I spent most of my 20s this way without major issues. I would still wake up in the morning full of energy and inspired to work. Friends and colleagues asked how I had so much energy. I just shrugged. I suppose I was blessed.

From 2005 – 2010, I was in a new country at least every two months — often every two weeks. At least once a month I gave a presentation at some conference or workshop. There was always pressure to “sound authoritative,” to have answers for all questions — even if half the time they were bullshit. Frequently I would arrive to some new country without having slept on the flight only to down three double espressos, put together a presentation, and then deliver it later in the afternoon. Later I would crash hard, but by the next morning I was always back to normal.

Then I turned 30. At first I didn’t want to admit to myself what was happening. All of a sudden I needed more than six hours of sleep. At least eight, sometimes even nine. I became more dependent on caffeine. To keep at my normal levels of productivity I now had to drink six, sometimes eight, on occasion even 10 shots of espresso. My stomach suffered. I was constantly dehydrated. Even after nine hours of (usually restless) sleep, I woke up tired with deep dark circles under my eyes. All my life people assumed I was younger than my age; now they are surprised that I’m not older.

The strange thing is that no one asked me to work ten hours a day. It’s not like I was working so hard because I was concerned that I would lose my job. All of my stress was self-induced; a bizarre internal conflict that justified sacrificing my own health in the name of “getting things done.”

Last week I ran into an old friend from the “conference circuit.” We first met years ago in California, but then continued to cross paths in Europe, South America, New York, and now Mexico City. We reminisced about the good old days, when we’d happily stay up late into the night tweaking some WordPress installation or learning the latest design tricks with CSS. Now we were left wondering where all that motivation had gone.

He sent me a link to a blog post about stress, which lists common symptoms:

• Fatigue
• Headaches
• Decreased immunity
• Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep and waking up
• Mood swings
• Sugar and caffeine cravings
• Irritability or lightheadedness between meals
• Eating to relieve fatigue
• Dizziness when moving from sitting or lying to standing
• Digestive distress

I was ten for ten. Finally it home: I need to change my routine, I can’t keep living like this.

When I am the most stressed, when I am near my breaking point, I fantasize about leaving modernity behind. In my daydreams I hop in my car and drive to some rural farm in Oaxaca where I offer to work in exchange for room and board.

Of course I never actually do this, which would come as no surprise to Todd Buchholz, author of Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race. I listened to Buchholz explain to EconTalk host Russ Robert why our actions speak louder than words. We romanticize a simpler, less modern lifestyle, but in fact we are most content working hard to achieve our goals and better our lives. As he puts it:

We are human beings and we’ve evolved in certain ways. Two of the important ways from a biological point of view and a neuroscience point of view: number one, we have this large frontal cortex that literally sits in the front of our brains. It is our window to the future. It is the part of the brain that allows us to imagine the future, to think forward. It’s like our windshield as we go forward. It rewards us for planning … Number two, we’ve got these neurotransmitters. Most people have heard of dopamine, for instance; dopamine is that neurotransmitter that gives us a rush, a surge of good feelings when we take a risk, when we try something new. So, my argument in Rush is that our brains have evolved in such a way that we are more likely to get good feelings when we move forward as opposed to just staying in place–that’s the frontal cortex. And it’s the dopamine. Dopamine is not the good feeling you get from winning the race. It is the good feeling you get from being involved in something, from being engaged.

Or as Gustave Flaubert put it:

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

Fine, I probably won’t be moving to a rural farm in Oaxaca any time soon. It is also true that I am often happier working than sitting around listening to people gossip about one another, or watching bad television. The solution, I suppose, is to find a happy, productive balance between my pre-modern fantasies and my cyclical addiction to stress.

It sounds like hippie shit, but I am going to start practicing meditation to see if I can calm my mind. I am going to finally start stretching before and after I run each morning. And I’m going to limit myself to a single cup of coffee in the afternoon. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I will stop comparing my own achievements to those who are willing to live much more stressfully than I.

