Tech and Kenyan Blogs

Oh heavens, I haven't been around at this blog for a long time. Like every space I inhabit, its in dire need of cleaning up. For the time being, excuse the clutter.

The impetus for this post comes from a post at The Black Campaign, Tech Killed the Kenyan Blog. It was cross-posted to A Kenyan Urban Narrative and the comments seem better there. Njorge Matathia has slightly different voices for the two blogs, and The Black Campaign might be his "yuppie" voice, while A Kenyan Urban Narrative the voice of Potash champion of ordinary Kenyans. Anyhow, the post fits both places well, as it begins with:

Days I miss: when Kenyan blogs were about stories. The politics of every day- the Kenyan way of life relived by voices hitherto unknown- and not big politics.

I posted one of my too long comments on his subsequent posts and he wrote me an email suggesting that I do my own blog post--very tactfully I might add. The picture is a screen shot of Trevor Horn of the Buggles from their 70's music video Video Killed the Radio Star. Back in those days the question was Beta or VHS--rival videotape formats. It wasn't so much that videos were new, but that people could record videos on a home machine to video tape. Technology advances, but it's never easy to predict what the ramifications of technology will be.

I like the edition of the post at A Kenyan Urban Narrative because that blog goes back to the times Potash is nostalgic for, and most of those who left comments there do too. A shared history is a big part of stories.

Matathia remembers the early day of Kenyan blogs when people were telling stories and linking to each other's blog posts. He writes of that time:

The parochialism was not only charming, it put fluency and local colour into the blogs and for one moment a pastiche of an immensely stratified and arbitrary nation called Kenya was starting to emerge.

He laments the passing of a a truly Kenyan-flavored network :

The pan-African curators or the African Internet’s power axis- chugging deux ex machina like in the background, all along- came to the fore and absorbed the Kenyan blogosphere into a broader African Internet narrative.

The common ground of this new narrative is around technology.

Of course the Kenyan context is particular, but there's a general issue of how to knit communities together and what role technology plays. In the the state of Vermont in the USA is a forum to knit at the very local level called the Front Porch Forum. We'll see lots more efforts to encourage such very local communications online. A part of these efforts are tech issues, but the bigger part are community issues. The good old days of the Kenyan Blogs weren't so local as the Vermont Front Porches and many writers imagined an even wider audience. Still, in having come together for a time there was a body of particularly Kenyan content online which coincided with more Kenyans accessing the Web. But now there is so many more venues for content what's missing is perhaps the sense that these sites present a uniquely Kenyan voice.

To promote their second studio album 82 the "experimental boy band" Just a Band uploaded a film to YouTube Makmende Returns highlighting the track "Ha-He" from the album. At Facebook the JaB fan page has about 3,659 fans. The Makmende fan page has got over 17,000 all in about a week's time. I don't have the patience to scroll through the fans, but it looks to me the majority are Kenyan. The YouTube video has about 23,000 views as I look tonight. I suspect that it's not so easy for people in Internet cafes in Kenya to watch the video at YouTube. I'm really curious if the video has gone viral in Kenya, and how? All their videos are cool. Makmende is particularly enjoyable to me because I'm old enough to remember the 70's when the Blaxploitation movies the video appropriates were popular.

Just a Band are multi-media artists. Matathia raises the point in his post that part of what did-in the Kenyan blogs was that the curation of them somehow escaped Kenyan borders. JaB is an example of artists using online social media effectively, and to an extent "effectively" means not holding on too tight but allowing the content to flow. I'm not sure for example that hundreds of Makmende jokes posted a day is sustainable, but the fan page will live on. Part of the appeal of blogs is the commitment to them is over a longer time than fan pages require. Perhaps the difference in numbers at Facebook between JaB's fan page and the Makmende fan page has to do with the sense that the jokes at the Makmende page won't be fresh forever so might as well be enjoyed "in season." In the present it's a gathering place for Kenyans all over.

Update: Ethan Zuckerman Makmende's so huge, he can't fit in Wikipedia

In the Kenyan blogs today perhaps the Gay blogs come as close to the sort of community that Matathia laments passing. Those blogs certainly are not overly concerned about tech subjects--although in general it seems that blogs by Africans are quick to adopt useful widgets. While these bloggers talk mostly about the scene in Kenya, certainly they also keep and eye out for a pan-African perspective. And no matter what the content of blogs or where they are written, it's a feature not a bug that people everywhere can blunder into them. Yet gay-themed blogs are perhaps too parochial in the sense that Kenyans looking for Kenyan content can easily by-pass them never really knowing they exist. There probably are many other subset of Kenyan blogs I don't know about.

Afrigator is a way to discover Kenyan blogs. Also since the blogs are rated by popularity it seems to provide some data to test Matathia's hypothesis about the tech take-over. I'm not sure how to do that somewhat objectively, but just pursuing the blogs I'm left with and equivocal yea and nay.

Matathia writes:

The death of Story came when Bloggers turned into professionals- Internet authorities. Suddenly the broadcaster and his equipment became more important than the broadcast.

Looking over the top blogs at Afrigator does to my mind reinforce the idea of "Internet authorities." There are almost 700 Kenyan blogs listed and I think since people sign up for Afrigator there's probably a selection bias towards tech-savvy people there.

