenge, and has just issued an RFP for research on the topic. Her goal is to change the dynamics of the equation. Child trafficking is on the rise because it’s currently more economical than selling drugs – if we can make child exploitation more difficult and less profitable, that would be a win.

Del Harvey has built the safety team at Twitter, working since 2008 to eliminate spam and other forms of abuse from the service, while trying to respect user needs. Working on the front lines of the service, she has a unique perspective on “unintended usage and unexpected consequences”, or as she puts it, “users do the darndest things”.

Many of the behaviors we associate with twitter – retweeting, hashtags, @reply messages – were not created by Twitter’s programmers, but were emergent behaviors created by Twitter users. When users start doing something novel on Twitter, it’s her job to look closely at the new behavior and ask, “Should you be doing that? How are you doing that?”

Where this job gets truly tricky is when users engage in behavior likely to get them suspended by Twitter’s automated algorithms. If you message someone multiple times, are you engaging with the, or harassing them? It might be one thing if someone messages you a dozen times, and another if they message a celebrity a dozen times – a form of showing their devotion and fandom. Some people send themselves multiple @replies, using Twitter as a form of bookmarking.

The easiest way to eliminate spam is to identify spammy URLs and block people who retweet them. But this works very badly when people retweet spam and add snarky comments to it. “Nothing pisses off a user as much as complaining about spam and suspending them for spamming”

Why do some users take all the trending topics and put them into sentences? Del isn’t sure, but it’s become a pretty popular practice, and it makes it unwise to block people who simply use lots of TTs in a post. Sometimes her team is able to anticipate behaviors – it seemed likely that people would try to report users as spammers to silence them. (Twitter has systems in place that makes this unlikely to be effective.) But what do you do with users telling Twitter to report their accounts as spammers, a behavior that’s unexpected and inexplicable.

Del’s talk gets a lot of laughs of the “users do the darnedest things” variety, but there’s a serious message. Her job, as she thinks of it, is to “try to figure out when users are experiencing unintended negative consequences” and mediate the consequences.

In an Ignite talk, Alex Leavitt offers a great example of the ways in which media is moving from individual platforms to existing in ecosystems. He introduces us to Hatsume Miku, an open source fandom and culture based around a vocal synthesizer program. The character of Hatsume Miku is a teal-haired anime popstar, whose songs are written by an army of fans who record her music, build complex music videos for her, and throw concerts in the physical world featuring the best of those videos. It’s hard to understand the sheer scale of the phenomenon – Leavitt notes that Hatsume Miku just appeared in Japanese Playboy, both in drawn form and as the photographs of a leading live action Hatsume Miku cosplayer.

The video system, built around a program called Miku Miku Dance, is one of the most stunning aspects of the phenomenon – Leavitt tells us it’s the #1 3D software package in Japan. Point a camera at you and your friends and you’re converted into Anime characters which move their mouths and limbs in sync with your actions.

The ecosystem exists through an integrated commenting and attribution system that allows people to publish on appropriate platforms, like YouTube, while ensuring followers of the community know about the individual publications.

Always the provocateur, Clay Shirky is predicting the demise of another industry: street level retail. His argument begins by noting the similarity of streetscapes in New York City, a repeating loop of drug stores, mobile phone shops and banks. As higher end businesses move to selling primarily on the web, lower-margin businesses move into retail space, a process that can’t continue forever.

Shirky suggests that New York made two major errors in repurposing urban space. The first was in insisting that loft space, used to manufacture products like belt buckles, must continue to be zoned industrial, just in case the belt buckle industry returned to the city. It took thirty years, he notes, before New York loosened those restrictions and let first artists, then ordinary people live in loft space. The second transformation has been the disappearance of the working waterfront. For years, New York was a center of global shipping. But in the container age, that shipping has moved far south of the city, and New York took a long time to realize that infrastructure dedicated to shipping needs to be repurposed into waterfront open and green space.

If street level retail is dying (and here, I assume, Clay will write something at length making a compelling case for this, as his 5 minute version is pretty hasty), will we react quickly enough to fill the spaces? Clay remembers purchasing comics at his local comic shop. It wasn’t a great retail experience – the selection was small – but it was a great community experience, an opportunity to gather with other similarly oriented nerds. Can cities like New York figure out how to transform street level retail into street level community space?

Mimi Ito wants help solving the problems of education. She notes that there’s a 50% high school dropout rate for black and latino youth, and reminds us that this isn’t okay – it’s creating problems of social stratification and inequality that we’ll be facing for years.

The sort of folks in this meeting are the educational 1%. We are learning elites who know how to mobilize the internet and develop professional identities. To help students engage with education, we need to help them develop the same sort of skills we rely on.

