A couple of folks were kind enough to ask me for notes and slides from my talk at Ars Electronica’s symposium on The Cloud today. Here’s partial complicance:

My talk was mostly abridged from a long talk I gave at the Berkman Center earlier this year, called Mapping a Connected World. There’s slides and a partial bibliography for that talk, and links to audio and video here. For folks who loved the mapping of airline routes, there’s a link to that project and lots more in that vein on this post on infrastructure and flow.

David Sasaki and Isaac Mao asked us all to produce artist statements for the catalog. Mine is online here, but the text follows below the break.

More posts tomorrow, summarizing excellent talks from Anders Sandberg and Stephen Downes. For now, I need beer and schnitzel. See you tomorrow.

“Mapping the Cloud”, Ethan Zuckerman

In the distant past, when the Internet was without form and void, before the days of Twitter, web 2.0 and graphical browsers, there was Usenet. It was a vast, rowdy community of conversations, where the tens of thousands of people connected by the early Internet talked about everything from esperanto to espresso.

One April morning, a message arrived on the network from a computer named “Kremvax”. It began, “Well, today, 840401, this is at last the Socialist Union of Soviet Republics joining the Usenet network and saying hallo to everybody.”

Arriving in the late days of the Cold War, the message provoked a flurry of reactions. Some welcomed the unexpected new users to the net, others expressed their hope that the Soviets wouldn’t use Usenet for propaganda. A skeptical few noticed the date on the message and realized the post was an elegant April Fools joke.

The joke was funny because it was eminently believable. Usenet users were used to conversing with people all around the world – the advice on brewing a great cup of espresso might come from Texas or from Tokyo. And, despite the fact that the Internet wasn’t far from its past as a US military research project, there were no restrictions on who could connect a computer to the Internet. It was technically possible that someone had connected a phone line between a computer that was connected and a machine in Moscow.

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

This type of imagining can be useful, and it can also be deceptive. We need to imagine a more connected world before we work to make one possible. But we need to be careful that this imaginary cosmopolitanism doesn’t fool us into thinking we live in a world where barriers of language, culture and national identity have vanished.

Like many of the infrastructures that hold together our connected world, the Internet disguises distance. Just as airplanes allow us the useful illusion that New York and London are as close as Vienna and Innsbruck, the Internet allows us to imagine ourselves co-present with people halfway across the globe. (This is an easier illusion to maintain in a comfortable apartment with a high-speed connection than from a cybercafé in Freetown, Liberia, paying a dollar an hour for a painfully slow connection.)

It’s a useful illusion because it enables new and productive behaviors. It turns my living room into the world’s largest record store, a library filled with scholars jointly writing an encyclopedia, a coffee shop filled with friends I’ve known for decades and those I’ve never met. The danger is in embracing the analogy too thoroughly. When I forget that we’re not physically in the same place and assume that my colleague in Nairobi will understand the reference I make to US politics or the local sports team, I’m reminded that the death of distance is just a useful illusion.

We’re now invited to partake in an exciting and useful new illusion – the Cloud. The Cloud promises us that it no longer matters where our bits live. Instead of focusing on the complex, intricate infrastructure that makes the Internet work, we’re asked to trust that our email, our photographs, our memos and love letters are somewhere out There, somewhere safe, being watched over by “machines of loving grace”.

While this all sounds hauntingly familiar to those of us who remember the age of mainframe computing, it’s a useful illusion because it encourages us to behave as if our bits are part of a larger whole. They’re not just my vacation photos from Denmark – they’re part of a global collection of photos of Copenhagen, helping the Filipino student studying Hans Christian Andersen or the Danish urban planner, mapping her city, to better understand it. With little effort, and sometimes with less intention, we find ourselves as collaborators in thousands of global projects.

This sort of sharing can feel good and rewarding, encouraging us to look beyond our local orbits for ideas, support and solidarity. Or it can feel involuntary and coerced. Every time I search, every time I place a link to a webpage on my blog, I help Google tune its search algorithms a bit more precisely. I benefit from an improving search engine, but can’t help wondering if I shouldn’t get a stock dividend as well.