Today’s accompanying song: Helplessness Blues by the Fleet Foxes.

So much of who we are – or at least how we are perceived – is based on how we speak. A few slight sounds escaping from our mouth can betray our class, birthplace, generation, urban tribe, career, and hidden aspirations. From our infancy we learn to speak by observing the speech of others; and that process never really stops. I know several aspiring radio journalists who spent months trying to sound like – but not sound like – Ira Glass. We are creatures of imitation and assimilation.

My entire childhood I moved around frequently – sometimes every year. With each new state, neighborhood, schoolyard I had to assimilate to a new vocabulary and enunciation. In Southern California, a Midwestern accent was a junior high death sentence.

Finally it became clear that Southern California would be home. I subconsciously invested all my linguistic faculty in mastering Southern California speech; the dude’s and right on’s and the ‘no worries, it’s cool bro.’ I knew the language, I felt part of the community.

Later, in college, there was a divorce between the language we used at the beach and that of the classroom. The same guys who spoke of ‘chasing tail’ and ‘cold chilling’ became lost in a magical trance of post-modernism and deconstructionism and who knows how many other isms.

One vocabulary sought acceptance and assimilation; the other, an authoritativeness over issues we still failed to grasp completely. At some point I realized that I was tired of both types of imitation. I wanted to speak my own speech, rooted in my own identity. A style of speech liberated from geography, but also from the presumptuous neologisms of the ivory tower. Around the same time I began to travel more and spend ever less time in the United States. At some point I developed my own way of speaking, in which I feel equally at ease in South Africa, India, Kenya, England or the United States. People frequently ask me where I am from. “But you don’t sound American,” they say. Even in my own country, I am told that there is something about my accent that they just can’t place.

I am comfortable with the way I speak English, the way I express myself, the way I am understood. What is interpreted as an American accent is often measured in tone, volume, and swagger. I take pride if those characteristics don’t apply to my own style of speaking. In fact, if true, it probably comes from years of effort and practice.

But Spanish is different. On my best of days I can convince a South American that I am from Mexico or a Mexican that I am from South America, but I can never seem to simply speak Spanish as me. For example, take one of the most important phrases in any language: “that’s great!” In Latin America the translation changes wildly across countries, regions, and generations. Que padre, que chido, que chévere, que bacano, que chula, and the list goes on. Though I have resorted to “que bien” or “que bueno”, there is really no all-encompassing term that works across the region. Of course another option would be to simply stop speaking so lazily. We tend to say “that’s great” most often when we are hardly listening at all. It is a way to stay on autopilot. But to respond at a deeper level requires more thought, more cognitive energy – and that is a resource that seems to be in increasingly short order.

Thinking about these issues, I came to realize that accent and identity must be a constant struggle for all immigrants. To truly master another language requires much more than imitation and assimilation. We must reach into a dictionary of tens of thousands of words and through our phrasings we must somehow find ourselves.

According to the famous quote by science fiction writer William Gibson, the future was in Austin this past week for SWSX Interactive. More than 15,000 of the digitally inclined brought their favorite assortment of screens and shoulder bags in order to sell their great ideas and make sense of what’s to come.

I stopped by myself (iPhone, iPad, and MacBook all in hand) thanks to the kind invitation of Amy Schmitz Weiss who organized a panel on social media in Mexico. There’s not much one can say about social media in Mexico (or anything else) in just 10 minutes, and so we must resort to anecdotes and soundbites. The ‘Tedification’ of intellect, one friend calls it. Still, here’s my presentation. I skipped through at least half of it.

All the veterans will tell you: you might catch an interesting panel here or there, but SXSW is to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I heeded their advice. I caught up with old blogger buddies – like César – that I hadn’t seen in far too long. Others – like Prentiss – who I had yet to ever meet. And still others – a thick wad of business cards stuffed into some corner somewhere – or people who I would like to be my friends if the nature of time were to take an unexpected turn. Then there were dozens of people – friends, colleagues, co-conspirators, what have you – who were allegedly there, but never seen. You get used to that, the veterans tell you.

