At some point in the future my children will ask me what I did during my 20’s and I will tell them that I traveled around the world going from one conference to the next with my laptop. And my children will ask me why I did that. And I will say, you know, that’s a really good question.

My hope is that one day our children will look back at photos like this one and make fun of us in the same way that we look back at photos of our parents from the 60’s and 70’s and shake our heads in sympathy and shame.

On September 19, 2005 a tall, dark, and handsome Taiwanese blogger who goes by the strange name of “Portnoy” decided that he would start translating select blog posts from Global Voices into Chinese. His first translation was of a post by Indonesian blogger Enda Nasution which summed up the week’s news from Indonesia through the eyes of its bloggers. Portnoy wasn’t asked to translate the article into Chinese, and he certainly wasn’t paid for it. Nor did he have any tools or a community of fellow translators to help him out. He simply published the volunteer translation on his personal blog because he felt it was important to share the information from Global Voices across a language divide.

Portnoy was ahead of his time. Fast forward three and a half years and the number of translators on Global Voices is greater than the number of authors and editors. Our articles are regularly translated into about 20 different languages and Jer has developed an entire system within WordPress to manage and organize the translations of articles. Additionally, we are no longer alone. Meedan is translating articles and conversations about current events in the Middle East. Yeeyan serves as a hub for volunteer translators who translate between Chinese and English. And TED has had much success recruiting volunteers to translate and subtitle their videos.

Furthermore, a number of open source programmers have begun developing tools to serve this ever-expanding group of volunteer translators. Those tools must also compete with proprietary tools like Google’s new Translator Toolkit, which was recently used by volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic.

Aspriation Tech, an NGO based in San Francisco, invited a number of translators, programmers, and publishers to Amsterdam last week to discuss how the social translation movement can be made more efficient, sustainable, and fun. Representing Global Voices at the gathering were Solana, Leonard, Georgia, Ivan, Ethan, Silvia, Anna, Rezwan, Jer, Paula, Marc, and me. For those interested in learning more, notes from all the sessions are available on the Open Translation Tools wiki, Ethan has a nice summary blog post, photos are on Flickr, and updates are on Twitter, and more related blog posts are available here. For those of you who wish to learn more about open source translation software, a valuable guide has been published on FLOSSManuals. There is another guide about open source “video translation”. For more information about the history of Lingua, Leonard has made an excellent timeline and Chris Salzberg has done thorough academic research on the community.

In The Omnivore’s Dilema Michael Pollan reminds us that food is an inelastic good, which is to say that, obesity aside, there is a limit to how many calories a person can consume in a single day. Any more and we would explode.

Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry can only grow at 1% (the average growth rate of the earth’s population). There is, after all, only so much food you can stuff down one person. The food industry got around this limitation by developing “foods” without any calories or fat – things like Coke Zero and potato chips made with Olean, which famously – so I’ve been told – causes anal leakage:

[Hence the need for anal bleaching.]

Information is also an inelastic good. There is a limit to how much information the human brain can consume in a single day. Once we reach that limit we develop information obesity – or, information overload as it’s normally called – which leads to stress, guilt, and feelings of meaninglessness. We may ask ourselves what is the point of drinking a diet soda that our bodies do not need. And we might also ask ourselves, what is the use of consuming information at all, and how do we know if we need it or not?

Information has always been a commodity. The greater the demand for information, and the more scarce that information is, the greater its value. The business model behind selling information has always been to function as a gatekeeper between the information and the access to that information. In relation to one another, information was scarce and demand was high.

That is, until all of the world’s information was made available in aggregate. Added to the “old media” are billions of contributions of information from sources that were previously excluded by the gatekeepers. Demand for information has stayed the same (after all, there is only so much the human brain can process per day) but the supply of information expands exponentially. (Kevin Kelly calls this phenomenon “the expansion of ignorance“.)

As information expands exponentially, the value of each individual piece of information declines exponentially. With the abundance of information comes the scarcity of attention. Value now lies not in information, but in its relevance: filtering, sorting, contextualizing that which “speaks to us”. Value is not in data but in eloquence.

There is, however, still one more gate between information and access to that information: language. If I were monolingual then I would only have access to a percentage of the world’s information available online. Let’s say, for example, that I wanted more information about Dao Lang, a Chinese pop star and the number one search term in China for 2005. Information about the singer in English is scant, but surely there are thousands of articles available in Chinese. If only I could request – and probably pay – someone to translate one of those articles into English.

Conceptualizing a system to allow readers to request translations of content that interest them and to facilitate the process of that translation is the new job description for Marc Herman who is leading Global Voices’ translation exchange.

