Title:El Oso
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Posted 3 days, 2 hours ago in the just before lunchtime by oso
Discussed: Cloud Intelligence, Electricity, History, Internet, Nicholas Carr, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison
When we think about electricity the first name to come to mind is famed American inventor Thomas Edison, who filed the first of his more than 1,000 patents at the age of 21. In 1879, at the age of 32, Edison invented what today we call the light bulb. It was a tremendous achievement; the gas lamps that electric bulbs eventually replaced left long black streaks up the sides of buildings, emitted toxic fumes, and frequently caused fires and explosions which destroyed homes and entire city blocks.
There was only one problem with the electric light bulb: practically no one had electricity. Or, to think about it differently, an excellent application was developed, but there was no bandwidth to enable it. The electric light bulb without electricity was like Facebook without the Internet, a great idea, but practically useless.
The following year Edison set out to develop an electric grid to supply homes and businesses with electricity so that they would purchase his light bulbs and other appliances. In 1882 Pearl Street Station in New York City became the world #8217;s first central power plant to distribute electricity with direct current. In just two years Pearl Street Station was serving 508 customers with 10,164 electric lamps.
Interior of Pearl Street Station, circa 1883
Pervasive persistent electricity would shape and revolutionize the 20th century. Electrified assembly lines enabled the affordability of the Model T. Efficient manufacturing led to a growth in accounting, marketing, human resources, and, hence, the American middle class. By the middle of the century this new American middle class spent much of their extra money on electric appliances (all of which could, crucially, plug in to standard outlets) that freed American housewives from washing dishes, scrubbing clothes, and heating up irons (which, yes, used to be made of iron). The electric revolution #8211; like the industrial revolution before it #8211; led to a cognitive surplus, which we invested in the television sitcom, another direct result of distributed electricity.
The Sacrificial Elephant
But it was not Edison #8217;s direct current distribution of electricity that catalyzed so much social change. As Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant point out in an entertaining podcast, Thomas Edison was a brilliant inventor, but an even more brilliant self-promoter. Nikola Tesla, on the other hand, was at least as brilliant, but one of the lousiest self-promoters in the long impressive history of self-promotion.
The problem with direct current is that it is a terribly inefficient way to transmit electricity over long distances. In order to create a national electric grid based on direct current, we would need central power plants in just about every neighborhood. Electricity would need to be produced locally. Tesla #8217;s invention, alternating current, allowed for electricity to travel across great distances without much loss in the process. American businessman George Westinghouse immediately understood the significance of Tesla #8217;s discovery: electricity could be produced centrally for far cheaper and then distributed all over the country via the wide network of power lines that today we take for granted as we drive down every major highway in the world.
#8220;Edison and Topsy #8221;, Acrylic on Canvas, 2006
The War of Currents, which led most horrifically to the electrocution of Topsy the elephant (video here), raged on until 1893 when Westinghouse won the contract to build the hydroelectric generators at Niagara Falls which used alternating current and bore Nikola Tesla #8217;s name. The rest was history. From Wikipedia: #8220;AC replaced DC for central station power generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving the safety and efficiency of power distribution. #8221;
Toward the World Wide Computer
For Nicholas Carr #8211; best known for his Atlantic article #8220;Is Google Making Us Stupid? #8221; #8211; the triumph of alternating current over direct current, of centralization over decentralization, is the historic parallel of what is happening in today #8217;s software industry. The centralization of software, computing, and storage was made especially evident last week when Google announced that it will be releasing a lightweight operating system to connect affordable netbooks to the company #8217;s popular online applications including Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa, Reader, and Documents.
With undisguised regret, Carr says that the centralization of software from applications installed on individual computers to applications installed on massive data centers is inevitable. Let #8217;s take a feed reader application as an example. The most popular desktop feed reader application for Apple computers is NewsFire, which stores all of your data on your own computer. Every time NewsFire is updated all of its users must download a new copy of the application. If something happens to your hard drive, then all of your data is erased. Furthermore, if you want to share information from your feed reader #8211; either a single article or an entire folder of feeds #8211; then you must send that data via email to each individual recipient. NewsFire is the direct current of feed readers.
Photo of inside a data center. Taken from a blog post on cloud computing by Google software engineer Mark Chu-Carroll.
