It
was a real nice clambake, and we all had a real good time...
I've wanted to use that phrase
from Carousel
for, like, ever, so thanks, Joe and Kathy, for the opportunity at last.
On Saturday, the Trippi family threw their annual clambake on
their Maryland
farm, so naturally, it was a bit of a Dean campaign reunion.
It
was also a memorial to the recently departed Kasey - the wonder
dog who was the spiritual inspiration to so many people at
the Dean Campaign - a West Highland white terrier with the
heart of a lionness. In his eulogy, Nicco Mele described how Kasey
could coax another three hours of fortitude from him when no other
power could.
Like a tiny Scottish Presbyterian cleric, Kasey would roam the cubicles at 60 Farrell Street and, seemingly, hound the slackers. You could almost hear her little burr as you halucinated over your keyboard at midnight: "Well, it won't be doin' the Guv'nor any good for you to be slacking, will it laddie?"
No dog of any size could
intimidate Kasey, who was so energized when cornered that she looked
forward to being cornered. Like the Guv'nor.
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In addition to the
what-are-you-doing-now questions I asked of everyone, there were also
conversations around how 'Net-mediated conversations might continue to
inform politics, especially compelling to me since the pace of growth
is not as galvanizing as it was at the start.
I had a stimulating
conversation with Matt
Stoller, who's now working on
Jon Corzine's campaign for New Jersey Governor. We didn't discuss that
campaign, but Matt described the importance of what he called
"micromedia connectivity" – the localized feedback loops that
were once supported by local papers discussing local issues, before
print media got ClearChanneled.
Back-Channeling the Clear
Channels
The key to political success,
Matt reminded me, is to show up at local party meetings and get
involved enough to become part of the political process rather than
simply being what I've been: a smart-ass commentator in a blogosphere
that no one in local politics knows how to spell, much less attend to.
The problem with party meetings
is their accidental cynicism – they seem purpose-built to
attract only those who like party meetings: people with too much
political ambition or not enough real life. Do you know anybody who
goes to local political party meetings? Do you know anybody who knows
anybody who does? I didn't think so. Naturally, you and I think that
people like us should be running things, and we're mad as hell that we
don't, and we resent it that people like us are so disinclined to hang
out at the power centers that there's really no place for us in the
political process. That's why our jaws drop in stunned amazement as we
watch the doofus political insiders cavort with glee at a Presidential
nominating convention. It's scary that these are the people minding the
spigot disgorging our candidates: Who are those people and why the hell
are they
the political power base?
Because they show up. They show
up for meetings that you and I would flee for an elective root canal.
And that's just fine with the insiders running politics.
The disinclination of centrist
Americans to "do" politics is at the heart of my
assertion that, based on
American voter data, it takes a zealot to even get out and vote, let
alone get active. As for the people minding America's political power
levers, they are so few in number that our politics is a central
planning realpolitik. If the Swiss ran their politics like we do,
they'd be Albania.
Clearchanneling has homogenized
media so that its "content" is as predictable as a shopping mall's
tenant roster. A corollary cocooning has insulated most institutions
from their constituents, whether it's an annual shareholders' meeting,
a nominating convention, a city council meeting or your homowner's
association. And that's the stonewalling that stops "regular" Americans
at the doorstep of local party politics. It's not just laziness, it's
the user interface.
Matt Stoller knows so much
about this that I'm embarassed to opine in the wake of our conversation
Saturday, there on the dock in the sunset on Cummings Creek. But
there's a distinction in our viewpoints I can't leave alone. Matt has
concluded, like so many others who are drawn to the tech side of
politics but who have faced the reality of actually doing
politics, that the newly energized people just have
to develop the will to go to party meetings.
I'm more cynical. I've
concluded that "real" Americans (i.e., people with a life) never will
do the local party thing and so we need to develop a robust and
seductive back channel for governance so that, as in the run-up to the
American Revolution, a new population emerges, taking over politics by
using technology as disruptive as Ben Franklin's press was in his day.
Technical Determinist at Work
Technical determinism is
politically incorrect. The sophisticated observers of culture, politics
and markets don't like technical determinism which seems, to put it
delicately, to really piss off the humanists among us. As a lifelong
card-carrying humanist, I'm not so sure. It seems that we humans and
humanists carry out our right-brain agendas totally circumscribed by
the information that we apprehend and by the reality we build from that
mental picture. Of course, all the elements of our constructed reality
are pawns of the communications technology that has been erected for us
in our immediate past. We'd like to think we are free intellectual
agents, perceiving reality and making astute judgments of absolute
value, unfettered by transient constraints and filters. I suggest that
we're really corks bobbing in the perceptual stream of media flowing
past our forebrain: that technology is the real determinant of what we
perceive and, perforce, of what we conclude.
At the O'Reilly Digital
Democracy Teach-In at the ETech conference in February 2004, I chatted
with Dan Gillmor briefly about the Dean campaign I was just coming off
of. Dan dismissed Dean as someone who wasn't fit to be President. I
asked Dan if he'd ever met Howard Dean, and he answered "No."
How do we "know" someone we've
never met? I won't argue with Dan that Howard Dean wouldn't have
intrinsic difficulties connecting with world leaders and the electorate
based on his apparently bristly nature, but it seems hubristic of any
of us to conclude a leader's true nature while observing him through
the multi-element lens of Main Stream Media.
So those are the issues I want
to deal with as our new little company tries to build the next round of
tools for people who want to govern from their arm chairs and not from
their local party meetings.
11:47:40 PM 
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