I am skeptical of the project, but it’s the type of skepticism that I hope is proven wrong. The most obvious question is, how do I know that I want to read something if I don’t know what it says? And, more importantly, why would I invest time and money requesting more information with less context when my hard drive is already brimming over with unread articles, unwatched movies, and un-listened-to podcasts?

To make such an investment I would need a pretty strong connection to Dao Lang, the Chinese pop singer. And if such a strong connection existed, wouldn’t that inspire me to learn Chinese, or to meet fellow Dao Lang fans who could provide me with the context I’m looking for?

We consume information as much for our social needs as our need to be informed. In fact, I’m not sure you can even distinguish the two. We don’t really care about Mark Sanford and his affair, but we read about it because the collective awareness about the case allows us to participate in conversations about the values and issues that underlie it. When I was in Argentina 80% of the news I read was about Argentina and the region because it allowed me to engage in conversations with those around me. Now that I’m in The Hague I’m following related news. Our social interactions define the information we consume much more than the other way around.

Social translation is here to stay, but the key is that it is social. Lena translated my post about Cochabamba as a gesture of friendship. Once money is inserted into the equation it becomes something else.

A lot of communities and tools have sprung up in recent years trying to make the translation market more efficient by cutting out wasteful middleman agencies like Lionbridge. Among others are Social Translator, dotSUB, Worldwide Lexicon, and iCanLocalize. Some companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have flirted with crowdsourcing the localization of their websites, but the lesson tends to be that volunteer translators don’t feel very social toward for-profit companies. There will always be a demand for translated information, but those translations will still have to compete in a world of over-abundant information and starved attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the supply and demand of information these days. A couple months ago I walked into El Ateneo, one of the world’s largest bookstores, to meet up with my buddy Scott. As I looked around at the mountains upon mountains of hardcovers, paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers I was hit by a kind of intellectual vertigo. On the one hand, here is humanity’s greatest accomplishment: culture, the ability to transmit knowledge, stories, and values from one generation to the next to eternity. On the other hand, with sadness and frustration I realized that in my life I would only come into contact with a small percentage of that culture. And that with each new year – and the exponential expansion of information – I would come into contact with a smaller and smaller percentage. The expansion of ignorance is inevitable.

La frase escrita en la pared al otro lado de la calle dice:

Ni indigenismo, ni oligarquía
Viva la revolución obrera

La calle principal, de concreto arrugado y lleno de huecos, se ramifica en un vasto laberinto tejido de callejones empedrados, bautizados con los nombre de países Latinoamericanos, líderes de esta revolución o la otra. Uno de cada diez edificios es un esqueleto de concreto y ladrillo, una declaración de lo que podría ser pero todavía no es, una metáfora de este continente entero.

Eddie y yo caminamos por el centro de Cochabamba en busca de lo que será un almuerzo tarde o una cena temprano. La economía informal se pronuncia en cada esquina: DVDs pirateados, maní dulce, cajas de diabetes. La plaza mayor (lo mejor que trajeron los Españoles al nuevo mundo) está llena de los habituales lustrabotas cargando sus cajas de madera y las parejas de novios adolescentes metiéndose la lengua por la garganta. Las mujeres redondas se sientan en la sombra ofreciendo artesanías e importaciones chinas. Los árboles de grandes hojas pesan, cargados de historia.

En el camino de regreso al apartamento de Eddie las calles están ocupadas con la emoción vibrante del atardecer: algunas chicas jóvenes sonríen vergonzosamente mientras intercambian los chismes del día, los chicos con su cabello peinado hacia atrás y el pecho levantado toman con firmeza las manos de sus novias. La luna llena está escondida detrás de las colinas, esperando que la ciudad se asiente, antes de levantarse y pintar lentamente el piso del valle de norte a sur, con una luz lechosa.

Sé que este no es mi continente. Se que siempre seré un extraño aquí, no importa cuántos modismos aprenda, no importa cuántas letras de canciones pueda cantar, no importa cuántos platos pueda cocinar. Pero caminando por las calles de los pueblos y las ciudades latinoamericanas siempre me llena de una sensación de familiaridad, una sensación de calma.

El podcast de hoy es una colección de parte de mi música electrónica favorita de América Latina. Está hecha para las largas caminatas a través de los callejones empedrados de su ciudad latinoamericana favorita.

Descarga (Clic-derecho y guardar)

[Traducción por Lena Zúñiga]

I’m in Amsterdam right now for three nearly consecutive meetings: Open Translation Tools, a Global Voices team meeting, and State of the Map.