Google Reader is the feed reading equivalent of alternating current. Unlike NewsFire, there are not millions of copies of Google Reader installed on individual computers. Rather Google Reader is a single application with millions of users all over the world. The computing power required by the application and the storage of data all takes place at at Google #8217;s massive data centers. When a new feature is added to Google Reader you don #8217;t need to download the latest version of the application. Rather, it loads automatically in your browser. The data is stored across millions of hard drives all around the world so even if one hard drive fails, your data is still safe. If I want to share my recent favorite articles or even my entire folder of Liberian bloggers all I have to do is select the option.
Desktop applications just can #8217;t compete with the efficiency of server-based applications, especially when they are data intensive and frequently updated, two characteristics that increasingly define the software we depend on from Wikipedia to Google Maps. Slowly but surely software development is moving from desktop applications that exist on each individual computer to massive data centers, often called #8220;the cloud #8220;, or in Carr #8217;s words, #8220;the worldwide computing grid #8221; and the #8220;World Wide Computer #8221;.
From Making Content to Making Sense of It
Every major software company is already in the process of moving its applications and data from the desktop to the cloud. Google #8217;s forthcoming operating system is the most explicit example, but Apple #8217;s Mobile Me program, and Window #8217;s Midori project have the same general purpose: to move data from the desktop to the cloud where it is accessible from multiple sources (mobile phone, laptop, desktop, television) and stored on massive and massively cheap hard drives. There is already an online version of Photoshop and Adobe plans on making similar versions available for its entire creative suite of applications. Soon you will be able to produce professional quality photos, audio, and video using applications that don #8217;t exist on your computer.
Adobe #8217;s free online version of Photoshop
But it #8217;s not in producing content where cloud computing excels, but rather in aggregating, sorting, filtering, and giving meaning to content that has already been produced. When the personal computer was invented we all wanted to create digital versions of our analog archives. We transcribed handwritten journals to text documents, scanned in shoebox upon shoebox of photographs, and digitized video from VHS tapes. Five years later and many of us had practically forgotten how to write with a pen. We snapped 100 photographs a day with our digital cameras, and filled up entire terabyte hard drives with HD digital video from summer vacations. All of a sudden our need wasn #8217;t to produce content but to share it and make sense of it.
The Melting Away of the Global Ice Industry
What is the societal impact of transitioning from a world wide web of networked computers to the World Wide Computer? This is the fundamental question that Isaac and I will examine with an all star cast of speakers at this year #8217;s Ars Electronica Symposium. A few obvious effects are frequently discussed. For one thing, software gets a lot more social, encouraging interaction among users, the sharing of data, and sometimes even collaborative creation of the software itself. It also gets a hell of a lot cheaper. So cheap, in fact, that Chris Anderson makes the controversial argument that free is the future of business Indeed, when was the last time you paid for anything online?
Of course there are always winners and losers during every major chapter of technological change. As Carr notes, #8220;while electrification propelled some industries to rapid growth, it wiped out others entirely, #8221; most notably the once-mammoth global industry of delivering ice to preserve food. The World Wide Computer and its various applications #8211; Twitter, Wikis, Blogspot, WordPress, and Google Search #8211; makes it so easy for ordinary citizens to publish and find news, information, and analysis that traditional journalism isn #8217;t able to charge for what is essentially the same product: relevant information. My own opinion is, #8220;who needs a global ice industry when you have refrigerators? #8221; But for Carr the loss of traditional journalism is tragic. In fact, Carr considers most of the effects of the cloud to be negative: our attention span shrinks, we become more dependent on technology, we don #8217;t control our own data, our privacy is at risk, we help corporations make profits by producing free content for them, we become more isolated and less satisfied.
Carr is far from the only pundit to focus on the negative aspects of the cloud. Last year Benjamin Mako Hill and fellow open source advocates published the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services, which argues that cloud computing takes power away from the users and gives it to the for-profit corporations that host their data. Furthermore, if you thought it was difficult to migrate your data from Microsoft Outlook to Thunderbird, just try moving it from Flickr to Expono or from YouTube to Blip. Once you surrender your data to the cloud, you tend to be locked in to a particular company. Also, when you store your data on your own computer it is up to you to back it up. But when you store it on the cloud a massive data loss could mean the end of your data and that of thousands of others, as happened recently to Ma.gnolia users. Finally, just as alternating current depends on increased voltage to travel over long distances, server based software depends on fast internet connections to deliver the data from server farms to cyber-cafes in Ghana. The problem is that cyber-cafes in Ghana don #8217;t yet have fast enough internet connections to support online applications like Picnik and JayCut. So even though cloud computing has brought powerful applications down to the cost of free, limited bandwidth still restricts their usage to broadband subscribers in the developed world.
