Drops on the Windowpane
Each of us is a raindrop on the windowpane, pure but with a heart of soot,
full of potential to join with others. As we run into each other on the way
to the bottom of our life of pane, we merge and gain power. Is the force
we gain the force of the original drop or is it a collective force which only
appears to be the original, grown large? When a third drop is absorbed into
the first two, themselves just joined, is its shimmer diminished by the larger
gleam?
The River
Barnes had once visited the headwaters of the Mississippi in Minnesota.
He was fascinated by the creek coming out of
Lake Itasca. A few yards downstream, it met another trickle,
smaller than the trickle next to the Mississippi River Source
monument, and the combined trickles together were called the Mississippi.
So it continued
as each slightly smaller tributary added to the stream's
volume. After major acquisitions at the confluence with the Ohio and the
Missouri, the trickle was a serious piece of business.
Barnes considered
the Mississippi monument a shrine of major importance, for it symbolized
his entire career. Barnes was nothing if not ever alert. All of his alertness
was to insure that he never started a conversation whose outcome he did
not know in advance, with someone not quite so powerful. Everyone he
spoke with needed him worse than he needed them, and so he accumulated
assets
and cash flows relentlessly as he tumbled downstream. "That’s
what’s
wrong with these Ivy Leaguers," he thought, "they’ve
never visited the source of the Mississippi. If they had, they might
understand
business.
—"Alpha,"
a work in progress
The Question
Mitch is
beating the leadership conundrum again. He points out that leaders may not
set out to be, but become leaders by doing something they simply can't not
do. The issue
last week was connectedness and the possibility of
10,000 MLKs,
RFKs
and Ghandis. Last week
Dr. Weinberger suggested that
perhaps only a strong individual can rescue progressivism from the trash heap
of current politics.
There's
a lot of despair
among so-called progressive liberals,
who seem to have been blind-sided by the power grab the conservatives spent
20 years engineering, accomplished with blow-job politics and anointment
of the runner-up by the high priests of our judiciary.
The over-arching conservative agenda, as Doc's friend George
Lakoff teaches
us, is Patriarchy—a strong parent model for society. Patriarchy
is the sponsor of fundamentalism, which makes a lot of us rightfully crazy
and which directly sponsors blowing people up as needed.
The controlling liberal agenda is what Lakoff calls the nurturant-parent model,
but I think of it as node-parity—every
node in a system has equal value, must be respected and nourished, and the
links among the nodes are more important than the brilliance or dysfunction
of any
single node, or all of them. This makes the patriarchists crazy.
I suggest we don't have time for a single leader because the culture lacks
the traditional handles such a leader might pull, so no "charismat" is likely
to appear.
Those who seek a systems-based rather than ideology-based culture (who sound
like but are not exclusively liberal)
need
to realize that
new tools have been accumulating to do so, invisibly. These tools have been
quietly put in place even while fundamentalists were using the old tools
to load the PTAs, city councils, courts
and Republican
apparatus, equally invisibly.
Collectively, the new tools of power are called the Internet. But we who
seem to most believe in it are still not using it as we might. I'm convinced
it's because the real uses of the Internet are not yet clear to us.
We'd like some short cuts to universal rationality, but there are none. If
we believe in the network, use the network. If not, we should go to work for
a political party.
Anybody Can Improve It. But How?
Some say that, despite initial expectations, the Internet is not
leading us toward populism. How might it? We need to become expert in
creating virulent populist data tools—web
applications—that
make it worthwhile for thousands, then millions of people to express their
political preferences in ways that
overwhelm traditional means of organizing opinion and resources. Imagine a
distributed web application that elicits and aggregates political values so
effectively and broadly that representatives feel compelled to consult it to
understand their mandate specifically:Vote the People's Will or Die.
- Compelling. Expressing your opinion must feel so urgent
that anyone who sees the web site will chime in. At first, this may be driven
by novelty
and the early adopters. It must be reinforced by the concern of the many
that, if they stay out of the accumulating data, something they have or want
will be denied them.
- Easy. No one uses a web site that isn't easy.
- Public. The results of the accumulating preferences must
be available to the most casual observer and the most exhaustive researcher.
Cast it so it's the authoritative source for pollsters,
commentators and pundits.
- Scalable. A central site might not hack it, and the public
dialogue is too important to be hostage to the shifting fortunes of an initially
enthusiastic
ISP.
Some day we'll have a way to manage data using grid computing or a napster-like
structure. If not now, when?
- Engaging. Get people to make personal (not astroturfing)
remarks to develop their sense of voice and power.
- Threadable. Tag remarks and portions thereof so like minds
have a reason to stay connected and maybe, just maybe, listen to
unlike minds. So might begin a slide into reasonableness and open thinking.
Let's discover how alike we are.
- Hopeful. Demonstrate that we can lock arms and build,
again, a government of, by and for the people.
- Presentable. Individual opinions must be aggregated and
depicted graphically so the weight of accumulated conviction is
sliced and
diced multiple
ways: visible and obvious. A Kartoo-like depiction of issues and preferences
seems useful.
- Committed and Promising. People who express their opinions
need a way to parse those opinions into immediate, effective commitment.
Let users link
opinions to legislation as it moves through congress and to legislators.
"If you vote for x amendment, I
promise to vote against you."
- Forward-looking. Most public debate is hand-wringing over
what's done or too late to change. Create contracts among people, linking
future votes and donations to impending legislative actions.
- Collaborable. Mitch and Dave came at the leadership issue
from different ends, but collaborated nicely without losing their viewpoints.
Bloggers do that.
- Value-Neutral. The purpose must be to expose private
opinion to public scrutiny. All remarks should be archived and then, once
exposed, watch reason
creep into the blogalogue.
- Opportunistic. Bribe people shamelessly: let those who
make remarks vote on each other's remarks. Let people reward those who make
the
best remarks.
Find someone
to spend $1,000 a day for 1,000 days. Juice is power.
- Meme-Based. Only a powerful central idea will get attention
and infect other minds. Today, safety has infected our populace, so we're
acting out of cowardice, not strength. When we return to acting from strength,
we need to discuss the difference between strength of character and military
power. Maybe the meme is,
See My Vote! It matters.
I'm more interested in being involved than I am in a secret ballot. Secret
ballots are for wimps.
I'm a design guy. If there's a known problem, I like to imagine a specific
solution and wonder about implementation. The above is obviously the talking
points for the Electoral Collage notion I floated last fall and repeated last
week. Who knows if it's possible? Does it matter?
Last week I reserved electoralcollege.com and invited anybody to use it.
On reflection, the name seems too cute and vague to be memetic. The core concept
in this web
application is that, when the electorate feels so powerful and confident that
it gives up its right to a secret ballot and goes on record to such an extent,
the vote is a formality. I like the idea of See My Vote!
If you'd like to do something with seemyvote.com, let me know. I'll trade
it for an action plan. I'm pretty busy with the microeconomy meme.
5:00:03 PM 
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