I had a lot of air miles. Rachel had a lull in the Jewish religious calendar between Purim and Passover. We hadn’t taken a “real” vacation – i.e., not one built around my speaking engagements – for about four years. And so we went to Argentina.

Neither of us knew much about the country, except that friends who’d gone came back raving about the beauty of Patagonia, the cosmopolitan buzz and atmosphere of Buenos Aires. And the steak. The wine and the steak.

In other words, our friends had headed to Argentina to find a place where their battered US dollars still packed some punch, where we wouldn’t find ourselves blowing the day’s budget on breakfast, as we’ve done in the past in Britain. We went to Argentina because, for those of us paid in dollars, it’s cheap. Like, “best steak dinner you’ve ever had, for two, and a bottle of excellent wine for $30 cheap.”

And being obsessed with economics, I spent our romantic vacation together asking my loving wife to help me read labels in Argentine grocery stores, trying to get a sense for what proportion of products were local versus imported. (Were she not in training to become a rabbi, the woman would be a saint.) And now that we’re flying back to the US, I’m not planning on remembering my Argentine experience by sorting through Patagonia photos, or re-reading Borges. Nope – I’m looking forward to looking up Argentina’s historical interest rates and trying to understand the softness of the Argentine peso and it’s effect on something I care deeply about – food – and something I could care less about – fashion.

As a tourist in Argentina, it takes a while to understand money – it’s a little complicated. The money changing booths in the airport warn “No hay monedas” – we don’t have coins. It’s not entirely true – they do, and they’ll give you a few when you change money, but they don’t want you to show up with a ten peso note and ask for ten one peso coins. You’d like to do this, because the buses which make the vast city (10th largest in the world, population-wise, by at least one account, which I hadn’t realized until we walked for four hours and covered less than 1/100th of the part of the city on our map) navigable only accept coins. There’s a coin shortage in Argentina, and people hoard coins; cashiers at supermarkets will beg you to give some coins so they don’t have to issue precious ones to you, and waiters will simply round the bill to the nearest 2 pesos, the size of the smallest bill.

But here’s the thing – the bus fare (and the subway fare, which fortunately can be paid in bills) is roughly a peso for a long ride, less for short ones. That’s about $0.27 US cents, or roughly an eighth of what I’m used to paying in US cities. This might be the sign of a progressive government that subsidizes public transport as a benefit to the working class and to promote environmentalism. But the taxis are cheap, too – our first twenty-minute ride across half a dozen neighborhoods cost roughly $6, and I found disoriented for a moment, as said fare would take you roughly one subway stop in Boston.

And then there’s the food. It’s uniformly excellent, if a bit limited in what’s available. And it’s unbelievably affordable for those of us who have hard currency. Our first night in Buenos Aires, before we figured out how to order, I assumed we’d need two $8 entrees to be well-fed. The steak I’d ordered was half a meter in length and required two platters to carry it to me.

I mentioned that the menu is a bit limited – Maciej CegÅ‚owski offers a poetic sample Argentine menu, which turns out to be good preparation for what to expect: empenadas, steak, a little pasta (usually homemade), the occasional green salad, ice cream or dulce de leche for desert, and lots of red wine. It’s a menu that features Argentine agriculture to great benefit. Or the sort of menu you’d gravitate towards if importing food from other countries was prohibitively expensive.

I started thinking things were a bit strange when I noticed an Italian restaurant advertising the fact that they used a particular dried pasta imported from Italy. The pasta in question – DeCecco – is fine stuff, but I buy it for $2 a box at my local supermarket. This restaurant was charging a steep premium for these noodles, roughly twice what they charged for handmade. In the US, where labor is at a premium, “handmade” almost always means “expensive” – in Argentina, handmade means local, which means cheap, while the imported noodles demand a premium.

So that’s where Rachel and I began searching labels for national origin. Many nations are self-sufficient for much of their agriculture – it’s a precarious situation to be in if you need to spend hard currency for your staple food, for instance. And even in this connected world, at least three-quarters of economic activity in a nation like the US is domestic. But the import premium in Argentina is stark – imported cheese runs 4x the cost of domestic cheese, and god help you if you insist on drinking Evian water, at roughly 8x of any domestic brand.

Most fascinating to me were the flip-flops. As an American raised in the late twentieth century, I automatically assume that anything made from plastic and designed to be semi-disposeable is made in China. But the 9-peso ($2.50) flip-flops were made in Argentina, a fact that took me back to Ghana in the early 1990s.