Literary Genre: Decentralization Nostalgia
My one complaint with the book is that Carr, while lambasting our current age of distraction, often becomes distracted himself from the book #8217;s theme of centralized computing to loquacious dystopian rants about technology in general. Quoting the playwright Richard Foreman, Carr writes: #8220;I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and #8216;cathedral-like #8217; structure of the highly educated and articulate personality #8211; a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self #8211; evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the #8216;instantly avaiilable. #8217; #8221; Foreman concludes that we are turning into #8220;pancake people #8211; spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. #8221;
(This idea of #8220;pancake people #8221; will most definitely form the basis of Carr #8217;s forthcoming book #8220;The Shallows: Mind, Memory, and Media in an Age of Instant Information. #8221; Futurist Jamais Cascio responded to Carr #8217;s essay #8220;Is Google Making Us Stupid? #8221; in the current issues of The Atlantic.)
The Big Switch is categorized as a #8220;Science/Technology #8221; book, but in my personal library I would put it on the #8220;Nostalgia #8221; bookshelf along with Michael Pollan #8217;s The Omnivore #8217;s Dilemma. Both Carr and Pollan are aware of the impressive efficiencies of centralized agriculture and centralized computing, but they are also both nostalgic about our decentralized past when both food and information were produced, sold, and consumed locally.
I sympathize with both authors, and I do believe that the tension between centralization and decentralization will be a major feature of this century. But until I see a large percentage of Internet users close down their Gmail accounts in favor of applications produced by local developers, or give up the grocery store for the farmers market, I would place my bet on continued centralization for the time being.
Permalink No love
Posted 1 week ago in the terribly early in the morning by oso
Discussed: FOKO, Global Voices, Madagascar, Rising Voices
Georgia and Ivan were on BBC #8217;s Pods #038; Blogs show a couple days ago discussing the past, present, and future of Global Voices. I have made a track of just their segment in order to save my esteemed readers from having to listen to a piece on virtual guide dogs in Second Life.
Georgia in Miami
Ivan in Amsterdam
You can listen to the entire show, including a piece by Chris Vallance on Maker Faire Africa, here.
The BBC also recently featured the work of Foko Madagascar, a Rising Voices grantee. Christina Corbett of BBC World Radio interviewed Tahina and Andry.
Tahina (on far right) explaining how to use Ushahidi to report from mobile phones during times of crisis.
Andry on the phone with Ariniaina explaining that it was not safe to be outside because soldiers were firing tear gas.
In May Solana interviewed Tahina about his use of Ushahidi to improve reporting during the coup. You can learn more about Madagascar #8217;s 2009 political crisis on the Global Voices special coverage page.
Permalink A little love
Posted 1 week, 1 day ago in the in the wee hours by oso
Discussed: Cities, development, Europe, USA
This is an especially American perspective of looking at the development of cities, but I think that the same basic evolution is generally true for cities around the world, even if they haven #8217;t yet reached some of the later chapters.
Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums
Tokyo slum during the US occupation years.
As Kevin Kelly rightly points out, #8220;every city begins as a slum #8230; a seasonal camp with free-wheeling make-shift expediency. #8221; Cities are founded on economic opportunity, spontaneous slums, and lawless saloons. Eventually gender ratios equal out, churches move in, government takes shape, and urban planning is institutionalized.
Chapter 2: Hegemony Rules
During the transition from slum to civic center some social group usually takes power and dictates policy. It tends to be the ethnic majority though in the case of colonized countries that was almost never the case. In most cities in the United States power lied among the WASP community. Ethnic minorities were pushed out to the edges while the elite built Victorian homes around the downtown business districts and plazas.
