Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili), is a location-based service that allows people to tell a central aggregator, essentially, where they are and what they’re doing. Any few false data points are overwhelmed by the aggregate picture, and we get a user-created map of where earthquake victims are located, where terrorists are hiding, where there are food or medicine shortages, or even (as the Washington Post discovered) which streets have been cleared of snow. The NY Times reporter gets poetical about Ushahidi’s power: “What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: ‘I was here, and this is what happened to me’?”

The thing is, brilliant ideas like Ushahidi only work because millions of unconnected users contribute, one at a time, to a mass goal. It’s internet terrorizing in reverse. When I read these two stories side by side, I keep getting stuck on the seemingly-intractable problem (the subject of chapter 9 of the book) of whether we can have the good without the bad, or whether they only come as a pair.

What is Ushahidi? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.