I am also now 29-years-old; dangerously close to real adulthood. Last year I spent the first half of my birthday with Revaz, Carolina, Álvaro, Gabriel and friends from HiperBarrio in Colombia and the second half with Georgia, CB, Nikipedia and a ton of Global Voices friends in Budapest. The result is to the right.

This year I was able to once again catch up with some of the GV family and, once again, consume too much alcohol from just about every corner of the planet. But, sadly, I wasn’t able to spend any time with my friends back in Colombia.

Speaking with Silvia – who is originally from Medellín but now lives in Spain – I realized just how much I miss beautiful Antioquia. And then came this video:

It is so amazing that the internet – and all the tools that have been built on top of it – can enable us to feel so much warmth and love oceans and hemispheres apart. Living in a new city just about every single week can be difficult, but the ways in which we are able to stay connected and how those connections affect our emotions across time zones and oceans … well, it’s really re-writing what it means to be human.

Thank you Jorge, Deneiber, Diego, Santiago, Catalina, Gabriel, and all of HiperBarrio. And thank you everyone who sent bday wishes – you made it a wonderful day.

Let’s take female genital cutting (or female genital mutilation or female circumcision depending on your bias) as an example. Amnesty International estimates that over 130 million women worldwide have undergone some form of female genital cutting, with over 2 million procedures being performed every year. If you are a supporter of the practice, writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, you might defend the practice by arguing that:

… unmodified sexual organs are unaesthetic; that the ritual gives young people the opportunity to display courage in their transition to adulthood; that you can see their excitement as they go to their ceremony, their pride when they return. You will say that it is very strange that someone who has not been through it should presume to now whether or not sex is pleasurable for you. And, if someone should try to force you to stop from the outside, you may decide to defend the practice as an expression of your cultural identity. They say it is mutilation, but is that any more than a reflex response to an unfamiliar practice? They exaggerate the medical risks. They say that female circumcision demeans women, but do not seem to think that male circumcision demeans men.

Let me clarify, Appiah is himself against female genital cutting, but what he wants to emphasize is this: “a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to.”

Those butchers want to torture you on your first days in this world and cause you unbearable pain when urine touches the gaping wound .. those ignorant butchers! Fear them not, no one will lay a finger on you as long as I am alive. When you grow up you can cut off whichever part of your body you choose … until then no one will touch you.

That is an excerpt from a blog post of an Egyptian mother who recently gave birth to a newborn baby. The doctor suggested circumcision, but the mother adamantly refused. The baby, I should point out, is a boy. (A Facebook group in Arabic to end male circumcision currently has 973 members.)

Is male circumcision wrong? On the one hand, it alters the most private anatomy of a baby boy before he is able to make the decision for himself. It also reduces his sensitivity and sexual pleasure. On the other hand, doctors report improved hygiene and lower HIV transmission among males who are circumcised. Is there a single moral answer for all humanity or does it depend on each culture, community, and country?

This is where Cosmopolitanism becomes deeply philosophical. Tracing its roots to the Cynics and the Stoics, Cosmopolitanism is founded on moral universalism, the idea that the same moral code applies to all humans regardless of their race, religion, culture, nationality, or any other sub-category of our humanness. It stands in stark contrast to moral relativism, which states that our moral beliefs do not reflect universal moral truths, but rather are mere values based on our social and temporal circumstances.

For the vast majority of the past 10,000 years, it was not considered ‘wrong’ to kill someone from outside your tribe; that is just how it was. Today it is not considered ‘wrong’ to kill chimpanzees for science or cows for dinner; that is just how it is. Moral relativists say this is because our “morals” are simply social norms that we construct to live peacefully. Kwame Anthony Appiah says that morals are universal and eternal, even if we haven’t yet discovered what those timeless moral laws are.

Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another.

As a believer of evolution, I don’t subscribe to Appiah’s moral universalism. (And I have yet to find a way to believe in one without contradicting the other.) But that doesn’t lessen my appreciation of Cosmopolitanism as a framework for thinking about ethics at a global level. I would consider its golden rule to be this: “focus on understanding difference first; work on coming to an agreement about universality later.” It is very much related to what Chris Blattman half-jokingly calls “A Thinkavist Manifesto“: that it is better to understand without acting than it is to act without understanding.