Ito has been interviewing people who learn by exploring passions online. She tells us of a webcomics creator, who while he attended college, taught himself what he knew about creating comics from his online encounters. He discovered the medium online, developing a passion, and began learning to create by following tutorials and how-tos online. In the process, he connected with a community of the likeminded and passionate. Ito calls this “connected learning”, learning in which embracing your passions allows you to connect with others and learn with them.

The Internet has lowered barriers to acquiring knowledge and expertise, but kids often have not deciphered the puzzle. We need to build better platforms that connect people around interests. Ito suggests that while Facebook connects you with the people you went to school with and Twitter with the folks you wish you went to school with, we need infrastructure that connects you with the people you want to learn from or want to teach.

Andrés Monroy Hernandéz studies the use of social media in conflict situation. He’s especially focused on narcoviolence in his native Mexico, and notes that in the country, he’s seen increasing adoption of social media aligned with an increase in stressful situations. In cities like Monterrey, not only is drug violence an everday occurance that impacts bystanders, it’s a force so powerful, it’s driven traditional media away. Reporters will not cover drug violence for fear of being killed or kidnapped. As a result, people are using Twitter and Facebook to create immediate alerts of violence in specific cities and neighborhoods.

This means that when you leave your house for work in Monterrey, you check a twitter tag like #mtyfollow to ensure that there’s not an active “balacera” – shooting – on the path you plan to take. Hernandéz has collected 300,000 #mtyfollow tweets and shows us a quick overview – the language is a language of violence and warnings. It’s centered on a very few people who consistently tweet about breaking news and others who amplify the stories.

Those using social media to report narcoviolence in Monterrey face at least two enemies. The government is worried about control over information and recently jailed two Twitter users for allegedly spreading misinformation. The cartels themselves are killing people who are using social media to document their actions – he shows us a banner hung next to the head of a Twitter reporter, warning others not to use social media to track drug violence. Citizen responses are not totally impotent in the face of these attacks – a group called CIC is using Ushahidi to collect and track tweets, offering a graphical map of violence in the city and a portrait of life during wartime.

Vastly more good stuff that I was able to cover in one post. Looking forward to today’s talks (right after the one I give this morning…!)

A few days back, I wrote a post about the Occupy Nigeria movement. As with many of my posts, my main goal was to research the issue and get a better understanding of what was going on and what I thought about it. The post has generated a good deal of feedback, some of it quite confrontational, some skeptical, some helpful in helping me understand the situation better. I’m particularly grateful for the last two types of feedback, as I feel like I understand the situation better than when I wrote the first post.

In my first post, I argued that removing the fuel subsidy is ultimately the right thing for Nigeria to do, as it is riddled with corruption, offers massive benefits to a few companies fortunate enough to have been awarded import contracts, and dominates the government budget at the expense of critical infrastructure projects. What I hadn’t understood fully is that the protests aren’t against removal of the subsidy per se, but about a lack of trust in government. As Nicholas Ibekwe, one of the organizers of the Occupy Nigeria protests in London explains, “Most organizers of the protest believe that removal of subsidy is not a bad thing. And I share that sentiment as well. However, the removal of subsidy in Nigeria is not about economics, it is mostly about trust, corruption and timing. The Nigerian government has not given the ordinary Nigerian reason to trust it.”

Put more simply by Chude Jideonwo on YNaija, “This is good policy badly executed, not because of timing necessarily as because of trust.” In the long run, Nigeria needs to eliminate a fuel subsidy that buys imported fuel – it makes very little economic sense for a nation to produce raw petroleum, export it to countries that refine it and subsidize its reimportation. It would make much more sense for the Nigerian government to help rebuild the nation’s refineries so the oil could be processed locally.

The problem is that, as Ibekwe and Jideonwo both explain, people don’t trust the Jonathan government to repurpose the subsidy to build infrastructure. Many of the arguments against subsidy removal focus on overspending in the Nigerian government, particularly on salaries and benefits to elected officials. The assumption – not without some justification – is that any savings from the subsidy will line the pockets of politicians at the expense of ordinary Nigerians.

Based on the feedback I’ve gotten from Nigerian friends, there’s no doubt that the subsidy removal was implemented poorly. Removing the subsidy in one fell swoop may have been designed to minimize opportunities for dissent (as each step of a gradual increase might invite protest), but it maximizes harm to the ordinary Nigerians who are struggling to cope with cost increases. The removal of the subsidy during the Christmas season had the additional complication of stranding some Nigerians in their home villages without sufficient funds to pay for transport home. And, as the commentators I quote above have pointed out, the Jonathan government simply doesn’t enjoy enough popular support and trust to have implemented these changes so unilaterally.

