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In Henry IV, part 1, Shakespeare penned a brilliant outburst by the great warrior, Hotspur. As he stands bloody and exhausted from battle, a mincing nobleman demands that he immediately turn over his prisoners to be taken to the King. Hotspur’s later response to King Henry IV:

My liege, I did deny no prisoners.
But I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reaped
Showed like a stubble land at harvest home.
He was perfumèd like a milliner,
And twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose, and took’t away again;
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talked;
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me, amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in your majesty’s behalf.
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a popingay,
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly, I know not what–
He should, or he should not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds — God save the mark! —
And telling me the sovereignest thing on earth
Was parmacity for an inward bruise,
And that it was great pity, so it was,
This villainous saltpetre should be digged
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,
Which many a good fellow had destroyed
So cowardly, and but for these vile guns,
He would himself have been a soldier.
This bald unjointed chat of his, my lord,
I answered indirectly, as I said,
And I beseech you, let not his report
Come current for an accusation
Betwixt my love and your high majesty.

It sounds like any warrior’s disdain for those who benefit from battle but choose not to participate. It echoes my raging disregard for Lt. Bush, who enlisted at the same New Haven USAF recruiting office that I did, but three years later.

Bush and I received the same expensive pilot training, which obligated us to serve a specified period, as a pilot, to return the public’s investment in us. I trained with National Guard guys, and respected their participation and future role. But none of the kinds of people I trained with had any choice but to keep flying airplanes and keep taking flight physicals until they fulfilled their obligation.

In short, there are those who serve and those who do something else.

Shirking

Yesterday, Clay Shirky straightened us all out again in Dean and the Last Internet Campaign. I stipulate unreservedly that Clay Shirky is more qualified than I to comment on social software and on social movements. However, I cannot escape my sense that a culture needs to fully honor its heroes and do so for more than a news cycle. In this medium called the Web, designed to post and comment on scientific observations, should we not embrace the obvious and dismiss the superficial? Here’s the beginning of Shirky’s post:

I just re-read David Weinberger’s quotes from the Trippi speech last week, because something felt funny the first time I read it, and this time I found it, where Trippi says:

“We did a pretty damn good job of it. Given the Party rules, we should never have been able to get to where we were 3 weeks before Iowa: Ahead in the polls, etc. We did it without the Party. The American people did, using the tools provided by the Internet.”

The Dean campaign has been proof-of-concept for a number of novel political tools and tactics, and for that, their place in history is assured. However, Trippi comes this close to blaming the voters.

This is interesting. Clay Shirky isn’t part of Dean’s place in history. I’m pretty sure he never visited headquarters in Burlington or even on Lexington Ave. He didn’t attend the Digital Democracy Teach-In last week so he has no direct experience to report there either. What we have here is Clay Shirky’s musings on David Weinberger’s report of Joe Trippi’s speech.

Shirky’s diatribe against Dean’s Trippi’s historic campaign seems to be that the campaign played to the 600,000 Americans who signed up at the Dean site rather than to the Americans who had not yet registered. Fair enough. Here’s Clay’s conclusion:

So those of us watching Dean thinking “This is it — the campaign we’ve been waiting for” were, in a way, correct. This is it, or rather that was it, before Dean decided that he could run a populist campaign without the support of the populous. The big surprise, to me and to many of us, is how little it mattered. Though Trippi said “It’s all about money”, they blew through $40M to surprisingly little effect.

So there is a second piece of good news for democracy here, but it’s not the good news Trippi would have you believe. The good news is this: a campaign can use internet tools to help create extraordinary successes in fund raising and generating name recognition and getting good poll numbers, can even have its candidate anointed frontrunner before the first vote is cast, and all of that, taken together, is still not enough to get people to vote for a someone they don’t like.

Aha! There it is, the root of the outrage:

“This is it — the campaign we’ve been waiting for”

It took me a while to understand the love-hate relationship so many social software advocates have with the Dean boom-bust cycle. Having embraced the campaign early, they feel betrayed by its meatspace results. Since the campaign “failed” in winning a primary, they must either dismiss social software as a force, or savage those who try and “fail.”

They never suited up for the game, but feel qualified to judge it from the cheap seats. They play the smaller and safer pundit game, where expertise and wisdom is implied by the voice of profundity, uncompromised by the inconvenience of engagement. What would be wrong with “Hey, this and that worked great! Why don’t we work together on this other thing?”

It’s like the guys peddling books on getting rich. Why would anyone skilled at no-risk wealth bother selling books about it?