Why everything is amazing but nobody is happy?, was one of the dozens of panels that I had wanted to see, but missed. It was also a question I asked myself repeatedly throughout the week. Actually, I should clarify. It’s not that the digitally inclined were unhappy; just anxious. An existential angst. If as teenagers they asked themselves what they should be doing with their lives, now they were asking themselves what they should be doing with every minute. The humid Austin air was thick with ‘first day of school’ anxiety.

“For the last two years Twitter was the new Twitter, what’s the new Twitter this year?” asked one friend when I told her I’d be going to “spring break for the Internet.” According to TechCrunch: “Advertising Was This Year’s Twitter, iPad 2 Was This Year’s Foursquare.”

In fact, there were no next ideas. No “the new Twitter.” All the keynotes were the same keynotes I saw last year. And I’m pretty sure that all the keynotes I saw last year were the same ones I had seen the year before. Oliver Burkeman, desperate for a headline to justify his expense account to his editors at The Guardian, says his big takeaway is that cyberspace no longer exists. I’m pretty sure I saw a keynote about that a few years ago.

My great next idea is that I need to stop going to social media conferences. But yes, I admit, I came up with that one last year too.

It was discomforting that everyone at SXSW looked either slightly familiar or slightly like me. Here I was, just another Internet mall rat, filing away these thoughts in order to later post them onto my blog. A few friends have told me that they consider me an early adopter. Is that a talent, a coincidence, or a condition in need of treatment? I feel like I’m supposed to do something with it. Something that I’m not.

There must be some grand theory out there to help me understand all of this. To help me understand myself. And so late in the afternoon on my last day of the conference I tried to attend the panel “Understanding Humans: New Psychology and the Social Web.”

Newer psychological theories like Activity Theory or Actor Network theory can help us understand our need for tools like Twitter and Facebook. This world of post-cognitive theories understand social relationship and move beyond the simple world of goal directed tasks with neat closure.

A world of post-cognitive theories? Surely that would help me help myself. The room was packed, overflowing into the hallway. I couldn’t hear a thing. Oh well – Wikipedia tells me everything I need to know: It’s a “psychological meta-theory, paradigm, or framework, with its roots in Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology.”

Of course.

In search of a smoothie to sooth my sore throat, I passed this guy – allegedly homeless – on Congress, sitting outside of Apple’s temporary downtown store to sell new iPads to my fellow early adopters:

Why not ride the wave of crowdfunded creativity?

Once, about a decade ago, I wrote in my (paper) journal that all I needed was a good digital camera and a decent laptop and my life would be complete. I had just returned from a round-the-world trip with recent visits to Patagonia, Easter Island, Polynesia and Southern Africa. I had seen so much, wanted to see so much more, and just needed a few tools to help make sense of it all … to communicate these thoughts in a compelling way.

Maybe Social Media Bum feels the same way. With the right tools, everything else is just a matter of time.

Here I was with all the right tools in my bag, feeling incredibly uninspired. I took refuge in a nearby movie theater and decided to watch a movie called El Ambulante. It was my path to redemption. The documentary follows artisan filmmaker Daniel Burmeister as he travels from small town to small town in southern Argentina, peddling his craft.

The business model goes something like this: Burmeister arrives to some small town in a rundown car with little more than an old VHS video camera and a stack of letters of recommendation. He first heads to the mayor’s office and asks for a month of room and board in exchange for making a movie about the town. With life’s basic necessities secured, he walks around getting to know the town’s residents and asking them to act in his movie. The mayor will play the mayor, the priest will play the priest, and so on.

The mere process of making a feature film transforms the town, the way the residents interact with one another, how they view themselves. It was especially fun to watch the documentary in a theater full of filmmakers (in town for SXSW’s film festival). While they couldn’t help but giggle at Burmeister’s amateurism, they were clearly inspired by his passion and his philosophy of “artisan filmmaking.”