Alex Thurston at Sahel Blog argues against two arguments he sees me making in the piece. The first argument he sees me making is that removal of the subsidy is a good thing. I don’t think that’s what my argument was, precisely – I think removing the subsidy, ultimately, is something Nigeria needs to do. But as I’ve conceded here, I agree the move was made badly, without sufficient consideration of the harms to ordinary Nigerians, and I hope it will be rolled back and implemented in a more careful, considered way.

The second argument Thurston disagrees with is my contention that a protest against the subsidy is reactionary. Here I think he and I genuinely disagree. Thurston suggests that removal of the subsidy favors the 1% over the 99%, and suggests that because the World Bank and IMF would like to see the subsidy removed, the interests of the powerful favor subsidy removal. I don’t think it’s especially fair to equate the oft-maligned IMF and World Bank with the globally rich and powerful. There are lots of smart economists – including Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Managing Director of the World Bank – who are looking for solutions to Nigeria’s long-term economic woes, and who see removing the subsidy as a step towards economic reform.

There’s no doubt that removal of the subsidy is hurting the 99% in the short term. But poor and middle-class Nigerians were experiencing a great deal of economic misery before removal of the subsidy. In the long term, one way or another, Nigeria needs a functioning infrastructure, a working power grid, better roads and rail, better health care and education. In the long term, some of these services need to come from the government… and the government will gain legitimacy by providing services that people want and need, beyond cheap fuel.

Thurston and the Occupy protesters seem to be arguing that the government can’t and won’t provide those services, and therefore we should focus on the short term: maintaining a large subsidy on the import of foreign petroleum products. That mistrust of government’s ability to provide any services sounds more like the Tea Party than the Occupy movement to me. I’m not saying that the protesters are wrong in their mistrust of Jonathan’s government. I am saying that a government taking steps towards modifying a budget to provide essential goods and services appears more progressive than supporting a massive subsidy.

In US terms, this argument sounds like a very typical right-wing argument: we can’t trust the bloated, lazy government to produce public goods, so we should have very low taxes and rely on the private sector for any goods and services. In practical terms, removal of a fuel subsidy is a tax increase. It’s a badly implemented tax increase and it affects people who are ill able to afford it. But the goal is a progressive one, so long as you accept the notion that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Jonathan are genuinely trying to build infrastructure and help the economy recover. If you don’t trust their motives, obviously, you won’t see this move as anything other than an opportunity for more corruption.

Do I think the subsidy removal was a good idea? I think it’s an admirable goal in the long run, but was badly implemented and should be rolled back and implemented gradually in closer consultation with a variety of non-government groups. Do I support the Occupy Nigeria movement? Yes, inasmuch as I think it’s great to see organized, peaceful, popular opposition to corruption in Nigeria. But I am deeply worried that the movement is focused on rolling back a change that, in the long run, is intended to correct some of the major problems of the Nigerian economy. Do I still think the movement is reactionary? Yes, in the literal sense that protesters are trying to roll back a change made by government, and more figuratively, because the movement questions the ability of the government to create positive change for the people. I hope the movement will become a broader anti-corruption movement, which I would see as less reactionary, more progressive and more in line with global Occupy movements.

Do I expect that this post will reduce the amount of angry email I’ve recently received? Probably not. :-) As several correspondents have pointed out, passions are understandably running very high around these issues. It’s hard to both critique and support a movement, but I think the issues here are complicated enough that it’s worth trying to do both simultaneously.

On January 1st, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonthan put into place a reform that he and key ministers have been discussing for years: he ended a 20-year old subsidy that kept Nigeria’s petrol prices the lowest on the continent. When Nigerians went back to work on Monday, the 2nd, they discovered that not only had petrol increased from $0.40 to $0.91 a litre, but the cost of private taxis, minibuses and other forms of transit had increased in price as well.

By Tuesday, the 3rd, protesters in Lagos were blocking access to petrol stations and shutting down stretches of motorways by building and burning barricades. On the 4th, protesters in Kano shut down petrol stations and threatened to burn down a newspaper they believed was supporting the removal of the subsidy. They occupied Silver Jubilee Square in the center of the city and attempted to maintain an encampment overnight, though police responded by firing tear gas and, allegedly, working with armed gangs to clear the square through violence and intimidation. The protests are led, in part, by two powerful trade unions, National Labour Congress and Trades Union Congress, who have promised to “occupy” Nigeria until the subsidies are restored. They plan a nationwide strike, beginning January 9th.