When I lived in Ghana for the first time in 1993, the Ghanaian cedi was extremely weak. In the year I lived in the country, the currency fluctuated between 500 and a thousand to the dollar, implying an inflation rate of 100% a year. (The real rate was actually much lower – the currency bottomed out around Christmas, when everyone was trying to buy dollars so they could purchase Christmas presents from abroad – once the holiday ended, the currency strengthened significantly. You know you’ve got a ightly traded currency when seasonal demand is the most important macroeconomic factor affecting its price…)

For a country of 18 million (at the time), Ghana produced a surprising amount of stuff. The ubiquitous plastic buckets we used for drinking and bathing water, the plastic plates we served meals on, the aluminum pots, the scrub brushes and brooms? All made in Ghana. This didn’t make a great deal of economic sense – Ghana probably could have imported plastic goods from China at a lower price than from running a plastics factory. But “import substition” was one of the dominant economic policies of the day, the idea that goods should be produced locally to encourage local industry, and imports should be taxed heavily to encourage consumption of the local goods.

Import substition has a tough track record. The few development economists who think it’s a good idea might point to Brazil as an example of a country that put up steep import barriers and ended up with strong domestic companies like Embraer. Others might point to South Korea, which nurtured a domestic steel industry behind fierce trade barriers. But as my late mentor Dick Sabot explained to me, South Korea did something governments almost never do – they required the domestic companies to continually increase quality until they were competitive with international steel producers. Most nations simply protect their domestic plastic industry, which turns out shoddy, overpriced buckets until smugglers figure out how to bring in superior, cheaper Chinese goods.

(In my original draft of this post, I had a paragraph explaining that I was sure that Argentina wasn’t doing anything as stupid as conciously seeking a policy of import substition – they were just suffering the lingering effects on their currency of their 1999 economic crisis and massive default in 2001.

Turns out the Argentine economy is even more screwed up than I’d thought and that Christina Kirschner’s policies include import substitution through import and coercive export tariffs. Remember those farm protests last year against Resolution 125, which increased levies on soybeans? (Of course you do.) Soy’s an export crop for Argentina, and the Kirchner government wanted to a) benefit from global high grain prices and b) persuade farmers to grow domestic staples like wheat or corn, to help lessen dependency on imports. Farmers really didn’t like being told what to plant, and began blocking highways with their tractors.

Wow. Punative export tariffs and import substition. Laying blame on evil exporters dumping their goods on local markets. Do their economists wear bell-bottom suit pants?)

Argentina experienced a pretty good decade in economic terms in the 1990s. With the Argentine currency pegged to the dollar, it was fully convertible – you could take pesos to the bank and convert them into dollars. As a result, Argentina experienced the same low interest rates and low inflationas the US did, and saw widespread economic growth.

But currency pegs are tricky things – they force you either to control government spending or to borrow heavily, and Argentina did the latter, issuing massive bond issues. They also can keep your currency artificially strong in respect to their neighbors – when financial shocks to Mexico, Russia and Southeast Asia ended up hurting Brazil’s currency, Argentine imports became unaffordable, and government debt increased further. Investors began shorting Argentine bonds, and the government eventually defaulted on almost a hundred billion dollars of debt, tanking the country’s debt rating and making future borrowing much harder. (The country’s debt rating is currently a B-, miles away from investment grade and well below the ratings of much lower development countries, like Ghana.)

While the country isn’t experiencing the steep devaluation it did in 2002, it is seeing significant devaluation and accompanying inflation. While the government reports inflation of about 9.3%, some international analysts believe it’s basically lying, hiding an actual inflation rate of 20% or higher. Let’s assume the currency is now devaluating at roughly 20% a year. An Argentine grocery store selling French cookies has to take a real gamble: it borrows Euros to buy the product, and has to sell them for pesos quickly enough to pay back the loan before the peso devalues substantially. Are you sure you wouldn’t just prefer some nice Argentine dulche de leche?

What this means to a gourmand like me is that Argentina is a paradise for cheap, good Argentine food, but that I’m never going to find a good, cheap curry joint in Buenos Aires. That’s not just because of ethnic patterns of settlement – the economics make it virtually impossible, as a cuisine that required lots of imported ingredients would lead to exorbitantly expensive meals. (We went out for sushi – purely for research purposes – and ended up paying through the nose for a meal that wasn’t especially good.)