I'm not so sure about the equipment becoming more important than the broadcast. Part of the problem is "broadcast" really doesn't quite describe what's happening with the new technologies. Bloggers are often putting content on different channels, like Facebook. But all of the channels also have feedback options so that readers can engage. Online content is peer to peer, many to many, so not quite like broadcast as we are used to thinking of it.

Facebook makes connections visible. Just in a cursory way I was looking at a few profiles linked from Kenyan blogs to Facebook and discovering that quite often mutual friends show up. I've never been to Kenya and am not especially connected so this surprises me. It is true that often the links are cyberactivists, For better or worse my connections have endured hearing my stories and I've heard stories too. I think that less than a hand full of my network at Facebook is from knowing people through the blogs they write. There are many venues for telling stories now.

One conclusion following from the observation that I, some random white guy in Western Pennsylvania, seems to have at least one connection made visible to the Kenyan blogosphere, is that the online world really is small. Potash with A Kenyan Urban Narrative surely has tried to provide a voice for those seldom heard. He admits that lots of regular folks are using Twitter and Facebook now and wants them to up their game, going beyond banal descriptions of their day-to-day towards the meanings they discover. Blogging for most requires more time than the 15 and 20 minute bites on the Internet most people buy. The short tweets, status updates and jokes are enough to say "I'm here!" and provide more bang for the buck. Some of my contacts to the Kenyan blogosphere are Western activists, but others are Kenyans who collect characters online.

Online participation in many frameworks to model it have watchers at the base. the simple observation that many more people will see something you put online than respond to it in a visible way. Beth Kanter provides a more descriptive framework from Forest Social Technographics: watching, sharing, commenting, producing and curating at the top. I'm no tech maven, but Matathia pins the blame on the demise of stories on Kenyan blogs not just on "Tech" but also with the curation of blog content. So I want to think aloud a bit more about curration, and who the curators might be.

Valdis Krebs uses social network analysis and blogs about it at TNT-The Network Thinker. In this post he provides a very simple diagram of a network and asks about it: "Where would you put your message?" The post gets rather involved, but a simple message is that very connected people aren't just the people who are so obviously connected. The Forest framework of course is about connections and the base who simply watch and don't post also don't curate much, but the other actions: sharing, commenting and producing seem to me to contain a bit of curation in them.

When I looked at my Facebook connections to prominent Kenyan bloggers one of my most productive links is a Kenyan fellow, I won't name in case to offend him. He doesn't blog and I don't see him putting much up at Facebook. I know him from the old Omidyar social network and now Ned. He's most active there participating in recreational games an posting an occasional wry comment in threads. Our direct correspondence isn't too extensive, yet we both know about each other from watching posts, and I think we are both what others might call slightly off-beat characters. I don't know him from comments on Kenyan blogs I read, although it's quite possible he uses an Internet handle; it's also possible that he doesn't comment much on them which is what I suspect is the case. Nevertheless, in looking at my social network as revealed by Facebook, he's one of my most direct connections to it.

Topping the framework modeling online engagement with curation implies there are very few curators. Probably the number of people who identify as curators online is few in number. And I think most of us do think there ought to be more sites online that join together various content in unique ways. Curation is also a collective activity. Just a Band is a great band and they bring together creative people in producing wonderful videos and shows. I'm sure they knew in advance that their promotional video staring Makmende would get attention, but it seems the popularity of the Facebook Makmende fan page probably came as a surprise. Just in my dilly-dallying with this post the number of fans has increased from 17,000 to 25,000 and counting--eight times the number of fans on the JaB fan page. I don't think all these people are new fans of JaB, but rather joining in the fun of Makmende is what enticed them to go a step further than just watching.

The length of this post is a good sign that I've not gotten around to making any point, so summing up is pointless, nevertheless her goes: One of the points I thin Njorge Matathia makes in his post is that the wide variety of venues for posts has diluted the availability of Kenyan stories online. Everyone got so interested in the tools that they forgot the stories. But the tools have changed the stories being told too. Blogs are still one of the best ways for people to make pages to share online with others. Facebook is getting lots of new folks accustomed to putting stuff online, and when it comes to making pages they might well choose to do it there. There are advantages to blogs versus the walled-garden sites. I like very much that Potash and Njorge use Facebook to get people to his blog because it demonstrates some of these advantages. One of the big advantages of blogs is there are hundreds of great Kenyan blogs all with social networks that often touch Facebook but expand beyond it.

There is also a point that I haven't addressed, as this post is too long already won't in any depth right now, that can be stated as a question: "How is an artist to make money nowadays?" JaB provides some clues of what it is to make something of a living from music, but written works, story authorship isn't just the same. I'll talk about this problem in a subsequent post.

Stories

I'm disappointed the picture doesn't show much detail. It looks funerary because it is indeed a shot inside a funeral home. When my mother died her remains were cremated, so for the visitation and memorial service we wanted something there to remind people of Mother. We emptied out a cupboard and filled it with artifacts from her life. There's a quilt she sewed under a piece of an old woven bedspread which we pinned photos. In the cupboard there's her sewing basket and a notebook with recipes. The Srabble board is open with the yellow pad we kept score. In her last days she wasn't always too coherent, but still managed to beat me in a game. Her vocabulary was immense.

