Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
Like many of you, I’ve been following the events in Kenya closely the past three weeks. One way to measure the continuing protest and unrest is to follow the story through Ushahidi, a citizen media site put together by friends of mine to allow Kenyans to post news about post-election unrest and violence. Each incident is added to a map, giving a visualization of the ways in which reactions to a rigged election have spread across the nation.
Most of the news on the Ushahidi blog is extremely sad. Some reports feature stories that are getting play in international media, like the shooting of youth by government soliders in Kisumu – video of the incident made its way onto Kenyan television and has been widely circulated on the internet. Many of the incidents documented on Ushahidi point to violence from state actors against protesters, something that’s become depressingly common as Kibaki’s government continues to maintain a “no tolerance” policy against protests, including peaceful protest.
But Ushahidi is also documenting stories that don’t get as much coverage internationally, or even within Kenya. A recent report on “Mama Peter” in Eldoret focuses on one aspect of the unrest – property crimes. An entrepreneur who’d invested in a hair salon and a training school for hair dressers found herself fleeing violence in Eldoret and the destruction of her stores. These reports aren’t as dramatic or brutal as video of soldiers shooting unarmed men, but they add to the complexity and sadness of the current situation in much of Kenya.
Ushahidi is tracking hopeful stories as well. A category of incidents on the site is “Peace Efforts”, community-based projects that are attempting to bring Kenyans together while other factors tear them apart. A report on a meeting of senior doctors in Nairobi begins:
A group of senior doctors concerned about the escalating insecurity met to think through the issues of the day and in particular to consider their possible role in the mediation process.
Their starting point is the fact that they as doctors are able to work across tribal lines while their patients in particular the politicians seem to be unable to do so.
My hope is that we’ll see more doves on the Ushahidi maps in the future, and fewer fires. And since the opposition is now shifting tactics towards a boycott, perhaps maps need to start being market with dollar signs?
In the long run, I suspect tools like Ushahidi – which now accepts reports via SMS – will be useful for everyone working in citizen media when events grip a nation or a region. I also suspect that the tool is important for Recovery 2.0 efforts, where having visualizations of people in trouble is a first step in deciding where and how to deploy aid. It’s too early to be looking for silver linings in a situation that’s still rapidly evolving, but I suspect the reaction of the Kenyan tech and blogger community will be one of the long-term positives of this situation.
I’m not the only one looking for silver linings. Daudi Were identifies the civility that’s prevailed in Parliament – despite ferocious political conflict – as a source of pride. At the very least, there were “no unseeingly scenes of honourable members doing what some call pulling a South Korea.” Amidst a wealth of bad economic news, Bankelele finds some hope in the fact that some insurers are covering damage from riots, despite the fact that policies don’t cover these damages.
If you’d like to be part of a hopeful story in Kenya, take advantage of the system that the folks at Mama Mike’s have set up to process donations to the Red Cross. $25 sends the following items to a Red Cross/Red Crescent center in affected areas: “5litres of cooking oil,sanitary products,2kg of unga,2kg rice and a pair of shoes.” Juliana is documenting the work that the Red Cross is doing assisting displaced people and has photos of a relief center set up in Jamhuri Park, near Nairobi. She urges readers to give: “This week we would like to appeal to all bloggers, friends of bloggers, wannabe bloggers, diaspora kenyans, Tedsters, treehuggers, geeks, nerds, boingboingers, worldchangers…you get the idea, to give what they can using Mamamikes’ donation page. ”
That page is right here, and I’m happy to report it’s very easy to use. So use it.
Amanda Atwood was complaining a week back about Zimbabwe’s $750,000 notes: “most of us aren’t very comfortable operating in base 75,” and even those who learn to count with the bills discover that they don’t buy much – they’re insufficient to purchase a newspaper.
Her post was titled, “Bring on the (hundred) million dollar bearer”. And Gideon Gono, the comically incompetent central bank governor, has done one better, introducing $10 million bills. They’ll buy a newspaper, and perhaps a kilo of sugar… though probably not for much longer. The bills are worth about $4 USD on the black market, but with inflation at over 50,000% a year, they won’t keep their value more than a couple of weeks.
I was struck by the image above, stolen from the BBC’s piece on the new bill. The bill is exactly the same color, layout and design as a $20 bill I’ve been carrying in my wallet since my trip to Zimbabwe 15 months ago. That bill has now expired – it wasn’t currency, per se, but a “bearer check”, entitling me to $20 from the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank if I redeemed it before July of 2007.
When I wrote about that $20, it was worth about $0.025 USD – a silly amount of money to represent with a bill, but still a functional piece of currency. At the moment, that bill is worth $0.00000005 cents, or 5 hundred-millionths of a cent.