The Cloud invites us to ignore the infrastructure that makes everyday miracles – reading my email on my phone in Accra, Ghana – possible. But before we accept this useful illusion, it’s worth a close look at what we’re choosing to ignore. There’s a complex web of electrical lines, telecommunications cables and cellular towers that makes my email reading possible. The single, overcrowded cable that connects West Africa to the global internet helps explain why there’s not a lot of video from Accra posted on YouTube – while Ghana’s 3G mobile phone system is faster and more powerful than the system I use in the US, the connection to the internet is so tenuous that uploading videos from my phone is prohibitively expensive. Look at the map of electric connections and it becomes clear why there aren’t a lot of bloggers in rural Mali – there’s not a lot of electrical power to power the towers or allow bloggers to charge their phones.

Humans have a fascination with mapping infrastructure. Atlases from the 19th century are filled with intricate spiderwebs of railroad tracks and the gentle arcs of oceanic shipping routes. At the end of the twentieth century, we drew impossibly complex maps of the Internet, maps that ceased to be useful for any sort of navigation, but showed an intricacy that evoked spiderwebs, snarled yarn and connected neurons.

Mapping infrastructure tells us what’s possible. We discover the road that leads to the small mountain town, the airplane service that connects the island nation to the rest of the world. But these maps can be deceptive as well. While they show us what’s possible, they’re not very informative about what actually happens.

Imagine the street map of a city. Those streets show you the locations where a taxi might go, picking up and dropping off passengers. Now imagine another map. This one emerges over time, and it’s drawn by taxis trailing lines of light behind themselves. We’d see patterns emerge very quickly – from the train station to the business district, from the business district to the airport. We’d see patterns we might not expect, from poorer neighborhoods to hospitals, carrying patients. And we’d discover that some parts of town remain unmarked – the taxis could go there, but they don’t, perhaps because no one wants a ride, or perhaps because taxi drivers don’t want the passengers who live there.

The map that would emerge – a map built by artists at Stamen Design of the city of San Francisco – isn’t a map of infrastructure, but a map of flow. The designers used the GPS system in taxicabs to watch the movements of taxis over the course of a day and combined their paths into a map. The resulting map shows us how taxis actually move in the city, the neighborhoods where traffic ebbs and flows, the parts of town where taxis never go. While the street map – a map of infrastructure – show us what’s possible, a map of flow shows us what actually happens.

Maps of flow aren’t very common yet, but they are exceedingly useful. Knowing if the road out of the city to the weekend house is packed with traffic or empty is critical information before leaving town. Knowing how pedestrians move from the train to their workplaces is critical for the shopkeeper who wants to place his cafe in the right area. But while infrastructure stays put – making it easy to map – flow is always changing. Mapping flow is a form of surveillance.

If we map the infrastructures of communication, we discover that it’s possible for people in almost every nation to connect to the internet. We discover that the internet connects big cities, but not many rural areas; that people in east Africa are connected by satellite dish, not by undersea cable, that farmers in Nigeria can call relatives in Lagos or in London. What these maps of cables don’t tell us is what actually happens, who speaks to whom, who reads what, who shares what.

When I read the morning newspaper twenty years ago, I had two choices – the thin local newspaper, and the thick New York Times, both available at the corner store. Today, I can read the Daily Nation from Nairobi, the Mail and Guardian from South Africa, the Manchester Guardian, the Times of India or the Shanghai Daily. If I’m willing to stretch my language skills, or trust online translation services, my options expand further. And if I include the hundreds of millions of bloggers, twitterers, message board posters, videomakers and podcasters, my options expand exponentially.

But most days, I read the New York Times, my local paper, the blogs of a few friends I know well. And, in this, I’m like most people in the world. I’m connected to an infrastructure that allows me information, opinion and perspective from vast swaths of the globe. I can read bloggers from Borneo, or watch television from Bulgaria. But the media I actually encounter – the flow of my attention – is local, focused on my home community and nation and on my particular interests.

When we track attention in a connected world, we look at infrastructure and flow, as we might with airplanes. The map of infrastructure shows you that there’s a series of flights that connects Linz and Lilongwe – the map of flow shows you that virtually no one ever makes that journey. Most flights take off and land in the same country. Most people read, listen and watch locally, nationally, more than globally.