This trope worked very well, there are too many little details to point out in the cupboard, but you get the picture. After we gathered together to say our prayers and sing our songs, we closed the door and locked it. Then a few of the grandchildren carried the chest to my mother's pickup truck to load it on for a parade back to our house for food. Along the parade home the chest fell over, and very nearly off the truck. That was funny and appropriate because my mother was always strapping something to the car to transport and on a few occasions she actually did loose the load. Where do stories like this fit?

This story has nothing to do with Kenya, I've never traveled to Kenya and nor did my mother. But I'm still ruminating on Njorge Matathia's post Tech Killed The Kenyan Blog. The cupboard we quickly filled with artifacts which somehow told stories about my mother occurred to me because those artifacts were so physical. And I wondered about the artifacts we create in cyberspace and the issue of curation which Matathia raises. I'm sure he making a good point, but it's so hard for me to place the blame on "tech."

Umair Haque has a new post up, The Social Media Bubble which seems to me to be making a similar point in a more general context; essentially that our online relationships are too thin and insubstantial. I'm not sure I agree with him either. I do note that the number of responses to his post seem greater in number than usual. Some of the comments are strongly in agreement, but most seem to offer nuance. Haque writes:

Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

I certainly have "lasting" relationships from online connections. What's true of most of these relationships is a great physical distance between us, but I'm loathe to think that the distance makes these relationships less than real.

There is some quite brilliant writing on blogs--I certainly haven't produced any. While I do seek out brilliant writing, I'm quite happy reading the quick and ready writing that's more common online. If friends were to memorialize me with my online writing, it's not clear what the story would show. Clearly that I'm a poor speller and proof reader would be evident, but that's not much of a story. Social media has introduced me to profound friendships that I'm truly grateful for. But my own online content when viewed objectively reveals a shoddy quality, and I'm hardly alone.

What I think both Matathia and Haque critiques have in common is a question of how to increase the thickness and quality of both personal relationships and content produced online. Both note the central importance of authentic relationships to such production. Certainly being in the same room can help forge authentic relationships, but there's no guarantee. There seems a certain similar ambiguity about content, like online writing. Physical content, like the the objects in we put into the cupboard to tell stories about my mother, seem to have authenticity that's hard to quibble with. Content displayed online seems to invite more quibbling. For people of a certain age works in print have a special sort of authenticity.

I'm very much in favor of beautifully made books with exquisite content. But I also like the idea of very inexpensive books. I want children to have stories they can enjoy and share with their friends. I want text books cheap enough for every school to afford to have them. It's easy to imagine that e-book readers in the near future will be inexpensive. I like the idea of e-book, but still think that printed books have a future. What's true right now is that computers and the Internet make the editorial production side of inexpensive books easier than before.

I noted with interest something Dimitri Orlov has done in part to help raise some funds so he can continue writing a book he's working on. Here's how he puts it:

Two years and just under a million unique visitors later it is time for this blog to ask for something back. But instead of an endless beg-a-thon, I've decided to give my readers something valuable in return for their donations: anyone who donates in excess of $20 will receive a numbered, autographed copy of a limited edition book which contains five of the most significant (and longest) essays I have published between 2005 and 2009.

So he's self-published a book of some of his Internet writing to participially fund writing a proper book. I like that. Perhaps it's because I'm "of a certain age," that makes me love books so. It's more than that, I think, books are a remarkable invention.

Dimitri Orlov writes about collapse of civilizations. When in that state of mind I often wonder about lost technologies, for example the scraping of movable type printing presses. I'm not really sure what the best sort of printing process for really cheap books is. Very expensive printing presses can cheaply produce mass quantities of books, there's already a market model for that kind of production. What I'm interested in finding is a printing process that's cheap for a more distributed production model. Back before photocopiers were common there were mimeograph machines, distinct from spirit duplicators to which people my age have a nostalgic attachment to from the aroma of the alcohol that lingered on the sheets. Mimeographs used cut stencils, the common method was to use a typewriter to cut the stencils, although the stencils could be cut by hand writing with a pen or stylus.

I had thought the mimeograph process had become extinct, but modern versions of the machines are quite neat. They use scanner technology and a thermal head to cut the stencil. The printing is faster and cheaper than toner-based photocopiers. And for runs of up to about 5,000 pages cheaper than offset printing. The machines are not cheap, but cheaper than many photocopiers. They are however heavy and so not as portable as the older mimeograph machines. Once the pages have been printed binding the books is something that could be done with little investment in tools, and various investments in time.

I strongly suspect that I'm missing something essential about this, because if it's such a good idea why aren't people already doing it?

I'm not sure of the right formula, there actually probably are many formulas which are "right." I do think that print is far from being obsolete, so that one of the key challenges is to find ways to bring some writing and make it live in print. One of the attributes of online writing is that it's often done for free or entailing very little monetary reward. The habit of thought about printed works always seems to point in the direction of requiring lots of money. Thinking really cheap seems to open all sorts of new possibilities.

