UPDATE. Mowjcamp.com is back up! Friends at EFF were able to broker a conversation between Yahoo, Moniker, Melbourne IT and Access Now. The situation is complicated, and I’m still trying to understand the details of the resolution, but it’s fantastic news that the site is back up. Special thanks to friends at Yahoo! who ended up taking the brunt of the criticism for the downtime. That wasn’t fair, and was in part my fault for not understanding everyone’s role in the situation. Yahoo! worked extremely hard to resolve the situation after being called out and deserve special thanks for their hard work, as does everyone who took action to get this important site back online.

Twitter users may remember recent downtime for the microblogging site that didn’t involve the familiar fail whale. For a couple of hours on December 17th, 2009, Twitter’s home page was replaced with a picture of a green flag and the message “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army”. Twitter’s administrators explained that their domain name records had been “temporarily compromised”, pointing the twitter.com domain to a rogue site rather than to Twitter’s servers. Chinese search engine Baidu was hit with a similar attack on January 12th, also by the Iranian Cyber Army, and regained control of their site within four hours.

Screenshot of hacked mowjcamp.com site by Josh Self, cc.

It’s one thing to recover from this sort of political cyberattack when you’re a well-financed company and something entirely different when you’re a volunteer-run alternative news site. Mowjcamp.com, a popular citizen media site associated with Iran’s green movement, was hijacked the same day as Twitter, by the same attackers, using similar techniques. (A blog post from activist Austin Heap explains that the techniques were probably not identical, which may explain why it’s been harder to restore Mowjcamp.) It’s still down six weeks later. The story behind their struggle to get back online shows how vulnerable the internet is to this new form of attack and how disruptive it can be for a small, grassroots organization.

Mowjcamp has been a major channel for disseminating news and video from the Iranian green movement. Their YouTube channel, filled with videos from university protests, gives a sense for their content, and their English-language site has become a critical resource for journalists covering Iran’s protests. While Mowjcamp is now accessible online in Farsi at mowjcamp.ws, mowjcamp.com, .org and .net remain in limbo, resolving to a NameDrive.com domain parking page.

I’ve been in regular contact with the administrators of Mowjcamp as they’ve tried to regain control of their site. For six weeks, they’ve been getting the runaround from Yahoo! (where they’d originally registered the domain names) and Moniker (where the hackers moved control of the domain name). Yahoo has been informed that the site was illegally moved by hackers who managed to access a Yahoo Mail account and authorize a transfer to Moniker – they’ve told the site administrators that there’s nothing they can do, and the problem’s in Moniker’s hands. Moniker, in turn, tells the administrators that they’ve responded to Yahoo, which will resolve their problem. In the meantime, the site continues to be inaccessible from the URLs by which it is most widely known. (Yes, I’ve contacted friends within Yahoo! So have many other well-connected friends, who’ve put pressure on Moniker as well. That I’m complaining in this blogpost shows just how successful we’ve been so far going directly to the companies involved.)

AccessNow, an online free speech organization born in the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian election, has been working on behalf of Mowjcamp admins to regain control of their domain. (Some of the Mowjcamp administrators are in Iran – some are not. Those in Iran are at constant risk of arrest, which explains their need to remain anonymous and seek help from groups like AccessNow.) I traded email this weekend with Brett Solomon, Executive Director of AccessNow, who explains his frustration with the situation: “The system is clearly broken when multi-million dollar enterprises like Twitter and Baidu can retrieve their sites in a matter of hours, and yet we have been trying to get mowjcamp.org back for more 6 weeks now. We keep getting stonewalled despite the vital role the site plays for the Green Movement in Iran.”

When the “Iranian Cyber Army” attacked Twitter, they embarrassed a prominent technology company and made a striking political statement about the company’s apparent support for the Iranian opposition. (You may remember that the US State Department asked Twitter to delay maintenance to keep the service accessible in Iran during post-election protests.) But ICA’s attack on Mowjcamp is different – it’s a denial of service attack by bureaucracy.

I spoke last week with a Mowjcamp admin who explained that their site has been under near-constant attack for months. They’ve moved the site to Amazon Web Services machines so they can better fend off distributed denial of service attacks. The irony is that the attack that crippled Mowjcamp is far less technical than a DDOS – attackers compromised a webmail account which allowed them to intercept DNS control panel login information and issue an authorization code to move the site. The admin I spoke with tells me that attackers evidently attempted a move half a dozen times before they were successful in hijacking the Mowjcamp domains.

When Twitter was hijacked using similar means, it was easy for Twitter to prove to registrars that they were the legitimate owners of the domain names. That the Mowjcamp administrators are still struggling to regain their domain is evidence that the system doesn’t work for ordinary users, though it clearly accommodates prominent corporations. The hijackers may not have expected their hack to work for more than a few hours. That it remains unresolved six weeks later shows that the system isn’t prepared to handle the phenomenon of political domain name hijacking. Perhaps the dispute resolution process that Mowjcamp, Yahoo! and Moniker is going through will eventually give Mowjcamp control of their site. But the time the process has taken is crippling for a site releasing timely political information. Given the success of this attack, it’s a template for this same sort of harassment against political campaign sites, protest movements and citizen newsrooms – any site that needs to release information in a timely fashion.

At Berkman, we’ve been studying internet censorship for several years, focusing primarily on state-level internet filtering. We’re now seeing a rise in other forms of censorship, attacks that attempt to make websites inaccessible everywhere, not just from within a repressive state. These attacks use DDOS to make sites inaccessible, social engineering attacks to spearfish for critical information, and legal threats to encourage hosting providers to exile targeted websites. It’s been difficult to determine if these new attacks are sponsored by government entities or carried out by nationalist hackers acting independently of the government. In either case, these attacks appear to be on the rise, and Mowjcamp’s experience suggests that they can be devastatingly successful.

What could we do to fend off these sorts of attacks? Everyone running a human rights site needs to double check their security precautions. Ensure your domain is locked at your registrar. Make absolutely sure that no one else is accessing your webmail (check login records to see that no unfamiliar IPs have accessed your account.) Avoid cascading failures by removing login information for other sites from your webmail mailbox. Use strong passwords, and different passwords for different online services.

But there are steps the web community could take as well. If domain name hijacking becomes a common form of attack, groups like Mowjcamp will need help navigating bureaucracy and undoing the damage. The State Department has had a great deal to say about Internet Freedom in the past weeks – perhaps someone at State should be available to groups like Mowjcamp to help them work through bureaucratic red tape when they experience situations like this one. Companies like Yahoo! have made commitments to freedom of expression through their participation in efforts like the Global Network Initiative – perhaps they could back up their commitment to free speech principles by providing a prominent human rights group with some actual customer service? Maybe Yahoo! and other providers need a team that can respond to complex situations like this one and treat them as something other than routine customer service matters?

Mowjcamp’s situation is aggravated by US Treasury regulations that make it extremely difficult for Iranians (and citizens of a handful of other nations) to do business with US companies online. While Mowjcamp wanted to use US servers to host their politically sensitive content, the administrators living in Iran couldn’t directly register their site due to these Treasury restrictions. As a result, the Mowjcamp team is working through intermediaries rather that interacting directly to solve this problem. If Secretary Clinton wants to “to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights”, perhaps she could start by making it legal for Iranian dissidents to register and host sites in the United States. And if she were looking for a tangible way to make good on her rhetoric, perhaps her team at State could lend a hand to the people at Mowjcamp.

Professor Julie Cohen of Georgetown Law School is visiting at Harvard Law this year and working on a book, “Configuring the Network Self”. Speaking at Berkman today, she explains that she’s had two motivations to undertake this work – an understanding of information technology possibility framed through the idea of the “structural conditions of human flourishing”. One is a sense that discourse about IT policy (in the US – she distinguishes US from European disrouce) tends to use “grandiose language” about poicy choices for free speech and free markets, but generally seem to create circumstances that don’t appear especially free. Users face complex rules about content they can and can’t use, but there are very few rules that govern how users can be watched, monitored and aggregated. There’s a disconnect between the copyright debate – where much of the discourse is unquestioningly in favor of openness – and the privacy debate. We need a discourse that makes a space for privacy in the environment of openness.

Second, she notes that most (US) discourse comes from liberal political theory, a space where there’s a great deal of discussion of autonomy and freedom. This discourse comes with an assuption of rational choice, the idea of disembodied individuals at play in the realm of the virtual, exercising autonomous choice. “This is not a worldview that has much relation to reality, in my opinion.”

Cohen wants to explore ideas of internet policy based on the “experienced geography of the information society”. This means accepting that people are real, embodied, located in cultures and context, and experiencing the network mediated by platforms and devices. The framework we’ve inherited from liberal theory doesn’t give us very good tools to examine these questions – fortunately, there’s lots of folks thinking about embodied use, just not in the legal field. People in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies and information studies look closely at these questions… and they tend to be dismissed, pejoratively, as “postmodernists” by legal thinkers. Cohen’s goal is to unpack this set of literatures and ask how the information society works in terms of situated, embodied users, and then ask how this understanding might then inform our law and policy.