I left the movie theater feeling inspired myself. I had momentary daydreams of buying a run down VW Bus in Mexico City and driving it around southern Mexico to follow in Burmeister’s footsteps.

It was, in fact, the first moment I had felt inspired all week. All this talk about The Next Big Thing had me feeling numb. I was tired of the next great idea. Later that night I checked into the Rising Voices website – the first time I had done so in weeks. In Colombia some of the newest members of HiperBarrio made a tribute video to their community librarian. In Egypt this week a group of female bloggers have gathered to discuss the future of feminism after last month’s revolution. And in Kenya some very brave bloggers are challenging the taboos and discrimination against HIV-positive Kenyans.

On the flight back from Austin to Mexico City I realized just how little I care about The Next Big Thing. The next great app, the next Mark Zuckerberg, the next great band, the next great filmmaker. I’ll leave that to others – and there are plenty.

As lightning lit up the clouds beneath us, I read Heather Ford’s excellent essay, “The Missing Wikipedians.” There is still so much work to be done. So many great projects that may not be innovative; just merely important. That is where I will try to focus my time and energy.

I find myself thumbing through the words and black and white photographs of Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It begins with an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s A Song for Occupations:

House-building, measuring, sawing the boards,
Blacksmithing, glass-blowing, nail-making, coopering,
tin-roofing, shingle-dressing,
Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, flagging of sidewalks
by flaggers,
The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln
and brick-kiln,
Coal-mines and all that is down there, the lamps in the darkness,
echoes, songs, what meditations …

An intellectual’s romanticism of the working class. I can’t help but fall for it every time. I flip through de Botton’s photographs of fishermen, electricians, construction workers, even cleaners, and I’m enthralled. There are also photos of officer workers, consultants, and salespeople, but I flip through those images much more quickly.

At last year’s Prix Ars Electronica we were given a tour of Voestealpine, the local steel factory that long sustained Linz’s industrial economy and Hitler’s need for steel railways. We were shown the process of forging steel, the furnaces, the cooling tanks, the filthy, sweating workers. At this year’s tour, which I did not attend, visitors were kept away from the actual plant. Instead they were treated to a slick, new multimedia visitor’s center with state of the art monitors and visualizations. The factory itself is now off-limits and that raw experience has been substituted by two-dimensional displays and three-dimensional graphics.

At last night’s dinner, perched atop the local museum of contemporary art, I sat next to Andreas Hirsch, a photographer and curator with a relaxed smile to balance out a uniquely intense gaze. He will be organizing a part of this year’s Ars Electronica festival in September and we spoke about the limits of leading an open source life. The concept of “dropping out” was a major movement in 1960s and 70s Europe and North America. What is the equivalent today in a world where Whitman’s “house-building, measuring, sawing the boards” has, for many of us, given way to “sending emails, accepting contacts, updating profiles”? Are people dropping out of the mainstream internet, abandoning corporate Web 2.0 platforms – Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. – to craft a more independent, utopian vision of digital space?

I mention to Andreas that the catalyst for the “drop-out” movement of the 60′s and 70′s in the United States probably originated in the birth of suburbia in the 1950′s. Returning soldiers from WWII were given low interest housing loans by the US government, and massive suburban housing tracts became the standardized way of organizing residential life.

The banality of a suburban childhood is an assault on the imagination. And many of us who grew up in the suburbs strive for – though mostly fail to achieve – an existence that is less homogenous, less corporate, more autonomous. Is Facebook the suburbs of digital space? Are people dropping out already? Where are they going? (A separate blog post.)

A city built of sand.

I know many people who moved to Dubai in the past five years. Some said that they wanted to experience a new part of the world. Others were more honest and admitted that the tax free living was irresistible. Others were searching for the 21st century El Dorado, a chance to make their fortune and flee.