I was with friends last night telling stories around a bon fire. The moon lit the woods in wonderful moonlight and no other setting I can think of is more conducive to telling stories. In regards to one idea or another a friend said that ideas are like a generally unmentioned--at least in polite company--human orifice, and we've all got one.

One of the reasons that I have tried to encourage my friends in meatspace to pay more attention to developments in Africa, comes around to a view that much of the technology we currently take for granted is unsustainable over the long term. In response interest in what E. F. Schumacher called intermediate technology strikes me as really good to cultivate. And from my obnoxiously privileged vantage point I make comments like: "If it works in Africa, it can work anywhere." I do think that a distributed publishing model of printed work has real potential in Africa. But what I'm realizing now is that making something work where I am has the same potential; i.e. what works for a poor guy in Pennsylvania might also work in Africa. It's hardly a new idea, I'm a late comer to zine culture. Still I think cheap books are a good idea, and the thing for me to do is to start making some!

Fitting in Our World Society

The bronze is of Toussaint L'Overture and is one of my favorite sculptures by Dr. John Moossy. Haiti is on my mind and I expect I'll say a bit about the situation there. But first I left a comment at Gay Uganda's blog and it's been troubling me ever since.

As an American I don't think it's strange in the least when people I meet online from other countries are interested to find out more about the USA. But there is something a little odd about my interest in Uganda. One of the odd things about is my presumption that people outside the USA are interested in it. And that presumption goes hand in hand with a presumption that by virtue of being an American I have something interesting to say to them. Maybe, but I'm sure the problem has something to do with presumptuousness.

I got online rather late in the game, but when I did I was fascinated by the social aspects of the Web. I also quickly got hooked on searches and the range of news and informative Web sites astounded me. And I fell enthrall to cyberutopian visions. That link is to a video of David Weinberg speaking at Reboot 11. I know most people don't have time to watch yet another video, so here's my quick summary: The Internet can enable people to create something good, but to do that it requires of us activism. Ethan Zuckerman, always excellent, has written several posts on cyberutopianism and this piece provides plenty to think about contra the notion. Anyhow I got charged up along with millions of others that together online people could come together in incredible ways not possible before. I had been chatting with people online from all over, but noticed I had not chatted with anyone from Africa and so sought them out.

I first began chatting with a young man who tended a computer lab at a high school in Uganda. We've been talking ever since. One thing led to another and so I've met more people in Uganda and other African countries. In 2002 my friend from the computer lab at the high school along with his brother and other friends began forming a community based organization. Early on there were some group dynamic issues I was keen to understand better and began searching through Yahoo Groups for other Ugandan groups. In the process of doing that I became acquainted with some Ugandan activists working on behalf of gay people.

I'm not saying that my interests in Uganda is noble. What I am saying is that I see the Internet as a tool that people can use to work together to get through what we're facing. And my interest in Uganda has been sustained over for nearly ten years now primarily through online friendships with Ugandans in various parts of the country and who have their own views.

Another way I've fed my interest in Uganda is to follow Ugandan bloggers. Gay Uganda provides a voice that's rarely heard and has been doing so since 2006. The 27th Comrade is in my view a brilliant writer, but in any case clearly is wickedly smart. He rarely tends his blog Communist Socks and Boots these days, but from the title you can tell he's a communist and as such is another unusual voice among Ugandan bloggers. Comrade 27th has also left frequent comments on the blogs by Ugandans and has done much to promote cross-blog communications.

Gay Uganda has written eloquently since October about a truly horrendous Anti Homosexuality Bill pending in Uganda. Comrade 27th has been critical of Gay Uganda's encouragement of people outside Uganda to work towards the defeat of this bill. I made the mistake of leaving one of my rambling comments on one of Gay Uganda's posts. I wish I'd learn to get to the point and I guess that comes down to thinking before I post.

Comrade 27th has made the point I'll loosely summarize as the USA's foreign policy is often heinous and the culture heedless and immoral; so why should Ugandans look that direction? I'm sure I differ with Comrade 27th on a multitude of details, but I've got to give it to him that in the larger sense of it he makes a good point.

The Box Turtle Bulletin has a great page where they've listed their coverage of the issue chronologically--just click on the link BTB's Uganda Coverage. Just scrolling through their stories an understanding why Americans, even if they could care less about Uganda, ought to care about this bill can be gleaned. Americans are involved in promoting this intolerance and this agenda often has more to do with politics in the USA than Uganda.

Few people care what I think, most people think me pretty goofy, which of course I am. When I talk to my American friends about what concerns me about American politics mostly the response is that eyes roll. If I use the word "plutocracy" I hear back: "Well what else is new." When I then use the word "oligarchy" they tell me: "The correct word is plutocracy." When in exasperation I use the word "fascism", well then I'm just beyond the pale and a nut. I am a bit nutty, but in general try to avoid such generalized talk in favor of more specific topics. But that doesn't mean I think people are not acting on some very bad ideas, or to put it succinctly that there are no bad guys.