She traces her narrative framework to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s discourse about “capabilities for human flourishing”. She wants to articulate a regime of law and policy for information technology spaces that seeks to let humans flourish. Acknowledging that there’s a danger of turning anything into a requirement for flourishing, she suggests we start by looking at these literatures, at the relationships between self and culture, self and community, and identify what’s really necessary for human flourishing. “Selves are constituted by culture -there is a mutually constituting relationship between information technologies and our embodied perception” of the world through them. These tools reconfigure our acess to the world, change the nature of geography as we experience it.

Cohen wants to root thinking about internet policy in the concept of “everyday practice”, which she describes as an “anti-paradigm”, a useful tool for describing what people actually do, rather than what we ideally believe they do. The dominant paradigm in legal literature, she tells us, is to evaluate a technology in terms of its effects on freedom of speech or a user’s ability to make free choices within a market. This paradigm tends to lead to reductive models of human behavior – do humans simply make rational choices in markets? Are we always motivated by romantic concepts of dissent? Everyday practice describes the welter of other motives that accompany our interactions with information technologies.

When thinkers critique copyright in intellectual property literature, they often talk about the concept of “play”, the idea that people should have freedom to play with cultural resources. The value of play is stated in terms of its links to creativity and invention. Cohen wants to broaden the discourse around play to encompass “the play of circumstances”. She theorizes that creativity blossoms not because an individual decides to play, but because life puts random incidents in your path. Policy needs to foster this sense of play – not play by individuals, but play in terms of random circumstance.

Cohen cautions the limitations of the Access to Knowledge movement. She acknowledges the importance of A2K, but suggests that it’s insufficient to provide a base for human flourishing. The A2K paradigm, she arges, doesn’t include rights to reuse the materials you have access to. It doesn’t guarantee a user’s rights of privacy – she worries that most privacy frameorks tend to put forward a vision in which more openness is always best.

Future policy strategies need to consider issues of operational transparency. It’s insufficient to build policy based solely on what information about a user is going to be collected. We need to know how that information is going to be used. “It’s not enough to offer a choice between Google and… whatever else there is. Between iPhone and Blackberry. We need to be given sufficient information to know what’s being offered as a possibility to us and what’s being closed off.”

Cohen hopes that information technology policy will provide open spaces through “formal incompleteness”. It’s a mistake that we need to invoke a catch-all defense like fair use in the copyright space – we need space to play with technologies, to repurpose and remix media without bumping into creator’s rights. Within rules about aggregating and monitoring the use of online spaces, we need to ensure there’s space for users to play with identities. With this in mind, Cohen worries that an architectural presumption – that everything will be better if we have seamless interoperability between platforms – is limiting our choices. In a seamless universe, our data moves around with no one to stop it. We may want some friction in our platforms as well as whitespace in which we can play and experiment.

(I caught only part of the question and answer exchange.)

Q: If “churchlady43″ is also “pornstar565″ and “terrorist 12″, we could see a security theater response to online speech, an attempt to squeeze out anonymity and make it harder for individuals to engage in identity play. An integrated online environment means that every environment is a workplace environment because someone might connect my unpopular opinions in one identity to my professional one. Will this lead to a revival of McCarthyism?
A: A great comment. There’s a tendency to say that if we restrict the flow of information, we’ll move down the slippery slope to Chinese censorship. That’s an oversimplication – we need to consider times we might restrict information flow to maintain the capabilities of these new spaces.

Q: (Charlie Nesson) I perked up at the mention of copyright and play, the idea that a playful person needs a defense besides fair use. How would we get there?
A: We should look back to the copyright law of 1909, a law that’s generally reviled by publishers. Under the 1909 law, there were narrowly defined categories for copyright – you couldn’t get the rights to a work unless it fit within the categories. Rights were far more limited. It’s possible to build a copyright system that gives significant rights to copyright holders and reserves rights for users.

1909 copyright law reviled by publihers – categories, couldn’t get the rights unless you fell without the categories. And rights were much more limited.
define rights to reproduction, adaptation which gives significant rights to copyright owners, reserves rights to users

Q: (Christian Sandvig). A book from a decade past, called “The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach”, makes the argument that the Internet is culturally embodied and located. In short, the authors argue that if you’re in Trinidad, the net is one thing – if you’re not, it’s another thing. The authors rushed the book into print because they thought they were about to witness a trend of scholarship that saw the internet as culturally embodied. That trend hasn’t caught on – why not?

A: Our discourse about cultural embeddedness tends to not go further than the digital divide. If your connectivity is limited, your knowledge is limited, and we want to help you overcome those limitations. That’s okay – it would be nice to have a comprehensive broadband policy designed to give access to everyone. But the assumption that there’s a uniform digital ethos, a universal competency to strive for is troublesome.

Q: (Salil Vadhan): Could you elaborate on the implication that interoperability implies a desire for information to flow freely between systems – those seem like two separate things.
A: We probably shouldn’t decree by fiat a set of randomized incompatibilities between systems. But there’s a value to not fixing all these incompatibilties. The challenge is to design a framework that encourages and rewards gaps between systems. But everything is driving against it… it might just be quixotic to think we can avoid this seamless integration.

Q: (David Weinberger) That the Internet is a different thing from Trinidad and from Cambridge seems incontestible. That said, as long as the internet is present in any recognizable form, in Trinidad, Beijing or Cambridge, you’ll have the sense that ideas can be linked, that there’s more information than you could ever consume, that much of that information is from people like you, and that there’s a lot of disagreement. Are these characteristics really universal, embodied within the technology, or is this culturally embodied? Is there something that can be said about the internet cross-culturally?
A: It depends on your level of abstraction. Technodeterminism comes into play if you think there’s only one set of rules that could apply within a digital space. It’s not at all obvious that there’s a single way the internet could (or does) work.

When we start talking about aspirations for how the internet should work, liberalism makes its way back into the project. We don’t want to throw away all the aspirations – but aspirations are a crappy descriptive tool. Critical subjectivity is an aspiration of liberalism, but it’s something we’re not very good at getting to.

Q: (Fernando Bermejo): Scholars of linguistics have been accused of creating an object – language – at the expense of speakers. Similar accusations can be raised about cyberlaw, internet studies and the spatial metaphor for cyberspace.
A: I wrote a paper about this, and agree that there’s a tendency to reify, separate cyberspace, then project our fantasies of social ordering on it. I prefer “network space”, a real space created by networks, defined by what people can do. Network spaces include the realization that Paris and New York may now be closer than New York and Williamsburg, VA, because there’s a regular flow of people from New York to Paris, a networked connection that reshapes realworld geography.

Please see David Weinberger’s excellent notes from the talk here.

My Global Voices colleagues have been taking time at the end this year to reflect on the past five years of our joint project. I’ve been rather busy with another joint project, my new son Drew, who is a month old today, and haven’t been particularly reflective. (Moments for reflection are generally spent asleep these days.)

Talking with an old friend today gave me the opportunity to step back and reflect a bit. My friend works for a foundation that supports social entrepreneurs and he’s interested in ways that the projects he’s supporting could work together. How could a set of cool, worthwhile organizations supported financially by the same funder somehow become a coherent movement, working together and learning from each other?

It took me a couple of moments to realize that my friend was turning to me for an answer to this question: how do you build a movement? (I’m sleep-deprived, remember?) He’s right – five years in, Global Voices isn’t just a website, a project, or a community. It’s a movement. Reading reflections from GV folks from around the world, it’s clear that Global Voices is a very different thing to different people – a window into other corners of the world, an alternative to despair, an antidote to stereotypes, a technologically-enhanced pilgrimage, a defender of language and culture, and of Article 19 rights, and an odd sort of family. The people who participate in Global Voices do very different things – mapping online censorship, translating texts, collecting links and offering original reporting – for very different reasons.

Believe it or not, this is by design. But it’s taken five years to get there.

Many nonprofit projects are the manifestation of the vision of one or more dedicated founders. That’s not the story behind Global Voices. Yes, Rebecca and I set the ball rolling five years ago with a meeting at Harvard. And we’ve both done what we can to move the work forward, Rebecca using her unparalleled journalistic skills, me leveraging my hard-earned talent for begging.

But the parts of Global Voices we’re proudest of are the results of other people’s passions and energies. Without Sami ben Gharbia, we’d be on the sidelines of the freedom of expression debate in cyberspace, rather than on the frontlines. Had Portnoy Zheng not started translating Global Voices into Chinese, we’d be a monolingual project, working to bring the world to an English-speaking audience, rather than the complex polyglotism we are today. Without Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen, we’d be writing just for blog readers, not reaching out to audiences through partnerships with newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. Had David Sasaki not challenged us to demonstrate that citizen media wasn’t just the province of the wealthy and well-connected, we’d not know about remarkable efforts in Colombia, Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire and dozens of other parts of the world.

When Rebecca and I invited some dozen bloggers from around the world into a conference room at Harvard in late 2004, our goals were pretty simple – we wanted to see if there was common ground between people from different circumstances and cultures, united by a single, simple practice: writing about their thoughts and lives online. By the end of the day, I was so excited and energized that I wanted our group to produce a detailed plan for world domination, complete with marching orders. I was furious at my friends Jim Moore and Joi Ito, who moderated our closing session, because we came out of it not with a concrete plan, but with a general sense that we had some common values that we could build on.

They were right. I was wrong.