Trippi’s Honor

On Sunday night before his keynote, Joe stopped by our table for about an hour with Josh and Franz and Neil and me. Joe has a huge heart and passion for the work he started wit
h the Dean campaign. He was struggling with how he would communicate the miracle that was wrought by the people attracted to the Dean campaign. His mantra is that the Dean renaissance was a dotcom miracle, not a dotbomb, as you can hear directly at Doug Kay’s terrific IT Conversations site. He did not then nor does he yet comprehend how so many smart people see what happened.

Joe is amazingly open and humble and has anecdotes from decades of Presidential campaigns. He also has some serious technical chops. He was the energizing and intellectual force that made the possibility of Digital Democracy even coherent enough to have a name. When Tim O’Reilly asked me the best way to introduce him, I suggested that Joe is the Thomas Edison of the movement, whose accomplishments are undimmed by our collective failure to identify better filaments.

Tim O’Reilly knows what all of us do, that Digital Democracy was the most galvanizing topic of what may prove to be the most seminal conference O’Reilly has produced; and that without Joe Trippi, the most urgent topic this week in San Diego might have been something about secure WiFi or maybe military robots.

It was interesting to follow the IRC channel during Joe’s talk. It gave me a raging case of cognitive dissonance, as I struggled to reconcile my direct personal experience and what I was hearing from Joe’s mind and heart, compared to a self-destructive dialogue of experts lacking expertise.

Snatching Disappointment from the Jaws of Exuberance

Net-savvy techies and blogizens have a liberating message for the world: The Internet is the planet’s best hope for deliverance from incompetent and often conspiratorial media, political and corporate dinosaurs using entrenched power to stifle innovation, information and individual freedoms. This is the “Information wants to be free” cohort of our culture, and there can be no better thought space as a basis for third millenium values.

Clearly that was the dominant mindset at Etech–the people commenting on Joe Trippi’s description of the intersection of politics and the Internet as expressed by the Dean campaign.

The mystery was why so many of them, rather than listening to the were telling each other that they understood this problem so much better than Joe Trippi, and so dismissive of the best work yet done in this space.

The present and future leaders of a new movement dedicated to the Great American Restoration have been created because one transformational leader, win or lose, will have made a difference beyond words.

And win or lose — so must we.
                                                         — Joe Trippi

 

5:28:32 PM    

I’m settling into the chapter I’m writing for an upcoming O’Reilly book on Emergent Democracy. The title is “The Revolution Will be Engineered.” Obviously, my continuing focus is on design and tools and as little conjecture as possible. That’s too bad, because conjecture sells better than specificity.

There was a lot of conjecture this week around the tech of campaigning and governance: starting with the O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In (DDTI) on Monday and continuing all week at the Emerging Tech conference. This high level of conjecture frustrated me since so much of it was just mistaken, with so little interest in listening to anyone who was close to the subject being discussed.

That phenomenon–disregarding the insights of those close to the problem in deference to one’s own provably mistaken impressions–deserves a book of its own. (Of course, that would be redundant. The disconnect between fact and myth has occupied most philosophers. La plus ça change, la plus le même chose. Roughly translated, “The more things change, the more the memes stay the same.”)

I hope to continue to develop my chapter here in public. This thinking out loud will be mercifully brief, since my deadline’s the end of this month.

“You’re such a Tool!”

OK, I confess I’m a tool. Or at least a tool lover, which many consider the same thing. This comes up because there was a backlash against tools at DDTI on Monday and its aftermath. This caught me and Joe Trippi, separately, off guard. Joe expressed his amazement candidly over drinks on Sunday night and in a more restrained version in his much-quoted keynote on Monday.

I’ve come to enjoy and admire Micah Sifry, especially after flying to San Diego with him and Franz Hartl of MusicforAmerica. Our conversations carry the undercurrent of tool-building vs. a sentiment that sounds to me like, “Forget about tools, everyone just needs to get smarter and better organized and more conscientious. Sheesh!” Here’s part of Micah’s DDTI post mortem:

   For all the intense discussion going on online and in the hallways about what the Dean campaign did or didn’t do right, and on how social software tools can empower people, I’m amazed by how little interaction this community seems to have with people who actually know something about social movements, political organizing and power analysis. Perhaps that’s a reflection of how new to politics so many of the people here seem to be, and that’s ok. After all, DeanforAmerica (my shorthand for the decision to try to run an “open-source”-style campaign, as opposed to Howard Dean the candidate for President) clearly inspired many people both in and outside of the hacking community and the A-list blogging community to get excited about personal political participation, and hopefully that will be a lasting thing.

    But people here talk like all that’s needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There’s almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why. Britt Blaser, who I’m getting to know and like a whole lot, is talking about “one-click politics,” as if mobilizing people for collective action might be made as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Last night at the open participant session on continuing the Dean campaign, someone, maybe Jon Lebkowski?, said something about how change can take place in an instant, as if it were simply a matter of spreading the right meme or something.