Several of the book’s chapters challenged some of my previous-held thoughts, but none more so than “In Praise of Contamination.” Appiah pokes fun at “cultural preservationists” who “make their case by invoking the evil of cultural imperialism.” Such talk, he says, is based on “an image of how the world used to be – an image that is both unrealistic and unappealing.” He reminds us that there is no such thing as cultural purity. Brightly colored kente clothing that is associated with West Africa and worn by so many Black nationalists in the USA was originally imported by the Dutch from Indonesia. Most “native” cultures and languages in Southern Africa actually came from a single group, the Bantu, who made up the African cultural empire from 1500 to 1000 BC. And the bombin, the most distinctive accessory of female indigenous dress in Bolivia, was introduced by British railway workers in the 1920’s.

Any group of individuals have the choice to maintain their own culture or to adopt the culture of others. While so many cultural anthropologists lament the latter, Appiah is adamant that the choice is not theirs to make. He says it is “deeply condescending” to force anyone to adopt any cultural practice or tradition, even if it is their own.

As Lokman and I finished our last foamy swigs of beer at Cambridge Commons I asked him what he’s learned so far in his Ph.D. thesis research of Global Voices. What were his impressions, for example, of how we all communicate on the vast network of mailing lists Global Voices uses to stay on the same page?

“Something that stands out for me,” he said, his words always slow and measured, “is just how polite and receptive everyone is. No idea is treated as too far out there, and everyone is encouraged to speak up.” We walked another 30 yards back toward Harvard Law School until Lokman was ready to finish his thought: “and that’s one of the reasons I’m interested in studying Global Voices. I think it represents the future for all of us. We are all going to have to learn how to communicate and work with people from completely different cultures who speak different languages.”

I thought of Lokman’s observation weeks later when I was staying at a $10-a-night hostel in northern Argentina. It was late, we all had drunk too much wine, and in the corner by the pool table two Israelis, a German, and an Australian Jew were yelling at one another about when it is and is not appropriate to make holocaust jokes. At one point I thought fists were going to fly. I finished my glass of wine, headed back to my dorm room, and made a mental observation that not every global community was as exemplarily tolerant as Global Voices.

Seven Billion Brains on Planet Earth

Every morning we – all seven billion of us – wake up with a certain amount of cognitive energy, our mental fuel tank for the day to come. We use up this cognitive energy every time our brain must process information and apply knowledge. This includes tasks as seemingly mundane as packing a school lunch for our children, and as complex as understanding the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.

On the one hand, today’s competitive knowledge economy is requiring a larger percentage of the world’s population to expend more cognitive energy than human beings have ever done in the past. Software programmers, for example, often spend 60 hours a week thinking about the logical rules behind the applications on our computers and cell phones. The need to make a day’s worth of cognition as efficient as possible has led to a whole industry of productivity gurus, and to a market of “nueroenhancing drugs.”

On the other hand, the efficiency of the modern global economy means that many individuals in the developed world are working far fewer hours than ever before. Tim Ferriss has recruited a large following on the internet by recommending a four-hour work week. Even those who aren’t able to heed Ferriss’ call to abandon the 9 – 5 office life still spend an average of two office hours per day (one-fourth of their working time) surfing the web for personal use. Salary.com estimated that those 2.09 hours of “wasted time” per 8-hour workday add up to $759 billion per year that employers in the United States spent on salaries “for which real work was expected, but not actually performed.”

In terms of discussing cloud intelligence, however, corporate America’s economic loss is far less interesting than what those millions of office employees are doing with their two hours of personal internet use every day.

Cognitive Surplus and The New Socialism

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

Clay Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

In fact, Clay Shirky points out that in the United States we still spend an average of 100 million hours every single weekend just watching advertisements. What else can you do with 100 million hours? According to Shirky, it took roughly 100 million “thought hours” to build Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever assembled and the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

It would be wrong to overstate Shirky’s argument that all of human society is waking from a sitcom-watching slumber to become active producers of online content; after all, most young people today who give up their expensive cable packages for slightly less expensive internet connections are now watching those same sitcoms on their laptops; clips from American Idol dominate YouTube; and the vast majority of the most popular daily search terms on Google are related to celebrity news. The passive consumption that defined decades of television watching, is also a mainstay of today’s connected generation.

Still, even if only an estimated ten percent of internet users actively contribute content, they have already constructed an vast online repository of culture, knowledge, and tools. And we are just at the beginning of what’s to come.

Kevin Kelly calls Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter the “vanguard of a cultural movement”, an emerging “global collectivist society.” Amateur photographers, he reminds us, have published over three billion photographs on Flickr. Six billion videos are uploaded to YouTube every month. The blog search engine Technorati tracks over a million blog posts published every single day. Apple’s pervasive iTunes media player serves over 125,000 podcasts, including more than 25,000 video podcasts.

