Between Kansas and Oz

The annual PopTech thought-fest got underway today in Camden, Maine, bringing together nearly 300 journalists, scientists, inventors, technologists, and others working at the forefront of social change for a three-day conversation about these volatile times and how the world is "rebalancing" into a new equilibrium. "We are," Curator Andrew Zolli told conferees, "in the midst of a great realignment - a series of connected and converging revolutions in technology, economics, ecology, energy, geopolitics and culture that mark the end of one global era and the beginning of another."

The status quo on all levels is being challenged at high speeds "from far away, from below and from within," Zolli told conferees, while new powers are rising in the form of new kinds of networks, leaders and influencers. "The very nature of power, itself, is evolving," Zolli added, and the changes are re-making relationships between individuals; re-framing society's notions of governance, and re-drawing the geography of innovation. This massive rebalancing also is driving "entirely new kinds of business opportunities, introducing new voices into global culture, and unleashing a wave of reactionary counter-forces -- simultaneously."

"We are not in Kansas, nor are we in Oz," Zolli said. "We are in the whirlwind."

Among first-morning conference highlights were talks by a trio of people working on initiatives intended to rebalance not just economic and political power, but also to negotiate new spaces for broader cultural and artistic expression -- "changing who gets to speak," Zolli said, "and who gets to shape the narratives of this new global conversation."

* Shahidul Alam -- a Bangladeshi photographer, activist and social entrepreneur -- kicked off the conference by introducing his work as founder of both Drik, an agency for photographers working in the East, and the Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography, one of the largest in the world. "A problem that comes up in the world today is a perception we often have of 'the other' and it makes it difficult for us to recognize equality in a wider sense," Alam told conferees. "Pictures have a power. Through them, we are working to change how 'the other' is seen and how, in this new space, we all present ourselves." In this way, Alam says, he is working to both fight media censorship and correct the West's distorted view of what he calls "majority world" countries like his own. "The rural poor only exist as numbers. By taking pictures, they are removed from anonymity." Added Alam: "I don't like the term, Third World, because I don't want to be third in anything. When you talk of democracy and freedom, by and large the G-8 countries which represent 13 percent of the world's population do not represent me or the majority world in which I live." Alam has created a Website called majorityworld.com to showcase and represent the unseen imagery of local, non-Western photographers. "The whole (Western) publishing process needs to be subverted," he told PopTech, so as to be able to convey the news more accurately, from local sources. "We can't simply let the West keep telling our stories," he said. "We need to be telling our own stories for global consumption."

* Anand Giridharadas, an American-born journalist for the International Herald Tribune, wrote his first book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, to update the picture of India he learned through the prism of his emigre family history and his childhood memories of India. "There is, in fact, some great news," says Giridharadas, who grew up in Cleveland. "And the great news is that contary to all you hear in the media, and contrary to all of this anxiety in this country right now, the American Dream is alive and well. It is, in fact, possibly doing better than it ever has before -- just not here," he added. In India, he says, a new version of that dream is taking hold. Indians are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of what it means to be Indian and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new. This rebalancing should not be seen as a threat of low-wage competition for the West, Giridharadas says, but rather as "a cultural and spiritual release." The "world is flat" idea, he said, "is a flat idea. It's not so much that the relationship between the West and India is flattening but that the world inside India is flattening, too -- becoming more fair" as old caste and class divisions are eroding. "Now, two powerful new ideas are taking hold," Giridharadas said. "The first is that destiny is something one makes rather than inherits. And the second is that ... the individual is sovereign" -- with an opportunity to excel according to individual ability and achievement, regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. Giridharadas warned conferees that political and class bickering among Americans "is making it harder and harder for people here in America to access the upward American spiral that brought my parents to this country from half a world away." This bickering is "not just eroding the America Dream" for Americans, he said. It is "wearing it down at the precise moment in history when the rest of the world has gotten wind of our once-secret formula, and I think that is something we need to think more about."

* Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development, argues in his new book, Eclipse, that China has already overtaken the United States as a global economic power, with consequences both positive and negative for Americans. "China's economic dominance will be much broader in scope and much greater in magnitude than anyone yet imagines," he told PopTech attendees. And he predicts that by 2020, the Chinese Renminbi will eclipse the dollar as the world's dominant currency. "We think of the United States now as going through an economic downturn," he says, "but the other dimension of weakness in the U.S. is that the middle class is getting squeezed and their mobility is declining -- the complete opposite of what is happening in India." Subramanian says "the U.S. is like an apartment block that used to be the envy of the neighborhood. Today, the penthouses are getting bigger and bigger, the middle floors are getting squeezed, the basement is flooded and above all, the elevator from the basement is broken down." He added that America needs to change the way it cooperates internationally and do more to integrate the Chinese into American culture and institutions. By 2030, he says, the Chinese economy will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. economy. Already, the U.S. and Europe no longer have "the carrots and the sticks to cajole China into anything," Subramanian says. "It's no longer about what America wants. That world is gone. The world now will need to be much more symmetrical and balanced."

* Paul Needham and his Bangalore-based company, Simpa Networks, are designing new products and services aimed at "doing capitalism differently" -- making things radically more affordable to the poor. In this case, it's electricity. There are now some 48 million people worldwide who have a mobile phone but no connection to the grid. Simpa is setting out to change that by offering the world's poorest people access to solar energy on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. It's a model that is similar to pay-as-you-go mobile phones in that there's a low initial cost for the hardware required -- but once the cost of the hardware is repaid, the device becomes the consumer's to use, and the electricity generated going forward is free. "Consider the power this model gives to underserved people to create new possibilities for themselves and their worlds, and in some cases for the very first time," says Needham.

Cause Global will be posting more highlights throughout the conference. Watch this space for updates. PopTech ends Saturday night.

Here's the livestream:

Watch live streaming video from poptech at livestream.com

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top, by Cinoby/Germany for istock.com)

PopTech2010: Exploring Failure

PopTech, the vaunted thoughtfest that annually gathers some of the nation's leading social innovators in the coastal hamlet of Camden, Maine, has kicked off its 2010 conference with a strongly resonant theme in this year of economic uncertainty and political dysfunction: failure and its upside.

Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures and Improbable Breakthroughs, the three-day conference, features more than 50 writers, musicians, scientists, technologists and social advocates and entrepreneurs -- all of whom are leading thinkers on the nature of creative change. The day-long sessions that run through Saturday are designed to explore with several hundred conferees the psychology of failure, the nature of risk and the role of mistakes in discovery. "There's something really remarkably accidental about so many of the discoveries that we make," conference curator and PopTech Executive Director Andrew Zolli said in opening remarks, which were being livestreamed on the Web. "...But what happens when we don't let failure happen, when we keep systems that are minimally functional in place? What has to die so the right things can live? How do we kill it?"

To underscore the difficulty but importance of answering those questions, Zolli shared the story of a massive failure of a United Nations-led project in the 1950s and '60s to bring clean water to Bangladesh. "[The U.N.] went out and dug 500,000 wells ... but once built, nobody tested them, and it turned out that 40 percent of them were polluted with arsenic, making for the largest mass-poisoning in human history," Zolli said. But it wasn't just the intervention that went awry, he said. The solution -- to test the wells and paint the spigots of clean ones green and polluted ones red -- also failed. What happened? "Almost immediately," Zolli said, "there was the perception in villages with red spigots that because the wells were tainted, the girls were tainted. Suddenly, many of them became unmarriageable and there was a spike in the sex trade." Added Zolli: "We tried to solve the water problem and we created an urban prostitution problem. We did exactly the opposite of what we intended. These kinds of stories sit very heavy in our hearts but they also remind us of the enormous complexity of the problems that we are trying to solve in the world."

Zolli urged social innovators to start thinking about failure, risk-taking, innovation and intervention in much more sophisticated, open and creative ways. The first step, he said, is to spot what doesn't work and get rid of it, quickly, so as to make negative space "for new forms" and "un-obvious connections."