A “department store” in Palermo Viejo

But there are some fascinating non-culinary implications to this situation as well. Wander around shopping malls in the Middle East and it becomes clear that European – especially French and Italian – brands dominate fashion consciousness well beyond their borders. No one would ever accuse Porteños of being anything but fashion forward… but those fashions don’t have a lot to do with what’s being put out on European labels. As with what’s on the menu in the restaurants, the fashion flavor is decidedly local.

We spent a pleasant Sunday evening in Palermo Viejo, a neighborhood filled with cool restaurants, trendy boutiques and a healthy scattering of craft markets and street cafés. Sipping (local, pretty good) beer, we watched flocks of teenage girls flit between the local “department stores”.

These stores are pretty simple affairs – long, warehouselike spaces lined with clothing racks high and low. Each two-meter section of rack is topped with a simple, sometimes hand-made sign, advertising the designer’s label. And they’re frequently manned by the designer or a friend, which means that if you really love the “Viva La Evolucion” shirt featuring Che Guevara with a monkey face, but want it in an extra-large blue, you can ask the designer if she could make you one and bring it the following week. Transactions are in cash, there are no receipts unless you ask, and I didn’t see anyone charging any sales taxes. I assume that designers pay the managers of the space a monthly rental for their rackspace, but there may be other arrangements – some of the most popular stores feature racks of clothing sold within bars, and I can imagine a synergistic relationship, where a hot designer sets up somewhere for free in the hopes that they’ll generate drinks traffic.

Fashion starts young in Palermo Viejo. Anyone think the Rolling Stones licensed their logo to this guy?

My total ignorance of fashion makes me an unreliable narrator, but it seemed to me – both from the traffic at these stores and the clothers the cool kids were wearing on the street – that it’s extremely cool to be dressed in locally made clothing. Hand-printed t-shirts are ubiquious on men, often featuring the logos of bands who would happily sue the designers into penury, if they could only find them. (The Ramones logo, refigured with Hunter S. Thompson in the place of the baseball-bat wielding Eagle. Lots of Beatles shirts on guys too young to remember the Beatles.) Colorful dresses on women, often asymmetric, looking both home-sewn and carefully tailored. Supremely funky shoes and handbags, and not a Coach, Gucchi or Dolce and Gabbana in sight.

Our friend Sophia, who’s been leading the expat life in Palermo Viejo, explained her interpretation of the phenomenon over a predictably lucious steak and bottle of Malbec. “Salaries are really low, so everyone’s looking for a way to make a little extra money. So people started sewing, or knitting, or doing metalwork, and selling it to tourists on the weekend, as the tourists are the ones with the money. But because Porteños really like fashion, it’s become at least as common to sell to each other.”

When your currency is relatively strong, it’s inexpensive to buy mass-produced fashions from The Gap. When it gets weak enough, you might be better off buying a locally designed and sewn pair of jeans that’s been custom fitted for you. This isn’t unfamiliar for those of us who’ve worked in developing countries – one of the projects I try to undertake every time I go to Ghana is to bring clothes I really like to my tailor, and ask her to make me copies of those garments, which tend to come out nicer, cheaper and far funkier than anything I could buy in a store. But it’s pretty unfamiliar to see in a high-development country.

“The designers are figuring out the whole idea of exclusivity,” Sophia tells us. “Someone will be wearing a cool pair of shoes, and you’ll ask who made them, find the shoemaker and ask for a pair. And now the shoemaker will tell you, ‘I only made six pairs.’ In other words, while she could make you more, she won’t, because the six pairs that exist out there in the world are cool in part because of their exclusiveness.”

The result is something that would make Etsy devotees very happy, a whole youth culture based around the idea that handmade is cool. What’s fascinating me is the idea that this may have been less about cultural trends – the rise of “maker culture”, the desire to hack and understand the means of production – and more to do with simple economics.

It also suggests we might see an expansion of maker culture in the US if – as some economists predict – we see our currency weaken after the markets start to recover and it’s clear that we’ve flooded the economy with new dollars as part of various recovery plans. Stagflation isn’t a pleasant economic trend to live through, but if it means we’ll see wallets made from old Wonder Woman comic strips on the streets of Boston, well, that would be a partial consolation.