It’s okay. It’s a fundamental human tendency. We’re not used to living in this massively interconnected world. As Kwame Appiah observes, a dozen generations ago, very few of us would have encountered people of another religion or race. It’s only very recently that we’ve all had the opportunity to become cosmopolitans, and only within the past few years that we’ve lived in a world where it was possible to know what someone in Samoa was thinking and feeling moment to moment. Our instinct is to pay attention to the familiar, to follow the suggestions of people we already know, to flock with those who look and think like us.

But just because the tendency to choose a smaller world is a basic human frailty doesn’t mean we should accept it. The infrastructures that hold us together bind us, inextricably. Our problems are global ones – pandemic, global warming, terrorism – and so are our solutions. If we can imagine healing and bettering the world, we are imagining connecting with people across the globe to build solutions and find different ways of living.

The Cloud encourages us to imagine a world where infrastructure doesn’t matter, where ideas and solutions can come from anyone and anywhere. Perhaps this is the useful illusion that frees us from old ways of thinking, lets us embrace solutions that come from halfway around that world, that we might have rejected had we known its provenance.

I fear that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll discover that the flow of ideas through the Cloud isn’t as frictionless and global as we might hope. The steep, sheer barriers of language render much of what’s posted online incomprehensible to us, the Chinese blog posts and the Spanish-language videos. On a polyglot internet, there’s more to read everyday, but less each of us, individually can understand. We’ve made great strides in making it possible for everyone to write online, releasing our words into the Cloud, but we’ve done far less work ensuring that we can read and understand what each other has to say.

In a world where many, if not everyone, can write online, we need editors, gatekeepers and filters more than ever. We’re experimenting with new techniques to sift through the Cloud and discover what interests us. We build tools that let us see what pages our friends find interesting, that let groups of people vote for what should be featured on the front page. With many eyes, we can see a broader stretch of the cloud. But ultimately, our view is as broad as that of the people we ask to help us navigate. If we flock together with like-minded fellows – as humans tend to do – we risk missing the serendipity of the critical recommendation from Nepal or Nigeria.

The Cloud tempts us into thinking that we are more global than we actually are. When we imagine a Cloud of bits from everywhere, divorced from physical reality, we can forget that infrastructure doesn’t yet extend to every corner of the world and systematically excludes places that are poor, unfree, disconnected. We are tempted to forget that our attention tends to flow towards our co-linguists, our countrymen, our friends, and that we must to consciously, continually challenge ourselves to break away from our flock and experience a wider world.

Shortly before the first World War, radio pioneer Marconi predicted that radio would make war impossible, because we’d be able to hear and understand the voices of people of other nations and would realize the futility of attacking and destroying them. Nine decades later, internet enthusiast John Perry Barlow predicted a world without borders, where states no longer mattered, where humans would organize themselves in a new, egalitarian way through the Internet. Barlow and Marconi made poor predictions, but they were both excellent prophets. The prophet’s job is not to tell you what will happen, but what could happen, if you work to make it happen.

The Cloud is a prophecy. It’s a beautiful dream of the future where we find ways to connect every corner of the world. It asks us to overcome the challenges of language, to break out of our usual orbits and familiar flocks and discover new, global, connected solutions to new, global, connected problems. We need to imagine this future so we can build it. But we must remember what we’re imagining and what’s real. We must continually challenge ourselves and not merely embrace and celebrate a useful illusion.

Juliana Rotich, journalist, activist and innovator, closes the day at Ars Electronica on a solemn note with a talk about the cloud and environmental change. Asking us what problems keep us up at night – global pandemic? educating our youth? – she explains that she’s terrified by environmental degregation. She tells us about feeding grey parrots in her youth in Kenya, where the birds were common. As she grew up, the birds became less common, and they are never seen today – they’ve been displaced by climate change. “You’re hard pressed to find climate change deniers in Africa – it’s a very visceral issue for us.”

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

This is the bad news. The good news is that we’re starting to see strong linkages between environmental activists and online communities. She mentions Corneille Ewango, a former poacher, turned conservationist in the Ituri rain forest, who’s personally responsible for identifying 200 species of lianas and 600 species of trees. In recent years, Corneille has been leveraging online spaces to raise money and awareness, especially around protection of okapi.