Chapter 3: White Flight and suburbanization
This is the chapter that takes on different manifestations depending on the ethnic and class make-up of a city, but the basic concept is still generally applicable. During WWII in the United States there was an influx of black americans seeking work in urban centers. After WWII four developments (other than blatant racism) led to white flight from urban centers to suburban communities. First was population density. After the war soldiers returned home to urban centers, but those who moved in while they were gone also remained. Then there was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which began the process of desegregating the country #8217;s public schools. White parents felt that their children would receive a lower level of education in a desegregated school, and so they moved to suburbs where neighborhoods and their schools were all white. Third, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 enabled the workday commute from suburb to city center. Lastly, suburban developers had large returns to scale as they could purchase a single large plot of land and build hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical homes.
Chapter 4: Urban Gentrification
White flight certainly continues today, often in new manifestations, but a far greater trend is urban gentrification. While the majority of white Americans from my generation grew up in mostly white suburban neighborhoods, our schools and public institutions became increasingly integrated and multicultural. Television and mass media brought the Cosby Show, The Jeffersons, Fresh Prince, and Family Matters into our living room. And then came hip-hop. All of a sudden there was nothing less cool than to have grown up in the suburbs. Young people from affluent suburbs moved into lower-income urban neighborhoods where they opened coffee shops, art galleries, and cocktail bars. Awkwardness and antagonism between the newly arrived affluent and the established lower-income population were inevitable. In the worst of cases property prices increased and low-income renters were forced to move out to other neighborhoods. However, there has also been an effort by young people across different classes in gentrified neighborhoods to shape a common aesthetic around hip-hop, indie rock, street art, and skateboarding.
This is where we are today, at least my generation, or at the very least, my group of friends. We live in urban multicultural neighborhoods where the one thread that ties everyone together is pop culture and consumerism. In fact, I mentioned to Chippla a few days ago that perhaps America has been able to achieve a higher degree of multiculturalism than Europe (which favors assimilation) because the entire country is unabashedly pro-consumerist whereas most European countries at least pretend to be anti-consumerist.
Chapter 5: Increased urbanization or decentralization?
Urban farms in China
The thing is, multiculturalism can be exhausting. Identity politics become an ingrained part of daily life. You are expected to know something #8211; if not everything #8211; about every cultural, ethnic, and sub-cultural group in your neighborhood. There are few common bonds around music, art, religion, or culture because the choices become infinite. Separate studies in the UK and the US have both found that as neighborhoods become more diverse the reported happiness and civic participation of their residents both decrease. Though the trend has been occurring for decades, today more than ever we don #8217;t interact with #8211; or even know the names of #8211; our neighbors. And yet the allure of hip multiculturalism still brings more affluent youth from suburban America, which increases the cost of rent, requiring a higher income and longer working hours. Life in gentrified America may look like American Apparel advertisements when you upload those dinner party photos to Flickr, but work overload, economic debt, information overload, and cultural overload are also all parts of living in gentrified America.
I often wonder if my friends will soon give up on city life. Paying $2,000 a month on rent while working 50 hours a week to bring home just enough to get by isn #8217;t anyone #8217;s idea of the American Dream. The escape fantasy of finding a cabin in the woods with a decent internet connection becomes more and more appealing.
I mentioned this to Ivan last week over an espresso macchiato and under a gloomy Amsterdam sky. He tries to escape city life as often as possible, but he also wonders if the problem isn #8217;t with cities, but rather cities as we know them. Maybe we don #8217;t really desire the farm and forest as much as we desire a little farm and forest in our cities. He reminded me of the community garden right outside of Revaz #8217;s apartment in Washington DC. Ivan would love to get a plot and test out his green thumb, but the waiting list is over a year.
I think that, ultimately, whether my generation flees or embraces city life comes down to economics. If city governments are able to make enough green space and agricultural land without raising already-high rent and property prices then multicultural gentrification might be here to stay. Otherwise, I believe a new (and environmentally harmful) flight to the open countryside could soon be underway.
Loosely related: Stewart Brand #8217;s presentation on #8220;Cities and Time #8220;, HowStuffWorks #8217; article on #8220;Five Modern Abandoned Cities #8220;, and McKinsey Global Institute #8217;s #8220;Preparing for China #8217;s Urban Billion #8220;.