Global Voices – the people, the projects – hold together not through a grand, structured design, but because we share some very simple principles: people have a right to speak and an obligation to listen. (That’s my Twitter-sized summary of the Global Voices manifesto, itself a compact little document.) The people and projects who’ve chosen to flock under the GV banner tend to share a fondness for late-night parties in global cities, a strange sense of humor and a fondness for open source software… but the core values that allow us to work together are extremely simple. More complicated, more tactical and less vague and we’d find ourselves excluding some of the remarkable people and the creative ideas they’ve brought to the table. Had we a plan, an agenda, a schedule, we would have said no to ideas that have shaped us, making us what we are today.

Here’s the thing about a movement as inchoate as ours – there’s no way to know what’s coming next. That’s the challenge for Ivan Sigal – who ably took the reins from Rebecca and me eighteen months ago, and who’s kept our project thriving through the toughest of financial times. I don’t think a project like Global Voices can be steered. I think a leader needs to listen, to discover where the community is going and figure out how to smooth the path ahead. It’s the opposite of what a management textbook might tell you to do, a form of leading by following.

So what’s next for Global Voices? I don’t think anyone can tell you. Not just because we can’t predict the Green revolution, the Fijian Coup or the Malagasy crisis. Not just because we don’t know what comes next after Facebook and Twitter. We can’t predict because a movement isn’t predictable – it’s the product of the passions and energies of the people who’ll stay with us, the new ones who’ll find us, and the continuing influence of those who choose to leave us. Global Voices has never stopped surprising me: what’s worked, what hasn’t, what we’ve done and left undone. Here’s hoping for an unpredictable, chaotic, participatory, passionate future built on the simple foundations of speaking and listening.

Many of my colleagues have featured a favorite recent GV post in their meditations. I wanted to do the same, but couldn’t fit the post I’d chosen into the thoughts above. So here it is as a bonus.

In early December of 2008, Mark Dummett of the BBC reported a wonderful “news of the weird” story from Dhaka, Bangladesh – a life-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built at enormous expense. Global journalists sprang into action, documenting a diplomatic spat between Bangladesh and India over ownership of this cultural treasure, talking about the shocking idea of “pirating” another nation’s national symbols.

None of these intrepid reporters actually visited the Bengali Taj, though. Bloggers did, and they weren’t impressed. Aparna Ray translated their posts for Global Voices and explained that it was a poorly-made tourist trap clad in bathroom tiles, not the diamond-studded wonder those hardbitten AFP journalists credulously reported on.

A critical underreported story? An important victory for intercultural understanding? Nope. But as someone who spent far too much time the past five years answering journalistic questions about the credibility of bloggers, I can’t but help celebrating this inversion.

There are ideas that, when you first encounter them, you say, “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”

That’s how I and colleagues at the Berkman Center felt when we saw a preview of Facebook’s Beacon “feature” in November of 2007. Introduced in time for that year’s Christmas shopping season, Beacon used a cookie set on one website (Overstock.com, for example) to display information on Facebook (information that you’d just bought a DVD on Overstock) in your events stream. The geeks in the crowd were nervous because the new feature looked a lot like a cross-site scripting attack, while user advocates like David Weinberger thought the feature represented Facebook either trying to change the nature of privacy or misunderstanding user privacy norms.

Suffice it to say, we thought it was a bad idea. So did Facebook users, who organized online campaigns to protest the feature. Some sued the company. And Facebook, as part of the settlement of a class action suit, recently sent a fascinating email to some users. I received it this morning and it reads as follows:

Facebook is sending you this notice of a proposed class action settlement that may affect your legal rights as a Facebook member who may have used the Beacon program. This summary notice is being sent to you by Court Order so that you may understand your rights and remedies before the Court considers final approval of the proposed settlement on February 26, 2010.

This is not an advertisement or attorney solicitation.

This is not a settlement in which class members file claims to receive compensation. Under the proposed settlement, Facebook will terminate the Beacon program. In addition, Facebook will provide $9.5 million to establish an independent non-profit foundation that will identify and fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security.

For full details on the settlement and further instructions on what to do to opt out of, object to, or otherwise comment upon the proposed settlement, please go to http://www.BeaconClassSettlement.com.

Please do not reply to this email.

Commenting on the settlement – which doesn’t pay affected users anything (fair enough – it’s a mostly free site), but creates a new non-profit foundation to work on online privacy issues – some have noted the irony that you need to choose to opt out of the class should you want to retain your right to sue Facebook over Beacon. (Part of the frustration with Beacon is that you had to choose to opt out of the system and it wasn’t especially easy to turn it off…)

I’d add another irony. As David Weinberger suggested, privacy norms are changing online. I shopped on Overstock.com for the first time in a couple of years, looking at birthstone jewelry to give my wife as a congratulatory gift for giving birth to our child. I bought a necklace… which proved to be sorta chintzy and ugly, and which I promptly returned. I’ve run into a dozen Overstock ads on different sites, each of which urges me to repurchase the ugly necklace I rejected, or similarly dreadful blue topaz jewelry.

It’s the same sort of cross-site behavior I found so uncomfortable in Beacon, though it’s not using the cookie information to publish on my behalf, simply to (ineptly) target ads to me. Perhaps David’s right, and Facebook has succeeded in changing social norms around purchasing. Or perhaps most of us are so good at ignoring web ads that it hardly matters that Overstock is taking what it knows about us and displaying it on other websites.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve discovered that I really dislike blue topaz, but I can’t help thinking every time I see an Overstock ad, “That can’t possibly be a good idea.”

I’ve opened a lot of lectures lately – presentations about our Media Cloud research at Berkman – by complaining about the New York Times’s Africa coverage. I cite the fact that Japan tends to average roughly 8-10 times as many mentions in the paper of record than Nigeria in any given year, which is odd, given their comparable population size and importance. (I also mention that the Times is not alone – all US media outlets I’ve studied closely show this pattern – and that the Africa stories the Times runs are frequently excellent.)

If the Times is undercovering Nigeria, the same can’t be said for their recent coverage of Equatorial Guinea. One of the most fascinating and dysfunctional corners of the African continent, Equatorial Guinea is a couple of tiny islands and stretch of coastline between Gabon and Cameroon slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. The country is occupied by roughly half a million people, most of them extremely poor and a small number who are obscenely wealthy, as the islands of Equatorial Guinea sit atop massive oil fields. Much of Equatorial Guinea’s oil output is exported to the US – 132,000 barrels a day – making Equatorial Guinea the third-largest sub-Saharan exporter of oil to the US (behind Nigeria and Angola).

While oil wealth may help explain the Times’s interest in Equatorial Guinea (six stories this year, as compared to two this year on its vastly larger neighbor, Cameroon) – I’ve made the case in the past that American media attention tracks national GDP more closely than population – the Times’s focus may have more to do with another natural resource: absurdity.

Equatorial Guinea is, simply put, one of the most absurd nations on the planet. It’s not just a kleptocratic dictatorship run by a man who is arguably Africa’s worst ruler – it’s a staggeringly wealthy kleptocratic dictatorship. The CIA’s world factbook estimates per capita income for 2008 at $37,300, making the average Equatorial Guinean wealthier than the average Dane.

This wealth doesn’t seem to make the lives of the nation’s citizens much better. The image above is from Hans Rosling’s amazing Gapminder, and it shows the “development” of the country over the past two decades. The nation’s gotten dramatically wealthier in those years – the GDP per capita has increased by a factor of ten – and infant mortality has increased. Generally speaking, this doesn’t happen – infant mortality is much lower in wealthy nations than in poor nations. But Equatorial Guinea isn’t rich – it’s a nation where most citizens are desperately poor and a very small number are staggeringly rich.

Because there’s so much oil money in Equatorial Guinea, people periodically have the clever idea of overthrowing the government and installing a new one that would, gratefully, share future oil profits. Frederick Forsyth wrote a gripping novel that reads, more or less, as a blueprint for overthrowing Equatorial Guinea with a small force of professional missionaries. Some have alleged that Forsyth’s book was the result of his involvement in planning an attempted coup in 1973 – Forsyth admits he knew the coup plotters and that he passed money to them, but claims that his involvement with the plans were merely “research”. A more recent coup – The Wonga Coup in 2004 – allegedly used Forsyth’s novel as a planning document. The Wonga Coup involved South African mercenaries, Zimbabwean arms dealers and Mark Thatcher, the son of Britain’s former prime minister. It was one of the more absurd stories of the past decade, and it’s possible that we’ll finally get the complete story of the coup attempt now that the organizer, Simon Mann, was released from an Equatorial Guinean jail. (Not all the coups are quite this literary in nature. There’s no evidence that the 16 coup plotters arrested earlier this year were Forsyth fans – more likely, they were members of the Niger Delta resistance movement, MEND.)

A rich country with radical underdevelopment, a country so ripe for plunder that people read novels to plan coups? Not absurd enough for you? Okay, so here’s this – Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue is Britney Spears’s neighbor. Mr. Obiang is the son of the aforementioned kleptocratic dictator, and his shrewd management of his $4000 a month salary as Equatorial Guinea’s minister of agriculture and forests has allowed him to purchase a $35 million estate in Malibu, California, a Gulfstream V jet and a fleet of luxury cars and speedboats. The US Justice department reports that Obiang the younger pilfered an estimated $73 million from the EG treasury between 2005 and 2006 and moved it into the US.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the strong evidence that Obiang is systematically looting his nation’s treasury hasn’t prevented him from getting US visas and visiting his estate several times a year. So why does Obiang get to play in Malibu while Robert Mugabe is forced to live it up in Hong Kong? According to the US State Department officials quoted in Ian Urbina’s New York Times story, the answer is simple: Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, while Equatorial Guinea does.