Michael Bociurkiw, writing in the Huffington Post, notes that it wasn’t obvious that petrol price increases would trigger such widespread protests. After all, there’s lots to protest in the country. Despite being sub-Saharan Africa’s largest producer of oil, most Nigerians are quite poor, the nation’s infrastructure is shambolic, and political corruption is widespread and well-documented. A rigged election in 2007 (and controversy over a mostly-clean election in 2011) led to some heated rhetoric, but little visible protest.

But petrol prices affect every aspect of life in Nigeria. The country has no (functioning) mass transit systems, which means urban dwellers are reliant on a complex system of minibuses, taxis and motorbikes, operated as private businesses. Those businesses will be sharply affected by the petrol price increase and pass the costs on to their customers. And because Nigeria’s electrical grid and power producing stations are notoriously unreliable, most businesses use generators to power their operations. Those generators have just become at least twice as expensive to operate, which is likely to increase prices at a wide variety of businesses. Complicating matters, Nigeria is least stable in the north, where tensions between Muslim and Christian groups have erupted into violence, and where the terrorist acts of Boko Haram, an extremist organization which wants all non-Islamic education and culture banned from Nigeria, have pushed President Goodluck Jonathan to declare a state of emergency in the North. Because the north is distant from the ports where Nigeria lands imports, goods are likely to increase sharply in price in the already troubled region.

Jonathan is not the first Nigerian leader to try to remove the fuel subsidy. Two of Nigeria’s military leaders – General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha both tried to end the expensive program, and both were forced to back down due to popular opposition.

On the one hand, it’s exciting to see a Nigerian population that’s often overwhelmed into inaction taking to the streets. Stories about Muslim and Christian protesters finding agreement over shared prayer space – and images of Nigerian Christians encircling and protecting Muslim protesters at prayer in Kano – are genuinely encouraging. And there’s no doubt that making a living was a tough prospect for ordinary Nigerians with the subsidy in place and that a tough situation will get worse without it.

That said, ultimately, I think Nigeria needs to get rid of the subsidy. It’s incredibly expensive – depending on how you account for it, it cost between $8 billion and $16 billion in 2011. Nigeria’s tax authority collected just under $18 billion in 2010, and budgets for key sectors of the Nigerian economy are substantially smaller than the cost of the subsidy: defense spending is proposed at $6 billion, education at $2.5 billion, health at $1.8 billion. And while the subsidies make life easier for ordinary Nigerians, they’re a massive boon to the few companies the government allows to import refined petroleum… and contracts to import those petroleum products are a likely source of patronage revenues for corrupt government figures.

The IMF has pressured Nigeria to remove fuel subsidies for years, and Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo–Iweala, an internationally celebrated economist and anti-corruption reformer has been a powerful champion of reforms, offering long briefings to the President and other leaders on the importance of the reform effort. (Rumors have circulated that she threatened to resign if the subsidy wasn’t eliminated. She refuted those rumors in classic Nigerian fashion… on Twitter.)

Ideally, the Nigerian government would use the monies freed by eliminating the subsidy to address some of the country’s chronic problems: weak road and rail infrastructure, unreliable power, run-down refining facilities. It’s possible to imagine a Nigeria where imported petroleum products were less necessary, if the country had functioning rail systems, a reliable power grid minimizing the need for generators, and refineries that could produce diesel and gasoline locally. Given the history of corruption in the Nigerian government, it’s not hard to understand why many Nigerians are skeptical that the monies released from the subsidy will go anywhere other than in politicians’ pockets. As the BBC observes, many Nigerians feel like the fuel subsidy is the only government service they actually see.

If you want to understand opposition to removal of the subsidy, an oddly partisan view can be found on the Occupy Nigeria wikipedia page, which is quite far from NPOV, but a very interesting read nevertheless. Statements from Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Lamido Sanusi make the case for subsidy removal in a piece on Bloomberg News. His basic argument: Nigeria needs to borrow a lot of money to build infrastructure, and responsible lenders won’t give the country money as long as it keeps doing boneheaded stuff like subsidizing oil consumption instead of building infrastructure.

Even though I think Nigeria needs to end the subsidy, I would be surprised if Jonathan can sustain these changes in the face of a sustained strike. There’s tension already over the idea that this isn’t Jonathan’s “turn” at the presidency – there’s a popular notion that Nigeria’s presidency should rotate between northern Muslims and southern Christians. The previous president, the Muslim northerner Yar’Adua died in office, and Jonathan finished his term. Some believe that, by this rule of thumb, the 2011 president should have been a northerner… Some northern activists and some labor activists have made threats that they will make Nigeria “ungovernable” during a Jonathan administration. It’s not hard to see how protests over fuel could make Nigeria vastly harder to govern.

