Get Over the Rainbow
The Democrats have had a nice ride with the rainbow coalition. It was brilliant
to build such an open tent and to thereby gain the political clout carried by
the real majority in the US: its minorities. But a
new golden coalition is waiting at the end of the rainbow: those connected by
even more than mutual self-interest: the continuous dialogue of the 'Net, serving
up tangible-seeming communities forged from ephemeral TCP/IP packets.
Like the eye fooled by 30 fps film, thinking it's watching reality, our brain
eagerly maintains the illusion that on-screen traces of keystrokes are a tangible
community. So pervasive is the illusion that people act on its imperatives,
so the community is as real as any has ever been. Perhaps more real, since through
it we embrace the best of our collective thinking and orphan our lesser inclinations.
Are We There Yet?
Since the future's unevenly distributed, we might test new political possibilities
earlier in some venues than others. Take New York City, for example. This is
probably the most connected and forward-looking city on the planet. Is it possible
that the next election for Hizzoner da Mayor could be driven by connectivity
in ways that the moneyed establishment cannot imagine? If so, how might it happen?
Patron Age
Patronage was the most powerful lever of the old politics, the source of most
political power until usurped by broadcast politics. Especially in a place like
New York, politicians and their ward bosses and precinct captains made sure
that voters got a free chicken every once in a while. Everyone knew that such
favors were to be repaid on election day.
Imagine you're a well-connected, reasonably prosperous, politically-oriented
New Yorker who "gets" the 'Net (that ain't me, babe, not even for
the purpose of this mind game). You might glimpse an opportunity to engage the
best of the old and new politics in ways others cannot comprehend.
Instead of buying chickens to compel voter loyalty, politicians now buy TV
slots. I assume that's based on the belief that it's better to hypnotize a voter
into acquiescence than to do some small thing of real value for a real family.
But might the 'Net empower politicians disproportionately, delivering real value
to voters as a scaffold for actionable loyalty–not with poultry but with
the fruits of online community? Imagine with me a few expressions of web services
as patronage writ large.
- NYCskills.com
This would be an extension of the deanforjobs.com
project we noodled with last winter. It's purpose is to bring together and
energize three kinds of people:
• Under-trained workers
• Skilled professionals
• Employers seeking skilled, motivated workers
You could probably build a political machine based on this web service alone.
At NYCskills.com, you connect people seeking new skills with people pleased
to demonstrate and coach them in anything from network
administration through HTML
coding to Word
tables, business
letters and the 500 courses that MIT
offers online. As work skills have become more technical and specific,
jobs have become a series of tech-based procedures strung together like pearls
on a string, a tight coupling of skills with income.
The key to NYCskills.com is the participants' required reporting of each hour
of skills training–mentor and student describing their session together.
If the model spreads, it's not hard to imagine the get-togethers growing to
thousands of hours per week, all provable and quantifiable.
This is heady stuff for politics. Imagine reporting to voters that your web
service has inspired a quarter million hours of skill training in the year
before the election. Imagine further that you're able to reach those engaged
participants directly, to leverage your web service and promote the proven
benefits of your proposed administration. When that happens, the candidates'
debates feature a guy who does business as usual, with the usual suspects,
and a guy who's not just promising improvements, but who's delivering them
to real people, by the thousands, every day.
- NYCyounglions.com
A cohort you should reach out to is the vibrant community of bright young
New York professionals who spend their days working for dead
white guys. This may be the best-educated, well-connected demographic
on the planet, but no NYC mayoral candidate has made a coherent effort to
reach them. Since so many of them are already prosperous, it's harder to entice
them than people looking to upgrade their skills. But one thing's certain:
they want a voice in the future of this great city and a sense of their collective
power, whether they know it or not.
My tactic would be to challenge them to build and maintain a virtual city
government. Invite tham to engage the issues the city government is facing
and stir up a messy and passionate debate about better ways to discuss things,
think of things, run things. Expose these young lions to the public and find
out how many of them have a future in governance.
Simply by hosting the community of young professionals, you'd demonstrate
that it's a community worth hosting. It's probably a genie you'd never get
back in the bottle.
- NYCnewunions.com
New York is a Union Town. Union members, like it or not, do most of the work
and collectively enforce the work rules that empower and constrain
the Big Apple's progress. Union members are outspoken but their passionate
voices are filtered through union management's alternate agenda. What if a
private citizen with an eye on Gracie Mansion decided to sincerely embrace
unions and their members' personal and family challenges?
What kind of a union-oriented web service might one commission? It would surely
chronicle and celebrate the history of unions and their real but camouflaged
contribution to our way of life. It would probably invite union members to
speak out in their own voices, to mentor each other through comments and blogs,
and weave a fine-grained tapestry of mentors' and apprentices' skills, voices
and hopes.
We might discover that union members' emphasis on skills and solidarity resonates
with geeks' emphasis on working code and rough consensus; that people who
believe that skills trump suits have a natural bond, regardless of the hue
of their collar. Once you engaged that synchronicity, you might fuel an engine
that could transform even a tradition-bound city like this.
You get the idea. Just by hosting disparate communities, one has the potential
to engage and energize voters as free chickens never could. Once glimpsed as
a campaign tactic, the failure to do so looms as a colossal oversight.
Opportunity, Meet Obligation
But is there more to such insights? OK, you're a clued-in dude with the means,
the insight and, possibly, the ambition to commission these web services. Do
you go ahead with them?
Turn it around. If you glimpsed that vision, how could you fail to deliver
these services? Whether or not you were jonesing for the Office, if you have
the vision and means, what keeps you from offering the services? They are obvious,
straightforward and powerful. Would a modern-day Carnegie, possessing a fraction
of the means and vision, shrink from the possibility, once glimpsed? That would
be the equivalent of ignoring a person lying on the track of the A Train, with
five minutes before arrival.
So possibility segues, compellingly, into obligation. The coincidence of insight
and near-zero costs make the unthinkable proximate and the grand gesture quotidian.
It's a strange reality we've built. The sweeping ambitions of statesman are
overlapping the incidental expressions of enlightened citizenship.
10:46:25 PM 
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