The issue of homosexuality in Uganda brings together powerful Ugandans with powerful Americans up to no good. And the story of this confluence of the powerful is long and winding. Gay Uganda has a good handle on the map of it and so it's easy for him to see common cause with people outside of Uganda. I'm with him against a vengeful oligarchy. But I'm not often very clear what to do about it. I certainly cannot presume to tell Ugandans what they ought to be doing. And 27th Comrade at least is making the case that those in the West who are totally confident they do know what to do in Uganda, are deluded. I think he's probably right about that. The real issue is not the argument but what it is that we all should be doing? Imagining how Comrade 27 would answer, he might point out that if a white guy is doing the planning, the plan probably won't help him or Uganda.

A Federal Court in San Francisco is reviewing the decision to uphold the infamous Proposition 8--a voter initiative in California retracting the right of gay people to marry. Firedoglake has extensive coverage of the trial. This trial is seen by many as a risky gamble and that if the case goes to the Supreme Court with it's very conservative majority it will be overturned regardless of the legal arguments. An expert witness for the plaintiffs testified about how the odds are stacked against legislations to ensure the rights of gay and lesbians. He pointed out that in the past 20 years legal protections agains bias-motivated on gays and lesbians have been:

Overturned by popular plebiscite. Initiatives have rollewd back gains. 150, not counting marriage, G&L antidiscrimination votes, in 20 years. 75% of these have lost.

The struggle for basic rights is far from complete in the USA. And the politics governing what a small minority can do in the face of an often militant majority is not easy to work out.

I am in favor of LBGT rights in the USA. I stand for the right of adult people everywhere to be in control of their own bodies, to love who they love, and to express that love together as they consent to. How to stand up for our rights is very particular to the context. In the case of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda I've encouraged other Americans to find out about it and to contact their political representatives. I have also tried to convince people that there is more at stake politically in this legislation than simply gay rights, that the bill inhibits rights of association and of the press. What that comes down to is basically I'm a blowhard, all talk and no action.

The safety of Gay Uganda worries me a lot. From the outside looking in, it seems to me that Comrade 27th should be an ally of Gay Uganda. Actually it seems to me that he is. As I understand Comrade 27th, he thinks that even well intentioned white people seem inevitably to diminish the personhood of Ugandans in hundreds of often trivial ways. He may be right about that, but I believe that people have the capacity to empower one another to be more fully human. And that the two points are not entirely mutually exclusive.

I don't feel like I've said anything useful in regards the thread at Gay Uganda. I've been thinking about it for days, so that probably means I'm just confused. But there's a loose connection with the situation in Haiti after the catastrophe and the Anti-Homosexual Bill in Uganda. As an America there should be no question that this country's relationships vis a vis Haiti is an ugly one. This 2006 piece in the LRB by Paul Farmer is the best short history lesson I've seen online.

Haiti is the result of a successful slave revolt. That revolution shared the ideals of the revolution that brought the USA into being and the over turning of the Ancien Regime. Europeans like to think that they invented enlightenment values. How then to incorporate Haiti? One alternative is to suggest that these are values of human invention and of shared patronage. The old order is never replaced without a struggle and the struggle for liberty and fraternity is a long one.

I'll quote Barak Obama, a politician I frequently struggle with, who is in turn quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice...."

I believe all of our hands matter. Growing up in where I have and how I have means that I must be responsible. We all must be. We can find ways to struggle together.

Interesting Times

河坑土楼群 Hekeng Tulou, Fujian
Originally uploaded by Fon ZHOU

"May you live in interesting times." Is a a well known curse, and such times are now. They were yesterday too. Sometime in early December I stumbled upon the Fujian Tulou. I think I was looking at links about Madame Chaing Kai-shek and discovered a reference to the Hakka people of China and had never heard of them. From thence saw the references to Fujian Tulou which were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.

Architecturally these buildings are interesting, and the other pictures from Fon Zhou's Flicker stream are worth a look. They are built of massive rammed-earth walls with some of them dating back to the 12th Century. These compounds were defensive structures protecting congregations of about 300 families. Unlike modern apartment buildings almost everywhere, there were no "deluxe" units; everyone got the same. So the heritage is not just a building but a way of life which has persisted for hundreds of years.

I fret about all sorts of things, consequential and not so consequential. Of the former sort the twin predicament of peak oil and global climate change stand out. I'm very thankful to John Michael Greer for casting these as a predicament rather than problems to be solved.

The question that has to be asked is whether a modern industrial society can exist at all without vast and rising inputs of essentially free energy, of the sort only available on this planet from fossil fuels, and the answer is no. Once that’s grasped, other useful questions come to mind – for example, how much of the useful legacy of the last three centuries can be saved, and how – but until you get past the wrong question, you’re stuck chasing the mirage of a replacement for oil that didn’t take a hundred million years or so to come into being.

Back in the 1970's there were two periods of sharp rises in oil prices in the USA in 1973 and in 1979. In both cases the proximate cause was political, and in both the economic ramifications were pronounced. As a young person at the time the realization that oil was a finite resource was brought home and I was eager to imagine appropriate responses. I did a lot of failing around, but nothing terribly productive as my peers established themselves in careers. Over the years I never thought that what I'd found out about oil as a finite resource back then was wrong, but events sure didn't turn out like I thought they would.

I don't know how long Business Week keeps it's content online, but in this week's edition is a story, Endless Oil: Technology, politics, and lower demand will yield a bumper crop of crude. The piece ends:

A nasty oil shock is always possible. But the case for bountiful oil is strong.