I’m interested to see Nigerian take on some of the rhetoric and tactics of the Occupy movement, including the occupation of a public square in Kano. I’ll be intrigued to see whether any of the global energy over Occupy goes to support the Nigerian protesters. The irony, I fear, is that while the global occupy movement seeks to equalize income disparities and fight government corruption, the Nigerian movement is currently pursuing radical and important reforms, and the Occupy Nigeria protesters are fighting against that change. Read one way, Occupy Nigeria is a conservative movement fighting to keep a dysfunctional status quo in place, which seems at odds with other branches of the movement.

Scholars of social media spend a lot of time studying Twitter. Twitter’s not the largest social network in the world – Facebook has at least twice as many users – but it’s massive and influential, particularly in the world of journalism, where smart practitioners have learned to report on stories using accounts from Twitter. And Twitter is something of a model organism for social media researchers. Most relationships and content on Twitter are public, while relationships and content on Facebook are often private. There’s an ecosystem of tools that use Twitter’s API to understand popular topics and networks of influence on Twitter, and countless research projects that use Twitter’s API to understand behavioral dynamics on social networks.

By contrast, there’s little scholarly research in English on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging network. (The top article on Google Scholar that comes up for a search on “twitter” has 637 cites. Top article for “sina weibo” has 9 cites.) The service is structurally similar to Twitter, with @usernames, hashtags, reposting, and URL shortening (using the t.cn site instead of t.co used by Twitter.) In one sense, the service is richer than Twitter, as posts can contain both 140 characters (which may contain significantly more information than 140 alphanumeric characters, as the 140 characters in Chinese are ideograms), and an embedded image or video. And Sina Weibo offers an API and supports an ecosystem of tools and applications that interact with Weibo data. Oh, and Sina Weibo has almost as many users as Twitter – 250 million in October 2011, as compared to roughly 300 million for Twitter at the end of 2011.

The obvious reason for the lack of English language research is that most English-speaking social media scholars don’t read Chinese very well. But this a lame excuse for ignoring a powerful media tool. John Kelly of Morningside Analytics doesn’t speak Persian, but he’s done groundbreaking research mapping links in the Iranian blogosphere. Colleagues at the Berkman Center are using Media Cloud (built by researchers who speak no Russian) to understand conversations taking place in Russian blogs versus those in state-influenced media. Language is a powerful, but not insurmountable, barrier to researching a media space. In both the cases I mention above, English-speaking researchers worked with translators to understand novel social media phenomena.

I sometimes wonder whether English-speaking scholars pay insufficient attention to Chinese social media due to an assumption that Chinese media has been censored to the point of sterility. I often speak about internet censorship, and American audiences in particular are quick to share their knowledge of the “great firewall”, the “fifty cent party” and other aspects of Chinese internet censorship. Because Chinese censorship has been widely reported in American media, I suspect many Americans know more about what’s not on the Chinese internet than what’s present. (David Talbot of Technology Review wrote an excellent article about “China’s Internet Paradox” which makes the case that the Chinese internet is freer and more complicated than most audiences think.)

One of the best ways to get a sense for the complexity of Sina Weibo is through WeiboScope, a tool created by Cedric Sam and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong. WeiboScope uses Sina Weibo’s API to collect posts from 200,000 Sina Weibo users. His sample is a subset of Sina Weibo’s most popular users, and contains only users who have at least 1000 followers. (His blog, the Rice Cooker, offers lots of details on building and deploying the system.) Taking advantage of the fact that many Sina Weibo posts include images, WeiboScope offers a visual version of Weibo “trending topics”, showing the images associated with the most retweeted posts.

A first glance at WeiboScope offers a sense for what’s hot in the Chinese internet. There’s lots of images of pop stars, and lots of pretty women showing off cleavage. Dig a bit further and there’s some hope for the xenophiles amongst us: internet memes that need to translation. Sam the Seagull – a bird who steals Doritos from an Aberdeen convenience store – has been kicking around the internet since at least 2007, and an animated GIF of the thieving bird is the second most popular post today. Other memes appear to be shared in realtime – this comparison of pollution in a Chinese city versus the skies above Australia featured on WeiboScope today, and also appeared on Reddit this morning.

