I’m going to break something of a cardinal rule for me (and doubtless will rue it later) … I’ve tried in general to keep this particular blog as apolitical as possible. I think that this is important - as I’ve become older I’ve realized that it is difficult to persuade people about the rightness or wrongness of their political beliefs, and that, especially in such a technical venue as this it is unwise to try.
However, I recently read a fascinating article, The Revolution Is Not Being Televised, by Stirling Newberry, a columnist and political consultant who has been fairly heavily enmeshed in the political uses of the Internet. Given the source (Truthout), I do not doubt that there are those readers who will sigh or even turn apoplectic at the political messages, but I wanted to comment not on the politics so much as at the message he himself presents.
I am, politically, something of a centrist, with perhaps a slight leftward leaning. However, what I am more concerned about more than anything is balance - the precarious act of assuring that the political process, whether in the US or Canada, does not so concentrate political power so completely in any one camp that there aren’t checks on the corruption from that power.
American politics is more unbalanced at the present time than it has been since before I was born in the early 1960s. One political party effectively controls the entirety of the government, with perhaps the marginal exception being a badly divided Supreme Court. This has resulted in a situation where the executive branch can effectively govern without any restraints, meaning that in essence it is only their own sense of ethics that can prevent them from doing actions which may be unwise. I have seen both Republicans and Democrats (and independents) faced with similar levels of ethical challenge - the ones with perhaps the highest ethical standards find themselves paralyzed with indecision. The ones for whom ethics is not a big issue take on as much power as they possibly can and then some, and I can think of no political leaders from either party that has convincingly demonstrated that they are immune to that level of unalloyed power for long.
This has always been the allure of the outsider politician, the one untainted by beltway politics, but in general such politicians aren’t necessarily any better about keeping clear of the flame - they are just more naive about political realities and occasionally come in with differing perspectives and less political strings than incumbants - and typically aren’t as tied into the political machinery as those same incumbants.
It’s why its worth noting Sterling’s article. His basic contention is that the Internet is continuing to change the dynamic of the political process in ways both subtle and profound, and may very well end up proving to be a major factor in the 2006 races. Of course, the Internet has impacted political campaigns since the early 1990s, but what seems to be changing is increasingly the degree to which the Internet is replacing the more traditional televised media as the vehicle by which campaigns are being decided.
Most telling right now is the campaign between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont for the Democratic primary. Lieberman is perhaps one of the consumate Democratic insiders, though he’s both quite hawkish and has sided with George Bush on a number of issues. However, few people seriously expected even as late as March that Lieberman would find himself running significantly behind in a Democratic primary. His opponent, Ned Lamont, is somewhat more liberal, though not dramatically so, and he’s been opposed to the Iraq war for some time. However, it is likely that while this is a factor in his increasing success, it may not be the major one. Instead, the difference appears to be the Internet.
I worked for a while on the Howard Dean campaign’s DeanSpace (which eventually morphed into Civicspace) in 2004, and was actually quite impressed with the degree to which it took a fairly unknown candidate for president and made him a serious contender (and in the end giving him the ability to take over the DNC). I was also impressed (and dismayed) at the degree to which the traditional media was used to squelch his candidacy (this isn’t sour grapes or partisan politics … both the Republican and the Democratic establishment had a lot to fear with a Dean candidacy for president, and I suspect that there were more than a few candidates on both sides who breathed a sigh of relief when Dean ended up out of the race).
So has anything changed in the last two years? Actually, a great deal has happened, though it’s likely you haven’t heard about it through TV or radio channels. Candidates have discovered that the Internet is an indispensible means of reaching out to their core constituents, not in glossy websites, but as a means of organizing and coordinating, lessons which have been passed down from many of “survivors” of 2004. In essence, the Internet is filling the vacuum once held by precinct caucuses - which have been fading in power as the old political machinery has decayed. Candidates are taking advantage of a whole raft of “political software” that emerged after 2004, and because of the two way nature of the web, increasingly the candidates are able to more effectively communicate with his or her potential constiutency, which in turn lessens the impact that both special interest groups and “professional consultants” have on the candidate.
Of course, this has also meant that the candidates that are most effective at taking advantage of this technology are also more likely to be technologically savvy themselves, which, in turn, translates into being increasingly in tune (and representative of) the more wired of their constituents. This can be a double-edged sword, of course - on the one hand, such people are usually more systems oriented, capable of thinking of things in an inter-connected fashion, which has been until comparatively recently a fairly rare trait among politicians. On the other hand, however, such people tend to be perceived as being both somewhat elitist and unempathetic, which can be offputting (and thus off-voting) for people who are themselves more emotive.