My own reaction to the story was that if there is a strong argument to be made, the story hadn't accomplished it. Then again, I'm no expert. Something I noticed about the expert opinions quoted in the article is they came from Cambridge Energy Research Associates. My general impression of CERA is the research they provide industry is premised in economic methods.

Lately the whole field of economics is in crisis. Back in early September Paul Krugman wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? which has been much discussed online. In this weeks The New Yorker John Cassidy has a piece After The Blowup: Laissez-faire economists do some soul-searching--and finger-pointing which deals with the consequences to the Chicago School of economics. The article is online only for subscribers. Much of the negative reaction to Krugman's piece in particular is in the form of "No we didn't!" Cassidy's piece presents some economists squarely in this camp, but many more economists are coming around to admitting that the finacial crisis does indeed suggest a failure. Perhaps "crisis" is too strong a word to describe what's happening within the economics field, and the more gentle construction is that the economic crisis "raises questions." Even the willingness to ask questions seems an advance in the field of economics.

John Michael Greer's post linked to earlier makes the point that mostly we've failed to ask the right questions. Perhaps as a field economists are forced to question whether they've been asking the right ones. So far I've seen too little engagement with the predicament of peak oil and climate change in the economic field. What's troubling to me about the Business Week article is how speculation is translated into positive fact. I'm left unconvinced.

Ah, but that leaves me wondering, while thinking our predicament is dire: What am I gonna do?

I don't have a good plan. The New Year is always a time for thinking anew, whether I want to or not. It's the middle of the month of January already, so I figured I'd put up my question to remind myself to start asking questions, and to start to do something. If nothing else the Fujian Tulou remind me that people in other periods of predicament responded in ingenious ways. Perhaps I can respond creatively too.

Happy New Year everyone.

Wisdom

If it's mentors we're nominating, I think I'd be about the last picked. Not the last probably, because I certainly never want to hurt anyone. It's not as if I don't have anything to share. Mentors are supposed to be trusted counselors to the inexperienced, and for what it's worth I've been experienced. Oh wait, maybe that's a disqualification for being a mentor? Anyhow,the main reason I'd be so far down on the list is I lack a certain wisdom. Wisdom, it seems is not only knowing what is right and and true, but also being able to put an action to it. That's the part, the wisdom, I lack.

Among the blogs I read are several that pursue the subject of peak oil from one direction or another. Most observers concerned about the ramifications of being on the downside of Hubbert's peak also seem to be quite hep to the consequences of global climate change too. For my part I'm convinced of both, but sometimes reading what I do gives me a big headache, and other times heartache. What I really want to hear is that everything is going to be alright, but I think otherwise.

Dave Pollard has a post up What Happens Nest: A Timeline for Civilizational Collapse. Here's a snippet:

A number of readers have asked me for an "elevator speech" that describes how I think our civilization will collapse by the end of this century. Being more of a "picture" person I decided to try to answer that question graphically. The result is shown above.

Go there if you think you can stomach it. It's a compact post which lays out the predicament we find ourselves. My usual response to articles like Pollard's, although I substantially agree with them, is paralysis. What am I to do?

When I start writing blog posts, I have a general idea for the direction they'll take, but the post almost never seem to go that way, or at least travel a straight path in that direction. The inspiration for this post was the delight I felt reading an email from a young Ugandan lad with whom I'm supposed to be in a mentoring relationship. So far, mostly it seems we talk past each other. But in this email he told me not to forget to include a poem for him. I don't write poems, but I had been including poems written by real poets in previous emails. To get feedback that he thought this a tradition worth keeping up pleased me. I enjoy searching for poems online and selecting something I like and think he might too. In short I felt sense of gratitude for how, even though it's hard to point to any real practical gain in the relationship, his presence enriches my life.

I started out saying I'd be among the last chosen to be a mentor, but in reality I was invited to take part. I participate in a social network called Ned and I think that the page about the Butterfly Project can be read by anyone. The point is that it's not only the relationship with the student I'm paired with that's gratifying, but also the online relationship with other students and people interested in the project.

So, this post began with the idea of convincing others to consider mentoring a young person. And I certainly wanted to link to a very dynamic set of Web pages at Tutor/Mentor Connection.

Well, then my mind started to wander. Oh and the tendency for my mind to wander is yet another reason I'd rank myself low on the list of possible mentors. A certain degree of concentration is necessary and negative examples really are never as effective as positive ones. I hit upon the notion of experience in defining what a mentor is supposed to be. From there I went to Youtube and watched multiple renditions of Are You Experienced. In the background for trying to write a convincing post is this gnawing feeling of paralysis in the face of apocalyptic dread. The sense of purpose the young students in the project have is quite the antithesis of this feeling. They want advice about how to proceed with tangible projects, and the gratitude I feel for their optimism and determination makes me want to be sure the advice is good.

