Dear Friends,
Happy Monday. And if you’re in Mexico, happy Constitution Day. Isn’t it nice to have a public holiday dedicated to the rule of law?1
Anyway.
Last week, we were in Medellín, Colombia, where I lived in 2007 and 2008. Iris and I had dinner with an old friend, Diana, to catch up and reminisce about the past. Diana asked if I had been the world’s earliest digital nomad. I wonder! She didn’t mean it as a compliment, though. Just four months ago, she was evicted from her apartment, another victim of Medellin’s skyrocketing rents as American digital nomads buy up housing to make Medellin their part-time residence. Now, nearing her 40s, Diana is once again living with her parents, still in love with her city but frustrated that she can’t afford a decent neighborhood on a professional’s salary.
Gentrification wasn’t the only transformation I observed last week.2 As we rode our bikes through some of Medellin’s poorest neighborhoods, I saw no signs of the extreme poverty that was pervasive just 15 years ago.
In 2007, Medellin was at the start of its renaissance. Has any other mayor transformed a city more than former math professor Sergio Fajardo? Here’s the synopsis of a case study by Princeton researchers:
During his four years in office, the charismatic former university professor turned Medellín around. He broke up clientelistic political networks, raised tax receipts, improved public services, introduced transparency fairs, established civic pacts, and restored citizens’ sense of hope. Fajardo left office at the end of 2007 with an unprecedented approval rating of nearly 90%.
I had never seen a city so inspire its residents. Fajardo installed gondolas to integrate the city’s hillside slums. Each new gondola station was accompanied by a sports facility or a new library. The libraries are architectural marvels, offering residents free wifi, workshops, and computer access. Fajardo wagered that the more time kids spent playing soccer and surfing the internet, the less likely they would be to join a gang.
It was the libraries that brought me to Medellín. It was my first real job, and if you have a few minutes to spare I’d like to share the story of that job, the people it introduced me to, and how it filled me with a sense of purpose that I hope to rediscover this year.
The Before Times
But first, to appreciate what Medellín was like before the renaissance, here is the opening paragraph from Alma Guillermoprieto’s 1991 New Yorker “Letter From Medellín,”3 when it was the deadliest city in the world:
Everyone here knows that if you get shot, run over, or knifed the place to go is the Policlínica, an emergency clinic run by the San Vicente de Paul Public Hospital: the surgeons and interns who staff it on weekend nights have intensive on-the-job practice and a reputation for performing miracles. Standing at the gate on a recent Saturday at midnight, I watched a man emerge unaccompanied from a taxi, with blood seeping from a large hole in his chest. He could still walk. He needed to because there were no hospital orderlies to help patients at the gate, and although I saw five taxis screech to the entrance and deliver five severely wounded men in less than ten minutes, not a single ambulance arrived. Metal stretchers were wheeled out and operated by the victims’ friends or relatives, but the man with the chest wound was alone. “How about that?” the gatekeeper said, watching him stagger past. “Maybe he’ll survive.” He was not being cynical, he knew from experience, he told me, that on weekend nights about ninety such men appear at the Policlínica, and between twelve and twenty die.
Everyone in Medellin over 40 has a collection of stories from the “before-times.” We heard several of them over the past week: the gunshot wounds, the scars, the funerals.
My first real job
After college, I moved to Mexico to report on free trade, immigration, drug policy, and the Zapatistas. Quickly, I discovered that foreign correspondents did little more than translate the work of local journalists without giving attribution. And anyway, newspapers were in financial crisis as Craigslist stole away their biggest source of revenue: classified ads.4
At the same time, blogging was booming. Salam Pax was a translator for the US military (and an anonymous blogger) who offered readers a local’s perspective on the Iraq War that was more informative and relatable than anything we read in the press or saw on CNN. Thousands of bloggers were popping up around the world. Could we fill the gap in foreign coverage by aggregating and translating their content? In 2005, we launched a website, Global Voices, and recruited dozens of editors and hundreds of contributors based in nearly every country. It was exhilarating.
Except, nearly all of the bloggers we featured were either wealthy elites or Peace Corps volunteers. In 2007, we received a grant from the Knight Foundation for an outreach initiative to “help bring new voices into the global blogosphere.” We selected the first five projects and I decided to visit one of them, HiperBarrio, in Medellín, Colombia.
A few days after I arrived, I was asked to lead a workshop (in Spanish!) to teach young library users how to upload digital photos to their blogs. I had no idea what I was doing, but my god was I filled with passion and purpose.