It’s hard to know what advice one would give Gono at this juncture. “Stop printing worthless money” is the conventional wisdom… but that worthless money is what pays the salaries of government employees, particularly of the police and security services that allow Mugabe to remain in power. Weimar Germany ended hyperinflation by issuing a new currency that was pegged to a gold standard, where each bill could be converted into a bond valued at a certain quantity of gold. In such a system, you can’t keep printing money without having gold to back it, which forces control of the money supply. Other nations have “dollarized”, either pegging their currency to a more stable currency or literally beginning to use the other nation’s currency, as Ecuador did in 2000. But pegging your currency to another nation’s means you have no control over monetary policy… and means you actually have to have revenues to pay those salaries, as South Africa gets pretty upset if Zimbabwe starts printing rand.
At a certain point in hyperinflationary nations, people simply stop using currency and return to the barter system. This is hugely inefficient for developed economies – imagine paying your cable bill in bags of flour. (This isn’t entirely far-fetched. When my father worked as a small-town lawyer two decades ago, at least one outstanding bill was settled in cordword. But it’s pretty inconvenient.) That hasn’t happened entirely in Zimbabwe. Instead, Zimbabweans find themselves aware of prices in several different currencies, purchasing essential goods like toothpaste from “runners”, who smuggle cases of goods in from Botswana or South Africa. Buying petrol requires either shopping on the black market, or having access to dollars, pounds or rand to buy the vouchers that can be exchanged for petrol. And, of course, people get it wrong, like a businessman who gave his employees sufficient holiday bonuses to let them travel to their villages and back… until the cost of busfare tripled, and his employees were stranded at home.
When I was in Zim, I was astounded by the resiliency of the people living there, their ability to adapt to impossible circumstances. But as I watch Zim bloggers spend more and more of their time and energy figuring out how to keep modest amounts of food on the table, I wonder how much longer a situation like this one can go on.
I’m speaking at this year’s O’Reilly ETech conference, which takes place in San Diego, CA from March 3-6th. Tragically, I’m there only for the day I’m speaking – the 4th – and then heading to New York to attend a board meeting.
I say “tragically” because ETech – short for “Emerging Technology” is consistently one of the most fascinating and stimulating conferences I get to attend. It began seven years ago as a conference on one of the hottest emerging topics – social media. And it continues to cover hot new fields in geekery – this year’s conference promises sessions on body hacking, DIY aerial drones, visualization of data and crowds, and a focus on emerging tech in the developing world.
That last bit, of course, is where I come in. I’ll be giving a talk titled “The Cute Cat Theory of Web Activism”. Familiar ground to regular readers of this blog, but I’m hoping a guided tour of digital activism using examples throughout the developing world, and a close look at how China is censoring user-generated content will be exciting to some folks. Even if not, the next speaker in my room is Violet Blue, talking about sexual identity online, so perhaps some folks will come to get seats ahead of time… :-)
Other reasons to come to this conference, even if you’re not interested in hearing me:
- Uber-hacker Saul Griffith on Energy Literacy
- Larry Lessig on his new focus on combatting corruption
- JC Herz on data visualization
- Physical computing god Tom Igoe with a tutorial on Making Things Talk
- Body-hacker Quinn Norton on the intersections of our bodies and society
Seriously, it’s going to be a blast. Come if you can. Use this code – et08fds – to sign up and save 20%.
My friend and colleague David Sasaki has just published a remarkable guide, “An Introduction to Citizen Media”. The guide is closely related to David’s main project, Rising Voices, a branch of the Global Voices family that’s focused on introducing citizen media to activists and citizens in every corner of the world. David is working with groups like HiperBarrio in Colombia and Nari Jibon in Bangladesh to help share the power and potential of citizen media with new audiences.
With lessons learned from the projects Rising Voices is currently assisting, and from David’s long tenure with Global Voices, the Introduction to Citizen Media offers a thorough overview of ways that blogs can help individuals make connections, learn more about the world, strengthen organizations and causes, and generally transform lives for the better. The guide is a terrific resource for novice bloggers, or for organizations who are considering starting blogs to increase their audience. It’s available now in English, Spanish and Bangla, with versions planned in Swahili, Malagasy, and Aymara. Given the enthusiasm on GLobal Voices lists for the guide, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a whole lot more languages as well. Please check it out, and feel free to spread it far and wide – it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, so you’re welcome to reproduce it any way you can think to.
About two years ago, when the Ion USB turntable came out, I bought one, set it up and began ripping old vinyl records to my laptop. I was deeply disappointed. The software that came with the turntable was unusable, and I ended up experimenting with filters and normalization within Audacity to try to get usable audio from the records I digitized. (You can see my dissatisfaction with that first iteration of the Ion in my review on Amazon…)
A couple days ago, I came across something that made me want to try again. An album by one of my favorite obscure pop bands, Game Theory, was available through Amazon, from a used record dealer. This double album, “Lolita Nation“, routinely fetches $100 as a CD on eBay and in the used record community. It was available on LP for $40, and I snapped it up.