The small minority of internet users who actively contribute content sure do contribute a lot of it. They review restaurants and businesses on Yelp. They fulfill the role of editors by recommending content on Delicious, StumpleUpon, Digg, and Reddit. They share their medical history on Patients Like Me and Google Health. They create high quality maps of their communities on OpenStreetMap and design 3D models of buildings, monuments, and landmarks using Google’s free SketchUp software. They report news just like traditional journalists. On Flickr they help the United States’ Library of Congress describe and contextualize the photographs in their collection. They translate blog posts, articles, magazines, and videos into different languages.

What is even more incredible is that they do this all for free, without receiving any economic compensation whatsoever. Hundreds of millions of internet users are spending a small amount of their day’s cognitive energy not on the work that they are paid to do, but rather the online projects and forms of self-expression that interest them. Kevin Kelly calls it a “New Socialism“, which is based on sharing and community, but not limited by political ideology. (The most active contributors of free content are as likely to idolize Adam Smith as Karl Marx.)

The Cloud: The Third Chapter of the Internet

A little over fifty years ago, Thomas Watson from IBM said that he could foresee a need for perhaps five computers worldwide, and we now know that that figure was wrong, because he overestimated by four.

Clay Shirky, Napster Speech 2

Whether you speak in terms of clouds, streams, or waves (the modern internet sounds like a naturalist’s dreamscape), the recent preview of Google Wave is indicative of a fundamental change that has transformed how we interact with the internet and how the internet enables us to interact with one another.

The modern web was developed in order to enable academics and scientists to share their research with one another. This was done primarily over email, but also with static (and often ugly) web pages. The second chapter began in the 1990’s when, during a bubble of investment, web programmers developed new technologies that made websites more dynamic by using databases, and more interactive thanks to JavaScript and Flash. The investment bubble burst, but those same technologies were implemented to create the tools that make up the internet as we know it today: wikis, blogs, RSS readers, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook.

We have now come to the third chapter of the Internet. The “cloud” refers to all those servers based around the world that store our personal data, but which we rarely ever think about. If you are a Gmail user, then your emails live “in the cloud”, on a server at one of Google’s many server farms. Our daily thoughts, in the form of Twitter messages, live in the cloud, as does our search history, our Facebook activity, all of the pictures we publish on Flickr and Picasa.

Just two years ago I stored all of my text documents on my own computer and would send them via email to anyone who showed interest. If they made edits to my documents, then I would need to update my own local copy. Today my documents are stored “in the cloud”, on Google Docs, where they can be instantly accessed by trusted friends and colleagues. At any time I can access the most recent copy of any document on my computer or mobile phone. Today we don’t just publish information to the internet; we actually create it online and then download it to our computers and cell phones when we need it.

The cloud is growing exponentially. Every day more and more of us spend a small percentage of our cognitive energy to add value to the cloud. And as we do so, the cloud itself becomes more intelligent, a vast social brain in which every internet user is a metaphorical neuron. In fact, the structure of the internet and the processes it depends on is similar to that of the human brain.

The less evolved brain

Neurons in the cingulate cortex of a mouse. [via Wikipedia]

The human brain is by far the most complex organ that three to four billion years of natural selection on this planet have been able to produce. It consists of roughly 100 billion neurons, each linked to 10,000 synaptic connections. Information travels across the brain via small electrical impulses that are transmitted from neuron to neuron, much in the same way that information travels across the internet. Right now, while you’re reading this, billions of small electrical impulses are firing away in your brain as you parse the information, store it in your memory, and apply your own knowledge to add context and challenge what I write.

Visualization of the internet by the Opte Project.

In comparison, the internet is a decidedly less complex and less evolved organ. Internet World Stats estimates that there are 1.6 billion internet users, or “social neurons”. According to one study, the average Facebook user is connected to 164 “friends”, a far cry from the 10,000 synaptic connections between our 100 billion brain cells. In other words, while the internet could one day become self-aware, it is still in the earliest chapters of its evolution. Yet, already there are several examples which reveal how the internet is rapidly becoming humanity’s social nervous system. Joshua-Michele Ross points to the emergency response following the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Obama’s “Project Houdini“, and Google’s global virus forecasting as three manifestations of the networked social brain.

The human brain formed its present structure over 10,000 years ago when our ancestors encountered environments which required the type of advanced reasoning only provided by a larger brain. With a larger brain came moral reasoning, consciousness, and most importantly, language, without which we could not transmit culture and knowledge across generations. The organ we each carry around in our skulls today, however, has evolved little in the past 10,000 years. It formed when our ancestors lived in tribes of roughly 150 people, not mega-cities filled with millions, and personal address books filled with thousands of contacts.