For our second workshop, I clipped dozens of articles from Medellin’s newspapers about their neighborhood, San Javier La Loma. Those articles described shootouts, drug busts, homicides, and paramilitary groups. I then asked them to form groups of four and explore their neighborhood for 90 minutes. “Use your five senses,” I told them. “I want you to come back and describe how your neighborhood sounds, feels, smells, looks, tastes.” Their descriptions were rich and complex, unlike the newspaper articles we had read in the morning. They experienced the transcendence of writing: considering one’s own experiences through the eyes of an invisible audience.5
In our third workshop, we gave them digital cameras to take photos that complemented the descriptions they wrote the week before. I saw how they gained confidence. They taught each other how to use Picasa photo editing software, and upload their images to Flickr. For the fourth workshop, we gave them voice recorders and asked them to interview a neighbor. Using Audacity, an open-source audio editing platform, we created a podcast feed and submitted it to the iTunes podcast directory.
Within months, these teenagers from one of Medellín’s most marginalized neighborhoods were regularly featured in national newspapers and celebrated by politicians. The next year they won a handful of international awards (beating out WikiLeaks and PirateBay at the Ars Electronica Festival) and were invited to share their work at conferences around the world.
The Read Write Library
Inspired by HiperBarrio, I started to promote the idea of the “Read Write Library” — that libraries should be more than silent halls to read books by foreign experts. In the digital age, libraries could transform into cultural laboratories to create and share local culture.
One of the initial programs of the Gates Foundation focused on digitizing libraries. I got to know the program officers and helped sell them on the vision.6 Before long, I was giving workshops to librarians in Chile, Taiwan, Austria, Turkey, and Macedonia. It was a dream job. I was constantly on the move; staying in a different city every week.
But it wasn’t sustainable. By 2010, I concluded that chapter of my life, the one that filled me with so much passion and purpose. Having just turned 30, for the first time in my life I had health insurance, a retirement plan, an office, and all of the accompanying internal politics. Somehow, I persisted for 13 years.
Medellín and me
With progress comes nostalgia for a more difficult past. Today’s Medellín is unrecognizable. I miss the old version, even if the new one is objectively better: less poverty, more services, better food, more cosmopolitan. It's akin to parents wanting a better life for their children but then lecturing them about all they take for granted.
Iris and I visited the same little library in San Javier La Loma (pictured above), where I gave weekly workshops back in 2008. A dozen or so young boys were lined up at the entrance, eagerly waiting for the librarian to return from her lunch break. When she opened the door, they rushed to the computers to play video games. The library didn’t become a cultural laboratory; it became a respite from reality, a place to get lost in the fantasies of game designers. “Whatever they’re doing,” the librarian told me, “I’d rather them be in here than out on the streets.”
Smartphones didn’t exist in 2007; today they are ubiquitous, even in the poorest neighborhoods. Every resident has a cultural laboratory in their pockets — an infinite scroll of storytelling floods TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Against the odds, Global Voices continues and its outreach initiative provides digital tools and training for speakers of endangered languages. Last month, they convened the second annual Mayan Languages Digital Activism Summit in Chiapas, Mexico.
What about me? Am I also unrecognizable compared to 2007? I confess it was a relief that my old friends in Medellín could still spot me in a crowd 15 years later. But our reminiscing was a reminder of the passion and purpose that slowly leaked out of me over the past 13 years.
This is the start of our 4th month of sabbatical and I feel the passion coming back. I needed last week’s trip to Medellín to reconnect with an earlier version of me. Medellín has changed. I have changed. And without a doubt, Medellín and its people changed me for the better.
What about you? Have you reconnected with work from your past that inspired your plans for the future? If so, I’d love to hear about it — either in a comment below or by responding to the email.
Yours,
David
Last year, I wrote about the dangerous temptation to pass public policy through constitutional reform. Fortunately, a couple of months ago, Chileans had the good sense to resist the temptation. (In fact, they resisted the temptation twice. The first proposed constitutional reform was a progressive pipe dream, while the second was a pendulum swing proposed by conservatives.) Hopefully, Mexico’s Congress will soon reject the president’s attempt to cement his policies through constitutional reforms.
But it was the topic of nearly every conversation. While we were in Medellín, protesters in Oaxaca took to the streets with banners that read “our city is not for sale” and “no more Airbnb.”
A PDF of the full article from 1991:
Footnote: After a decade of billionaire investment, digital advertising, and subscriptions, the news media is now going through another crisis — or two crises, according to Matt Yglesias.
The topic of next week’s newsletter: how the transcendent magic of stepping outside of ourselves changes with Instagram, TikTok, and virtual reality.
A few years later, the Knight Foundation started funding innovation in libraries, which continues to this day.
It's really cool to see the then and now photos. You haven't aged and I kinda hate you for that ;).