Dig a bit deeper and there’s quite a bit of political content. Take this deeply disconcerting image:

The face of the mammarilly-enhanced cow is that of Niu Gensheng, CEO of Mengniu Dairy, one of the companies implicated in the 2008 Melamine scandal, where companies apparently added a toxic chemical to milk powder to increase protein content in their products. Mengniu recently revealed that some of their milk is testing positive for another toxin, apparently because cows were fed moldy feed. The company’s share price dropped 24% on this news today, knocking more than $1 billion of the company’s value. The text accompanying the Gensheng cartoon warns the executive of the dangers of angering 1.3 billion people. Another post, the most popular today, links to an article on Songshuhui.net that argues that Chinese people should stop drinking milk. While the article doesn’t explicitly mention Mengniu, it references scandals about milk, and it’s likely that the conversation about eschewing milk is directly related to the Mengniu news. Another popular post suggests a boycott of Mengniu, reminding readers that Saatchi & Saatchi, which had worked to rebrand the company, left after the tainted milk scandal of 2008.

I suspect some readers will note that the story I’m featuring about popular dissent is about consumer issues, not about direct opposition to the government. It’s worth remembering that popular protest often focuses more on economic and social issues than on overtly political issues – the Occupy movement in the US has been triggered by frustration with banks at least as much as it is with frustration with US politics. And there’s more directly political content on Weibo as well – this post talks about a family’s house that’s demolished by the government and a man’s protests in Beijing. This isn’t to say that Sina Weibo isn’t censored – it is. But the speed of Weibo means that stories can be widely discussed before censors declare a topic off limits, as we saw with extensive online coverage of the July high speed train collision. And the popularity of Weibo gives Chinese authorities a classic Cute Cats problem – censoring the service too heavily would alienate the 250 million people who use it, including the majority who are largely interested in scantily dressed celebrities.

I should note: I don’t speak or read Chinese. That means that my interpretation of the Mengniu cow could be deeply mistaken. But it also means that it’s possible to puzzle out a breaking story in Chinese media using WeiboScope, Google Translate and a few web searches.

Here’s hoping tools like WeiboScope will help make the Chinese internet seem like less of a foreign land and more like a near neighbor.

Oiwan Lam at Global Voices has posted about online activism around Mengniu, with some wonderful (and generally less disturbing!) images. And An Xiao offers a great reaction post to the ideas I’m putting forward here, including a clever inversion of the Cute Cat Theory: “with Chinese political memes, the cute cats are the activist message.” Very interesting, something I’m still digesting.

It’s a few days after Christmas, and if you overextended yourself in buying gifts for your family and friends, you may be thinking about options to tide you over until the next payday. For years, payday lenders have offered short term loans at extortionate interest rates to people desperate for cash. Some loans are tied to collateral: the title to an automobile or deed to a house. Others offer unsecured “cash advances”, usually requiring evidence that a borrower is employed and that paychecks are deposited into an individual’s bank account. Borrowers secure the loans with a check to the lender dated in the future, or by giving the lender permission to debit from their checking accounts.

Payday loans charge extremely high interest rates, as high as 400-800% annually. The theory behind these rates is that they’ll be paid back in a few weeks, so finance charges aren’t competitive with more conventional bank loans. But payday lenders allow borrowers to “roll over” loans, using a new loan to repay a previous loan – a paper on payday lending coauthored by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren explains that as much of 90% of the profits in the payday lending industry comes from loans rolled over 5 or more times. When these loans extend for months or longer, their interest rates mean that the cost of borrowing rapidly exceeds the initial sum borrowed.

In a few American states, these high interest rates violate usury laws, and payday lending is prohibited. The Pentagon, worried about the impact payday lenders were having on military families, asked Congress to prohibit this form of exploitative lending to military personel. The Talent Amendment, passed in 2007, helps protect servicemen and women… but civilians are still fair game. And while the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was intended in part to help regulate payday lending, lobbying from payday lenders has helped keep the business from being one of CFPB’s early priorities. (Law professor Nathalie Martin makes a compelling case that payday lending should be an early priority for CFPB. But CFPB’s website makes no mention of payday or title lenders.)

Home for the holidays, I’ve been catching up on Top Chef reruns on Bravo. Watching late night satellite TV exposes one to some unusual ads. I saw an extraordinary ad last night: A handsome Native American man in a suit tells me that, if I need money transferred to my bank account right now, Western Sky Financial may be able to help me. His name is Thomas Morgan, and he warns, “Yes, the money’s expensive, but there’s no collateral required, and you can keep the cost down by paying it as fast as you can.”

He’s not kidding about the money being expensive. If I borrow $1500 from Western Sky, $500 is immediately reclaimed by the company as a loan fee. I pay 234% interest on the loan, payable in 24 payments of almost $200 each. In exchange for $1000, I pay $4,756.56 over the next two years. Larger loans offer lower loan fees and interest rates, but the interest rates start to create truly surreal situations. Borrow $5,075 and the 84 scheduled payments add up to $40,872.72.

