The Campaign Mentality
We all know that technology accelerates during wartime
and that a war is a series of campaigns. I'm fascinated by the wartime
mentality, whether or not it occurs in combat, so let's call it a campaign
mentality.
The campaign mentality sets in when a group feels so strongly about its
mission that it transcends the usual carping, grandstanding, empire-building
and
pettiness that marks so much of enterprise. It's invigorating.
War is the easiest way to produce the campaign phenomenon,
and gets the most attention. But the mentality is not unusual. Every time
a plane takes off or a boat launches, its occupants share a campaign mentality
as
to the
importance
of
arriving
gently on dry land. In the startup companies I've started or helped, a campaign
mentality was expressed by the participants' olympian willingness to work
harder, longer faster–and cheaper–than people in established companies.
Political campaigns are the best non-combat examples of the
campaign mentality. And they're an interesting counterpoint. The aim of war
is to blow things up, so war technology is designed to blow them up more
accurately and cheaply. The aim of political campaigns is to build consensus,
so its technology is about building consensus faster and more cheaply.
I've felt for a while now that a smart mob is in the process
of stealing the Dean campaign, because the smart mob is growing faster and
more intelligently than any campaign's ability to manage it. As Doc suggests,
the competition will learn how to use the tools that Dean is using, but what
will they get for their trouble? A campaign like Dean's, where the people
manage the dialogue, a decidedly counter-Rovian management style.
Massage the Medium
If the people take over your campaign, what have you got left?
- The campaign blog with staff personalities and volunteers'
comments is the Sunshine law of backroom politics. You lose control of
the process and start
to
host the kind of dialogue
that the front
runners
have never wanted.
- Your Contribute Now link attracts a zillion people
who think they have a stake in your campaign just because they charged
20 bucks to their Visa.
- Rank experts set up their own campaign
sites and then open
source hobbyists invent a whole new set
of tools to let the sites talk
to each other and all their users blog and then let them vote on the ideas
they like best, just like it was a participatory democracy rather than
a Tory republic.
- People dream up new ways to give you money and then bitch
at you if you don't put up an automatic donation tool in a week. (Zephyr?
Bobby? Anyone there?)
- People start chatting online with the campaign manager, taking
valuable time away from the important work of writing ads to get people
interested in the campaign.
- Instead of making up your own mind about fundraising tactics,
you end up having to ask the donors if they're ready to give another half
mill you hadn't counted on.
- College kids and even high schoolers
(high schoolers!) run their own sites without
asking permission, (the high schoolers patiently explaining that half the
kids in high school will be able to vote in 16 months). They're so insistent
that
the candidate feels obligated to shuffle off to Buffalo between Oklahoma
and Iowa. The kids even organize their own ride
board, fer chrissake!
And these people think that, just because they replace the
PAC and National Committee and corporate soft money that
they should have as much say in your administration as those they replaced.
They feel entitled just because they bought their own votes!
Remember that part about users voting each other's ideas up
the queue like a bunch of SlashDotters? That's the Knowledge Base tech that
everybody's been talking about but not getting around to. It's the campaign
mentality! These amateurs may not even think they're inventing new tech and
may have never heard the endless conversation about how to turn blogs into
knowledge. Just
like WWI for aviation and WWII for atomic energy, this campaign is spinning
off blog-to-Knowledge Base tech.
Democracy, the Killer App
And blogs-to-knowledge base is the end of politics as usual. With citizen
blogs and preference-registering knowledge bases and interested amateurs taking
ownership of
government, democracy becomes the Next Big Thing. The campaign mentality
works like it always does, pushing tech to the limit. Special interests realize
they'll never get everything they want so they start to get real about what's
possible, so NYC Democrats cheer for a balanced budget pitched by a rural-state
Guv who opposes national gun control.
It wouldn't make sense unless they felt like they own the
guy.
11:37:18 PM 
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