We’re starting to see the use of electronic media for on the ground organizing – protests to prevent the sale of the Mabira forest in Uganda to sugarcane companies were organized via mobile phone. In Egypt, Tamer Mabrook used his blog to expose a company that was polluting the Mansala River. (Unfortunately, his activism cost him, as he was sued, successfully, in Egyptian court.) Urban Sprout in South Africa provides information on organic and green products and businesses in South African communities and is gearing up to direct visitors to South Africa for the World Cup to environmentally sustainable businesses.

Juliana pushes back on Evgeny Morozov’s concerns about slacktivism. She wonders whether he’s discounting the value of online activism with ofline impacts, referencing Wildlife Direct, Gorilla.cd and Friends of Lembus Forest, all of which raise money and awareness via online tools.

In the future, Juliana hopes to see a move from static to dynamic environmental data to help people understand what’s changing in the global environment. She’s like to link the sorts of electronic payment systems being pioneered in Africa, like MPesa, to cap and trade systems, allowing people affected by environmental change to participate in markets designed to mitigate these changes. Ultimately, change is going to be both personal and cultural – she closes with examples of campaigns to get people to introduce tree planting as part of life-cycle rituals, a real world activity with the possibility of positive change.

Pablo Flores has been instrumental in the spread of the OLPC laptop in his native Uruguay, helping communities learn how to use these new computers to blog and communicate to the wider world. (See this blog as an example of the work he’s doing with the support of Rising Voices.) Through Project Ceibal and One Laptop Per Child, 350,000 laptops are being distributed to children from 6-11 years old in Urugay. There’s also a widespread project to build wireless connectivity to support those laptop efforts.

At Ars Electronica, Pablo focuses on the thorny social questions necessary to answer if we’re to bring people like a young shepherd, pictured holding his OLPC, into the cloud. He posits that we need, at minimum:

- health, food, a roof
- functionging homes and educational systems
- access devices and internet access

But that’s probably not enough. For people to really take advantage of cloud intelligence, we need both good tools and a culture of accessing and making good use of the cloud in the real world. He points out that most Uruguayan parents aren’t using the internet without external help – they wonder why it would be helpful. We also need a culture of sharing knowledge, a culture that includes a careful, responsible approach to online publishing. This culture emphasizes support, including peer support – he cites an conversation between Brazilian and Uruguayan students which started as a peer support effort and turned into a conversation about culture in both countries.

Finally, Pablo suggests that we need to avoid black box technology. The success of OLPC in Uruguay has to do with the openness of the Sugar system, and he points to the ability for people to add onto and expand WordPress as a reason his blog work has succeeded.

Andrés Hernández of MIT Media Lab is a great guy to talk to about open, expandable systems. He’s working on Scratch, a programming environment that encourages people to learn Smalltalk, a powerful and extremely creative programming language. He sees Scratch, which is designed to let people share and explore each other’s code online, as a step towards democratising cloud computing. “Most people don’t have the knowledge necessary to build cloud systems,” but systems like Scratch may change that balance over time.

Scratch has gained a great user-base – there are 320,000 registered members, who’ve posted 500,000 projects including 12 million scripts. The largest userbase is young teens, between 12-14, but there are a lot of adults in the community as well, and they often end up mentoring younger users.

There’s a fascinating virtual team aspect to Scratch – Andres shows us a collaboration between young kids in different countries who’ve jointly started a software design company, collectively building games. It’s an amazing peek at a cloud future and what it might mean for kids.

Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora explains the complexity of the African diaspora on the Ars Electronica stage. He includes in the diaspora all people of African origins, both the descendents of people kidnapped in the slave trade and the more recent, voluntary diasporans, who he calls “neo-diasporans”. Using this broad definition, the contemporary diaspora includes 40 million in the US, 9 million in Europe, 22 million in the Caribbean and over 100 million in South America. There are complex cultural dynamics in this diaspora, a 150 years of cultural separation between slavery and colonialism, during which very few Africans had opportunities to migrate.

In a pre-internet age, Teddy tells us, it was very hard to communicate with fellow diasporans around the world. Myspace is widely used to share African music in culture, while Twitter is increasingly becoming the space for direct connections between diasporans who are geographically separated.