It’s not a coincidence that Western Sky’s spokesman is Native American. The commercial and website both emphasize that the business is
“owned wholly by an individual Tribal Member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and is not owned or operated by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe or any of its political subdivisions. WESTERN SKY FINANCIAL is a Native American business operating within the exterior boundaries of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, a sovereign nation located within the United States of America.”

That’s a fascinating legal construction. It’s important for Western Sky to assert its status as a Native American-owned business so it can assert the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Court as the legal jurisdiction for the loan. And Western Sky’s default loan agreement forces borrowers to waive their rights to a jury trial, and to seek arbitration within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Nation’s jurisdiction. Borrowers also waive the ability to participate in a class action lawsuit, and certain rights of discovery in the case of a lawsuit. It’s possible to opt out of this clause, but only through a convoluted procedure involving a written request.

(I don’t have a good answer to why the legal verbiage makes it clear that it’s an individual, not a tribal business – my guess is that if high-rate lending were an official tribal business, it might come under the purview of a federal regulator… but I’d be grateful for anyone’s insights on why Western Sky insists that this is an individual tribal member’s business.)

In the case of Western Sky, the lender is Martin Webb, who is a member of the South Dakota-based Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. Courts in West Virginia have determined that Webb’s legal status doesn’t protect his business from state and federal regulation, at least as regards loans to West Virginia consumers. (Western Sky’s website won’t let you apply for a loan if you are from West Virginia. The company faces similar bans in Maryland, California and, ironically, South Dakota.) And the Federal Trade Commission, while not ruling on whether Western Sky is based in Cheyenne River Sioux territory or South Dakota, has ordered Webb to stop collecting on debts by attempting to illegally garnish customers’ wages.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that Native Americans – cheated out of their lands by unfair treaties, politically and economically isolated since the foundation of the United States – are seeking economic development by preying on America’s least fortunate. Businesses run using sovereignty include casinos, discount cigarette sales and payday lending, all businesses that target vulnerable populations in the US. That’s the case, eloquently made, by Thomas E. Gamble, chief of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, which is involved in several lending businesses. In response to a request for information from reporters from the Center for Public Integrity, Gamble argues that tribes exiled to remote and desolate areas have had to find creative ways to develop “a diverse economy that can provide jobs, housing, education, infrastructure, health care and other vital services for our members.” How many of the 3,500 members of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma are profiting from their lending business is unclear, but Gamble argues that by permitting lenders to operate within tribal lands, “is no different that South Dakota passing favorable laws in order to attract Citigroup and the like to set up niche industries within its jurisdiction.”

(Here, Gamble is referring to the exodus of banks like Citibank to South Dakota in the late 1970s. Under heavy lobbying from banks, South Dakota overturned its usury laws, allowing banks to issue credit cards with high interest rates. A Supreme Court decision in 1978, Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp., allowed banks to “export” the interest rates of the states they were based in to states where they had customers. States responded with “parity laws”, allowing locally chartered banks to offer competitive rates… so their banks didn’t all decamp to South Dakota. Gamble is correct that South Dakota made these changes to attract business and that these changes were legal. But he’s also making the case that his tribe should be allowed to engage in the sorts of practices that have created financial crises for millions of Americans, faced with punitive interest rates and fees from their credit card issuers.)

I’d find Gamble’s argument slightly more compelling if it were clear that his tribal members were the main beneficiaries of usurious loans. Generally, they’re not. Payday lenders are remarkably creative in finding loopholes in state laws that prohibit usury, and one of the most recently exploited loopholes is “rent a tribe“. Lenders based outside of Native American lands strike agreements with tribal members to “rent” their sovereignty in exchange for a small share of proceeds. A suit from the Colorado Attorney General uses financial documents to demonstrate that the tribes are generally making about 1% of proceeds from the lending business in exchange for “owning” the companies. The rest of the proceeds go to the lenders, whose offices are generally far from tribal lands.

Those proceeds go to guys like Scott Tucker.

Scott Tucker, race car driver, entrepreneur, apparent scumbag.

Chief Gamble’s letter in defense of Native American lending refers to AMG Services, a “tribal business” that manages several payday lending operations. Center for Public Integrity and CBS argue that AMG Services is actually run by Scott Tucker, the alleged gentleman pictured above. Gamble states that Tucker is an “employee” of AMG Services, and Tucker refuses to speak about his relationship to the Miami Tribe, citing a confidentiality agreement. CPI’s investigation discovered that Tucker and his brother were the only parties authorized to write checks on behalf of AMG, suggesting that the Miami tribe’s “ownership” of the company is nominal at best.