Urbina’s story is an example of advocacy journalism at its best. Armed with research conducted by Global Witness, a leading pressure group focused on increasing transparency in resource-rich countries, Urbina points to rules bent or ignored by two US government departments, the possible complicity of two US oil companies and the role played by a prominent Washington PR firm as the EG government’s paid apologists.

So what?

When I started working with Open Society Institute, I was introduced to the phrase “theory of change” by a colleague who persistently (and, usually, very helpfully) insisted we unpack the logic behind any project we were considering funding. What did we want to accomplish, in the long run, and how would this project advance those goals?

So what’s the theory of change behind Urbina’s story? There may not be one – Urbina saw a fascinating and provocative story and used the platform provided by the New York Times to share the tale. Even if that’s true, the folks at Global Witness who provided Urbina with the documents to make this case had a theory of change – a belief that a story in a prominent newspaper would lead towards a policy change in the US government, or increased support for their campaigns for transparency in resource-extracting nations.

Perhaps the US State Department will be sufficiently embarrassed by the Times story to change their visa issuing practices. Perhaps some of the readers of the Times story will be grateful for Global Witness’s research and support their work. (You should – they’re an extremely responsible and credible organization doing important work.) I’m interested in the question of how a New York Times reader, agitated and motivated by Urbina’s story, would take the information she received in the story and move towards constructive action.

Global Witness doesn’t make it especially easy for individuals to involve themselves with campaigns, except as donors. Their webpages on corruption in oil, gas and mining and on banks and corruption include lists of the organization’s laudable achievements, their publications and their partners in advocacy. They don’t include a call or action or participation beyond encouragement to donate.

Would Global Witness benefit from a Facebook group dedicated to convincing Secretary Clinton to deny Obiang a visa? A petition demanding that Equatorial Guinea hold free and open elections? Probably not. They’re making a bet that the way to influence a government like Obiang’s is to operate at intergovernmental levels, providing actors within the State department with information and impetus to act.

Here’s the rub: information alone is insufficient to provoke action. In “A Problem from Hell“, Samantha Power unpacks the history of genocides in the 20th century and the reaction of governments to these systematic mass killings. Pointing out that Clinton administration wasn’t unaware of the genocide taking place in Rwanda, just unwilling to act, Power argues that governments only act to prevent genocide in reaction to consistent, relentless citizen pressure. Given the reasons not to act against Equatorial Guinea (the fear of driving EG to oust US oil companies and invite in Chinese ones, for instance), it’s reasonable to believe that merely informing and embarrassing the State Department won’t accomplish anything, without building accompanying citizen pressure.

So let’s reexamine the idea of the anti-Obieng Facebook group. My friend Evgeny Morozov argues that a great deal of online activism can be best characterized as “slacktivism” – it’s a symbolic gesture, a fashion statement, not an action that could lead towards real change. The examples he offered at a talk at Ars Electronica were, to me, compelling ones – a Facebook group dedicated to “saving the children of Africa” with 1.5 million members and a total of $8,449 in donations; a psychology experiment in Denmark that demonstrated people’s willingness to sign onto an online protest against an imaginary injustice. Evgeny worries that such online activism isn’t just ineffective – it leads to social loafing, where people get less involved with actually saving the children of Africa because they see a group of likeminded individuals and assume the collective effort will solve the problem.

While I find Evgeny’s argument compelling, I’m starting to wonder whether there’s countervailing dynamic at work. During the June 2009 protests over the Iranian elections, there was a burst of online activity as people moved by accounts of the protests looked for ways to offer solidarity and support for the activists on the ground. Twitter users turned their avatars green and changed their location information and time zone to suggest that they were in Tehran. They joined Facebook groups, shared links to the Neda Agha-Soltan video, donated USB keys to load with censorship circumvention software and send to activists, and opened proxy servers to offer Iranians an uncensored path to the internet.

These efforts weren’t effective in overturning the Iranian election results or leading to a popular revolution in the country. That might reflect their ineffectiveness – it’s unclear that the greening of Twitter would strike fear into Ahmedinejad’s heart – or the fact that the current Iranian state is powerful, well-organized, controls an experienced security apparatus, and has support from many Iranian citizens. I’m wondering if they were effective in another way – they allowed people with no personal connection to Iran to feel like they were part of the events. This feeling, in turn, may have encouraged individuals to pay closer attention to the news in Iran than if they’d been non-participants.

I’ve got no data to support this theory, just an anecdote or two about friends who compulsively aggregated Iran information on twitter, and a quote from Susan Sontag’s recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others:

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do – but who is that “we”? – and nothing “they” can do either – and who are “they” – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

If the inability to act makes us bored, cynical and apathetic, is it possible that doing something – even something that’s ultimately ineffective – could keep us engaged and compassionate? If so, is there an interplay between action and information-gathering that could turn a story into a movement that builds public will?

I read Urbina’s story. I get pissed off, and start researching other articles on Equatorial Guinea, which I post to Twitter and Facebook under the #eqguin tag. I encourage others to do likewise and to propose actions we might take to persuade the State Department to ban senior Obiang regime officials from traveling to the US. We start online petitions, a postcard campaign to the State Department and keep twittering links to the #eqguin tag… which becomes a trending topic, prompting journalists to declare a Twitter revolution in Equatorial Guinea. Witnessing our vast public will, Secretary Clinton declares that the State Department will enforce anti-corruption legislation and stop issuing visas to Obiang’s family. We promptly start a campaign to pressure CNOOC not to take over the leases that Obiang cancels with Exxon and Marathon in response to Clinton’s decisions.

A blueprint for turning knowledge into action and into will, or a fantasy? I’m not sure. (I am sure that it’s a blueprint that smart advocacy organizations are starting to try to implement, which makes the efficacy of the strategy an important topic to study.) I’m watching a debate between Evgeny and academic/activist Patrick Philippe Meier on this topic, centering around Evgeny’s recent article in Prospect magazine, “How dictators watch us on the web“. Evgeny makes the case that the rise of participatory web technologies has benefitted repressive governments as much as activists, who often aren’t able to use these technologies effectively; Patrick respondsby repeatedly asking “so what?”, arguing that Evgeny doesn’t have the data to prove that online activism is effective or ineffective. (Evgeny’s response to Patrick seems to agree on only one point – no one’s got the data to answer these questions effectively.)

Here’s my question: does it matter if action is effective or ineffective if we can demonstrate that action leads to more interest in a topic and more knowledge acquisition? I’ve been making the case for years that Americans (and likely people in many developed nations) don’t get enough information about the developing world, and that this lack of attention has consequences for developed and developing nations. If Americans don’t hear about an economic boom in Ghana, they don’t invest… which slows the boom, costing Ghanaians growth and costing Americans business opportunities in a growing economy. Similar dynamics apply around aid, humanitarian and security intervention, export of physical and cultural products.

A couple of years back, I realized that this was a supply problem, as much as a demand problem – journalists want to write about the developing world, but they and their publications have little evidence that their audience wants to hear these stories. Without evidence of reader interest in the developing world, it’s hard for most publications to support the research and travel that goes into creating these stories. If action (useful or otherwise) and newsseeking behaviors are linked, starting a movement may be a way to aggregate demand for a story, and encourage more reporting like Urbina’s story.

So get pissed off and start a Facebook group. Launch a Twitter hashtag. Translate compassion into action. But realize that the most effective action probably involves aggregating and disseminating information, building knowledge and awareness that’s an asset even if it doesn’t lead directly to political change.

And help us – me, Evgeny, Patrick, the Berkman Center, and everyone else studying this phenomenon – think about how we can bring data to the table and test some of these questions. Is online activism effective in bringing about political change? What mechanisms and tools are effective? Does the ability to take action increase and sustain interest in a topic? Does action need to have political effect to sustain interest? Does increased interest lead to increased media attention, and does that attention lead to real-world change? What sort of data and experiments do we need to move these questions beyond anecdote and theory and into testable propositions?

Warning! Professor Bowles’s lecture was rich in economic jargon, and I’m not an economist. And it had an unusally high idea density. It’s quite possible that I missed large swaths of what he was saying and misinterpreted what he did say. If something here seems obviously wrong, please use the comments section to gently correct me.

Yochai Benkler introduces Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute as his “intellectual hero” referencing his ability to apply a completely different set of intellectual tools to problems, switching tactics each decade. The target of Professor Bowles’s thought is “the weightless economy”, and his talk is titled, “Kudunomics – Property rights for the information-based economy”.

The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.

Bowles suggests that we may gain some insight about the evolution of institutions under these conditions by studying the reverse transition: by studying the transition from the late Plioscene forager economy, where weath was difficult to own, to agrarian and industrial economies, based on ownership. We can study this by “running history backwards” with an agent-based model of the weightless economy. We understand the forager economy fairly well due to ethnographic research, and we might gain insights about the governance of this emergent weightless economy from studying governance dynamics in forager economies.