However, one of the other effects of such campaigns is the degree to which it is able to mobilize the technorati, which increasingly includes not only the programming and engineering communities but most creatives, the management that is increasingly dependent upon those creatives, those involved in information disciplines (including lawyers, the medical profession) and those who are in the frontlines of providing information even in the more traditional media
Note that I think this is increasingly true on both sides of the political fence, and this fact is changing the political landscape in profound ways. Much has been made of the Great Cultural Divide, the Reds and Blues, and how one is conservative and the other is liberal. I think this is hogwash. I think increasingly what we’re seeing is a divide that exists primarily between those who get their “worldview” from television vs. those who “live” on the Internet.
AOL announced yesterday that it was shuttering its commercial service and laying off 5000 people. It’s main problem has not in general been quality of service, though that’s usually the reason most often cited. I personally believe that AOL has reached a point where its audience in general has either “graduated” to the Internet or largely retreated from it completely, the latter largely shutting themselves off of the net. Those people in the AOL pool for the most part were the fence sitters, the ones that were unsure about the technology but had heard from their kids (or grandkids) how powerful it is. I’d be willing to bet, however, that for every one person that decided that the Internet was too complicated and turned the computer off, there were five or more who wanted out of the AOL box so they could play in the bigger sandbox of the Internet.
One interesting statistic, of which I remember only the gist, indicated that people over the age of 60 actually made up the fastest growing segment of users on the Internet. Yet another study recently, from Statistics Canada, points out that people who use the Internet socialize less in person and often tend to withdraw from their families. I don’t see these trends as at all mutually exclusive. The Internet provides a vehicle for communication with other people outside of one’s immediate physical neighbors. Chances are pretty good that you and your neighbors share only one thing - physical proximity. Your circle of connections on the Internet, on the other hand, are far more likely to share interests and beliefs with you.
While both are important, I suspect that it is the latter that tends to be the stronger social glue. Retirees in particular often find themselves having retired from the one place where they dealt with people who at least shared a common goal, their workplace, and are forced instead to building a new network of social connections among other retirees who likely share only very peripheral interests. If, on the other hand, you can get online and discourse about birds or quantum mechanics or realpolitik with like-minded people the world over, two things happen. Three first is that these people increasingly “disappear” from their physical neighborhoods into their computers. The second is that you have rising levels of communication (and hence coordination) between places that are not geographically connected The final is that the other portal to the outside world, the television, becomes forgotten.
If you call the Blues the ones that are communicating over the Internet and the Reds that are largely getting their media and information in general from centralized sources such as their churches or their TV news station of choice, then many of the seeming discrepancies in the model otherwise disappear. Geographically the reds make up a larger portion of the country, but in terms of people they are actually in the minority by a considerable amount. However, the US political system was set up along geographical lines (as was the Electoral College) such that in many states, rural inhabitants (and those most likely to be least serviced by internet service providers) have perhaps five votes for every one urban inhabitant in terms of political power.
My suspicion, borne out in repeated observation, is that the “liberal vs. conservative” labels of the 1960s are to a great extent obsolete. There are a large number of Democrats with strong religious beliefs and convictions who still tune in on the TV or radio every day to hear what the “official” news is, just as there are a large number of Republicans who are technologically sophisticated and get Google alerts in their e-mail every morning when they log on. However, my guess would be that those Republicans are far more likely to have “blue” values than those Democrats are (and vice versa on the Reds).
Our view of the world is shaped, to a great extent, by the inputs that we receive. The traditional media, by and large, are mouthpieces for a fairly uniform viewpoint driven in great part by the power of advertisers representing company executives who by and large are perfectly happy with imbalance, since it gives them incredible leverage to game the system. They like TV because it is a privileged platform from which to sell products, unduly handicaps local interests in favor of larger, more moneyed concerns, and, because it is visual, provides an incredible vehicle for the manipulation of people’s symbols at a fairly subconscious level.
However, population dynamics and the above trends of the “Media Reds” and “Media Blues” also means that many such advertisers (and their clients) are having to pursue their audience as it heads to the Internet, which in turn means that they are now having to deal with a medium which has very different rules, different control points, and what’s worse from their standpoint, an infinite number of potential channels. Politics is, at its core, advertising and marketing - the marketing of the fitness of a given individual for political office. The smart candidates, the ones who understand their constituency, will be able to ride those respective ways - but in the great horserace the TV horse is looking a little long in the tooth, and may find itself increasingly unable to deliver the votes the way it once could.
If my surmise is right, I suspect that the imbalance in the government is likely to start righting itself (or lefting itself, as the case may be) over the next few years, starting potentially this year, and far more likely by 2008. Yes, the issues will be important, and already you can project what the planks will be - “Defense” (or “Defence” for my Canadian neighbors) vs. “Global Warming” - but in the end I think it will be the degree to which the “Internet Generation” is able to coalesce as a political force that will determine the course of the election.