Diasporans having an influence on international conversations isn’t a new phenomenon – Teddy references Filippo Marinetti, an Egyptian/Italian who authored an influential futurist manifesto in 1909. More recently, we’ve seen economist Dambisa Moyo taking the stage with “Dead Aid”, a passionate argument against international aid to Africa. “Moyo is arguing an issue that’s too often been the province of middle aged white men,” and her influence was due, in part, to skillful use of social media.

Teddy discovered the power of social media for himself when he took on Aston Kucher and his strange campaign for Twitter followers. Hoping to pass CNN, Kucher asked twitter readers to follow him and bring him to 1 million followers, and promised a substantial donation to Malaria No More to buy bednets if the goal was achieved. This pissed Teddy off – it’s another example of paternalistic outsiders offering to “save” Africa – and he wrote an angry post in response. Amplified through twitter and blogs, his post was read and responded to by the anti-Malaria organization Kucher agreed to help.

We’re only starting to see the impact of the online diaspora – there are only about 65 million diasporans online. But the people who are online can help with the problem of African invisibility in digital spaces. Lots of maps of online populations ignore Africa entirely because of low penetration. Even at these low levels of access, there are 60,000 Ugandans on Facebook, from a national population of 32 million. “In the long run, there is deep potential for the diaspora to take the lead in communication and participation as Africa comes online.”

Kristen Taylor is a food pornographer. She asks us not to tell her mother… though she’s just told a very full room at Ars Electronica in Linz. She’s the instigator today of a “food hacking” contest, asking us to reshape our lunches, ala Fancy Fast Food. The best food hack posted today will win a catalog celebrating 30 years of Ars Electronica.

Her talk at our cloud symposium is titled “the secret life of foodpaths,” and looks at the idea – and problem – of food as a cloud. She offers two ideas as organizing principles. From Clay Shirky and Kevin Kelly, she reminds us that “the internet runs on love,” which is quite different from the lust in food she’s often trying to generate on her blog. She quotes an “urban homesteader”, who reminds us “food is the thing we do most.”

She asks us to consider the production of honey and ideas of locality. Beehives are travelling circuses – commercial beehives are brought from field to field, pollinating different crops. People are starting to become increasingly interested in honey, in part due to colony collapse disorder, but also because of interests in local food. She introduces us to the idea of “single-origin” products. A single-origin honey might be tupelo or avacado, named for the plant the bees primarily feed on. Kristen tells us that the health benefits of honey are better for honey produced geographically close to you. Unfortunately, beekeeping is illegal in Brooklyn, but it’s an open secret that people are putting beehives on urban rooftops.

A second buzzword she examines is “source verified food”. The termshows our distrust of food labels and the difficulty of really knowing where things are from on a local level. For people who really want to know where their food is coming from, you can explore the fallen fruit of Sherman Oaks, California – a map of fruit trees shows urban explorers where they can pick up fruits that fall to the ground.

Kristen ends her talk with an exploration of the food truck movement in NYC. A dozen or so trucks roam New York neighborhoods and sell a variety of fascinating foods. These trucks use Twitter to document their location, and often ask followers for help in figuring out where to park. You can see dialogs between trucks – an exchange between schnitzeltruck and biggayicecream, a custom ice cream truck, in Brooklyn. It’s a community, with trucks looking out for each other, raising their stature and perhaps providing protection. “When I think of my urban food map, the movements of these trucks is what I’m thinking about.”

Xiao Qiang is a long-time Chinese activist, and now teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, where he leads the China Digital Times project. He introduces his remarks at Ars Electronica by saying that his focus is “less about computing, more about human experience,” specifically the experience of people seeking space for free speech in China. He reminds us that China is digitizing rapidly, showing us the photo of a Chinese man, an IV strapped to his back, texting on a cellphone and reminding us that there are now 565m cellphones in China.

Some technologies are more open than others. There’s a “digital panopticon” that monitors cyberspace, symbolized by Jingjing and Chacha, a pair of cartoon characters with “cute panda names”, that remind users that the authorities are watching online activities.