Bowles offers a model of wealth where the wealth of a person is the sum of network wealth, embodied wealth and material wealth. He puts exponential weights on these types of wealth in a Cobb-Douglas production function. He plots different types of economies in a triangular graph, showing their wealth in terms of these three different dynamics – material, network and embodied wealth. Recent economies based on the domestication of plants and animals concentrate in the material corner, while older economies cluster around the network wealth – embodied wealth axis.

Network wealth is the contribution made by your social connections to your well-being. This could be measured by your number of connections, or by your centrality in different networks. A simple way to think about this is the number of people who will share food with you. Embodied wealth is a combination of what you know and how strong you are. It measures factors like hunting prowess and grip strength. Bowles asserts that we’re moving from a history where network and embodied wealth mattered more that material wealth – we briefly (for about eight thousand years) moved into a world of embodied wealth, and now we’re moving back.

Smith’s invisible hand theorem suggests that “good fences make good neighbors”. Smith’s complete markets have certain characteristics:

- The effects of the actions of economic actors take the form of contractual exchanges.
- The cost of contract enforcement is low and handled by a third party.
- Increasing returns to scale are absent and small. This is important because it maintains competition.

Under these assumptions, goods will be priced at their marginal cost, which will equal their true scarcity. Price moves towards marginal cost, which also equals social marginal cost. This isn’t just false in a weighless economy, Bowles tells us – it’s proveably false.

In economies of grain and steel, you could weigh, fence and contract. To find examples of these classic Adam Smith markets, you actually need to go to the developing world and look at grain markets, in which homogenous goods are traded in competition by using simple forms of measurability, weighing grains out in tin cans.

These markets aren’t a good analogy for contemporary economies. Instead, we’re more likely to see economies where first copy costs are extremely high and marginal costs are low. The first copy of Windows 97 cost $50 million. The second copy cost $3… and it can be copied for even less. Generic drugs sell for about half the price of brand name drugs. For some drugs, the ratio is closer to 10 to 1. When copying costs are low, enforcement of property rights is difficult… and ultimately irrational. Intellectual property rights are a way of forcing a violation of the invisible hand theorem. You allow someone to charge $20 for a CD whose marginal cost is $0.85.

The market structure of the economy of grain and steel exhibited a mixture of competition – approximating Smith’s ideal – and stable oligopoly: the emergence of a small set of succesful, competing firms. Network externalities – the economies of scale on the side of demand – tend to lead towards a winner take all dynamic. Take the decisions inherent in deciding to speak a second language – if lots of other people learn how to speak Chinese, there’s a strong incentive for you to learn Chinese.

In the weighless economy, positive feedbacks and winner-take-all dynamics are very important. Those who get ahead will tend to stay ahead. They don’t need to be the best, just first and good enough. This dynamic tends to generate significant inequality – whether we’re considering pop stars or dentists. Private firms can’t confirm to the price equals marginal cost theory – marginal costs are much less than average costs because of the increased first copy costs. And property rights become both ambiguous and difficult to enforce.

In other words, the invisible hand isn’t working in a weightless economy. It might be time to look back to the Pleistocene.

Bowles has hunted with the Hadza people in Tanzania – he reassures us that he didn’t actually kill anything. Actually, that’s pretty common. The Hadza hunt kudu, an animal which contains about 160,000 calories. These people have no refrigeration, so it’s hard to eat your kudu over a month. And even very good hunters are lucky to kill a kudu once a month – there’s about a 3% success rate for a hunt. So when you get a kudzu, it needs to be widely shared. Something like 2/3rd of the calories are shared outside the nuclear family – Bowles watched roughly 60 people join a small set of hunters for a feast on the kudu they harvested.

The culture of the foraging band emphasizes generosity and modesty. There are norms of sharing. You depricate what you catch, describing it as “not as big as a mouse”, or “not even worth cooking”, even when you’ve killed a large animal. In the Ache people of Eastern Paraguay, hunters are prohibited from eating their own catch. There’s complex sanctioning of individually assertive behavior, particularly those that disturb or disrupt cooperation and group stability. This makes sense – if hunters can’t expect that they’ll be fed by other hunters – particularly by a hunter who suddenly develops a taste for eating his own catch – the society collapses rapidly.

Mobile foraging bands and accompanying collectivist and egalitarian norms were displaced by a society based around property rights, made possible through the domestication of crops and livestock. Initially, this domestication probably reduced individual human productivity… but it increased land productivity. This led to an idea that you should define a set of resource as yours and invest in those resources. This idea preceded states – they were enforced by interpersonal conflict, not by third parties – but the system became more efficient in a system with strong state actors.

As Smith speculated in “The Wealth of Nations”, the property rights revolution contributed to the wealth of states. It emphasized unambiguous ownership of land and resources. But now the most important resources – information and ideas – are difficult to own, risky to pursue, and wasteful if not shared. Strong property rights might not be the best strategy for allocating resources in this environment.

Bowles references Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, where Diamond explores the challenges of domesticating individual plant and animal species. “Is a song or an application more like a cow or like a kudzu – something that will simply cause trouble if you try to tie it up near your house?” This question leads to the phrase “kudunomics”, which has a nice resonance with “kudonomics”, reflecting the fact that the economies of hunter-gatherer societies were reputation economies.

Information, suggests Kenneth Arrow, is a fugitive resource. There are contradictions between private property and information acquisition and retention. In this sense, Arrow is replicating Marx, and his recognition that “information was what allowed us to appropriate nature.”

Studying changes in institutions is hard. In history, we rarely encounter changes as large as the French revolution or the end of Chinese foot binding. Instead, we’d do better to build agent-based simulations. Bowles and his group at Santa Fe are building Markov process models to try to understand the dynamics of this hunter/gatherer-pastoralist transition. It’s a hard problem to solve as a system of equations. There are events outside the model, and a complex interaction of group and individual selection processes. The feedback of a society on individual decisions is non-lineral. Because we can’t easily solve the equations, we build models and watch them instead.

Watching these models, we discover that they’ve got multiple equilibria. In economic terms, what’s goint on is an equilibrium selection process, watching societies transition between multiple equilibria in a system.

Bowles’s model (which you can download and run on a Window machine) looks at three different strategies for coping in an economy:

- Bourgeois – if you’re in posession of an item, defend it
- Share – Share and don’t punish those who don’t share
- Civic – share and jointly punish those who don’t share

The civic strategy succeeds if there are lots of civic members in a group. If there are very few, they tend to fail. This is one of the dynamics which leads to multiple equilibria in a system. The bourgeois strategy is stable (an asymptotically stable symmetric Nash equilibrium) if property rights are well defined. But if property rights are ill-defined, the bourgeois stragegy is no longer evolutionarily stable.

The simulation introduces costs for conflicts between “firms”, groups of individuals which share a strategy. Because there’s a cost to conflict, firms that resolve conflicts without much expenditure of energy are going to outlast those that spend resources on conflict. Individuals within these firms are paired with cultural models drawn from a group of possibilities, conveye by “conformist transmission”. Individuals might simply draw from neighbors, or might compare how others are doing and change strategy. Losing groups are not eliminated – instead, they lose resources and tend to adopt the cultural model of the winning group. Individuals who are in losing firms will have a strong tendency to adopt the strategy of winning firms.

In these simulations, some fraction of the time, a bourgeois player will challenge someone over a resource he doesn’t own – i.e., he’ll attempt to steal it. Because of this, if there are very few bourgeois, civics will do well, and vice versa.

It turns out that simulations where all actors are bourgeois are stable. The two strategies where sharing is involved are equivalent if there are no bourgeois actors. A smiluation might drift between sharing and civic strategies without outside influences. As a result, All C (civic) is not a stable equilibrium – it’s subject to drift. And all B (bourgeois) is not stable if property rights are not well defined.

With Jung-Kyoo Choi, Bowles built models with 25 firms of 20 individuals. They were randomly seeded with S,B,C actors and run with different levels of property rights. The property rights are varied by changing how often bourgeois actors challenge ownership incorrectly – to simulate high ambiguity in property rights, bourgeois actors challenge property rights incorrectly quite often. Actors in the simulation go through a cultural learning process – someone in a minority could choose a model in the majority.

If you run the simulation with no ambiguity in property rights, there is rapid consolidation around B as a strategy. We watch a live simulation, and Bowles points out that “the ‘equilibrium’ is actually pretty volatile – we watch societies cluster around b-heavy strategies. As ambiguity increases, we see an emergence of strategies that orbit between the civic and shared poles – societies appear to go through rapid revolutions, shifting from one set of societal rules to another. An all-shared equilibrium is more efficient because there’s no cost for enforcement, but it’s not a stable state, as previously discussed.

Bowles points out that the evolutionary success of the bourgeois equilibrium depends on property rights being unambiguous – he shows a curve of experimental data where stability tracks ambiguity in a cubic relationship.

As we consider evolution of institutions in the weightless economy, we know of at least three forms of economic governance: communities, states and markets. Markets allocate resources well in conditions where the individual hand applies. States have superior powers of enforcement, which allow for powerful civic strategies. And as Elinor Ostrom has pointed out, communities can handle ambiguity of property rights, but tend to fail where inequalities between members are large.