One thing even a little exposure to teens quickly assures is they can smell a phony in a heartbeat. That's why "Do as I say not as I do" never succeeds as a strategy. Of course there is something quite real about apprentice relationships. The Cynefin Framework is a simple model to describe situations. It's really quite simple, there are: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic situations. Apprentice relationships are especially good for complicated situations where there are best practices to apply. Most trade involve very evolved sets of skills, the trades are complicated and it takes time and concentration to master them. I think when people think about mentoring relationships we most often think of the transmission of best practices. But so many of the pressing problems of today seem complex or even chaotic. While students might not really be thinking outright about complexity, really it's simpler when someone tells them what to do, in the face of complexity thinking for themselves is going to be more useful in the long run.

I neglect this blog. Part of it is that I can't imagine why anyone would read posts that start out going in one direction but end up meandering all over the place. The simple solution to that problem would be for me to stop doing that. Alas, I wish I would, but I'm not sure I can. It's also a relief not to imagine that I actually can convince anyone of anything, even if I seem to start from that premise. The blog started with the premise of convincing people to consider ways they could be of service to people in Africa, especially online. Over the years of this blog, I've certainly questioned the wisdom of this premise, but never questioned the value of the friendships I've made. I don't write much about my contacts in Uganda because often the conversations are private. It's one thing for me to tell about myself, but quite another to tell about someone else.

I think online collaboration is useful and rewarding. I also believe I've got to be more serious about making more in person collaborations. What my readers think, and hope to do, is for them to discover; although I have a keen interest in hearing about it. My sense about the complex and chaotic situations we all face today is there are no silver bullets, certainly not one big and simple fix. Doing everything we're suppose to is what got us in the fix we're in, so doing more of it even more earnestly isn't going to get us out of it. The best approaches, if they come along at all, won't come from the center.

Apart from the students in the Butterfly project my interlocutors in Uganda aren't so young, but they are younger than I am. Everything we've done together has been to try to create something good with all sorts of attendant concern that maybe it's not so good at all. There's little money, there's ordinary problems on the ground, sickness and health, progress and setback, and constant reminders of how vast the territory of my ignorance really is. I suspect my relationship with the Butterfly project will be more of the same.

I linked to the Tutor/Mentor site because there are so many really thoughtful articles there. Most people when they're thinking about collaborating will think closer to home than Africa. I know of no better site than the Tutor/Mentor Connection to find out more about collaborating with young people regardless of where you are. At the site are hundreds of pages which plainly explain many types of relationships. And you won't go far before discovering that the Tutor/Mentor Connection has a distinctively wise approach. It's much too simple, yet I'm tempted to say that the key ingredient is the importance of relationships. All relationships don't resolve into us and them, indeed the best relationships begin and end as we. Along the way there is good we can create with others, even if at the end there's no real escaping our predicament.

The photo is of a fungus growing under a butternut tree a few weeks ago. It looks like a brain don't you think?

G20 Pittsburgh Summit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/knobil/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I followed the news of G20 on Thursday and Friday evenings by obsessively updating Twitter search. I'm not very swift when it comes to learning computer stuff. For example I use Open Office Writer frequently and have for years. I'm appalled that I still don't know how to do rudimentary things with it: What are styles? I also seem incapable of being succinct about any subject; probably revealing my ignorance of most subjects more than anything. So while I'm happy to look at my Twitter stream, I don't put up tweets.

Earlier this month I learned about riots in Kampala early through updates at Facebook. I know some folks in Kampala so I was keen to find news, but little was available. So I turned to Twitter searching #Kampala. Because I read some Ugandan blogs, some of the persons putting up tweets were known by me. Following retweets, people copying tweets they find relevant so their Twitter followers will see them, I was able to identify trusted sources; following friends of friends. The riots were very worisome and as it turned out some of my friends were affected by the violence. It probably is a little strange, but the flow of tweets during that crisis was engaging. I tend to stay up far too late, so I was getting real time updates.

Appfrica "is a web portal for the latest news related to African innovation, education and entrepreneurship in technology." Incredibly quickly after the riots Jonathan Gosier, CEO of Appfrica Labs,wrote an incisive piece about citizen reporting of the event with thoughts about how to make such reporting more useful, entitled Asynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting.

I was eager to use Twitter as a source for information about the G20 Pittsburgh Summit. In advance of the event I followed people and planned aggregators at Twitter. But when the pedal hit the medal, the generic search #G20 seemed the best way to follow events. Posts at times were coming fast and furious, and as a "Trending Topic" the thread included Spambots. Still it was easy to identify credible sources, even when I hadn't known about most of them in advance. I was quite impressed that reporters from various mainstream news outlets were participating in the stream.

People were listening to the police radio and tweeting what they heard. For example a tweet was broadcast that four hooded actors were at a certain location with the added directive: Leave Now! The other side of the coin was that at one point the police dispatcher remarked that their Twitter intelligence was pretty good! Network research scientist Valdis Krebs wrote for One Web Day:

Remember...

The technology that gives You the power to organize,
also gives Them the power to watch.

I'm not sure where that leads us, but it was hard to miss during the action.

Because I know Pittsburgh well, I was able to place addresses and to recognize places in photos and videos, even the grainy ones taken with cell phones. On Thursday there were some windows of businesses broken. A friend of a friend put up photos on Facebook taken from inside her place of work across the street from the action. The photos were good enough to use for identification of the perpetrators. Probably the most serious of all the property damage done was done by one guy from California. My father was incredulous about the report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I reminded him of the location of the banks damaged and pointed out that the corner had to be one of the most photographed in all of Pittsburgh. If there were more involved they're certainly on tape and can imagine no reason the authorities would be holding back.