Xiao encourages us to consider the full diversity of the Chinese media space. In mainstream media, there are official voices, which are strongly statist, and a second voice of reformist media. Once the Internet joins the picture, the world is far more complicated. Blogs include resistant and subversive discourse, and overseas Chinese website and alternative media like BBC/VOA introduce views rarely seen in Chinese media… though they’re generally blocked by the great firewall.

Using delicate language, Xiao walks us through the phenomenon of the river crab and the grass mud horse. (It’s complicated – here’s my explanation in an earlier post.) People react so strongly to censorship and are promoting these mythical creatures in online discourse because “Censorship is a form of violence agaist the human spirit.”

During the Sichuan earthquakes, Xiao reminds us, offices and government buildings fared well, but many school buildings collapsed. This showed people deep-rooted corruption in Chinese society. Journalists wanted to report on the story, but officials threatened people who explored it. The well-known artist and blogger Ai Weiwei – who helped design national stadium – wanted to explore the story, and began publishing the names of students who died on his blog. When that blog was censored, he put up the photo of a single lit candle and reposted the names elsewhere.

Recently, a formal hearing was held on the Sichuan earthquakes and school collapses. Seeing the report as a coverup, many people protested the report. Ai Weiwei documented the protests via video and has been spreading the documentary online, showing the difficulty of silencing dissent in a cloud age.

Journalist and academic Evgeny Morozov offers not a direct response to Xiao Qiang’s talk, but a healthy dose of skepticism about the possibility of digital activists changing the world via Facebook and Twitter. He begins with the story of Anders Colding-Jørgensen, a Danish psychologist who created a Facebook activism group to protest the dismantling of Stork Fountain in Copenhagen. Of course, the government wasn’t actually planning on dismantling the fountain, a national symbol. But his Facebook group implied that the fountain was under threat, and from his initial 100 invitations to the group, there were 27,500 members of a Facebook group demanding the fountain be saved within three days. At the peak, two people were joining per minute – Jorgensen decided to end the experiment shortly afterwards. (Amusingly enough, there are still more than 26,000 members, even though the fiction as been well exposed.)

Why do people join Facebook groups? “Just like we need home furnishings a Facebook group gives us cultural objects.” Evgeny terms this “slacktivism” – activism for slackers. It’s easy to do, and probably doesn’t do anything. He references a Facebook group called “Saving the children of Africa” – there are a million members of the group, and only $5000 has been donated. This may be okay – “Not every problem can be solved through an injection of funds, or by attention raising” – but the danger is that slacktivism distracts us from real activism.

“500,000 people might be less effective working together than one working alone.” Psychologists describe a phenomenon called “social loafing” – if you ask a group of people to pull on a rope, they’ll all pull less hard than if you asked them to pull individually. This makes some sense – if we’re all singing Happy Birthday together, we’re likely to be quieter than if we’re carrying the group alone. In activism, this might lead to the opposite of social synergy – “Increasing number of persons decreases relavent pressure from each person.”

When we join a Facebook group, Evgeny postulates, we are likely to follow the pace of the group rather than working at our own pace. We also shouldn’t take it for granted that Facebook activism is the limit to what’s possible with online activism. Evgeny offers Freerice as a different model – people participate because they want to improve their vocabularies, not to raise money for global hunger. “Through that selfish motivation, they probably do more than joining a facebook group.”

Evgeny offers some suggestions for effective online activism. “Don’t give the merit badge until people complete the work” – joining a group shouldn’t be recognized, while contributing should. Don’t allow people to fade into the background – encourage them to act. And don’t assume the Wikimedia model always works. It’s great that people can contribute to Wikipedia by fixing a stay comma – finding the lowest common denominator in online activism isn’t always a good thing.

I’m behind on my blogging, because my copresenters this morning gave extremely rich, complex talks – it’s going to take me more time to get their accounts up, and the symposium keeps going forward. We lead off this afternoon with Isaac Mao, introducing a set of speakers who are speaking on cloud activism, ways in which we can shape the emerging cloud for positive social purposes.

Hamid Tehrani, Iran editor for Global Voices, leads off, with an analysis of reality and myths around social media and the recent Iranian elections and protests. “If anyone had questions about the power of citizen media, those questions were answered by the Iran protests,” he tells us. People risked their lives to post to Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook. But the reality of digital activism in Iran is complicated and not always well understood.