It’s possible that the rise of handmade as fashionable requires a certain population density. If everyone in your neighborhood decides that handmade shoes designed by your neighbors are cooler than Manolo Blahniks, it’s easier for you to think globally and shop locally. While Etsy benefits from the fact that somewhere, out there on the web, there’s someone who’ll pay $200 for your Star Trek corset, Palermo Viejo merchants benefit from local concentration – it’s pretty clear that young fashionistas are looking at each other and contemtuously thinking, “My god, is that machine-made? How gauche!”

If it’s true that Argentine economics have a major effect on diet and fashion, it raises questions for those hoping for the rise of creative economies and hyperlocal agriculture in countries like the US. I’m a big proponent of local agriculture, not because it makes environmental sense (because often it doesn’t), but because local food tastes great and supports my neighbors. Unfortunately, it’s really expensive – self-interested economics suggests that I’m going to buy factory-farmed chicken when push comes to shove instead of local, organic alternatives.

My guess is, so long as the US dollar remains the global reserve currency, it’s going to be tough for local food and fashion to become a mass movement instead of a conscious political statement. While that may not be great news for the makers, it’s probably good economic news – as much as I like the steak, I’d be pretty unhappy if the Obama administration started looking to Argentina for macroeconomic advice.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone. I’m joining the nearly two thousand people who’ve responded to Suw Charman-Anderson’s pledge: “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” You’ve got a few more hours to join the pledge, if you’d like – you’ll be in very good company.

I’ve had the good luck to work with inspiring, brilliant women at every stage of my technical career. At Berkman, I get to work with incredible researchers like danah boyd, Judith Donath, Eszter Hargittai… and, of course, Rebecca MacKinnon, my co-founder on Global Voices. In my activist work, I cross paths with inspiring folks like Katrin Verclas, Beth Kanter, Bev Clarke, Brenda Burrell, Ory Okolloh, Juliana Rotich, and so many others. Once we open the Pandora’s Box that is Global Voices, I could spend all day – let me simply say that I think of Georgia Popplewell whenever I need an inspiration to help me be calm, compassionate, professional and caring in my work – she’s truly one of the most extrodinary people I’ve ever had the honor to work with.

But as I thought about Ada Lovelace day, I realized that I wanted to honor not just women in technology, but programmers, the folks who get their arms dirty making code do what we want it to. And so I found myself thinking back to Tripod, the first real job I ever had, and still the best time I ever had building something from the ground up. In retrospect, Tripod looks like a pretty amazing boot camp for joining the Web industry. My dear friends and colleagues Kara Berklich and Margaret Gould Stewart both found themselves, alongside me, in the odd position of being vice presidents of a large and growing web company before we’d left our twenties. Kara’s now the Veep of marketing for Rubicon, an innovative ad network, and Mags is heading up user interface design for YouTube. (She just moved there from Google, so don’t blame the current mess on her – she’s there to make it better.)

But the Tripod friend I was thinking of was Kate Krolicki. In 1997, Kate had two fairly lousy jobs. One involved life modeling for art classes at Williams College. The other was as a “porn-sniffer” for Tripod – this involved looking at screen after screen of images uploaded to Tripod that our algorithms had identified as being likely to be pornographic, and therefore subject to deletion under our terms of service. After a few months of these two jobs – which Kate reported “can do very strange things to one’s body image” – she found herself hanging out with a group of Tripod programmers and asked, “How hard would it be for me to learn Perl?”

Almost everyone at Tripod at this point was a self-trained programmer. We had a chip on our collective shoulder about computer science majors, and tended to hire folks who’d learned enough programming to be dangerous while majoring in physics, math or philosophy. So Kate found herself learning Perl from a bunch of cocky, sloppy hackers… who happened to have thrown together a web service used by roughly 15 million people. Within a couple of months, Kate was no longer stomping out porn, but writing the core code that controlled our mail systems. She went on to write some nifty mail code for the late, great community newsletter company, Streetmail, and now geeks for Williams College, where she’s part of a small team that helps faculty figure out how to integrate technology into their classrooms.