The photograph is from Mark Knobil's G20 photoset at Flickr. Mark is an accomplished cinematographer. I love his still photographs and often enjoy them best large. Prior to the event we were talking in a group of friends speculating what might happen at the G20. I suggested that the police probably wouldn't let marchers go beyond a particular street. I pegged it about right, what hadn't occurred to me at the time is what it would mean for the neighborhood where Mark lives. I suspect he was more prescient than me. His photos from his neighborhood move me because I love the part of the world where I live. His photos are brilliant in general, and if you want a sense for what Pittsburgh looks like you can really get a feel for it exploring his posted photos of the region.

There was lots of press touting the transformation of Pittsburgh from a sooty industrial town to a greener high-tech industrial base. This article in The Christian Science Monitor is a good example. But what the articles fail to convey is how painful the collapse of the steel industry here has been. Coping with that transition has been a defining effort for people of my age locally. It seems as though I'm reaching for something other than "misery loves company," but perhaps there is a bit of that in our local character. At least there is a shared experience of loss and attempting to make tranformative change.

Seeing the city reflected through the lens of international attention has been interesting to me. I'm eager to get together with others to talk about the experience. I wonder if anyone else was paying attention to Twitter? My hope is the G20 has stimulated our thinking about what we might do together. We've come along way as a region, but surely there's a long way still to go.

Windmills and We20

The picture is the book cover of a book by William Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer. The book has gotten rave reviews--I particularly enjoyed Ethan Zuckerman's review and like to link to Zuckerman's blog just because it's always so smart. If you're thinking of buying the book, buy it at Amazon from this link so your purchase will help to fund the Moving Windmills Project for community initiatives in Malawi.

I'll get back to William Kamkwamba in a moment, but first a detour. The G20 Pittsburgh Summit begins tomorrow morning. In the lead up to it I remembered a Web site set up in advance of the G20 Meeting in London called we20. We20 is a great idea, it's a platform for small groups of people in communities all over the world to share locals plans relevant to their economies. I began talking up having meetings with my friends. As it turns organizing isn't my forte. Still over the last month or so when I've gotten together with friends the subject has come up.

The idea of making plans and sharing them online is really the important part of we20. But looking back over the "meetings" over the last month or so, I realize now that planning is a stage that comes after quite a lot of discussion. Something else I've come to understand is when you get together in small groups to talk about the economy, the talk gets quite personal. The conversations turn to our relationships, and most of that seems the last thing in the world to put on a public Web page. Nevertheless, plans are specific must relate to our real personal lives.

Last night I attended a meeting. Some of the conversation revolved around protests and the city's response. Some of the meeting was around global monetary issues like proposals for instituting a Tobin Tax in the context of Oxfam's proposal How to find $280bn for poor countries this weekend. We were able to sustain conversation about global monetary issues and global issues in general like climate change and commodity prices for a while. But in a small group of friends it's hard to sustain such talk for very long without the dire reality of our own situation coming to fore. The relevant question, and what we20 is all about is: "What are we going to do?" And there are no ready answers to that question.

Last night and in a previous meeting we touched on the issue of whether we face problems to be solved or a predicament. That way of framing comes from John Michael Greer by way of Sharon Astyk's The Pedagogy of Collapse. Astyk has a brilliant post today that sums up the hard dilemma we were facing last night that there's no easy change possible. In her post Dreaming a Life she notes that baby steps are all well and good, but babies quickly learn to walk, and faster than we'd like, to run! Our lament is being stuck in baby steps.

I bet that most we20 groups coming together have to start with these sorts of discussions. How to move them forward towards making actual plans, is something we've yet to discover. But I hope that even as the G20 Meeting is over and gone, discussion will continue and we find some way of making plans.

At William Kamkwamba's blog today there's a post annoucing that his TED Talk in Oxford earlier this year is up. The talk is about six minutes long, but had me cheering loudly. A couple of years ago William spoke briefly at TED Global in Tanzania. At the time Mike McKay a blogger who was working with Baobab Health in Malawi and had helped to get the story of William's remarkable windmill out expressed concern that people take care with all the attention to William. Things seem to have worked out well, perhaps because William has been too busy at school to pay too much attention to the hype.

William was only 14 when he built his first windmill. He was 19 when he spoke in Tanzania and he's 22 now. At his blog William says he's proud of his recent talk. And I felt so proud of him too listening to it. The old saw about genius is that it's "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration." In the last couple of years William has put in hours of hard work. I was so moved by his presentation and exhortation to other to try and make. He directed his words to poor people, but the rest of us should listen too.

The problem that I face along with my friends and our informal meetings is we're quite invested in living in ways we know are ultimately unsustainable. The conundrum is how to find a path towards a more sustainable way of life. We've figured out little parts of the puzzle, but are still far from making a comprehensive plan, or even a modest plan in the right direction. That's quite a different sort of situation that William was facing which led to his building a windmill, nevertheless he provides an inspiration that much can be done even when faced with very difficult situations.