The entire city was built on a bubble; by now every newspaper reader is aware of that. But what has been lacking from most analyses of Dubai’s decline is the implicit involvement of every Dubai resident in the worst kind of neoliberalism: a pyramid scheme built on a pyramid society with South Asian indentured servants building a base layer for the irresponsible fantasies of greedy Western expats and the nouveau riche Gulf Arabs. The best dissection I’ve read of Dubai’s contemporary feudal system is Johann Hari’s “The Dark Side of Dubai.” In fact, it’s one of the best articles I’ve read in a very long time.

Dubai was destined to fall apart, but the question is, Did anyone learn their lesson? I doubt it. Already I hear rumors that those who fled Dubai are now searching for new tax havens in Asia with access to cheap manual labor, luxury apartments, and four-star eateries.

Paul Romer has a theory that the city states with the best rules will attract the best talent, which will lead to the best innovation. He is thinking of places like Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Bangalore. But his theory – or at least his talk – makes no mention of morals and I wonder if some of these tax-free city states are confusing greed for talent.

You get to ninth and Arizona and you decide to pee. This is illegal, but fuck it. The trucks roll by, purring with the passing storm. In the earphones: Sleepyhead by Passion Pit. “They crowd your bedroom like some thoughts wearing thin. Against the walls, against your rules, against your skin. My beard grew down to the floor and out through the doors of your eyes, begonia skies like a sleepyhead.” It makes no sense.

Unless you’re drunk. The point is this: you walk four extra blocks for a midnight glazed donut at 7-11.

7-11, which was once open from seven o’clock in the morning until 11 p.m. in the evening. Hence the name. And what is a glazed donut anyway? Flour, oil, sugar, that’s it.

And in 7-11 is a woman in her 40′s who is waiting to talk to you. Lonely. So much loneliness. But now in the earphones: “wake up to your window, the day calls in billows, it’s echoing moonlight onto the blue nightmare of your heart, in cozy red rainbow, it’s shaking off halos, and the memory of our sacred so and so.”

You don’t talk, don’t acknowledge, but my god is this a good donut.

The point is this: on Lincoln and Wilshire is a homeless person. One of Santa Monica’s hundreds of homeless people. And it’s 50 degrees. And it’s raining tomorrow. And it was snowing today as you drove over the Grapevine. And you give this person ten dollars. And you wonder why you don’t give this person $10 when you are sober.

You’re almost home and you’re tired of being an adult. In the earphones, New Order: “Won’t you please let me go. These words lie inside they hurt me so. And I’m not the kind that likes to tell you. Just what I want to do. I’m not the kind that needs to tell you. Just what you want me to.”

And that’s it, that’s the point. A minor headache in the morning, but whatever, fuck it.

It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

- Frank Schirrmacher

Sometimes I wish that my computer had a “fuck it” key. I would press it and it would fuck everything up. My Facebook page: deleted; my Flickr account: gone; my Twitter feed: evaporated; my blog: what blog?

The sheer beauty of all that digital destruction. The temptation. The illusion of protection through forgetting.

“Sometimes I feel like all that is important in life is what we can stick on a 4gb USB drive,” a friend once told me. I hate that feeling. I know it well.

(And, yes, I realize that all of this contradicts what I wrote just a week ago.)

So that’s the story of my personal involvement. Now, the story about the World Blogging Forum itself. From what I understand, the whole thing was the idea of a group of far-too-attractive 20-year-old girls from the Romanian Association of Foreign Language Students (ASLS). Mihaela Draghici, the current president of ASLS, and perhaps the most ridiculously attractive of all the girls, spearheaded the event. Mihaela approached the Romanian government – specifically the Agency for Government Strategies – and proposed an event which would bring the world’s most popular bloggers to Bucharest for a meeting about the future of media. In doing so, the event would generate international buzz about Romania and portray the government as open and forward thinking. In the end, the Romanian government – that is, the Romanian taxpayers – agreed to pay $74,347.91. It should be noted, as far as federal budgets go, that is a very small drop in a very large bucket.