Tripod got over its prejudices against trained programmers, in part because the CTO who (thank god!) took their reins from me started hiring programmers from General Dynamics, the downsizing defense contractor two towns over. As it happened, many of the best programmers from General Dynamics were women with CS degrees and years of experience writing careful, well-documented, tested code for department of defense systems. They basically kicked our collective asses and taught us a great deal about how production code gets written in the real world. But I’m still proud of my friends who believed – and, I suspect, still believe – that programming isn’t a cult, an art form, a strange, esoteric discipline, but a straightforward, practical tool that can be mastered, even by women and liberal arts majors. That it seldom is is more a function of the pretensions of the people who program and the culture that’s grown up around it.

That’s why my inspiring women for this Ada Lovelace Day are the fine folks behind the Organization for Transformative Works. Not only is OTW building a women-centered community dedicated to the art of fan fiction, where fans extend, remix and rethink works of fiction, they’re building a vast archive of the works that have been produced. And the software for the archive – An Archive of Our Own – is written and sysadmin’d by a team of remarkable women. Notable among them is Naomi Novik, who’s not content to be one of the best fantasy novelists in the world today – she led the team that designed and began building the Archive… while writing books that have dominated the New York Times Bestseller list.

What’s most impressive to me is that OTW saw the project of creating an archive as an opportunity to induct dozens of women into the wonderful world of programming. They’re building a huge, complex system that is truly their own and mastering tools in the process. That, I suspect, is something Ada Lovelace would have appreciated, and it’s something I’m inspired by.

As promised, the code for Media Cloud is now available for your download. It’s licensed under the Affero GPL, and you’d want to have current versions of Perl and Postgres SQL on your system before playing with it. It’s not really packaged for easy installation – this is a very early alpha, but it runs, even if it’s a complex install. More importantly, we’d committed from early on to make this system available under and open license, and I’m thrilled that Hal and David made it such a high priority to get the code out.

(And yes, I am on vacation… but our lovely hotel in Buenos Aires has good wifi, and this seemed exciting enough to share…)

Light, if any, posting for the next ten days – Rachel and I are going to Argentina. Looking forward to posting photos, and to testing the accuracy of this amazing blog post, “Argentina on Two Steaks a Day“.

See you in April.

Lova Rakotamalala has been spending a lot of his time explaining the crisis in Madagascar to the global media.

In a recent blog post, he explains some of the factors that’s led him to the unusual position of becoming citizen spokesman for his homeland. His work summarizing posts on Twitter is very similar to what he’s done so well for Global Voices – finding citizen voices, and putting them into context.

Lova shares his most memorable moment from the crisis, an exchange with @dipnote, the Twitter handle for the US Department of State. I hadn’t realizd that the State Department knew what twitter was, never mind that they knew how to use it well. Here’s a stretch of tweets from @dipnote from midday yesterday:

# RT @usembassylondon: Reports that President Ravalomanana of Madagascar is seeking sanctuary at the U.S. Embassy in Antananarivo are FALSE.12:30 PM Mar 17th from TweetDeck

# U.S. continues to call upon all parties to exercise restraint following the resignation of President Ravalomanana of #Madagascar.12:07 PM Mar 17th from TweetDeck

# @lrakoto @ paulissima @tandriamirado @xcazin President Ravalomanana has made no such request and is not in the U.S. Embassy.12:01 PM Mar 17th from TweetDeck

# President Ravalomanana has made no such request and is not in the US Embassy.11:46 AM Mar 17th from TweetDeck

# We are aware of media reports that President Ravalomanana of Madagascar is seeking sanctuary at the U.S. Embassy in Antananarivo.11:46 AM Mar 17th from TweetDeck

Okay, so I’m impressed. Not only does the State Department follow Twitter, they’re using it to get out in front of rumors that were being reported on major news networks, including France24.

I’m impressed by Lova as well. It’s not easy to report on events tearing your country apart, and to weigh the accuracy of these reports in real time. Twitter has made this process faster, and therefore harder, for those of us trying to help others navigate citizen media. Glad to see Lova getting the attention he deserves.

• Ethanol's African Landgrab | Mother Jones
  An ambitious plan to grow sugarcane for ethanol in the Massingir region of Mozambique raises complex land use issues, suggestions about corruption, and complex intrigue. As a rush for agricultural land in Africa unfolds, we're likely to see lots more stories like this one, or like the Madagascar Daewoo story.
  (tags: africa mozambique sugarcane ethanol agriculture agribusiness)
• Tweets on Madagascar conflict – AOL Video
  The role of twitter in covering the Malagasy 2009 presidential conflict. Featuring a webcam interview with Lova.
  (tags: twitter africa citizenmedia madagascar lova globalvoices cnn)

Jonathan Zittrain introduces David Post of Temple Law School as “one of the framers of the field” of cyberspace governance. With David Johnson, Post laid down much of the track for an argument sometimes referred to as “internet exceptionalism”, an argument that the Internet won’t be – or shouldn’t be – governed in the same way that other spaces are governed by states. Zittrain argues that this argument was strong enough that it took Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu ten years to develop their counterargument, articulated in their influential book “Who Controls the Internet“.