Kurt Cagle is a writer and web consultant living in Victoria, British Columbia.
Here in Canada the Blues are the Conservatives, Reds are Liberal. This being the case, the best way to maintain a balanced political outlook is to cross the 49th several times a year. Even the most staunch Liberals and Conservatives will come through a sublimly neutral brown!
Life in Victoria, where the Liberals are the conservatives and the NDP are the liberals, should only increase political neutralization. From what I can tell, this confusion has to do with our flag only having red and white, instead of red, white and blue, but enough lessons for one post!
PS. Kudos on your progress with the celcius scale! And thank you for the informative XForms articles, keep them coming!
Or begin to reform the evangelical base. In some places, the liberals who have stayed away from their places of worship to avoid the politics of the church are returning to provide a different voice and a fresh perspective over the legalists who use literalism to trump common decency.
The signs of change are always weak signals from the edges of the network. Have faith and patience and a fool's love of right over might and the long tail. And no fear. At the worst of times a good joke is more powerful than a shrill challenge.
Oops. Didn't mean to post anonymously. I abhor that. It's early in the morning in 'bama and my eyes haven't caught up yet.
Thanks Kurt, encouragement in these dark(politically hideous) times.
"new politics... integrity and connection and coherence of community"
-The Revolution Is Not Being Televised
Cool water in this desert.
Cheers
There's a corrolary on the religious front - one of the interesting facets of the religious right is the fact that it properly exists as a fairly limited number of organizations, mostly based out of the Southeast US (with a few outposts in the Western mountain states). This has long been a group that has been politically active, and seems to kick up a particular type of charismatic religious leader every so often that take well to television.
However, one of the things I've found quite fascinating has been the degree to which other churches that have traditionally represented a less parochial viewpoint have become a major factor in the opposition to the Iraq war and to many of the more extreme social policies that seem to be emerging as a direct consequence of this. Most of this organization is again taking place not through the media of television and national newspapers but through the electronic ether of the Internet.
I think that what you're seeing here is a form of long tail dynamics that the Internet has been noted for previously. The religious movement on the right is extraordinarily hierarchical in its structure, with the interpretation of belief largely coming down from on high through the filtered bureaucracies of the religion in question. It is, to borrow a singularly appropriate (albeit mixed) metaphor, a cathedral. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps a good emblem of this, though this isn't an exclusively Catholic phenomenon (and certain sectors of Catholicism definitely fall outside of this).
The religious movement on the left is distributed, locally autonomous, placing more emphasis on individual interpretation and more likely to be cellular in nature ... the corresponding bazarre. I think the most emblematic movement here is the Unitarian Universalists.
The Religious left has typically suffered politically because of its very nature - organizing beyond a fairly minimal level (usually limited by geography) was very difficult, because any given "church" might have a third the size of the corresponding church on the right and the much broader spectrum of beliefs involved meant that it was not logistically viable to organize.
In other words, if you think of the set of all religions by population, you get a fairly typical long tail distribution in which in the aggregate the "left" and the "right" are roughly equal in size, but the "right" has tended to be concentrated in the first few highly populated silos of distribution while the left was (largely) what remained.
The Internet dynamic has made it possible for the first time in history for that long tail to begin working together with a certain degree of unity. It's also meant that many of the people that were incorrectly "represented" by the broad label of a given religious right organization (and hence would have their church contributions, if not their votes, being used to fund political activities that they disagreed with) are increasingly able to shift outside of that space (by contributing to other causes) while still maintaining their associations with their church of choice.
I've not seen a lot of discussions about the implications of long tail dynamics within social movements, but I suspect we're seeing just the beginning of this phenomenon as well.
Again, I want to avoid necessarily placing moral judgements on these labels - the same factors that make it possible for a rise in the Religious Left also make possible the rise in neo-Nazi and similar hate group activity, for instance, as these organizations also tend to be network based and cellular in nature.
Hierarchies are capable of rapid, decisive movement, there are clear channels of responsibility and getting a snapshot of the state of the organization at any given time is usually quite simple. Distributed networks are often slower to react, tend to lack cohesion except in the presence of an obvious threat or attractor, are chaotic (by definition) and lack accountability.
Hierarchies are geometric and linear - a given amount of input while usually provide a corresponding linear output - while networks are non-linear, in which there may be no apparent response no matter how much energy is put into the system, then when the tipping point is reached, a phase shift occurs and a (hopefully desired) change takes place over night.
Thus, a good social systems engineer (re: non-linear politician) would need to understand feedback loops, chaotic transitions, information fluxes and other aspects of network systems analysis in order to work with this Internet generation, whether that politician is trying to mobilize the religious or social left. Sometime politicians implicitly understand that (the late Tip O'Neal's observation that "All politics are local" was perhaps as succinct a summation of this viewpoint as I've ever seen) but I think it safe to say that there are few such people in the current administration.