Still, the night of our arrival, surrounded by free food, free cocktails, and fawning beautiful girls, I couldn’t ignore the cough cough of my conscience. I remembered my visit to Hospice Casa Sperantei, of the absolute failure of the Romanian health care system, of all the Roma kids sniffing glue.

I remembered the little girl at the train station in Braşov. The girl who hadn’t showered for days, maybe weeks. The girl who couldn’t have been more than eight, all alone at the train station, just hanging out as if it were the most normal thing in the world. The girl who accepted my apple as if taking an apple from a stranger were the most normal thing in the world. If I were to adopt that girl, I remember thinking, to give her a home other than this train station, that would probably be more useful, more meaningful, than anything else I’ve done so far with my life.

Instead I boarded my train.

I thought of all the Romanians who told me that capitalism is only good for 10% of society. And here I was, surrounded by that ten percent. The privileged, the beautiful, the eloquent. We’re drinking mojitos, we’re mentioning the places we’ve traveled to, the languages we speak, we’re touching each other’s arms as we talk.

I tried, but I failed to ignore the cough cough of my conscience. This is my problem. I go out to a nice restaurant or a fancy bar with friends and I try to enjoy myself. But I can’t. And so I grow quiet and distant. And for the rest of the week: “you’re such a quiet person. Why are you staying in? You don’t like to have fun?” And I smile and I nod and I don’t know what to say.

And so I stayed in my hotel room drinking tea the next two nights. It’s not that I’m such a self-righteous funaphobe. (The size of my hangover a couple days ago suggests otherwise.) In fact, I believe strongly in the value of fun for the sake of having fun. I just couldn’t put myself into the right frame of mind. Besides, I had enough work to keep me up until two in the morning every night. Despite my own issues, the World Blogging Forum turned out to be very useful in several respects.

It was great seeing Onnik, and so wonderful to meet Parvana. Helge’s calm and eloquent analysis impressed me once again. I found a new friend in Erkan who says he will start covering the Turkish blogosphere for Global Voices, which I’m looking forward to. I had fun on KosmoShow with Jakub, Matthias, and Wael. (I did my best to badger Matthias into inviting Rising Voices bloggers to the World Economic Forum … we’ll see, though I don’t have high hopes.) And it was so great to finally meet Emin Huseynzade, Dario Gallo, Cyxymu, Dodi, and Zola. And so strange to meet them in the second largest building in the world.

There are dozens and dozens of lengthy blog posts out there about the World Blogging Forum. Ashley Corinne Killough, a Fulbright scholar researching blogs in Armenia, might have the most thorough coverage in parts one, two, and three. Chinezu seems like the king of guy I’d like to grab a beer with. His critical review of the forum is worthwhile. And Dani – one of the few (only?) male organizers – has a good post from the perspective of host.

Finally, even if I would have done things differently, I still can’t stress enough how impressed I am by all the work the organizers put into this. I mean, seriously, a group of 20 and 21-year-olds convinced their government to bring bloggers from around the world to Bucharest, and they even managed to convince their president to come speak to at us. They showed a complete mastery of online marketing for the event. They took care of all the many details that go along with any conference which brings people from different countries, languages, and cultures. And I know they sacrificed at least a week’s worth of sleep in the process. I am certain that all of the girls are going to go on to incredibly successful careers. I just hope that they share their success with a larger percentage of Romanians.

“He has very American eyes,” she told me. I let out a little chuckle, not quite sure what very American eyes are. “They are very big,” she explained, “and they are always staring at you. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Now I was laughing. I knew what she was talking about. Lots of cultures are ok with eye contact, but Americans are the only ones I know who so actively seek it out.

Perhaps encouraged by my laughter she went on: “He has a very American smile as well.”

“An American smile, huh? And what is that?”