If Goldsmith and Wu can be summarized on a bumpersticker – “States have guns, and you don’t” – David Post’s new book is much harder to summarize. His recent work, “In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace”, is a conversation with Jefferson’s ideas about building representative, republican government and the implications of those ideas for cyberspace.

The book has been a long time coming. In 1995, Post put a proto-blog post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s newfangled “web site” called “Jefferson in Cyberspace”. It’s hard to know which facet of Jefferson’s intellect to apply to the Internet – after all, John F. Kennedy once told a gathering of nobel laureates, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Post references an aphorism by Archilochus, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Jefferson may be one of those rare intellects who knew many huge things – he was a leading expert on linguistic evolution, viniculture, plow design, cartography, architecture and other fields. “He may not have all the answers, but was asking the right questions.”

Post takes his title from an extremely quirky Jeffersonian story. In 1787, when Jefferson was serving as American ambassador to France, he had the carcass, bones and antlers of a male moose, seven feet tall at the shoulders, shipped to him and reassembled in the entry hall of his residence. Jefferson’s letters and notes suggest that the moose was extremely precious to him.

There was a point to the moose. Jefferson was engaged in a debate with European scientists about the size of animals in the “new world”. European scientists advanced a theory that new world animals were smaller, “degenerate” versions of their European cousins, a view that Jefferson strongly disputed. “The moose was the coup de grace,” Post tells us. “He wanted a bison as well, but couldn’t get one.”

It turns out that Jefferson was right on this debate. And this study of scale of animals helped give Jefferson the solution to one of the great problems of government, the scaling of republican government to cover an entire continent. Many wise political thinkers argued that representative government could only work in small communities – Montesquieu believed this so strongly that there’s a law to that effect named for him. Alexander Hamilton believed a republic couldn’t scale and worried that the thirteen colonies might already be too large to be governed as a republic. The Whiskey Rebellion suggested this might be true – if we can’t control Pittsburgh, how can we govern an even larger country?

But Jefferson figured it out, guiding US expansion westward, by proposing a model that allowed groups of 20,000 people to hold their own constitutional conventions and found states that would enter the union as equals to the original colonies. This allowed for radical expansion, like the Louisiana Purchase, and ultimately enabled a nation that spans from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The internet, Post argues, is a phenomenon defined entirely by scale. There are hundreds of thousands of interconnected networks – this particular one grew to the size to cover the entire globe. “The internet is not big because it’s the internet, it’s the internet because it’s big.”

It’s not obvious that the internet should be able to scale this smoothly – “If the internet was a bridge carrying ten thousand cars a day, it’s not obvious that it can carry a billion, or ten billion cars a day.” But the internet has shown an amazing ability to add capacity and processing power to keep growing. But we might be facing some real hard limits, like a limit to IP address space.

As we bring the internet to a large scale, other problems come into play. Copyright law breaks down at this level, Post argues. “Songsmith videos – if I were Larry Lessig, one would magically appear behind me and start playing – videos made using Microsoft’s songsmith system and old video footage,” present incredibly complex legal problems. “I’m a pretty good copyright lawyer and it would take me ten or twenty hours of legal advice to figure out how to clear one of these videos… all for a video that might have taken 15 minutes to create.”

Post tells us that we need to scale our institutions to a global scale so we can govern this new space, and that we don’t know how to do it. When we talk about these things, we tend to talk about institutions like the UN, and that’s not an especially promising model to govern the space.

Before opening the floor to a flood of questions, Post assures us that the omens surrounding his book are good ones. “The day I sent of the manuscript, a male moose stood in the driveway of my house in southern Vermont”. It stood there for a day and a half, inspiring his neighbors to call him and see if the animal was ill or confused. A week after the book was published, Post continues, news comes from San Diego where they’re excavating the foundation for the Jefferson Law School. Excavators discover the skeleton of a mammoth. Under that, they find the skeleton of a baleen whale, and under that the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, an animal from the same genus that Jefferson described in a scientific paper. (Zittrain terms this confluence of skeletons “Jefferson’s turducken”.) “If that doesn’t convince you to buy my book, I don’t know what will.”