Which left me with an interesting problem. While I like LPs – a lot – it’s really useful to have audio as digital files, so I can listen to it on airplanes, etc. So I now need to digitize this pair of LPs. Which means it’s time to try to get the Ion to work better.
In the past two years since I struggled with it, Ion has radically improved their software. When I bought the turntable, you basically had to fool your Mac into thinking it was a MIDI device. Now it mounts as a USB Audio Codec, just another input in your Sound control panel. And they’ve done a lot of work so that the audio the Codec puts out is clean, equalized, and sounds really, really good. Digitizing now is mostly a matter of getting the record as clean as possible, getting the turntable isolated from vibrations and dumping it into Audacity.
While working the past couple of days, I’ve been digitizing some of my favorite old discs. Most of them sound great – some, unfortunately, are so ripped up from my years of playing them that they just aren’t going to digitize well, and I’m going to need to find cleaner vinyl. But those that sound good sound really good.
Which leaves me with an ethical question – what are the ethics of putting these files up on my website, or on peer to peer networks? Let me be very, very clear – I’m speaking only of albums that are long, long out of print and cannot be found through other means. Let’s take, for example, Herbie Hancock and Foday Musa Suso’s beautiful “Village Life”. It’s a gorgeous collaboration between one of jazz’s great pioneers, and the most creative kora player of the 20th century. CBS released it in 1985, but for many years, the only way to get it has been through used record dealers… and it will probably set you back $75 or more. (There’s a CD version currently for $20 on half.com. If you’re intrigued by this album, that’s as good a price as you’re ever likely to see for this music.)
When I buy “Village Life” from a used record dealer, none of that money goes to Herbie, Foday or to CBS – it goes to whoever was lucky or smart enough to hold onto a copy of the disc, clean it up and put it up for sale. My guess is that putting the digital files online doesn’t actually damage the online market for the disc that much – if you’re willing to pay $75 for this disc, you actually want the vinyl in hand. But putting the files online would radically increase the number of people who get to listen to this gorgeous piece of music.
I did, in fact, put two tracks from Village Life online about a year and a half ago. They get downloaded now and again, but haven’t put a real strain on my server. No one has asked me to cease and desist – I would have pulled the files immediately if asked.
My temptation is now to start buying lots of rare old records I’ve always wanted to hear and to digitize them. This is an even more tempting prospect when I think about the possibility of making these files available to a wider audience… which is very clearly illegal, and would probably be disastrous to me in terms of bandwidth usage.
My goal isn’t to become a pirate vinyl digitizer and distributor – what I’d really like is for these old albums to be available on iTunes, where I’d happily pay $10 for clean copies, with the hope that some percentage of the money made it to the people who’d actually recorded this beautiful music. Then I could blog about these records and encourage you to go purchase them.
In the absence of that, is flooding P2P networks with digitized out-of-print vinyl an ethical way to promote the reissue of brilliant music? Or is it a form of disrespecting the wishes of the copyrightholders, who’ve decided not to reissue this music?
The last time I wrote about happiness, I found myself swamped with emails requesting my data set and asking questions about methodologies for measuring happiness. Readers, it seems, are pretty interested in happiness. And editors certainly are – Businessweek just produced a story and photoset of the dozen happiest nations, according to British researcher Adrian White.
People love to think, talk and argue about happiness. I have a hard time counting the number of times I’ve been approached at development conferences by someone who wants to tell me the story of Bhutan’s decision to focus on Gross National Happiness, not Gross National Product. Or the times I’ve been forwarded an article asserting that Nigeria tops a world happiness survey. We’ve all been happy and unhappy, and we’ve all got opinions – well- or ill-informed – on what makes people happy, which means we’ve all got something to say on the topic.
I was interested in correlating happiness to health, and threw some simple statistical techniques at a data set I’d found online. In a development that made me, well, pretty unhappy, I discovered that the data I was using – also Adrian White’s Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being – was apparently “borrowed” from the New Economics Foundation’s “Happy Planet Index”. That data, in turn, is apparently extrapolated from Dr. Ruut Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness, which is a concordance of happiness research from around the world. The database includes results from 95 countries, many of which have been surveyed several times over the course of decades, asking people a fixed series of questions about their subjective satisfaction with their own lives.
Veenhoven’s database is the starting point fror Eric Weiner’s excellent “The Geography of Bliss“, a witty, funny and insightful book, which follows the wanderings of a self-described “grump” through his travel to happy and unhappy nations.
