B.Y.O. Bias to the Virtual Party
It's axiomatic that insights arrive in bunches, like lights
going on in several windows at once. I felt so clever declaring yesterday
that Dean's best shot at winning the Presidency is to officially form the Great Centrist
Party, the GCP, an act of chutzpah which
no longer requires the irritant of owning assets to give voice to your constituents.
I'd been thinking it for quite
a while and circulating a white paper to that effect in Burlington.
Obviously I hadn't been thinking about it as long as Everett
Ehrlich, who had researched the idea's resonance with the Nobel Prize-winning
work of Ronald Coase and published his conclusions yesterday in the Washington
Post. Coase won the 1991 Nobel for Economics by noticing that the cost of
gathering information
determines
the
size of
organizations.
As Ehrlich puts it,
It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex
tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths. This
was as true for the Democratic and Republican parties as it was for General
Motors. Choosing and marketing candidates isn't so different from designing,
manufacturing and selling automobiles.
But the Internet has changed all that in one
crucial respect that wouldn't surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the "trick" of
the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually
zero. So according
to Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations.
And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether
small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on
the big ones.
Well. Ehrlich's article inspired responses from Slashdot,
Cory
Doctorow, Clay
Shirky
and John Robb,
so I'm emboldened by that reaction to follow through on my threat to list
the specific, technically trivial web apps that will,
I think, guarantee a sweeping change in the nature of democratic governance.
My shorthand for those scaling issues is that an organization
is stressed to the extent of its conversation opportunities. When the press,
regulators, lawyers, vendors and customers are hounding you for feedback,
you are trapped in a conversational black hole that means you can't get
the goods out the door.
But in the case of a campaign, the "goods" are
conversations that result in sympathetic voter's hands on voting levers,
ballots and (shudder)
touch screens. Dean's people are not just the campaign's voters; they are
the national staff. They are the ones operating in the campaign's novel permission-free
zone. As far as I can tell from close up and personal, there's no limit to
what role you can play in the campaign, as long as you provide an end-to-end
solution and don't call on the paid staff for resources of time, attention
or money.
Essentially, Joe Trippi's mantra is, "Talk among
yourselves and everything will work out."
A conversation about our core American values and the explicit
pledges we're willing to make to each other will have the force of a new
national political party, and there's nothing the Rs and Ds can do about
it. The Dems are
screaming helplessly today. The trick is to make the Republicans
join them in their impotent wailing in about 6 months.
Is there anything more American than turning the tables on
those fat ass bad asses? In a campaign full of inspiration, the most inspiring
truism I've heard came, as usual, from a blog comment: "Dean's the
messenger, but WE are the message."
Do We Have the Stones to Design Democracy?
The change depends only on technology, and pretty trivial
tech at that. If my premise is correct, this new political tipping point
will inspire so many new conversations about governance and the role of individuals
governing themselves that the promise of the Golden Age of Greece will be
realized soon.
All
we need is the stones to do it. The G[r]eeks voted with little round
white and black stones–white for aye and black for nay, an eminently
auditable voting system. Everyone
could see the result when the top was taken off the clay pot, and each
voter retained a receipt in the form of the opposite-color stone left in
his
hand. From a geek perspective, it's all engineering.
Jay
Rosen stopped by for lunch yesterday and he amplified
what I had not learned well enough from his web site–that blog software
so trumps the press mentality that we really are at the beginning of the
end of the dominance of the master narrative that dominates the press: what
Doc calls the "vs." story: sports and conflict as the universal
metaphor for life. Jay, a decidedly tech-averse guy, is so taken by Moveable
Type that he anthropomorphizes the little widgets on its interface as speaking
to him. "Use me," he hears them calling.
The Revolution will be Engineered
I had a pleasant visit with Tim
Bray at XML 2003 in Philly
on Tuesday. Anyone who's read Tim's blog knows that he's a polymath with
broad and
deep interests. In describing some of our challenges, he smiled coyly and disclaimed, "I'm
just an engineer." I laughed out loud. That's like saying Howard Dean is
an
internist. True but less filling. Tim, like so many other systems designers,
looks at the
world's most assertive democracy and wonders who designed its OS?
I'm an engineer at heart also, and so I assert that the sole
difference between tipping point 1 and tipping point 4 is engineering and
chutzpah. If you build it, they will come, but "it" includes a
great User Experience.
Let's start with some imagination: imagine that Dick Morris
knows what he's talking about in his Chris
Lydon interview–that Howard Dean
is dead meat because the Republicans have
40 times
the email
addresses as Howard Dean, and that Republicans are intrinsically more connected,
through church, school and boosterism, than Democrats. If that's so, we need
to modify
the tipping point options from yesterday.
Limiting Our Options
I was disingenuous when I suggested yesterday that I thought
Dean has four options:
- Win the nomination and lose the election (the current smart
money)
- Squeak by Rove et. al. and barely win the election
- Craft robust coattails using the Boswell strategy to eke
out a majority in Congress
- Design and instantiate a virtual Great Centrist
Party,
the GCP, as Ehrlich describes, not merely a great tent but an immense echo
chamber where the illusion of the press-inspired conservative-liberal polarity
gives way to agreement on the specific issues that unite us:
- fair play
- financial responsibility
- love
of family and friends
- reverence for our shared spirituality
- modest public behavior home and abroad
- freedom
to be privately reserved or outrageous
- the right, as Greta Garbo
pleaded, to be left alone
- the primacy of human beings over corporate persons
- mistrust of bureaucracy and its seductive handmaiden,
unearned rewards
Alan
Kay taught us that the best way to predict the future is to invent
it. Recognizing that we're forging a new political party anyway, and knowing
that it's easier
to build
our GCP
than
to win over
the DNC,
I say we pump enough fuel into this beast to get us to the destination and hold
for the weather delay.
The New York Times reminds
us today that Joe Trippi's plan is more likely to be grand than
timid.
Joe's vision, plus the military's axiom that hope
is not
a
plan,
suggests
we'd
better go for the gusto and assume there are just
two
options,
1
or
4:
Dick Morris points out in his Lydon
interview (.mp3) that it
doesn't matter who builds the tools of democracy: politicians will go where
the voters go because that's their food supply: visibility into the hearts
and
minds
of
voters could
inspire a politician to practice Bikram yoga three times a week, if that's
what the constituents demand. If we want the democracy we think we were
promised, we merely need to build it. Here
are
the
pieces I can think of, your list will be better:
- Assertion Processor - RSS feeds of facts that matter
- Constituents' Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
- Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded
individuals
- A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based
campaign
- Citizen-based (not faith-based)
programs for training, jobs & mutual support
- Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors
and shared video archive
- of terrorism
- polling place coercion
- brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats
And a few other means, obvious to others, that
are obvious to the citizens as we wake up, shake off our accumulated drowsiness
and get it that we
are the message.
I'll flesh out my list next week, but why wait? As Joe Trippi
might put it, Code among yourselves.
6:18:24 PM 
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