My Berkman colleagues and I had ample opportunity to ask Post about the implications of his work, both during his public talk and in a smaller conversation at the Berkman Center. Most of our questions focused on asking Post the practical implications of his work – what would we need to move to a constitutional moment on the internet? What might a contitutional moment look like? Is this realistic to talk about given how much regulation and censorship is already affecting the internet?

Post responds to these challenges with an answer that’s both inspiring and mildly frustrating – if we don’t ask for a constitutional moment, we won’t get it. He references “the Tinkerbell effect” – if we believe in the possibility that an internet that governs itself in a representative fashion is possible, it can become true. “You get in a trap if you think that the is is the ought”, if we never get the opportunity to rethink the ways in which we govern cyberspace. People thought the constitutional moment to create a republican government controlling tens of thousands of people in the New World was crazy – is it as crazy to think that such a movement could happen online?

Pressed for where this movement might emerge from, Post points to small communities online that are finding ways to govern themselves. He references Wikipedia, acknowledging the critique that some argue that dissenters are driven out of the Wikipedia community (see Wikitruth.info), as well as communities developing within Second Life. Given the ability of these communities to self-organize and self-regulate, Post sees the possibility that real-world courts may acknowledge decisions made within these systems and accept the governance mechanisms within these spaces as valid for settling disputes. I.e., imagine a version of Second Life that’s truly democratic and self-governing, rather than ultimately controlled by Linden Labs – it’s possible that US courts would defer to the internal governing mechanism of such a community rather than trying to settle property disputes within the US legal system.

I’m always intrigued by the willingness of lawyers to talk about constitutional moments. As an activist, I wonder whether the place to start these discussions is at a moment of revolution, not at the moment of lawmaking. What would inspire participants in online tools to demand actual self-government? It seems like there have been many rapidly quashed revolutions: Facebook changes terms of service by fiat, users threaten to revolt, Facebook changes TOS again by fiat and revolt quiets. Will these movements ever erupt into full-fledged rebellion? Will Facebook users rise up and build their own republican online community?

Post suggests that they will, once the issues become more serious. Once we’re living more of our life online, once the consequences for behavior in virtual worlds are more serious, once we’re making more money in these spaces, we might see such a revolution emerge. “If institutions aren’t worth taking seriously, won’t be taken seriously.” I’m far from convinced, but that’s why I bought the book and hope to spend some quality time this week with Jefferson and his moose.

In 2005, journalist Jeff Howe was writing a story about MySpace. He wasn’t interested in the site so much as a social network, but as a tool that creative artists, especially musicians, were using to circumvent gatekeepers like music labels. In the process, he got very interested in the kids who were following the Vans Warped tour. These folks practiced “promiscuous creativity”, authoring lots of content and sharing it with each other. It was not always high quality content, but Howe thought their relationship with the process was fascinating. Their use of web designs, video and flash animation was “completely transparent, like we’d use a typewriter.”

In exploring the phenomenon, Howe decided he hated the phrase “user-generated content”. He wondered what he’d find if started looking for “user-generated” anything. His search led him to John Fluevog, a popular shoe designer, who’d introduced a model of “open-source footwear”. Fluevog invited his fans – not just would-be shoe designers – to send him sketches, as rough as they liked, of shoe designs. If he liked them, he’d produce them and name the shoes after you, though not share any revenue.

Howe became convinced that the “user-generated content” we were seeing on blogs and social networks were like looking at Old Faithful – “it’s an amazing phenomenon if you’ve never seen a geyser before,” but it doesn’t show you the really amazing phenomenon, the underground magma that makes the spouting water possible.

Writing about this larger phenomenon – the magma as well as the geyser – Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing”. He showed us screenshots of Google, one showing three matches for the term “crowdsourcing” – “all references from Wired people or folks sleeping with Wired people” – and one a few weeks later showing 669,000 mentions of the term. “It was not the best article I’ve written. There’s lots of research in it, but it’s far from a masterpiece. But I was in the right place at the right time.” As these ideas sometimes do, the article became a blog and the blog became a book.