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Posted 1 week, 6 days ago in the just before lunchtime by oso
Discussed: Conferences, Information Overload
At some point in the future my children will ask me what I did during my 20 #8217;s and I will tell them that I traveled around the world going from one conference to the next with my laptop. And my children will ask me why I did that. And I will say, you know, that #8217;s a really good question.
My hope is that one day our children will look back at photos like this one and make fun of us in the same way that we look back at photos of our parents from the 60 #8217;s and 70 #8217;s and shake our heads in sympathy and shame.
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Posted 1 week, 6 days ago in the terribly early in the morning by oso
Discussed: Global Voices, ott09, translation
On September 19, 2005 a tall, dark, and handsome Taiwanese blogger who goes by the strange name of #8220;Portnoy #8221; decided that he would start translating select blog posts from Global Voices into Chinese. His first translation was of a post by Indonesian blogger Enda Nasution which summed up the week #8217;s news from Indonesia through the eyes of its bloggers. Portnoy wasn #8217;t asked to translate the article into Chinese, and he certainly wasn #8217;t paid for it. Nor did he have any tools or a community of fellow translators to help him out. He simply published the volunteer translation on his personal blog because he felt it was important to share the information from Global Voices across a language divide.
Portnoy was ahead of his time. Fast forward three and a half years and the number of translators on Global Voices is greater than the number of authors and editors. Our articles are regularly translated into about 20 different languages and Jer has developed an entire system within WordPress to manage and organize the translations of articles. Additionally, we are no longer alone. Meedan is translating articles and conversations about current events in the Middle East. Yeeyan serves as a hub for volunteer translators who translate between Chinese and English. And TED has had much success recruiting volunteers to translate and subtitle their videos.
Furthermore, a number of open source programmers have begun developing tools to serve this ever-expanding group of volunteer translators. Those tools must also compete with proprietary tools like Google #8217;s new Translator Toolkit, which was recently used by volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic.
Aspriation Tech, an NGO based in San Francisco, invited a number of translators, programmers, and publishers to Amsterdam last week to discuss how the social translation movement can be made more efficient, sustainable, and fun. Representing Global Voices at the gathering were Solana, Leonard, Georgia, Ivan, Ethan, Silvia, Anna, Rezwan, Jer, Paula, Marc, and me. For those interested in learning more, notes from all the sessions are available on the Open Translation Tools wiki, Ethan has a nice summary blog post, photos are on Flickr, and updates are on Twitter, and more related blog posts are available here. For those of you who wish to learn more about open source translation software, a valuable guide has been published on FLOSSManuals. There is another guide about open source #8220;video translation #8221;. For more information about the history of Lingua, Leonard has made an excellent timeline and Chris Salzberg has done thorough academic research on the community.
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Posted 2 weeks ago in the in the wee hours by oso
Discussed: Anal Bleaching, Buenos Aires, china, Information Overload, ott09, translation
In The Omnivore #8217;s Dilema Michael Pollan reminds us that food is an inelastic good, which is to say that, obesity aside, there is a limit to how many calories a person can consume in a single day. Any more and we would explode.
Once we all reach that caloric daily limit then the food industry can only grow at 1% (the average growth rate of the earth #8217;s population). There is, after all, only so much food you can stuff down one person. The food industry got around this limitation by developing #8220;foods #8221; without any calories or fat #8211; things like Coke Zero and potato chips made with Olean, which famously #8211; so I #8217;ve been told #8211; causes anal leakage:
[Hence the need for anal bleaching.]
Information is also an inelastic good. There is a limit to how much information the human brain can consume in a single day. Once we reach that limit we develop information obesity #8211; or, information overload as it #8217;s normally called #8211; which leads to stress, guilt, and feelings of meaninglessness. We may ask ourselves what is the point of drinking a diet soda that our bodies do not need. And we might also ask ourselves, what is the use of consuming information at all, and how do we know if we need it or not?
Information has always been a commodity. The greater the demand for information, and the more scarce that information is, the greater its value. The business model behind selling information has always been to function as a gatekeeper between the information and the access to that information. In relation to one another, information was scarce and demand was high.
That is, until all of the world #8217;s information was made available in aggregate. Added to the #8220;old media #8221; are billions of contributions of information from sources that were previously excluded by the gatekeepers. Demand for information has stayed the same (after all, there is only so much the human brain can process per day) but the supply of information expands exponentially. (Kevin Kelly calls this phenomenon #8220;the expansion of ignorance #8220;.)