Indeed that administration is made up overwhelmingly of former CEOs, evangelical leaders, and hierarchically trained analysts, most of whom got their training dealing with the hierarchies of the Soviet Union, and who deal with such things as terrorism (which is a fundamentally distributed network-based activity) using all of the tools of the hierarchy. Not surprisingly, they're losing.
Kurt,
While the left may have a lead in the blogsphere, the overall content is ugly...when it comes to light it embarasses the politician (as has recently happened to Ned Lamont, who tried to distance himself).
Lieberman Assails Lamont Over Supporter's Blog Post
It's just rather funny that you brought up Ned in this context.
Actually, this doesn't surprise me at all, and I think it's actually pretty typical of what can and does happen in long-tail politics. It's hard to control the message in a sea of blogs, and every so often that blogosphere is going to throw out something that may be inappropriate or even inadvertantly damaging.
In that particular race, I think the impact of this will depend upon whether or not Lamont can prove that he had no influence upon the blogger in question. If he can (and this is where that issue of accountability arises) then this backfires upon Lieberman, who gets portrayed as grasping at straws. If he can't, then Lamont takes the hit. My suspicion is that Lamont's doing precisely the right thing here - she's not on my campaign staff, I'm not responsible for what she or anyone else writes, I have no control over the messages of others ... "she's a member of the 'blog' press".
I'm accentuating that last point because I think it's perhaps the most important aspect here. Many professional journalists disdain the blogosphere, and for good reason - the new breed of "journalists" represent a significant shift away from the power base of the old ones, has the potential to take away their jobs (or debase already low salaries) and render moot any protection that they as journalists may have had. Most in the blogosphere do not have the hierarchies of accountability that the professionals do - but in many ways the rules acting on bloggers are just as strict, if not as well defined.
A blogger lives or dies based upon reputation. If he or she is seen as engaging in unfounded rants, or even worse if that person is "untruthful", making up lies to fulfill a specific agenda, then that person will not be seen as being representative of legitimate information (doesn't mean they won't have a following, mind you - there are those people who are looking for precisely this sort of thing, but they aren't generally in a majority). What that means is that the ones that are generally good have to develop a sense of journalistic ethics or they will become news, usually in the worst possible way.
The traditional journalist, on the other hand, is often shielded from this concern because they are already "blessed" with the authority of the media that they write with. Fox News, for instance, can provide incredibly biased, inaccurate and scurilous "news" that is still accepted by a fairly large minority because it comes from a "professional" television network. The medium is the message. The vetting process that such news goes through does not necessarily insure that it is any more accurate, only that it is sufficiently bulletproof that by the time any questions can arise the news has become stale and forgotten - only the tenor of the message remains.
I suspect that this will either make or break the reputation of the blogger in question (more likely the latter), but in the long run it won't matter. If Lieberman makes too much of an issue of the picture, he runs too many risks of painting himself as being unable to take legitimate criticism and of trying to seize on anything to tar his opponent. Thus, it makes for interesting mid-campaign fodder, it puts Lamont on notice that he does need to better control his own message, and in the end, it becomes a non-issue.
As long as you remember there is no clean divide between hierarchies and networks (just as objects and relational systems can be frameworked) and the left and right can become equally adept at the game of non-linear directed evolution of short-cycle situation dynamics. The difference if the hierarchy is more narrowly goal directed and tends to win the short cycles unless an overwhelming signal from the environment galvanizes the loose confederations (think of the effect of energy bursts inside a ruby making a pulse laser organizing the coherent effect). Al qaeda relies on this tactic and it is the definition of asymetric warfare. It requires a resonant base. To stop this, one dampens the resonant frequency.
The next step in thinking is to look at controller types, eg, PIDs. Otherwise, you are looking at the difference in confederated and federated systems.
That is something federated hierarchies do better than confederated networks but individuals do even better.
V for Vengeance is a good allegory, but you may want to understand the value of common values. The biggest invisible contributor to the damping of race problems in the American South was not the power of Federal troops. That only had a short cycle effect. The long cycle damping occurred because the majority of the population shared a common religion and wives started telling their husbands that racial hate and a *satisfying* homelife weren't compatible.
Make of that what you will, but there is a lot of truth in what Golda Meir said: the killing will stop when we love our children more than we hate each other.
Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!
'...candidates that are most effective at taking advantage of this technology are also more likely to be technologically savvy themselves...'
I am not so sure about this. Maybe it is important that candidates only recognize the importance of technology and hire the right people. Or, like Ron Paul buzz shows, it is enough that the supporters of a candidate are technologically savvy.