Howe runs us through some of the key book examples:

A t-shirt contest on (now deceased) web forum Dreamless brought a pair of designers together. The Two Jakes, as they’re now known, decided that they would run a perpetual t-shirt design competition. Their fateful decision: instead of picking the winners themselves, they introduced a voting mechanism, letting fans – potential buyers – vote on the designs they liked. This opened the voting from a small set of experts to a community of people who liked cool t-shirts and were willing to buy them.

The resulting company, Threadless, had $30 million in revenue in 2007, at a 33-34% profit margin. Winning designers are happy to participate, as the contest gives them a $2000 prize, as well as fame. Voters happily rate dozens of t-shirts, and will vote the best shirts by checking a box that says, “I’d buy that”… which registers them for a reminder when the shirt is made and allows the company to estimate how many shirts to print. Users are invited to photograph themselves wearing shirts – and recieve $1.50 in store credit for submitting the photo – which turns customers into evangelists.

In other words, Howe tells us, cheap labor in the 19th century looked like children in mills. Nowadays, cheap labor looks like slackers in their living rooms with laptops.

A web designer living in Calgary, Bruce Livingstone, found himself doing a lot of pro bono design work for friends in the punk music scene. His pet peeve was discovering how much money he needed to pay to license stock photographs for album covers and posters. He built a simple system around his own photographs, uploading his own content and offering it for download using a credit system adopted from the “warez” scene – you get a credit for uploading a photo and it allows you to download three.

The breakthrough for Livingstone was making the decision to charge money – $0.25 – to download a photo. This turned the nascent iStockPhoto site from a small community into a “microstock” agency. These agencies are now eating the lunch of stock photo giants Getty and Corbis. Jonathan Klein, the CEO of Getty, decided to purchase iStockPhoto for $50 million, an investment which looks very smart now that the company brought in roughly $130 million in revenue last year, with a 50% profit margin. Howe tells us that Getty’s core business is flat or declining, but that iStockPhoto projects almost $300 million in revenue in 2012.

There are several other stories Howe works through quickly:

- Ed Melcarek, a freelance engineer who was making his money installing HVAC systems in Barre, Ontario. He started participating in Innocentive.com, a bulletin board where corporations post R&D problems and invite the general public to offer solutions. He’s solved eight major problems, “likely earning six figures” in the process.

- Television network current.tv now shows roughly one third user-created content.

- A group in Washington, DC is starting a crowdsourced restaurant, Elements. It hasn’t opened yet, but the community sourcing the idea has already settled on the lucrative raw food market.

Howe’s model for the rise of crowdsourcing puts the success of the model on the back of four factors:

- The amateur renaissance
- The open source software model, which has emerged as inspiration for these projects
- The democratization of production, which translates primarily as “cheap tools”
- The rise of online communities.

Howe tells us that these projects succeed primarily because of the communities behind him. He ends with a slide that reads, “Ask not what your community can do for you – ask what you can do for your community.”

While Howe’s model of crowdsourcing emphasizes community, he’s troubled by a new research paper by Daren C. Brabham at the University of Utah. Bradum found that while the iStockPhoto community is extremely passionate – over 90% of participants visit the site daily – there was less interest in the community aspects of the site than Howe had guessed, and much more interest in making money. This challenges Howe’s theory that the community is the thing, and that revenue is gravy – the Bradum study seems to find that revenue matters a great deal as a motivator.

(Eszter Hargittai offers her observation that the study may well be methodologically flawed.)

The study is concerning to Howe because his core question is “Why do people participate in community production?” It’s important to answer this question because it has implications for lots of other fields – Howe wonders if stock photography is “the canary in the coal mine”, and whether other creative fields will fall to crowdsourcing. He sees a similar dynamic taking place in graphic design, and wonders if we’re going to see other fields go crowdsourced… like journalism…

I love the examples that Howe offers, but wonder if he’s stacking his deck. His examples are of people doing extremely creative work and getting feedback by other people in the creative community. I wondered whether the sort of crowdsourcing made possible by Mechanical Turk was the same phenomenon as the one Howe was describing.

Howe draws a sharp distinction between the two, observing that Mechanical Turk is highly rote and very ill-paid. He uses the system to transcribe interviews, but argues that there really isn’t a community around transcription the way there is around translation. That said, he suspects that the interest in Mechanical Turk can’t be purely about the money, as Amazon reports that roughly 50% of Turkers are in the US. “I’m not really sure how to explain it.”

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