Blogs are vital tools for activists, used to communicate and to organize. A bus strike was organized via blogs, and blogs have emerged as the preferred platform for reformist voices to communicate. Youtube has become a powerful tool for complaining about sexual harrasment at universities and the corruption of ayatollahs.

So why did the government unblock these powerful tools a few months before the June 12th election? Tehrani argues that they wanted to attract more voters and make election look more legitimate. Three of the four candidates used social media very succesfully – they’d learned to use social media in part because alternative journalists had been chased from the independent press and moved online. Citizen media acts as the main information platform for protesters and opposition, and as
a bridge between inside and outside Iran. Moussavi’s Facebook profile has 120,000 followers – it functions as a very powerful publishing platform in English and Persian to share information with audiences around the world.

The internet channel goes both ways. Information about Neda’s death came out via digital media, then became the face of the protest movement worldwide. Cartoons drawn in Iran spread over the internet, but cartoons from Canadian media showed up, printed out and on signs, at Tehran protests.

Here’s the myth – some Western journalists shifted their focus from the role of Iranian people to the role of technology. Tehrani considers it amazing – and shameful – to suggest that there should be a nobel peace prize for Twitter, rather than for the Iranian protesters.

“Twitter does not organize demonstrations.” The Iranian government can read tweets, so this is a lousy place to organize. Twitter can spread misinformation. One tweet claimed 700,000 people protesting at a mosque in Tehran – this “fact” got spread around Twitter… but it seems that fewer than 5,000 people actually showed up in real life. We can misunderstand who’s actually speaking on Twitter – people represent themselves as being on the ground, while they’re actually in the diaspora… or in some cases, might not actually be Iranian activists. Finally, he warns that citizen media may be becoming “militant media” in an Iranian context.

In other words, Twitter mattered in Tehran… but it’s really, really complicated.

We start the seminar at Ars Electronica on cloud computing in darkness, which David Sasaki reminds us, is the state of nature. We think of electric lights as pervasive, almost too cheap to meter. We don’t expect to pay to plug in our laptops. But it would be a mistake to assume that this infrastructure is universal – he shows us students in Monrovia, sitting outside the airport to study by electric lights.

When Thomas Edison began generating electricity, he used DC electricity to light up a small corner of lower Manhattan, powered by the Pearl Street station. Because DC didn’t carry very far without lossage, you needed lots of small power generating plants. Edison was unseated, ultimately, by Nikola Tesla, who worked with Westinghouse to consolidate the electric industry and make it possible to transfer high voltage electricity over long distances.

David shows Edison’s electrocution of Topsy the elephant, a scare tactic designed to scare the world away from high-voltage alternating current. Edison argued that the high voltages of AC would electrocute anyone unlucky enough to touch the wire. He was right, of course, but ultimately that was irrelavent. When it became possible to generate power from Niagra Falls, the game was won for AC – there was no other practical way to deliver the incredible amounts of power from a rural area to the cities where electricity was needed.

The history of computing has had at least as dramatic a set of changes as electricity, from the Control Data 3600, a half-million dollar monstrosity that featured a .483 MHZ CPU and 1.5MB memory. These machines were used by groups like the IRS. It took years for computers to become personal, with machines like the Apple.

David tells us that we’re now in an age of computing that looks like the Pearl Street power generation. Offices are filled with IT guys who look after small networks, installing software, issuing email passwords. David sees the move towards cloud computing as a move towards AC electricity, a centralization of resources into more efficient ways to deliver services. As a result, computers are getting dumber, not smarter – we’re increasingly using smartphones and netbooks, much less powerful than desktop computers, but enabled by the Internet to be profoundly powerful.

The cloud could be a dangerous abstraction, David warns us – it can blur the infrastructures that actually make these behaviors possible, like Google’s huge data centers, which include 40-50 thousand individual computers. David asserts that the internet now uses 5% of global energy (that figure is deeply disputed, and folks like Kevin Kelly have been looking for more accurate counts) and that data centers are being built by “cool rivers” to allos machines to be cooled (hmm… I haven’t seen a lot of river-cooled data centers, though I know many people are looking for data center space near cheap hydro-power.) He shows some maps that help us understand the infrastructure of the internet, the cables that carry the net, and the distribution of people who use the internet, showing us that in 2008, the number of Chinese internet users passed the number of American users.