The CPI investigation finds that Tucker is one of the pioneers in using “rent a tribe” to protect otherwise prohibited payday lending businesses. Tucker is a convicted felon, who served time in Leavenworth in the early 1990s for mail fraud associated with a bogus loan scheme. After his release, Tucker turned to payday lending, managing a set of shell companies from an office in Overland Park, Kansas. When regulators in Colorado began investigating a Tucker-owned lender, Cash Advance, they faced an interesting challenge: the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and the Santee Sioux Tribe announced that they owned the lenders, arguing that this put the business’s operations outside of Colorado’s subpoena powers. A Colorado court responded by citing Tucker for civil contempt.

Oddly, the citation for civil contempt hasn’t cramped Tucker’s style. He maintains an $8 million home in Aspen in his wife’s name, though AMG Services (the “tribal business”) pays the property taxes. And he likes to drive fast cars. When Tucker was recently ticketed for speeding in Olathe, Kansas, AMG donated $1000 to the campaign of the Kansas district attorney whose office processes tickets. In an odd coincidence, Tucker’s ticket was turned into a parking offense, leaving his driving record clean.

It’s important that Tucker’s driving record stay clean because driving is his passion and pastime. A breathless 2010 Wall Street Journal article celebrates Tucker’s participation in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a massively popular auto race described as “the Super Bowl of international sports car racing”. The Journal – which has never met a bank it doesn’t like – describes Tucker as “a wealthy private investor from Leawood, Kansas” and marvels at the fact that Tucker apparently has “world-class talent” at motorsports. Nowhere does the WSJ article mention Tucker’s felonious past, or suggest that his driving skills may have developed as an attempt to outrun bank regulators.

A recent article on Tucker’s Level 5 Motorsports notes that Microsoft Office has recently signed on as the company’s chief sponsor. I guess Microsoft looks more sightly on a racing jumpsuit than the logos of payday lending firms. And I wonder whether Microsoft’s marketing department knows they’re supporting the hobby of a man whose money is made by bankrupting vulnerable borrowers.

I started writing this post because I saw Western Sky’s ad and immediately concluded, “That’s got to be illegal.” What’s remarkable, of course, is that it’s not necessarily illegal. Four of 50 American states have taken action against Western Sky, and at least one (Colorado) have attempted to cripple or shut down Tucker’s businesses. But it’s going to take a long time for 50 states attorneys general to bring proceedings against these semi-virtual lenders. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see lenders attempting to service this market across international borders.

One of the most interesting businesses in this space is Wonga.com, an English company that offers short-term loans online, much like Western Sky does. Like Western Sky, Wonga charges very high interest rates – their website advertises a 4214% annual percentage rate. Unlike Western Sky, Wonga claims to be a responsible lender, and does not seek to extend loans beyond their initial term (which, remember, is where payday lenders generally make their profits.) They give money to Kiva.org, and have taken investment from responsible venture capital firms and from one of the UK’s leading charities. They appear to be expanding and now operate in South Africa. It’s hard for me to know whether Wonga competing in the US against Western Sky and others would be a good or bad thing.

When I tweeted about Western Sky last night, a couple of people responded by arguing that if payday lending is too closely regulated, it will simply send the business underground. The opposite seems to be happening at present. Payday lenders have traditionally targeted the poor, and neighborhoods in the US where poverty is endemic tend to feature check cashing, auto title and payday loan businesses. (Nathalie Martin’s article notes that in states where payday lending is legal, there are more payday lenders than Starbucks franchises.) Businesses like Wonga claim to be targeting a wealthier set of customers who see high-cost loans as a convenience. (Why Wonga loans would be more convenient than a cash advance on a credit card, which though expensive, tend to cost less than these loans, is unclear to me.) Perhaps “overregulation” would mean a rebirth of illegal loan sharking – in the meantime, the appearance of TV ads for high-interest loans suggests that legalized loan sharking may be becoming more socially acceptable.

If you’re considering a payday loan or an online, high-interest loan, please read this article first. It’s from the Center for Responsible Lending, and offers a number of less expensive alternatives, including cash advances from employers, cash advances on credit cards, consumer loans from credit unions, payment plans from creditors and military loans.

Kudos to Center for Public Integrity and CBS News, and specifically to David Heath, Laura Strickler and Armen Keteyian for their stories on payday lending and the Native American connection. I cited these four stories (1, 2, 3, 4) in this post. It’s a reminder of the importance of investigative journalism in exposing complex stories like this one.