A foreign correspondent for NPR, Weiner sees a lot of nations at their worst. And he claims not to be a happy man, an addict of self-help books designed to help him enjoy his life more. Explicit in his journey is the question, “If I lived here, would I be happy?” There are some interesting geographic patterns to happiness. Impoverished and wartorn nations are generally not happy places. Scandinavian and Alpine nations are, for the most part. You might conclude that cold, rich nations are the places to be if you’d like to be happy.
But making generalizations in this field is difficult.
Many of the former Soviet states are cold, and most rank very low in happiness. Money’s not guaranteed to help either. There’s an “East-Asian Happiness Gap“, where wealth East Asian nations are a lot less happy than you’d expect given their wealth. (Possible explanations for the gap include, “environmental disruption, excessive competitiveness, repressive education, excessive conformity, negative attitudes towards enjoyment, and the emphasis on outward appearance.” Sounds like a drag.)
Weiner travels to nine nations in writing the book, some unusually happy (Switzerland, Bhutan, Iceland), some surprisingly unhappy (Qatar, Moldova). He’s better at writing about the unhappy ones than the happy, which may reveal a fundamental truth of travel writing – it’s just not much fun to read about someone having a great time. (One of my favorite travel writers is Redmond O’Hanlon, whose jungle journeys generally sound like misery, interspersed with danger, failure and sheer terror, gently seasoned with British wit. My guess is that he wouldn’t be nearly as good at writing about beach vacations in the Bahamas.)
It’s hard to draw firm conclusions from Weiner’s travel about what makes some nations happy and others miserable. Weiner gives us intriguing hints at the state of the art of happiness research, writing at some length about “the hedonic treadmill“, a concept coined by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, who were studying the happiness of lottery winners and accident victims. Unsurprisingly, the lottery winners were quite happy, and the paralyzed accident victims unhappy. But over time, both returned to levels quite close to their happiness before these surprising developments.
Most people believe that acquiring a bit more money would make them happy; they tend to find that acquiring wealth is a trap, as they always want a bit more (hence, the treadmill.) There’s an exception – people who are truly impoverished will see their happiness increase with increased income. But this effect maxes out at a surprisingly low level, around $15,000 in annual income. In a rich country, there are only a few things likely to have an unambigious effect on your happiness over a long period of time, Weiner tells us: “Noise and big breasts. Studies have found that we really never get used to loud noises, despite prolonged exposure. Another study found that women who get breast implants never tire of the enjoyment it brings them, and presumably their companions as well.” And now you know.
Weiner adds his own layer of theory to his travels, introducing a couple of useful concepts to people interested in happiness. He discovers that throughout his travels, he meets people who are much happier in the places they’ve migrated to than in the lands of their birth. “They are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually, hedonic refugees have an epiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, they were born in the wrong country.” My guess is that a lot of people born in Burkina Faso, for instance, have this moment of clarity but aren’t able to relocate to Denmark – this is, perhaps, a more useful concept for explaining the migratory patterns of the rich and privleged than the world as a whole. But it’s an intriguing clue about “cultural fit”, the idea that someone who doesn’t fit well with the dominant culture of a place may be unhappy even if most of her fellow citizens are blissful.
Weiner also suggests that culture goes a long way towards explaining unhappiness in Moldova, the unhappiest nation he visits. Moldova is legendary in the happiness studies community, a nation that ranks extremely low in happiness despite beating out many nations in terms of life expectancy and wealth. Weiner believes this is because Moldova is:
…a fabricated nation. It doesn’t exist. Oh yes, you can go there, as I did, and walk its streets, eat its mamaliga, drink its bad wine, talk to its miserable people. Later, safely home, you can flip open your passport and admine, if that’s the word, the stamp that says “The Republic of Moldova”. None of this matters. Moldova does not exist, and existence is, in my book, a prerequisite for happiness. We need a solid identity – ethnic, national, linguistic, culinary, whatever – in order to feel good about ourselves.
This theory helps explain Weiner’s reaction to Qatar, which he finds surprisingly unhappy. His visit to Qatar’s historical museum, an unairconditioned concrete bunker in a nation where summer temperatures routinely break 50C, convinces him that Qataris have outsourced their history and heritage, not just all menial – and much technical – labor. Unless it’s the claustrophobia that comes from a society bound by tribal rules, but freed of the constraints of traditional financial rules by incredible wealth through national resources. Turns out it’s almost as difficult to pin down the causes of unhappiness as it is to explain happiness.
“The Geography of Bliss” makes a lousy self-help book – it won’t help you relocate to your happy spot on the earth, if such a thing exists. But it’s a really fun way to get a handle on what we do and don’t know about happiness, and you’ll likely be (marginally, slightly, temporarily) happier if you read it.
My Heart's In Accra by Ethan Zuckerman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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