Hayek’s work questioned the efficiency of central planning versus that of the market. At the center of that question is information – in societies where information is easily available, central planning might be very efficient. If it’s harder to acquire information, markets can act to aggregate that information. To govern in these systems, you can either adjust prices to get an equilibrium or collect sufficient information to engage in efficient central planning. Ostrom suggests that we need different mechanisms to govern by communities.

Bowles closes by reminding us that societies need to support high levels of information creation. We need incentives to provide these resources in the first place. But there’s a paradox: Why do hunters hunt if they have to give it away? In the Ache society, hunters aren’t allowed any of what they catch – they could spend their hunting time harvesting fruit and tubers. Why don’t they? This question has important implications for the creation of information resources in a weightless economy.

David Weinberger has a good accounting of the questions and answers that followed Professor Bowles’s talk – I largely missed the Q&A, desperately trying to catch up with the substance of the talk!

Who pays for content and services on the internet?

My friend Bo Peabody thinks we should be asking not just whether ad-supported journalism is feasible, but whether ad-supported social networks will work. In a Washington Post op-ed titled “Twitter.org?“, Bo leverages his experience founding and running Tripod.com to suggest that social networking sites are misunderstood as content sites, and won’t be profitable as ad-supported properties. He suggests that, because these spaces are critically important digital public spheres, we should consider supporting them as nonprofits if necessary, but shouldn’t expect them to sustain themselves based on advertising. As I look more closely at Bo’s thinking, I’m concerned that advertising may not be a viable model to support anything other than search online, and that systems we are increasingly reliant on may be supported by the shakiest of foundations.

Bo may not be right that social networks need to become nonprofits – I’m interested in communities where participants are willing to pay for membership (see Dreamwidth or Metafilter as examples), or communities that might thrive via an alternative revenue stream (see Brian McConnell’s suggestion for how Skype could run a highly profitable Facebook or Twitter and generate more call traffic in the process.) But I’m increasingly convinced he’s right that advertising is a lousy way to support social network sites.

Internet advertising works extremely well in the context of a search engine. Many searches are intended to lead to transactions, so matching a paid ad to a query is sometimes a good user experience. Advertising can work well in the context of niche content – a website focused on cross-country skiing is a great place to advertise to cross-country skiiers, and there’s a decent chance they’re going to be interested in learning about your ski wax. Ads on sites like Facebook work much less well, and while targetting those ads based on demographics may make them more effective, that targeting doesn’t fix the core problem: people are using social network sites to communicate, not to consume content, and they don’t want to be bothered by ads when they’re communicating.

The good news – for users annoyed by ads, not for advertisers – is that we appear to learn very quickly how to ignore online advertising. comScore, a company that monitors user behavior on the web for advertisers, reported in 2007 that only 32% of internet users clicked on banner ads in a given month. By 2009, that number had fallen to 16% of internet users, and that a core 8% of all internet users – “Natural Born Clickers” (yes, that’s what they called the studies) – are responsible for 85% of all banner clicks on the web.

There’s at least two ways to spin this finding. comScore, which exists to provide information to advertisers and would be out of business if people stopped buying online ads, uses this data to make the case that advertisers should stop obsessing over clickthrough rates:

“The act of clicking on a display ad is experiencing rapid attrition in the current digital marketplace,” said Linda Anderson, comScore VP of marketing solutions and author of the study. “Today, marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84 percent of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. That’s precisely the wrong thing to do, because other comScore research has shown that non-clicked ads can also have a significant impact.”

Anderson may be referring to this study by Gian M. Fulgoni and Marie Pauline Mörn, which finds a modest increase in users visits to an advertised website based on being exposed to that site in banner ads, even if they didn’t click them. The argument is a traditional advertising one – you can’t know whether that particular billboard led a customer to find you, but we know that exposure to ads builds your brand, so buy more billboards. And you may or may not be surprised to learn that Fulgoni is the co-founder and CEO of comScore.

There’s another response to the clickthrough study: ask yourself whether you, personally, ever look at banner ads on the web. You probably don’t – you’re “banner-blind“. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen uses this term to explain a wealth of eye-tracking studies that illustrate web users’ almost uncanny ability to sift through a webpage and focus only on the parts that contain actual content. (He’s reported on this behavior since 1997.) Nielsen concludes that web users are so good at avoiding paying attention to ads that the only way to make an ad banner effective is to be deceptive and disguise it as content. At the same time, his studies suggest that search ads – ads that are sometimes helpful to users – aren’t filtered out in the same way.

comScore’s study suggests we – collectively – may be becoming more banner-blind over time. If only half as many users click banner ads as did two years back, we might conclude that those users have learned how to ignore banners in the interim. If comScore would release demographic data on the 8% who are inclined to click, we might be able to confirm these suspicions. If those 8% are new internet users, it suggests a future internet with mature users too savvy to pay attention to most forms of advertising.

In the meantime, here’s a thought, this one from danah boyd – anyone building a new, ad-supported social network is building a business on that 8%. Assume for the moment that I’m right and that those 8% are the newest and most naive users. We’re at 74% internet penetration in the US – there just aren’t that many new users who can come online and click those ads. Instead, that 8% may well represent new users from other parts of the world, where internet penetration is much lower and where new, naive users are still coming online.

Companies like Facebook aren’t planning the future of their business around these users. As Brad Stone and Miguel Helft pointed out in a New York Times article, “In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit“, some social network sites are beginning to question whether they’ll be able to continue providing services to users outside the US, Europe and other markets they perceive to be lucrative. The article points to efforts at MySpace and Facebook to provide lower-bandwidth products for developing nations, both to improve user experience and to cut costs in serving these markets. It’s possible to imagine a future in which Facebook, strapped for cash, focuses on providing services only to users their advertisers are interested in reaching. Technorati recently relaunched their blog search engine with a near-exclusive focus on English-language content, de-listing prominent non-English blogs – my guess is that the change reflects advertiser demands.

Internet users all over the world have access to a vast array of powerful publishing and communication tools. While some premium users pay for access to these tools, the vast majority do not. Whether we believe these tools can lead towards more transparent and democratic governance, or whether we’re skeptical of such cyberutopian ideas, it’s clear the internet would be a very different place if these tools weren’t available for free. If Facebook weren’t free, it would likely be orders of magnitude smaller… which would increase exclusivity, but lose some of its utility as a powerful tool for reconecting with lost friends. It would include fewer users from developing nations where credit cards are significantly less common. Optimised for membership revenues rather than for ad views, it would be a deeply different place.

Revenue models have a deep impact on digital spaces. Why’s Twitter growing so fast? My guess is that it’s because the founders are following the traditional social media playbook: attract a ton of users, promise to monetize them through targeted advertising, sell the company to a larger one for billions and never confront the difficulty of monetizing that ad space. We can imagine a different Twitter, one that decided to focus on digerati and first-movers – that space might have used invitations to control access or membership fees to limit growth. It would be less ubiquitous, more exclusive and have a different utility curve. Or consider a company like Demand Media, which publishes more that four thousand articles and video clips a day, all intended to answer commonly asked questions on search engines and create targeted advertising inventory. We tend to think of the Internet as a place where questions are answered by random people all over the world, organized into a useful collection by Google. What if those questions were answered hastily and poorly, all by the same company, through content commissioned for $20 a video? Demand Media focuses on the business model first, and appears to be positioned to reshape the biggest internet space of all – the search and content space – in the process.

Fernando Bermejo sent me a paper of his, “Audience manufacture in historical perspective: from broadcasting to Google“, which suggests that researchers have a “blind spot” when it comes to considering the power of revenue models in media environments. He references a debate, sparked by Canadian social scientist Dallas Smythe, who suggested that communications research overfocused on the cultural side of communications and didn’t pay enough attention to the economic dimensions. Fernando worries that we’re doing the same thing today, ignoring the pervasive influence advertising has on the contemporary internet environment.

I suspect he’s right. We’re far more likely to discuss peer production, open-source models or collaboration at the Berkman Center than we are to discuss how advertising might shape the future of Facebook. I spend far more time trying to figure out how activists are finding clever ways to use social media and how those uses may be shaping these tools that I do considering how ad models are shaping these tools. “Blind spot” is putting it mildly

In our defense – it’s hard to study advertising. The data’s hard to get – it’s carefully controlled and tends to be released with large price tags on it, while participatory media projects tend to release usage data and welcome analysis. And researchers tend to be biased towards what we’re inspired by – I’m fascinated and inspired by independent and citizen media, so I pay attention to them, even if most of the use of social network tools is for communication, not for media publishing,

What if the social internet as we know it is being built on sand, on ads that almost no one looks at now and fewer will look at in two years? What if we’re optimizing tools for advertising audiences that don’t exist and turning aside models for social media built on membership fees or premium services? What if my assertions and speculations are wrong, and advertising’s a sure-fire way to build the social web?

I’m realizing that I (and probably anyone studying social media) need to understand at a much deeper level how advertising really works, because it shapes the systems I study, the systems we increasingly rely on. We need to know who those 8% of users who were “born to click” are, and we need to think about what happens if they stop clicking.

My colleague Hal Roberts has been hard at work on a fascinating research question: where in the world are the websites we pay attention to? It’s an important question for his work on surveillance – if most of the popular sites for Chinese audiences are hosted in mainland China (they are), then surveillance doesn’t have to occur at the edges of the national network, but within China.