He shows a video, “Social Media Revolution”, that offers a large number of social media statistics, including:
- 1 of 8 couples in America met by social media
- if facebook were a country, it would be 4th largest
- 80% of companies using Linked In as their primary tools to find employees

What might a world shaped by social media and cloud intelligence looks like? David asks us to look back, and features the work of Paul Otlet, who theorized a global question-answering service in 1934, where queries by telephone would be answered with texts and audio delivered by a screen. “Cinema, photographs, radio, television will become the new book”, delivered by “the radiated library”. Looking forward, he offers glimpses of the cloud future:

- the reCAPTCHA, which harnesses anti-spam technologies to digitize books
- the use of Mechanical Turk by a frustrated shopper to find online items that he’s shopping for offline, with the cooperation of Amason
- a cloud service that permits listeners to get the identification of a song playing on the radio, via mobile phone… and which helps map what music people are listening to
- The Michael Jackson tribute, the eternal moonwalk

What’s to come in the age of the cloud? That’s the job we’re facing today, with speakers (myself included) exploring this new territory.

Perhaps the most intriguing piece I’ve seen at Ars Electronica so far is called WIA<>WIA, “Water in Africa, Water in Austria”. On the surface, it’s a well-thought through piece of installation art by a set of Malian artists, led by Melissa Fatomata Toure. It builds a connection between a toilet in Linz and a well in Koulouninko, a village outside of Bamako. The well in Koulouninko produces only 200 liters of water a day, and the toilet uses seven liters per flush. Once the water usage in Linz exceeds the capacity in Koulouninko, the Linz toilet shuts off and can only be reactivated with a 1€ coin. The proceeds of the project will be donated to WaterAid.org, which operates well-drilling projects around the world.

So far, so good. But there’s something a little odd about the photo that shows the installation in Koulouninko – the woman in the left foreground appears to be three meters tall and casts no shadow. And things evidently got weirder when the festival organizers interviewed the artist over Skype. My friend, involved with the interview process, tells me that the artist looked distinctly non-Malian, and while she was supposed to be in Bamako, the interview ended at 6:30pm and the background she was speaking against showed broad daylight. (The sun sets very quickly in equatorial climes, and it’s usually quite dark by 6:30 in Bamako.)

As it turned out, the “artist” interviewed by the Ars team was a German collaborator of artist Niklas Roy, wearing black face paint and a wig. None of the team of Malians responsible for the project actually exist, and the project photos were photoshopped.

Ars Electronica made the interesting decision to feature the piece despite its origins. My friends explained that the rules for the contest “encouraged creative hacking”, and that the guidelines never specified that the projects had to be real, not fictional. Given the social value of the project, the ability to direct attention towards global water issues and the artistic merits, the piece was accepted and displayed at the festival, with a note on the accompanying text, noting the hoax and listing the creators as a set of fictitious Malians, followed by “AKA Niklas Roy”.

Roy is clearly enjoying the success of his hack. His website includes a picture of Duchamp’s legendary “ready-made” sculpture of a urinal, and notes “Next week, I’ll present my latest project at the Ars Electronica. It is the exhibition of a toilet, that I didn’t even build myself. Another clou of the project is, that I entered the exhibition under an invented name.”

I don’t quite know what to think about the piece. Would this piece have been as interesting if it had been proposed by a German artist without the cooperation of any Africans, or was it initially viewed favorably because it was from a female Malian artist? Is putting on digital blackface the magic ticket towards being displayed at Ars, where there aren’t a whole lot of African artists featured? Is the piece a wry commentary on race and artmaking? Is it poking fun at our fondness for feel-good projects? And if the piece is, in no small part, about the artistic fraud, why is that story not front and center at Ars Electronica, where it’s presented almost as a footnote?

That last sentence, it turns out, wasn’t a fair one on my part. Ars actually documented the fraud pretty well – it just did so on the back of the exhibition displays I looked at. I still have lots of uncomfortable questions about the project, but I feel much better knowing that Ars hung it with an explicit discussion and display of the prank/fraud nature of the piece.

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