In other highlights from Day One:

*Kathryn Schulz, the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and The Wrong Stuff blog on Slate, said humans are "experts in being wrong." They use language, have tools, have opposable thumbs and get stuff wrong often. We are, Schulz says, like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, forever leaping off cliffs in pursuit of our goals, unaware we're in trouble until it's too late. "We think we're on solid ground," she said, but "more often than not, we deny our mistakes. We get defensive about them. We blame them on other people or we come up with amazing, inventive explanations for why we weren't that wrong after all," Schulz said. She cited a heated argument that a man in her book had with his wife over how many carbohydrates there were in a jar of pickles. The man said he realized he was wrong halfway through the argument. But rather than admit he was wrong, he invented imaginary facts to support his position. "If this is how we behave when we're wrong about really trivial things, you can imagine what happens when we're wrong about things that actually matter," Schulz said -- "like the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction; the safety features on an oil rig; the stability of our housing market; the identity of a murder suspect; the integrity of our money managers; the fidelity of our spouse -- or any of the many beliefs we have that are hugely consequential and which help us to understand ourselves and make sense of the world around us." So how do we get better as a species? The solution, she said, lies outside our inner selves -- in collaboration. "We need to recruit other people" to make sure we're getting things right. "That's why in high-stakes situations, we have safety valves and copilots. That's why open source is a good model for uncovering errors quickly and making corrections, and it's also why democratic cultures do better at preventing and discovering and correcting mistakes," she said. "...We need each other to find our own mistakes and turn them into better ideas, better financial systems, better conferences, better relationships and in the end, maybe a slightly better world."

* Kevin Starr, founder and director of the Mulago Foundation, built upon Schulz' presentation, saying the nonprofit advocacy community tends to delude itself over its impact on social problem-solving. [Overly wordy, self-important and confusing mission statements, he said, are one symptom of this behavior.] Starr, who coaches nonprofits on how to be more effective, said he uses three questions to determine whether a nonprofit is up to the job. Do its leaders know clearly what it is trying to accomplish? "If you could only measure one thing to know if you fulfilled your mission, what would it be?" Starr asked. Do nonprofits measure the right things to determine success and do they measure them well enough? "Measuring well means taking an honest stab at understanding what change you're creating," he said. Is it needed? Does it work like it is supposed to? Will it get to those who need it and enough of those who do? Will people use it immediately? Starr then named three high-profile, nonprofit failures: One Laptop Per Child, the Lifestraw and PlayPumps. In the case of the laptops, Starr said, each was made well enough but ended up costing families living on $2 a day an estimated $400 each. "If you're a $2-a-day family, are you really going to let your kid take the most expensive thing in the household to school every day?" he asked conferees. "This was nuts," he said -- and not needed. "Where we work, there's not a digital divide," he said. "There's a pencil divide. Schools are falling down and teachers don't show up." In the case of the Lifestraw, Starr said, the device proved to be an excellent water filter but it cost too much and took too long to use, discouraging widespread adoption by villagers. The one study available on usage rates showed that only 13 percent of the people even claimed that they ever used it, Starr said. The third project, PlayPumps -- a simple merry-go-round that doubled as a water pump to bring clean water into villages across Africa -- also missed the mark, Starr said. "This was so seductive and so wrong," he said. "Twenty million dollars later, the party's over and we still don't have any idea of how many of these things are still spinning," he said. "A lot of them broke down and there were some areas where kids would have had to push this for more than 24 hours a day to keep the water tank full" and that wasn't happening. "We have depressing footage of women trudging in a circle," Starr said. "This was a bad idea." Starr said in each case, do-gooders were oblivious to on-the-ground challenges to actual usage. Accurate impact measurement, early on, could have averted some of the problems, he said. "We need to do a lot more of that."

* Ned Breslin, CEO of Water for People, said a lot of nonprofits and NGOs and other development agencies aren't just wrong about the impact they're having. They will also try to mislead donors about their effectiveness. "Many will tell you that everything is good" after you donate money to clean water projects in Africa, regardless of what's really happening on the ground, Breslin said. "They'll show you happy kids drinking clean water, laughing," he said. "They'll tell you everything is good. They'll give you a report and a picture. They'll say, 'Here are receipts that prove we spent your money well.' .. But the problem? What happens when we foreigners leave, when the new water system has to run for a while? Is the system still working over time? Are girls who had to carry water from the river all day now attending school, instead? Is water still flowing?" More often than not, Breslin said, families that had been helped with new wells now need to go back to rivers to get their water, thanks to a proliferation of broken well heads and pumps. "...Sustainability to our organization is not how many hand pumps you put in, nor how many beneficiaries we helped last year, nor how many microfinace loans we make," he told conferees. "It is this: is the water still flowing? Africa is littered with broken technology, broken dreams and broken promises. We've got to turn that around and move to different outcomes." Want to change the world? "Push the nonprofit sector and NGOs to do better," Breslin said.