As the cloud continues to expand exponentially with more information, more social neurons, and more connections between them, our own humble human brains will need to adapt in order to make the most effective use of the cloud without succumbing to lifetimes of mere “continuous partial attention.”

No matter how actively or passively we spend our time online, what we can all be sure of is that one day sooner or later our brain will stop functioning and our stay here on planet Earth will conclude. We will remain, of course, in the memories of our friends and family, and also in the bits and bytes of digital footprints that we leave in the cloud for the generations that follow. What they do with the information we leave behind – or, indeed, what the cloud itself does with the information – will depend on a new type of networked evolution that values sharing and community over proprietary protection.

The writing on the wall across the street reads:

Ni indigenismo, ni oligarquía
Viva la revolución obrera

The main thoroughfare of wrinkled, potholed pavement branches out into a vast labyrinthine lattice of cobble-stoned alleys named after Latin American countries and leaders of this revolution and that. One in every ten buildings is a concrete and brick skeleton, an assertion of what could be but isn’t quite yet, a metaphor for this entire continent.

Eddie and I walk through Cochabamba’s downtown in search of what is either late lunch or early dinner. The informal economy punctuates every street corner; pirated DVD’s, candied peanuts, diabetes in a box. The main plaza (the best damn thing that the Spaniards brought to the new world) is filled with the usual shoeshiners toting their wooden footrests and the teenage couples sticking their tongues down one another’s throats. Plump old women sit in the shade peddling handicrafts and Chinese imports. The leafy trees weigh heavy with history.

On the walk back to Eddie’s apartment the streets are busy with the buzzing excitement of dusk: young girls smile embarrassingly as they exchange the day’s gossip, boys with slicked back hair and puffed-out chests hold on tightly to the hands of their girlfriends. The full moon is hidden behind the hills, waiting for the city to settle down before rising and slowly painting the valley floor from north to south in milky moonlight.

I know this isn’t my continent. I know I will always be a stranger here, no matter how many modismos I learn, no matter how many lyrics I can sing, no matter how many dishes I can cook. But walking through the streets of Latin American cities and pueblos always fills me with a sense of familiarity, a sense of calm.

Today’s podcast is a collection of some of my favorite electronic music from Latin America. It is meant for long walks through cobblestoned callejones of your favorite Latin American city.

Download (Right-click, save as)

They believe in human dignity across the nations, and they live their creed. They share these ideals with people in many countries, speaking many languages. As thoroughgoing globalists, they make full use of the World Wide Web. This band of brothers and sisters resist the crass consumerism of modern Western society and its growing influence in the rest of the world. But these people also resist the temptations of the narrow nationalisms of the countries where they were born. They would never go to war for a country; but they will enlist in a campaign against any nation that gets in the way of universal justice. Indeed, they resist the call of all local allegiances, all traditional loyalties, even to family. They oppose them because they get in the way of the one thing that matters: building a community of enlightened men and women across the world … Sometimes they agonize in their discussions about whether they can reverse the world’s evils or whether their struggle is hopeless. But mostly they soldier on in their efforts to make the world a better place.

That comes from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, a framework for thinking about universal ethics in a “world of strangers.” At first glance the description seems apt for the hundreds of bloggers, editors, and translators that make up Global Voices. It could also easily describe the dozens of human rights geeks gathered a couple months ago in Berkeley. Or a week later in San Jose. It could describe Teddy, Alex, Juliana, Erik, and hundreds of others.

But no. That was Appiah’s description of Al Qaeda and the global Muslim fundamentalists they attract. An important reminder that there is another side to cultural globalization, and we’re not engaging that other side in conversation.

Given that it is my last full day here in Buenos Aires I decided to treat myself to a gourmet lunch at my favorite San Telmo restaurant, Caseros. (The restaurant is on Caseros Avenue, hence the name, but caseros also conveniently means “homemade” which is an apt description for everything on the menu.) To begin with, I asked for a glass of water straight from the tap. Clean, cool, fresh, and absolutely free, municipal water is one of the miracles of the modern era; a miracle I try to take advantage of as frequently as possible. I also ordered a glass of Malbec from a Mendoza winery and its domesticated vines of vitis vinifera. Unlike the Malbec grapes of France, the Argentine grapes tend to be smaller in size. One would think that the smaller the grape, the less water, the more robust its flavor, but according to Wikipedia, high yields and excessive irrigation led to wines which were, until recently, “more simplistic and lacking in flavor.” Maybe that’s true, but I’m no wine snob and this particular glass on an overcast wintery afternoon hit the right spot.