“It is a smile that is always ready to smile. And it is always the same smile.”

Again, I was laughing. Most stereotypes I hear about Americans (and I hear a lot) ring hollow. The archetypical blonde bimbo with constant high rising terminal does surely exist, but (s)he is much more likely to be on a TV sitcom than in an international hostel. These two descriptions, though – the trigger-happy smile and the wide-eyed stare – I can picture perfectly. I don’t think that they are just WASP characteristics either. White, brown, or black … just about every American I know who has traveled for long enough comes to the same realization: that we’re actually much more American than we had ever expected.

Update: Via Lauren I came across this most sensible question from Olivia Judson: “do some languages contain an intrinsic bias towards pulling happy faces?” Does American English pre-dispose us to smiling faces? (And, one might wonder, does the New York accent produce facial expressions of constant irritation?)

In front of us was a two hour drive in the rain from Budapest to a Communist-era four star resort on the Tihany peninsula. I needed to digest some anxiety so I went for a long run through the misty rain along the shores of Lake Balaton, Central Europe’s largest. When I returned to my room a copy of Hungarian Playboy – complete with a DVD of amateur videos – was placed perfectly on my bed.

This was clearly not the typical conference I have grown accustomed to speaking at. Over 2,000 people were on their way and, I quickly realized, their priority – in fact, what seemed to be there raison d’être – was to make money online. The night before the conference I had dinner with a fellow speaker, Norm Johnston, who helped get me up to date on all the latest ways that advertising agencies were making money online. (Norm, I should point out, is an extremely likable fellow despite his occupation.) What, I wondered, could I possibly say to a large crowd from the business class all hoping to make money off of people like … well, me. What I truly wanted to say was this:

The night before my presentation was the famous (infamous, I was told) Internet Hungary party with an open bar and throngs of attractive women in pencil skirts and high heels. I was up in my room. Pitiful, I know. I was adjusting some images on my slides a few pixels one direction or another. I was trying out different font types and character spacings. I was leveling the audio on a video I made specifically for the presentation.

While I worked late into the night I could hear giggling, temporary couples stumbling down the hallway and fumbling with their electronic keycards. By 1 a.m. it became obvious that it didn’t matter what I said the following morning; most of the world at Tihany Club Resort would be too hungover to get out of bed. And for the sober minority, I doubt anything would bore them so much as a 30 minute talk on craftsmanship. But still I worked on. I wanted to get this presentation right – not for them, not for me, but for the sake of the presentation itself.

The peasant pigtails suggest the slow life of the countryside, but her makeup and injected lips are firmly cosmopolitan. It is impossible to know the woman’s ethnicity. She could be from anywhere: India, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Brazil, Guatemala, Europe, North America. She is the icon of the 21st century: global, sensual, sexual, and on an advertisement for a multinational chain.

UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON, all caps, white print on green background. There are four mannequins, all white, the men with swimmers’ bodies and the women with hardly any bodies at all. They wear the standard fare: tight pants, tight shirts, summer scarves, designer sunglasses. They are lifeless, and yet infinitely more fashionable than we mere humans could ever hope for.

I desperately needed a break from the daily routine of waking up, checking my email, adding items to my to-do list, and then spending the rest of the day checking them off. I needed a break from the invisible world of bytes; a foray into the outside world of atoms, trees, and buildings. I grabbed my paper journal, the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, my sunglasses, and headed out to Porto’s blinding summer streets.

It felt as though my journey could have taken my anywhere – that was, after all, the whole point. But now it seems inevitable that I should arrive here, Dolce Vita, the “sweet life”, Porto’s most luxurious shopping mall. The four-story atrium of advanced capitalism lures you in with soft light, cool air, the lapping sounds of the ground-floor water fountain, the familiarity of brand names and perfectly presented display cases. The opaque glass floors are sparkling clean; not a speck of dirt to be discovered by the most probing eyes.