As information expands exponentially, the value of each individual piece of information declines exponentially. With the abundance of information comes the scarcity of attention. Value now lies not in information, but in its relevance: filtering, sorting, contextualizing that which #8220;speaks to us #8221;. Value is not in data but in eloquence.
There is, however, still one more gate between information and access to that information: language. If I were monolingual then I would only have access to a percentage of the world #8217;s information available online. Let #8217;s say, for example, that I wanted more information about Dao Lang, a Chinese pop star and the number one search term in China for 2005. Information about the singer in English is scant, but surely there are thousands of articles available in Chinese. If only I could request #8211; and probably pay #8211; someone to translate one of those articles into English.
Conceptualizing a system to allow readers to request translations of content that interest them and to facilitate the process of that translation is the new job description for Marc Herman who is leading Global Voices #8217; translation exchange.
I am skeptical of the project, but it #8217;s the type of skepticism that I hope is proven wrong. The most obvious question is, how do I know that I want to read something if I don #8217;t know what it says? And, more importantly, why would I invest time and money requesting more information with less context when my hard drive is already brimming over with unread articles, unwatched movies, and un-listened-to podcasts?
To make such an investment I would need a pretty strong connection to Dao Lang, the Chinese pop singer. And if such a strong connection existed, wouldn #8217;t that inspire me to learn Chinese, or to meet fellow Dao Lang fans who could provide me with the context I #8217;m looking for?
We consume information as much for our social needs as our need to be informed. In fact, I #8217;m not sure you can even distinguish the two. We don #8217;t really care about Mark Sanford and his affair, but we read about it because the collective awareness about the case allows us to participate in conversations about the values and issues that underlie it. When I was in Argentina 80% of the news I read was about Argentina and the region because it allowed me to engage in conversations with those around me. Now that I #8217;m in The Hague I #8217;m following related news. Our social interactions define the information we consume much more than the other way around.
Social translation is here to stay, but the key is that it is social. Lena translated my post about Cochabamba as a gesture of friendship. Once money is inserted into the equation it becomes something else.
A lot of communities and tools have sprung up in recent years trying to make the translation market more efficient by cutting out wasteful middleman agencies like Lionbridge. Among others are Social Translator, dotSUB, Worldwide Lexicon, and iCanLocalize. Some companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have flirted with crowdsourcing the localization of their websites, but the lesson tends to be that volunteer translators don #8217;t feel very social toward for-profit companies. There will always be a demand for translated information, but those translations will still have to compete in a world of over-abundant information and starved attention.
I #8217;ve been thinking a lot about the supply and demand of information these days. A couple months ago I walked into El Ateneo, one of the world #8217;s largest bookstores, to meet up with my buddy Scott. As I looked around at the mountains upon mountains of hardcovers, paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers I was hit by a kind of intellectual vertigo. On the one hand, here is humanity #8217;s greatest accomplishment: culture, the ability to transmit knowledge, stories, and values from one generation to the next to eternity. On the other hand, with sadness and frustration I realized that in my life I would only come into contact with a small percentage of that culture. And that with each new year #8211; and the exponential expansion of information #8211; I would come into contact with a smaller and smaller percentage. The expansion of ignorance is inevitable.
Permalink 8 comments
Posted 2 weeks, 3 days ago in the terribly early in the morning by oso
Discussed: america latina, Bolivia, Cochabamba, musica
La frase escrita en la pared al otro lado de la calle dice:
Ni indigenismo, ni oligarqu��a
Viva la revoluci��n obrera
La calle principal, de concreto arrugado y lleno de huecos, se ramifica en un vasto laberinto tejido de callejones empedrados, bautizados con los nombre de pa��ses Latinoamericanos, l��deres de esta revoluci��n o la otra. Uno de cada diez edificios es un esqueleto de concreto y ladrillo, una declaraci��n de lo que podr��a ser pero todav��a no es, una met��fora de este continente entero.
Eddie y yo caminamos por el centro de Cochabamba en busca de lo que ser�� un almuerzo tarde o una cena temprano. La econom��a informal se pronuncia en cada esquina: DVDs pirateados, man�� dulce, cajas de diabetes. La plaza mayor (lo mejor que trajeron los Espa