In Argentina bread comes with every meal, but it is almost always eaten plain and without butter. Bread is an incredible invention, both in its diversity (leavened and unleavened, flat and spongy, flaky and fluffy) and in its simplicity (flour and water – and, optionally, yeast or baking soda). In its simplest form bread is nothing more than dried ground wheat, water, and saccharomyces cerevisiae, a microscopic fungus floating all around us. Throw the right proportion of those three ingredients into any enclosed source of heat – an oven – and you’ve got bread.

Next came my first plate: roasted vegetables (sweet white onions, red peppers, and squash) over a bed of spinach. The vegetables were roasted in olive oil (likely imported from the Mediterranean region), but the only other ingredient added to the salad was a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar – aged and fermented white grape juice, probably introduced during the wave of Italian immigration to Argentina in the early 20th century. Whereas the packaged salads I would often buy from Trader Joes while in the US probably had over 30 different ingredients (the majority derivatives of corn), most salads in Argentina have no more than four vegetables, olive oil, and vinegar. At first these salads seem comparatively flavorless, but in their simplicity we can more easily appreciate the individual flavors of lettuce, carrots, onions, and tomatoes, and the various strategies each species has adopted to transform soil, water, and sunlight into carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. (The goal of fruits and vegetables, Pollan reminds us, is to become appealing enough to animals who eat their seeds and – a few hours and cups of espresso later – create a rich natural fertilizer so that the species can spread.)

The salad was delicious, quite possibly the best I’ve ever had, though the half-finished glass of Malbec could have influenced that judgement. Now time for my main course, a cut of bife de chorizo cooked slowly over an open flame. (I ordered mine “a punto”, rare.) A bife de chorizo (”sirloin strip steak”), is a thick cut of muscle and fat from the top rear of the cow:

Cows have have one stomach with four compartments, including the “rumen“, which enables cows and other ruminants to eat and digest basic field grasses that humans cannot. Through photosynthesis grasses transform sunlight into carbohydrates; cows then turn grass into protein; and I then (ahem, any time now) turn cow into fertilizer which helps the grasses efficiently turn more sunlight into more carbohydrates; and the cycle continues.

At least that is how the human food cycle worked for the entire history of our species – and continues, for the most part, here in Argentina – until relatively recently when an oversupply of corn and a shortage of grazing land in the United States led to giant feedlots which truck in corn-based feed from Kansas and Illinois to fatten up the tens of thousands of cows as quickly as possible. Because cows have not traditionally eaten corn throughout their evolutionary history, they are given anti-biotics in order to stay healthy.

My grass-fed steak was delicious. Meaty but not chewy, pink but not bloody. It was sprinkled with pepper and parsley (and perhaps a hint of garlic and olive oil), but otherwise my main course was nothing other than the meat of a cow made more digestible thanks to the flame it was cooked on. Piece by piece, with a swig of Malbec in between, I cleared my entire plate.

These three are part of a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer, in search of both work, even if it might pay next to nothing, and social change.

They come armed with little more than soft hands and dog-eared copies of Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which takes a dim view of industrial agriculture.

“Many Summer Internships Are Going Organic“, New York Times, May 23, ‘09

Finally came my single shot of espresso – steam pushed through finely ground coffee, probably grown in Colombia. How much did this meal cost me, you ask? 30 pesos, including tip. About $8.

As I sipped slowly on the steaming hot espresso, remembering the coffee farmers I visited in Mexico and Colombia, their hands rough and permanently stained with soil, I reached over for my own worn-out, dog-eared copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Very few other books have given me so much reason to re-think my own beliefs, outlooks, and behaviors.

But let me first apologize, recant, retract, and hang my head in embarrassment. I apologize for my previous (and mostly kept-to-myself) characterization of foodies as mere privileged members of the self-indulgent class, eager to show off their esoteric knowledge of kitchen arcana. Though that particular incarnation of the foodie does certainly exist, I’ve come to realize that most of my food-obsessing friends and acquaintances are actually ecologists and historians. They have long been doing what has only just now kicked in for me: thinking about where their food comes from, how it got to their table, and what they are now able to do with it thanks to the vast cultural collection of recipes, and our ability to build upon it.

Some students say food is the political movement of their time.

I won’t attempt to summarize the brilliant structure of The Omnivore’s Dilemma; I would only cause harm to the perfect recipe of writing that Pollan has managed to fit into a single book. His personable style and his ability to tell a good story (often from a plant’s perspective) is probably just as responsible as the issues it raises for the book’s success. And the book’s success, no doubt, is largely responsible for what has unmistakably become a movement. (For the current status of that movement, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s talk at the Long Now Foundation.)

