I stepped off the pavement, walked backwards a few paces looking up, and, from the middle of the street, brought my hands to my mouth to make a megaphone, and shouted toward the top stories of the block: “Teresa!”
My shadow took fright at the moon and huddled at my feet.

How can you not fall in love with a story that begins like that? The Man Who Shouted Teresa by Italo Calvino is one of my favourite pieces of writing, by one of my favourite authors. It is very short, and very pretty, and he wrote it when he was 20 years old.

The simple premise - a man shouts Teresa repeatedly under a window, people join in, and eventually he confesses that he doesn’t know who lives there but they keep shouting anyway - lends itself to the making of a short film. So I was not entirely unsurprised, but charmed nevertheless, that a number of people had actually made such short films. I wasn’t looking. Serendipity. Here is what I found: four video shorts and one pretty creative interactive flash animation. The names are mine - naturally, they’re all called “Teresa” or something similar.

1. boston by gohfish, is set in Boston, in black&white, and most artistically captures the spirit of the story - although the American rather than Italian pronunciation of Teresa is somewhat jarring.
2. italian dub by keepyourdayjob, produced “over a six hour stretch, while drinking beers out of the trunk of [a] car” was shot on Super 16. Nice, but the attempt to make “a total Fellini rip-off” falls a little flat with the Italian dubbed voices and rather dramatic “acting”.
3. kids can read by brian smith is heartening, featuring a bunch of what look like high-school kids outside a suburban low-rise, acting like, well, enthusiastic high-school kids. Who read Calvino, apparently. This is quite true to the story, I think - Calvino was 20, and 20-year-old Italians do behave like schoolboys…
4. Just when I thought I couldn’t find anything more, I came across this: korean, by korusinc. It’s not actually in Korean, though it has a Korean title and appears to feature at least a couple of rather young Korean (or Korean-American?) children. They look barely old enough to read Dr Seuss, let alone Calvino.
5. Finally, the interactive animation by Timothy Moraitis is probably the best way to read the story, if you haven’t gone and bought the book yet. Click somewhere on the screen, and along with some stick figures moving about, the next few sentences appear. Very nice, and couldn’t be done with a much longer story.

All in all, this left me feeling happier about the future of civilisation. One puzzle remains, though: all these videos were American. Perhaps Italian kids read, or make video shorts, but not both?

you whine, you always
need attention
you cry and throw up
exceptions
you never say what’s wrong

you wake me, howling
every two hours,
all night
just to burp. sigpipe.
network error.

frustrating.
and exhilerating.

codebabies.
look, so cute
just like daddy.

am i like
your secret vice
you only admit to
when drunk?

when sober you pretend i
don’t exist you
try to wean yourself off me you
pretend the ache of withdrawal
is indigestion

but you should know,
your stomach
is in fact
some inches below

earlier this year, i was told by the immigration lawyers that i would need an O-1 visa to work in the US. this fascinating piece of US immigration regulation is an example of why the US drains brains from everywhere else - while Europe, despite endless reforms, just makes it hard for skilled immigrants to work.

the O-1 visa is for “persons of extraordinary ability in their field”. it has no specific criteria. no formal certification. it is usually used for, say, concert pianists, but apparently applies also to open source economists. what you do need to provide is evidence of any kind, such as publications, conference invitations and - most importantly - letters of reference.

i am extremely grateful and would like to thank, once again, philippe aigrain, david axmark, david hammerstein, brian kahin, ronaldo lemos, larry lessig, eben moglen, simon phipps, petri rasanen, luc soete, louis suarez-potts, michael tiemann, jimmy wales and jim zemlin for their encouraging and generous letters of reference. thanks to their promptness, the US citizenship and immigration services approved my visa application 8 days. some kind of record!

it took rather longer for the original approval papers to come through; the actual visit to the US embassy to get a stamp in my passport was entertaining (note: l’occitan en provence hand-cream is a false positive trigger for explosives tests and will get you stuck in detailed “are you or have you ever associated with” interrogations). and the social security and other administration will take even longer.

but thanks to friends and colleagues, and amazing support from the law firm (you rock, olivia!) the biggest hurdle is over.

i now have an apartment in san francisco, where i will spend half my time every quarter. i still head the collaborative creativity group at UNU-MERIT and will thus spend the other half of my time in brussels (both apartments empty half the time, visitors welcome!). i’m planning to severely cut down on all other travel, so no more 170 000 flying miles a year to speak at conferences.

oh yes, what’s this all about? i’m co-founder of topsy labs in san francisco. it’s still hush-hush, but is the only thing for which i can imagine reducing my time in academia: a project that enables the trust networks that underlie social and economic interaction on the internet.

way back in 1997, i actually had running code for some of this, with my old friend and co-founder vipul ved prakash. computers weren’t fast enough back then, and the conversational internet, the living web, wasn’t there either. now the time is right, i hope.