The question is critical for my research, too. I’m interested in whether we’re more or less cosmopolitan in an internet age than we were in earlier media ages. One proxy for cosmopolitanism could be the ratio of domestic to international news sites that are popular in a given country – we might consider a country that looks abroad for news coverage to be more cosmopolitan than one where most media attention is focused on domestic sites.

For both of our research, we need really good data on global language distribution. It appears that country that acts as a center for a global language, as China does for Chinese, or France for French, will tend to have a higher degree of locality than a country in a language’s periphery (Algeria for French or Taiwan for Chinese). To test this – and to see if it’s hiding other factors that explain our data, we need to know how many people in a given country are fluent in a given language. And we need to know, or be able to calculate, what percent of a language’s speakers are located in one country or another.

Hal’s been discovering that this is really tough data to get. The CIA World Factbook has data for about half the countries we’re interested in, and we need data for all. Ethnologue is focused on mother tongues, which leads to weird distortions in the data. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in Tanzania speaks Swahili, less than 5% speak it as a mother tongue, so it shows up as a minority language in Ethnologue’s data. Wolfram Alpha seems to have what we need… but you’re banned from scraping Alpha, and there’s no source for their data, which leaves us very reluctant to use it. The data on Wikipedia isn’t especially helpful – it’s largely extracted from either CIA or Ethnologue, and not well footnoted.

I’m posting the question in the hopes that one of the brilliant folks who reads this blog might have a line on a data set for us, or could pass this query to someone who does. We need information on who speaks what where, what percentage of a language’s speakers globally are in a particular country, we need to know the source of the data, and we would greatly prefer to work with open data. If you’ve got any leads, please post ‘em in the comments, or drop me a line. Thanks in advance.

There are many things I admire about my friend and colleague, David Weinberger: his intellectual curiosity, his generosity with his time and guidance, his sense of humor… One facet of David I most admire is his willingness to think in public. Most people who speak for a living (as David does, and as I aspire to do) use well-worn and carefully roadtested material. David is brave enough to put new ideas in front of audiences and work through new ideas, live and in public. And we’re lucky enough at the Berkman Center lunch today to hear his new talk, “What Information Was: Bits, Links and the Iron Rule of Irony”, an exploration of issues that David is starting to think about and wrestle with.

David starts with the provocative question, “How did we become the information age?” We’re moving out of that age and into a new one, one we haven’t named and don’t even understand yet. So we’re at a good point to reflect on this closing age and ask, “Why did information become the central metaphor?”

Information has been a cradle to grave metaphor for this age. David tells us that, if he were to stand up and say, “DNA is not information” – we’d probably think I was anti-science and an idiot. But DNA doesn’t come labeled with base-pairs. When we look at DNA, we see information… but DNA is a squiggly little molecule, a physical thing. It’s helpful to consider it as information and analyze it that way… but it’s a molecule.

Ray Kurzweil represents the “grave” side of the metaphor. Kurzweil’s “Age of Spiritual Machine” asks “when will we have computers large enough to model the brain, and allow Kurzweil to pour himself into a computer and survive his own death… .” Our willingness to consider this idea – the idea that a computer running a model of Kurzweil’s brain, the idea that this even makes sense to us, shows us that we think of ourselves as information.

In epistomology, we’ve traditionally considered sensation, perception, and judgement. In the past century, we’ve added “sense data” to this paradigm, and in the last fifty years, added information. We tend to consider information to be a basic constituent of the human mind. Stephen Wolfram argues that the universe itself is made from information – he suggests that the univese can be thought of in terms of cellular automota, reductions to pure information.

Despite the fact that we’ve reconsidered huge aspects of our culture in terms of information, we’re extremely bad at answering the question, “What is information?” Weinberger cites Ronald Day, who mentions that he’s discovered roughly 200 definitions of information. There’s a technical definition for the term, but that’s almost never what we mean.

There’s a conventional history of information, which moves from the Jaquard loom through Babbage, through Hollerith, through Turing and Shannon. But that history is a reading back into the 19th century of a concept that we didn’t have, a Shannonian definition of information. Instead, David proposes we look at Babbage and see how he considered information, long before Shannon’s information theory. Babbage uses the word “information” 28 times in his autobiography. Initially, he’s talking about information as “something you didn’t know, and now you do.” The second use is as “the contents of a table” – a set of data that was useful to the railroad industry.

In 1948, Claude Shannon took over the term and introduced a new definition for it. He did this for “noise” as well, and redefined them with highly technical meanings which allowed us to discuss the carrying capacity of different channels. In this definition, information is “a sequence of choices from a finite set of elementary symbols” which can be transmitted.

The history of information starts with simple definitions, takes a detour into complex mathematics, and then becomes a metaphor for… well… everything. So what enabled information to take over the world? Its utility, and its politics. But David’s interested in the implications of the metaphor:

Information scales. Information allows corporations to grow to new sizes. But the secret of the information age is that information works by reducing the amount of information – you simplify individuals to the simple categories you decide are important. Information helped companies only because we made the decision to strip things down.

In that paradigm, we might reduce an employee as a few database fields – name, title, social security number, salary. Now, we might represent an employee as a Facebook page – a vast set of connections, an abundance of information. Links aren’t about stripping down – they’re about expanding the universe. In an age of abundance – an abundance of good stuff and of crap – we’re actually better at managing the crap than the good stuff. We still use email because we’ve figured out how to avoid the crap.

We’re less aware of the good stuff – we believe that good ideas are fairly scarce, and this turns out not to be true… and this may be what’s killing newspapers. Institutions that depend on scarcity start to fail in an age of abundance. These institutions used to separate signal from noise. But that’s the wrong way to think about things today – we’ve got an abundance of signal, not of noise.

Information is a resource. We can query information and we can fetch from it. Alternatively, we can navigate it, entering a space. We thought about this a lot in the information age – think of a movie like Tron where we enter into data, becoming an avatar. We also thought about ourselves as being engulfed and threatened by information, like Katherine Hepburn in “The Desk Set“. These days, we routinely think of ourselves as entering the web space. The web and the real world are now so integrated, we can’t bring our children out of this space – they’re on their phones, in virtual space at he same time as the real world.

We used to measure our ability to query and fetch information in terms of precision and recall – did we get what we were searching for? Did we get all of it? In a world where we query trillions of pages, we’ve begun to think about relevance and interestingness. Precision and recall are generally less important, especially in the gigantic world of the web. Relevance has to do with whether information meets your needs; interestingness is obviously an idiosyncratic characteristic. We’re no longer using objective metrics – we’re using deeply personal ones.

Bits apply to everything. Nothing escapes being “bitified”. And we have a sense for what bits are – David quotes Gregory Bateson: “bits are a difference that make a difference”. A bit measures some sort of difference. While we talk about “atoms versus bits”, we don’t talk about “atoms versus links”. Bits are useful because they can apply to everything – “plain or peanut M&Ms, Kurzweil is or is not in the machine”. With these distinctions, we can build models that are coextensive with the world. They apply to everything, or almost everything.

We can only do this because bits are unlike atoms. We believe that atoms actually exist. Bits don’t have that same, objective reality. The holes in a punchcard are bits – the holes in your shoes are not. Bits have to be in a system, a system that is highly regularized or standardized. If you punched holes in a card at random, they wouldn’t be bits – they’d be noise.

There are a hundred billion neurons in Ray Kurzweil’s brain. We could model his brain in a swirling cloud of dust, somewhere out in the universe – a piece swirling to the left could be a 1, to the right, a 0. Somewhere, if we consider the left and right spin of clouds of dust, we have a model of Ray Kurzweil’s brain as it was in the ten minutes when he first met his wife and fell in love. But this is absurd – reverse the spin, and we’ve got an entirely different representation. Bits are not real.

When we turn the continuous, real-world into bits, we need to decide what our resolution is. That resolution is different between a satellite map and mapping each rock on a coastline. Bits depend on our resolution, what we’re intending to do. This is true in computers as well – we decide to measure certain voltages as positive or negative, ones or zeros, based on a defining line.

Bits are about reducing distinctions to the simplest possible states – black or white, yes or no. They simplify. The web, by contrast, is a web of links. They agree, they amplify, they endorse, they denounce, they connect. Those links aren’t as simple as on and off – they build an enormously complex and intricate world, an abundance of rich, linguistic human intentions.

Information explains communication. At the very beginning of his critical essay on information, Shannon makes it clear that he’s not talking about semantics. But he introduces a very clear, formal model: Information is created by a sender, encoded, put through a channel, decoded and delivered to a recipient. Warren Weaver, who is credited as developing this model with him, acknowledges at the beginning of his seminal book that communication has a much broader sense – not just written and oral communications, but music, theatre, ballet and all human behavior. So why did the Shannon-Weaver Mathematical Model – an extremely narrow, formal model – turn into what we think communication is?

We adopted a conduit metaphor for communication before information theory, a vision of communications that looks like tin cans with a string between them. Communication isn’t a signal that’s a vibration in the air – it’s an act within a world where people share context and concerns. So why is the tin can model so powerful for us?

Descartes solved the mind-body problem, culminating a long tradition in western philosophy. He explains that we live in mental images, not just in the real world. It’s a lonely view of the world: each of us live by ourselves, in our own mental images of the world. In that space, communication has to be the act of communicating a worldview into another person’s heads. This is, “strictly speaking, a pathological, schizophrenic metaphysics.”