And it’s not just the United States where college kids and computer programmers are giving up the 9 – 5 office life for the 6 – 6 days of manual labor on the farm. Via my cousin from another dozen, Tomami Sasaki, and her partner in crime, Scilla Alecci, I learned that a renaissance agricultural movement is also beginning to take hold in Japan. But this isn’t the same back-to-the-land luddite rhetoric of the 1960’s; these young Japanese farmers are using the internet to make agriculture more profitable. From The Japan Times:

Shinichi Soga of Niigata Prefecture may be one of the most successful farmers so far. His tomatoes are selling like hot cakes thanks partly to his popular Web log, which he started in 2006.

Soga, 31, initially began blogging as a way to connect with customers and other farmers. The blog, titled Furyo Nomin (the Delinquent Farmer), depicts his life in rural Niigata and is viewed more than 10,000 times a month.

“I started blogging because I also felt lonely, surrounded by much older farmers,” said Soga, who traveled to the United States, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and France over five years to learn the trade.

In a recent entry, he used photos to explain that after harvesting asparagus, some of the stalks need to be left in the ground to grow like bushes so their roots will accumulate nutrition for the next year.

Pointing to the similar “Grow a Farmer” campaign in the United States, Serge Lescouarnec calls farming “the new punk rock in Japan.”

It was a cold day in Santa Lucía, Uruguay where we were giving a workshop last week on blogging to teachers from the local primary school. Walking back to the classroom after lunch in a local eatery (homemade spinach ravioli) Pablo and I were talking about the difference between technical appropriation and technical adoption, and how Uruguay’s young students will need to learn programming from the ground up in order to develop products and solutions that aren’t just re-engineered versions of what is produced in the developed world.

“You know what technology all the cool kids in the United States want to learn now?” I asked him.
“What’s that?
“Agriculture.”

He smiled, unsure if I was joking, but then I went on to explain further how the first human technology has made its comeback. I think there are a few reasons to explain the success of the today’s new agricultural movement in advanced capitalist societies like Japan and the United States. For one thing, the economies of both countries are hurting, and for many who have just been laid off, this is a perfect time to consider a new career for the next 30 years. Also, the local organic food movement encompasses several other movements: environment, health, and the fair treatment of animals. Then there’s the fact that agriculture keeps you rooted to a particular community and ecosystem, something which my generation has lacked due to its constant nomadism. Finally, over-saturated with information, conversation, and online to-do lists, I believe that there is a strong desire to return to working with our hands.

This blog post is written in English, a form of communication which belongs to the Anglo–Frisian, West Germanic, Germanic, and finally Indo-European families of languages. The Indo-European languages, in fact, cover more of the globe than any other group:

The success of the Indo-European language in propagating itself across Europe and Asia Minor, scientists now believe, is largely due to the invention of dairy farming by the Kurgans, and their eventual ability to digest lactose in adulthood. (The lesser evolved of us still have difficulty digesting lactose.) As a review in Seed Magazine put it, “with a mobile food source, those milk-drinking warriors would have been able to terrorize and conquer their plant-tending neighbors.” And conquer they did, spreading their language across the continent, where it merged and fused with other local languages, giving rise to the 500 or so languages which today descend to this one common group.

Much of what Pollan complains about in The Omnivore’s Dilemma are food systems which are not “natural”, for example, feeding cows corn rather than grass. He also warns against genetically modified foods, arguing that carbohydrates which result from sunlight and photosynthesis are superior to those which come from chemicals and biological techniques. But then, there was nothing “natural” about humans drinking cow milk either. In fact, the Kurgans probably suffered some pretty bad stomach aches until the genes best suited for digesting lactose won the game of natural selection.

Pollan is, in many ways, an unapologetic food conservative who is quick to dismiss the millions of otherwise malnourished mouths that have been fed over the past 65 years thanks to the Green Revolution. On the other hand, he is right to point out that industrial agriculture is largely dependent on cheap oil, and that it has harmed animals, our environment, water supplies, biodiversity, and our own health.

So, what is the future of food? Is the fashionable pastoral landscape of organic farming that has attracted thousands of college students to work for free this summer a signal what’s to come? Or will scientists in laboratories develop new genetic techniques that enable both industrial agricultural and small farmers to decentralize and break their dependence on oil and chemical fertilizers? Michael Pollan hopes for the former. Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak argue that the latter is inevitable. Only the future will tell.