DLTQ.org

The real-time web is here to stay, and the question is how we deal with it.

Louis Gray posted a good overview of the real-time web yesterday, and I can highly recommend the piece for anyone wanting to get a good grip of some of the basics.

This morning, I watched “Debt“, a movie by Jorge Lanata from 2004. It is a movie exploring the debts of Argentina, how parts of the population in Argentina is suffering heavily, and the attitudes of people from within the IMF, and other institutions.

The movie is on-line, and the first part is here:

(I guess watching it directly on YouTube is best)

I found the movie very interesting, for several reasons. It was interesting to see a movie about a problem in a country that is majorly fu**ed, made by a national of that country. If this documentary was made by yet another U.S. or French film-maker, it would not have the same inpact on me. Jorge Lanata asks where the responsability lies, whether it is too convenient to just blame the IMF or other international actors, and why on earth the tracking of the debt was so haphazard. No control where the money went. No idea how the loans would be re-paid. No clue as to why this country has such a massive debt and so little results to show for it.

This wikipedia-article “Argentina default” gives a pretty good view of some of the complexities of this. The extremely interesting part is when international agents or banks are doing illegal activities, but of course such activities are often hard to track, and hard to write about in a single blog post. For instance, I could quote the mentioned wikipedia article:

As a clearing house, Clearstream has a “dominant position” in Europe, according to the European Commission. Funds composing the private and public Argentine debt have transited through Clearstream, which is inevitable because of its quasi-monopoly situation. However, according to Revelation$ (2001), written by reporter Denis Robert and Ernest Backes, some Argentine funds have transited through an illegal system of non-published accounts used by Clearstream; the Citibank in particular, which held a large part of the private Argentine fund, had numerous unpublished bank accounts in Clearstream. This illegal system of non-published accounts makes of Clearstream, according to several judges as Eva Joly and Renaud van Ruymbeke, European members of Parliament (MPs) such as Harlem Désir, Glyn Ford and Francis Wurtz, and Attac NGO, a major actor of the underground economy, through which global tax evasion and money laundering may be investigated.

But I don’t really feel like I can go around badmouthing Citibank without having read more about it. This is part of the problem. This is why blogging about difficult issues is so much less done than blogging about – say – the most recent iPhone or the latest MJ news.

International politics is a landmine. It is potent stuff, and there are so many actors; public, private, and a mixture of public-private entities that are crawling all over it like ants in an anthill.

I don’t know ‘who is to blame’ for the Argentina debt situation. I don’t know who to blame for the mess in Afghanistan. It all becomes muddled. Your talking points may even simply vary according to your stanze in the issue. Should we pump more soldiers into Afghanistan, or leave the country alone? What will happen to Iraq? Or the Kurdish minority in Turkey?

If you have some time to spare, I suggest you watch the Jorge Lanata movie. It is quite good.

I am off to Bardufoss today to meet Roar Sollied, the 1st candidate for Venstre in Troms. We will shoot some video, and I will teach him some web2.0 things. Of course, we all know that not every politician does well on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes, it is quite hard for them to get used to the new conversational media. But we will try to get Roar to be more comfortable with this. He is an enthusiastic person and he is interested in visualizing politics, so that is a promising start. You can follow him on twitter here – although he tweets in Norwegian.

I have 6 days left in Tromsø for now, then I go back to Oslo. These weeks I have spent here in Tromsø have been good on several levels. Most importantly, I have actually learned to really like this city. Before I have had such a negative view of Tromsø – seen it as some backward city filled with alkiser. Yeah, yeah, I know. I guess the truth is more simple – I am not very good at standing the cold, and Tromsø is not the warmest city on earth.

I have begun looking for a job in Tromsø as well as Oslo, and I will also look for a new job in Copenhagen once I get there at about the middle of the month. I now basically have three options for where I want to live: Copenhagen (where I have lived since 2006 and where my girlfriend will continue living for the next two years, studying), Oslo (capital of Norway, lots of interesting organizations active there – but I dislike the city for some Oslophobiac reason), or Tromsø – the city in the far North of Norway where there are quite a lot of cultural activities going on, and where I wont be drowning among the masses of people.

I really want to work with sharing information. Not so that organizations or companies will make more money, but so that individuals will be more able to navigate systems of information as well as sharing their own perspectives. One of my old dreams is to help people who suffer from mental illness to explore the world through social media. Of course, that is a beehive of issues, but it is something that I have been thinking about for quite a while.

Anyway, I am off to Bardufoss now. I will be back in Tromsø tomorrow, and I will try to stay to blogging at least once in a while. It becomes so boring when a blog isn’t updated for months

This blog post is not about Superman or Batman defying gravity, but about cities like Tromsø defying the gravitational force of Oslo in Norway.

This afternoon I had some very pleasant hours drinking coffee and discussing with Morten Skandfer, the deputy leader of the social-liberal party Venstre in Troms, the region where Tromsø is main city.

One of our main themes of discussion was Tromsø. For those who have discussed these issues with Morten before, this is old news. But for the rest of you I want to share some of my notes from this very inspiring discussion.

Morten’s main point was to tell me how the geopolitical map is changing, and how the role of Northern Norway is changing with it. Here is his first map, which he drew on a piece of paper

Today, there is no railroad going from Tromsø to Sweden or Finland. However, in the E.U., there are several discussions about the transportation of goods across Europe, and the melting of the Arctic ice will very soon make it possible to have a new transport between Europe and Asia – going North of Russia (in International Waters) instead of through the Suez channel. This new sea-way will shorten the transport time between Europe and China/Japan with several days.

We know that Narvik is an important harbour for iron coming from Kiruna (the largest Iron field in the world?), and the Narvik harbour is a good entrance to the Scandinavian and European markets through ARE (Arctic Rail Express). They are developing ARE III which will connect Narvik with Russia and China.

Now, the Kiruna orefield that today is shipped through Narvik also has a Finnish part of it, and today the Finnish ore does not have a port to go to. What would happen if we were to build a railroad track between – for instance – Skibotn and Finland? This is an idea that has been around since the 1970s, but it has renewed relevance now because of the Finnish ore production. If you understand Norwegian, you can read an article about this here.

In Norway, Northern Norway is often seen as the provincial place, middle of nowhere. But if you draw a new map where Northern Norway is at the centre, you will see – for instance – that Tromsø is the larger city in Europe that is the closest to Japan. We are already now seeing direct flights from Japan to Tromsø with tourists eager to see the Aurora Borealis.

Could Tromsø or another harbour in Northern Norway be the new Rotterdam? Could we see a development in Northern Norway that defies gravity and is as exciting and news-worthy as the development in the capital of Norway? What will happen once ships can safely travel from Europe to Asia through the arctic region?

This is part of an ongoing exploration, and I will return to this topic soon.