A less schizophrenic vision is that two individuals share a world, share perceptions and concerns. There is something interesting and relevant to them, and by talking, one may now see the world differently than before. Yes, there are vibrations in the air. But the tin can model of communications strips out everything that’s important – it’s a bad, incomplete, way of understanding communications.

In Shannon and Weaver’s model, communication is content, transmitted through a medium, disrupted by noise. That makes some sense – the model was developed in part in response to studies of communication during wartime. If you want to understand communications and start from the battlefield, then communication looks like a challenge that needs to be overcome – how the hell do we ever communicate? It’s a model based on examining the failure of something, not based on examining how communication actually takes place. That’s something we often do in our culture – we study failure, not a functioning system, and that study can lead to weird distortions in our understanding.

Hyperlinks, on the other hand, assume a path through an existing world. They’re generative paths – making a new hyperlink increases the abundance of that world. In the age of links, we assume that communication is possible, not a challenge. This model breaks the information age understanding of communication.

We can build models of anything using bits. We’re all familiar with the critiques of models – we’ve just seen models of a financial system lead towards massive disruption. The Department of Energy required a 10,000 year model to evaluate storage of nuclear material at Yucca Flats. This helps show the absurdity of models – we assume regularity and predictability, but there’s all sorts of possibilities that we can’t model. (David shows us dinasaours destroyed by asteroids – “didn’t plan for that!”) Models exclude that which doesn’t fit. They inherently deny the abundance of the world, the overflowing, uncapturable abundance of the world. And they’re purely formal – they leave something critical out: the body.

A bit is a measurement, the measurement of a difference. Any other measurement measures something in particular – weight, length. Bits just measure difference, which means they apply to everything. But the world never shows itself to us merely as a difference – it only presents itself in particular ways, differences between things we perceive in light, warmth, texture. The pure formality of bits comes from the fact that they are exactly how the world is not.

Returning to the Shannon-Weaver model, David asks us to focus on noise – the disruption in the system. But the noise is the world. The world shows up in Shannon’s diagram as the problem with the system. “In the system of abundant hyperlinks – this abundant system which is beyond systemization – we’re embracing, not avoiding the noise”. On the internet, we know that this information is interesting to at least one person because they put it there. It is a web of noise – that’s where it gets its strength.

Moving from the age of information to the age of noise on the web, the problem might be that the web is not noisy enough – we’re not appreciative enough of the differences.

I was catching up with David’s words and wasn’t able to accurately transcribe the questions. But I caught John Palfrey’s question, which asked David whether this new project represented a shift from the normative to the descriptive. Intercepting, and making the question much less polite, I rephrased, “So what?”

David argues that there is no “so what” – he’s intrigued by the idea that we embraced this broken model of the world. But it’s not a prescriptive or polemic project, he argues. I beg to differ – I think he’s starting to articulate a vision of a linked age, rather than an information age, and starting to think about the implications of how that age might work. And I suspect that he’ll be talking about those implications in the next few talks…

David offers an outline of his talk on his blog, though he tells me that the outline is an earlier version of the presentation. J’s of J’s scratchpad offers her notes from the talk as well – might be useful as a complement to my account here.

US politicians talk a lot about Main Street. But what does Main Street actually look like in contemporary America? That’s what Harvard PhD students Jesse Shapins and James Burns, and journalist Kara Oehler, along with public radio producer Ann Heppermann, are doing with their “collaborative documentary”, “Mapping Main Street“.

Shapins, Burns and Oehler are speaking at Berkman today explaining the nature of a documentary which is attempting to document what’s happening on the 10,466 streets named “Main” in the US. They’ve accumulated photos and videos of 400 of these streets – a little under than 5% of the whole set. Only 80 of those streets have been mapped by the project’s initiators – the others have been mapped through submissions from the public.

Why create a “new map of the country through stories, data, photos and video recorded on actual main streets”? There’s lots of political and artistic theory inspiring the work, Jesse tells us:

- Bruno LaTour’s idea of the crisis of representation. The images and turns of phrases in today’s networked publics shape political sensibilities, capacities for action, and therefore we need to closely consider those representations and their implications.

- Russian/Soviet avant-garde filmmakers and media critics. Jesse cites “Man With A Movie Camera” by Dziga Vertov, a provocative 1929 film that is a reflection both on modernity and on filmmaking, editing, the audience and the process of media itself as well as “Art as Technique” by Victor Shklovsky. Shklovsky warns us that we take aspects of our lives for granted, leaving them unquestioned. Art’s role is to bring the unconscious, the ignored into consciousness: “to make the stone stony.”

- Robert Frank’s famous 1950s photo series, “The Americans” and earlier series from the 1930s shot by photographers for the Farm Security Administration

- The idea of the “deep map”, put forward at the Stanford Humanities Lab, a map that overlays the historical and contemporary, the artistic and geographic, the multiple layers of geography.

James, trained as an economist, argues that a belief in causal relationships leads to a reductive understanding of data, data as a descriptor of cause. By playing with a data set “that no sane economist would ever be interested in,” James hopes to understand data in a more complex, less reductive fashion.

In practical terms, Kara tells us, this has meant that the researchers piled into a 1996 Subaru and started visiting Main Streets. The first trip took them from Boston to Chicago. Kara notes that street interviews – vox pops – usually yield one response out of three. “But everyone talks to you on Main Street.” From May to August, the team travelled 12,000 miles, stopping at hundreds of Main Streets.

They produced a series for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, which began with a focus on Chatanooga, whose Main street features both a small portion revitalized with galleries and restaurants, and a stretch used primarily for prostitution. The story follows a couple, one making a run to buy drugs, the other reflecting on her history turning tricks on the street.

Not all the media is a radio story – they’ve asked four songwriters to offer musical reflections on Main Street. Their site incorporates a set of main street photos contributed by photography students… and anyone can contribute a photo by posting it to Flickr, tagging it with “main street” and the location, and submitting it to the Mapping Main Street group.

If you visit the Mapping Main Street site and search for a city, you’ll see footage if the project has captured any. Otherwise, you’ll see a Google Maps view – the view the producers tell us they’re trying to move away from – and an invitation to submit your own media. The project serves both as a “relational navigator” (driven by similar tags) of this data and as an archive of professional and user-submitted media.

Questions include:

Q: How do you manage user contributions, authentication?
A: We’ve put the responsibility onto the media hosting sites, like Flickr.

Q: Is there demographic data included in your set?
A: Not yet, but we could incorporate it. But we don’t want people to encounter the summary statistics as much as we want them to encounter the impressions.

Q: Are you getting a bias of submission based on what Main Streets are popular and which are abandoned? Can we condition the behavior of content producers?
A: We’re using a simple algorithm for “interestingness” to push people towards unexpected places. If we’re getting a bias in submissions, we could use that to drive people to different locations for producing media.

Q: Is there a political output of the project? A path towards civic engagement?
A: A lot of people felt like Main Street was extremely unrepresentative of their town. (This was acutely felt in Chatanooga.) Others felt like Main Street focused attention on stories that we too often ignore. The project itself is a wedge to provoke debate.

Q: Given that the audio stories synthesize, while the user submissions are pontillistic, what decisions go into making media from Main Street?
A: The decision was not to have rules about what was submitted. Originally, the project suggested ten things to photograph on Main Street, but we ended up removing that suggestion after going out and shooting Main Street ourselves.

Q: Robert Frank’s work was very focused on people. Your project so far seems to be shooting architecture. Is that okay?
A: Actually, there are six hundred photos tagged with people thus far. But there’s an attempt not to look for the classic “small town America” photo.

Q: What do you do when “main street” isn’t your main street?
A: What’s interesting is the places where Main Street takes you to a part of town you normally wouldn’t go to.

Q: What’s the strategy for including the voices of youth in the project?
A: Teachers are already using the project without our intervention. And we’ve been approached by more people than we can actually respond to.

Q: There are at least two levels on which politics play into this: the national symbol of Main Street and small town America – this project may open up that meaning. On the local level, it might close down meaning – Main Street can define a town in unwanted ways. Is the project in opposition to itself?
A: Main Street can force us to look away from the monument, the other part of town, where we might usually look.

Q: How long do you keep going?
A: Perhaps until we get all ten thousand. Visualizing progress is going to be very important – looking forward to the moment where there’s one dot left.

Q: In most places, even if Main Street is now run down, the intention was for the Main Street to be the center. It might be nice to have that history included with the documentation.
A: We’ve had people share some bits of older imagery. You could develop a lot of subprojects within the project.

Q: You say you want to capture Main Streets at a particular place in time, but the project is evolving over time. Have you thought about visualizing the passage of time?
A: We’ve got data on the dates taken, at least on new photos. It’s a cool idea and a good point.

Q: What happens when the photos you have online aren’t representative of Main Street? Or represent one part and not another?
A: We could move towards a panorama or more geographic information. But thus far, we’ve been trying to make it as simple as possible, not taking into account geo-tagged information.

Q: What does it mean to curate the Internet as an archive?
A: We’ve got unbelievable amounts of information online, produced in different media formats. Archives tend to be closed, undemocratic institutions. But the internet is helping the archive transition to the database. This project is database-driven, taking bits and pieces of Vimeo and Flickr and curating them into an archive.