PopTech continues through the weekend; Cause Global is attending and providing coverage. Watch this space for updates.

--Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration, Uncertainty, by Tavik Morgenstern)

The Spinternet

In the mid-1990s, people began realizing the Internet would transform the world—but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that it would be mostly for the better. One of today's panels of thought leaders at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford agreed it's time to take another look at that assumption.

 Charles Leadbeater, a social entrepreneur and author of We-think: the power of mass creativity, said the Internet has, indeed, given more people access to knowledge [and will continue to do so, through such sites as Ushahidi, kiva.org, the new Wikimap Aid, and M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money exchange service in Kenya]. It's also clear, Leadbeater said, that the Web has begun to topple the top-down, Industrial Age way of managing people and projects into more level, lateral types of conversations, relationships and collaborative teams. "I also think the Web has huge potential to allow knowledge to be deployed in different ways which are not determined by profit," he told Skoll conferees.

Panelists also agreed that the Web—particularly cellphone video-sharing—is empowering many people to hold their leaders accountable for bullying: Witness.org Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm shared citizen videos that her nonprofit either helped to produce or took viral on the Web in an effort to stop human rights abuses. This mobile phone video, about a California man shot and killed by police, led to the arrests of two officers after it went viral shortly after the incident. [Note the irony of the "danger" sign on the closing door of the subway train that appears at the end of the clip.] Another video, shot on a Flip video camera by Witness.org-trained Yemeni activists, showcases the six-year-old daughter of Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and her recollections of the day authorities broke into the family's home, beat her father unconscious, and imprisoned him for his pro-democracy views. Witness.org uploaded the video and took it viral; a screen shot of that video, emblazoned with The Hub's logo, was then published by an Arab newspaper. A public uproar ensued and led to the release of al-Khaiwani last September. "Once a story is out in the public sphere, it cannot be removed from public consciousness," Alberdingk Thijm said.  "The Web can help shift the dynamics of power."

But citizens, beware. It's getting harder to use the Web for social change. Challenges to the Web's potential for democracy and freedom are growing quickly now, panelists agreed. "The enemy is getting just as smart in using these same tools to silence people yet again," said Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who is writing a book about censorship and the use of the Internet by authoritarian states. 

Morozov cited a half-dozen examples of government and corporate "Net-cleansing"—including cases where companies are hiring "reputation cleansers" to bury Web references to poor corporate track records on Web search engines, while nationalist groups in Africa and the Middle East are using Google maps to mashup census data, so as to better pinpoint minority neighborhoods for targeting. Crowdsourcing also is being used by the governments of Thailand and China to drum up lists of Web sites and blogs critical of the current regimes; the Thai government, Morozov says, asks citizens to nominate Web sites to be blocked for content that offends the king; in China, a "50-cent Army" of some 200,000 or more citizens is paid to post pro-government comments on blogs critical of Beijing authorities. Morozov also says denial-of-service attacks are emerging as powerful tools for silencing political dissent in Georgia, Burma, Russia—and the United States. [During last year's debate in California over the controversial Proposition 08, Morozov says, denial-of-service attacks were used by proponents of the anti-gay proposal to stem the ability of gay and lesbian nonprofits and political action groups to fight the measure.]

 "We tend to assume the Net is going to be helping [civil rights advocates] and not the dictators," Morozov says, "but repressive groups and regimes love the Internet, too, and are figuring out how to use it to control others." When asked by moderator Andrew Zolli which side is winning—citizen civil rights activists or the dictators—Morozov said: "Both ends of the spectrum are expanding, but it's very hard for me to deliver an argument that the Net benefits one political side more than the other."

For more on the 50-cent Army and Internet censorship, see Peep Show, an August post on Cause Global about online censorship around the world.  

The Skoll World Forum 2009 ends today.

(Illustration by istock.com)