Are You on the Dean's List?
That would be Howard Dean's list. You oughtta be. Not because he's a Democrat
or willing to be outspoken or a physician who understands exactly how you're
gonna be screwed when you or your family actually need medical care, or because
he runs a state where the governor actually governs and which is prosperous
without exploiting resources, while Texas is bankrupt
despite its huge resource base and fouled environment, dead-last among all states.
As for media consolidation, here's a clue
from yesterday:
May 27, 2003
Chairman Michael Powell
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street SW
Washington, DC 20554
Dear Chairman Powell,
Americans cherish the freedom of the press -- and the diversity of
the press that ensures they can get access to the truth and to the information
they need. The Bush Administration may not appreciate that freedom and
diversity, but they should not tamper with it.
On June 2nd, the Federal Communications Commission should decide against
allowing a single company to own multiple television stations, radio
stations, and newspapers in a single town. The Bush Administration has
urged the FCC to remove regulations that protect every Americans’
right to a free press. This latest attempt by the Bush Administration
to undermine the American ideals enshrined in our Constitution is wrong...
...Therefore, I urge you to take the following actions:
- Delay the June 2nd vote by the FCC.
- Testify before Congress so that the Representatives of the American
people can have the opportunity to question the representatives of
the Bush Administration.
- Allow for, and consider, additional public input. The FCC must
provide sufficient opportunity for public input on a decision that
affects every American.
I appreciate your consideration.
Sincerely,
Governor Howard Dean, M.D. |
But never mind all that. You need to support
Dean because he has
said the most important thing that any candidate has ever said:
"I'm not unwilling to change positions based on facts,
but I am unwilling to change positions based on polls."
The reason his point is important is that we've never had a fact-based politician
and if you read or write a blog or software code, you're committed to the
outrageous notion that facts matter. For many people, facts don't matter. The
process of discovering, testing, discarding and describing facts is such a mystery
to many that they're not willing to trust it. Most of us, and certainly most people
in power, are interested only in what increases our influence, which is rarely
factual.
So here's a person who governs without the right to print money, who says he's
willing to listen to facts and make fact-checking a campaign issue. The other
thing he's doing is using the Internet as the center of his campaign strategy,
ramrodded by his Internet-obsessed Campaign Manager, Joe
Trippi:
When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for Trippi. Some
campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting
union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount
of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal blogs, sending text
messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and
otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions
as "the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party."
His team is so focused on leveraging the Net that they may win in 2004 because
they have ways of getting out the vote of disaffected centrists. They'll also
use the Net to sow discontent among the authentic conservatives who have seen
their civil rights purged by a big-spending, little guy-hating big-gummint administration
that promised all the right things and did all the wrong things, from the viewpoint
of authentic (pre-1990) conservatives. You know about authentic conservatives,
don't you? They're as committed to the Constitution as the ACLU.
My logic is escapable but probable: Appropriate use of the Internet is the
inside track to the 2004 election, and Dean's team is the only one that knows
what the track looks like. Appropriate use of the Internet isn't fake emails
or PR but is the use of meetup.com and blogs and Knowledge Management to organize
consensus around people's inclination to support a candidate who makes sense,
not noise.
For about 24 hours I've been urging Doc Searls to get all over this. There
are still nine candidates for the Democratic nomination, eight of whom are congress
critters who have supported most of the measures that have gutted civil rights
and fair use of published materials. Dean will wipe up the floor with them,
but can't yet be sure of it, so he and his growing team are probably willing
to listen to the blogging world and to consider a blog-based administration.
Here's my recommendation:
- Someone arranges a meeting with, at least, Dr. Lessig, Doc Searls, Dr. Dean,
and Joe Trippi. The agenda is simple:
- Will you go to the mat to return fair use of published works to the
people?
- Will you sponsor a blog-based, blog-responsive administration?
- Will you promote a fact-based judiciary?
- If those answers are public, unequivocal and satisfactory, Searls, Lessig
and other Net thought leaders should pull out the stops and get behind Dean,
our last best hope for an administration knowing that managerial capitalism
is about to consume the seed corn that makes capitalism possible. The nutrients
they're snorting up are the major food groups of the American miracle:
- A free and informed electorate
- The freedom to oppose the majority opinion (which usually isn't)
- Freedom of speech, and, implicitly, freedom from single-agenda broadcasting
- Freedom from unreasonable seizure and, implicitly, limits on fair use
of purcahsed media
Listen for the Blog Horn
Dean is the first candidate to treat relatively unknown bloggers as a
critical opinion-making constituency. "We understand the blogging community
and have been active in it," says Trippi. "A lot more people are
seeing us on the blogs and other sites every day than on TV at this point
in the campaign."
...Last week, Dean even gave his first exclusive interview to a blogger,
a rather well-done exchange via e-mail by the anonymous author of the blog
LiberalOasis. The Dean campaign itself has an official blog that includes
dispatches from the road, and Trippi also posts regularly to Dean2004.blogspot.com,
an unofficial Dean blog that has become a hub of Internet organizing for the
campaign.*
Like most emerging media, blogging tends to contemplate its own navel. But
it's probable the navel's attached to something worth attending to. Blogging
inspired the social software meme and is wrapping Knowledge Management around
itself. By the time Super Tuesday hits, we'll probably have a way to aggregate
bloggers' opinions and roll them up into a coherent sense of grass roots sentiment
in ways never before possible. My gut tells me Technorati could tally up our
common sense of reality by identifying political key words and associating them
with positive vs. negative adjectives and adverbs.
So we shouldn't support Dean just because he reads and uses blogs. Rather,
we should get behind any candidate who:
- Has a mind
- Speaks it clearly and well
- Proves it by blogging for the record, in a human voice
Blogger interest is just a start. The work part of this possibility is for
bloggers and aficionados to engage friends, neighbors and fellow workers by
proving that there's a there there: someone who deserves our support
because he's actually committed to responding to facts, including proofs that
most of we the people have a more than wee interest in doing smart things.
The Central Plank in the Platform
But let's not get blindly behind this guy unless the centerpiece of his campaign
is fact-based policy-making in a blog-based and blog-responsive administration.
Then we may see a role for technologists in politics at least equal to Big Oil
and Big Media.
3:32:37 PM 
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