Pepe Jeans London has a backdrop of leaning Caribbean palm trees. An orange and yellow beach chair is draped by a single pair of artificially worn-out jeans and a simple red t-shirt. Four cardboard boxes painted deep denim blue sit atop scattered sand and broken seashells. They announce in white paint that from now until September 15 select items are marked 20, 30, 40, and 50% off.

I stare and wonder how the whole display came about. Is it packaged in a single box that is shipped directly from Pepe Jeans London headquarters? Who is in charge of purchasing the sand, and where does it come from? Who is the entrepreneur that thought to collect sand and seashells to sell to multinational retail stores for their display cases?

I try to picture the young woman responsible for setting up the display. She is proud of her work. I can picture her telling her parents over a family dinner that building a display case offers her a creative outlet. Like any artist she has her tools and she must craft beauty with them. I picture her sprinkling sand slowly on the floor of the display case. Then, unhappy with its appearance, she sweeps it up to start over. Her cell phone rings – a special ringtone – and she explains to her boyfriend that she will be late. She really wants this to look just right.

Upstairs on the fourth-floor food court are all the usual suspects: KFC and Pizza Hut (both owned by Yum!), Burger King, and a handful of Portuguese chains. I settle on Ò Kilo, its slogan: “the flavor of Brazil.”

The men wear white button-up shirts, khaki pants, red aprons, and matching visors, all with the Ò Kilo logo. The woman wear red polo shirts and tight khaki pants – no apron to cover the curves of their bodies. Ò Kilo is the Boston Market of Portugal — comfort food reminiscent of Sunday afternoons in the park. You choose three types of meat, three accompanying sides, and you pay a single price. There is even a glass jar of lemonade topped with ice cubes and freshly sliced lemons next to the cash register.

I worked at Boston Market (a subsidiary of McDonald’s) as an 18-year-old in Washington. Every item on our menu arrived weekly from a central distribution plant in clear, frozen, plastic bags. Preparing food at Boston Market is as simple as pulling one of these bags from the freezer, inserting it into an industrial steamer, and pouring the guts of the bag out into the black plastic serving bins. Every single gram of food was measured, quantified, tracked. Food scientists had developed perfect recipes to maximize taste and profits. The kitchen was the essence of stainless steel industrial efficiency, and the restaurant outside was covered in clever imagery of pastoral pastiche.

A couple days later I was sitting with Sara and her family at their dining table for a freshly cooked meal. Sara had just arrived from East Timor where she had been working with a group of women who make cloth dolls and textiles. She has been trying to build a market for these goods here in Portugal, but all the shoppers are at the malls and the retail stores don’t deal with small scale suppliers.

The next week I sat in on lecture after lecture by various academics pontificating with lefty lament that the wildly independent internet that we once knew and loved is being replaced by a few gigantic corporate platforms.

Just as the small independent shopkeepers of our city centers closed down, unable to compete with the efficiency of retail shopping malls, so to is the online ecosystem closing in around the digital versions of mammoth shopping malls and food courts. It is an unfortunate trend I suppose, but I think that it is far from the inevitable future. The 1990′s was a decade of massive corporate consolidation toward centralized efficiency. In major cities around the world independent stores closed down and were replaced by multinational retail corporations that today can be found from Johannesburg to Jakarta to Japan. The era of artisans and boutiques, it seemed, was over.

But in recent years local artisans’ movements have taken hold in just about every major city in America. Downtown districts are gentrifying, boutiques are back, farmers markets are spreading, and most young fashion designers would prefer to sell their designs to just about anyone other than major retail chains. Against all odds, independent bookstores and music stores are surviving in the digital era while their big box brethren file for bankruptcy.

Facebook, Amazon, and future ‘online malls’ will always be around; as will their real-life equivalents. But I predict that in the next ten years (if not five) we will begin to see an artisan internet emerge around open standards like OpenID, and led by digital natives yearning to express their individuality in a world of indistinguishable mass-manufacturing.