    Umm, sorry, but change is hard.

(Umm, sorry, but due to a CSS error, Micah’s blog is almost unreadable)

My phrase was “1-Click for politics”, not “One click politics”. There’s a world of significance in the conjunction. Amazon’s inappropriately patented means for charging and shipping your purchase with the stroke of a mouse hasn’t revolutionized online purchasing, but it may be the seminal tool (that word again) that defines the Amazon user experience. Amazon is to purchasing as DeanforAmerica is to politics.

User Experience vs. Experienced Users

None of us cedes our turf gracefully. “Or Logic” means that the existing experts must fight new ways of doing things in order to survive. Frankly, Micah, I think that’s what’s going on here. Instead, we have to embrace “And Logic,” whereby we add the new thinking to the old and thereby increase the odds of achieving the shared goal. That is the essence of invention.

Tools are all we have. Micah Sifry is a bona fide authority because of his political activism and his authorship of 3-going-on-4 books and a sheaf of articles. His experience and ideas are important whether or not they are published, but we only know they’re important because they’re published. When Micah looks at publishing, he sees a cultural phenomenon and I see a technical one dependent on specific tools.

Without recent technical contrivances, Micah Sifry has no voice.

We only benefit from Micah’s voice because publishing now allows authors to type their own books and e-mail their drafts to editors. Public Campaign, which Micah serves as Senior Analyst is just one of many organizations with a tiny physical presence and a profound virtual one. In short, Micah Sifry, who works mostly out of his home, is a creature of the virtual world, deploying the tools of virtual presence, spending money that’s an electronic fiction to educate bright kids in how to be more effective in a world which, because of emerging tools, will look nothing like the world Micah lives in and, compared to the world Micah was born into, is pure science fiction.

Regarding Micah’s broken blog: a fascinating example of the importance of tools is what happens when they break, as did Micah’s blog almost a week ago:

Apologies to anyone reading this blog who is having trouble with the margins (or the lack of same). I’ve got my ace designer Bryan Bell looking into the problem and hopefully we will have it fixed soon. I would have gotten that going sooner, but in the process of engaging Bryan’s help I managed to lose my password to get onto my own blog!

I’m writing a quick web report on the Digital Democracy Teach In for The Nation, and a much longer piece for the magazine that will incorporate conversations I’ve had here with all sorts of interesting people. (If you want to know who, check out my expanding blogroll…) I’m also committed to talking to people from the other side of this equation: political organizers and academics who study social movements. If you have any suggestions on other stuff I should read or people I should talk to, I’m all ears.

I know that Micah is excited by and committed to his blog. As a professional writer he know
s the value of his bully pulpit, unimpeded by editorial caprice or publishers’ misguided business plans. He’s even learning the mechanics of FTP and CSS and, mirabile dictu!, what those acronyms mean.

For now though, Micah’s blog is unreadable, since each paragraph runs unchecked across the page: about 5700 pixels wide as I write this. Unless he fixes it, his most dynamic expression of his valuable voice will be silenced.

Micah Sifry’s voice is more dependent on tools than the tools are dependent on him: they arbitrarily give and taketh away, yet he dismisses rather than embraces the tool-builders’ naiveté.

This is not a great way to stay in the loop as we the tool-builders fire up our forges to make the next generation of arrowheads for Micah and all the other marksmen clamoring for social justice.

7:40:23 AM    

The blogosphere is humming with the Dean post mortems, but the Dean people are giving money in record amounts. What’s going on here? This morning, as Jim Moore reports, Dean’s List received a message from the Guv:

The entire race has come down to this: we must win Wisconsin. We must launch our new television advertisement on Monday in the major markets in Wisconsin. To do that, I need your help to raise $700,000 by Sunday. Please contribute $200 today so that we can reserve the air time: http://www.deanforamerica.com/wisconsinad A Wisconsin bat went up at 2 this morning, and, as I write this, the Dean faithful have sent in $693,000 as of 11:15 pm. This is a live bat, so YMMV. Jim describes this as a perfect swarm and wonders what it means: Is the DeanforAmerica community transforming itself into a community that goes well-beyond its original mission to create multiple ways to make itself heard and to be powerful–using the web as centerpiece and platform. I think perhaps so.

More revealing is Jim’s description of how groups find their common rhythm:

What is going on?  Swarm power, emergence, something larger than ourselves.  Here is a fun thing to do: Take a large crowd–perhaps you are giving a speech–and ask them to clap together to an aligned beat.  But don’t give them a lead beat.  Just ask the crowd to find a beat, by paying attention to their neighbors, and syncing up as they can.  I’ve done this dozens of times, and the amazing thing is how fast a group can come together when it wants to.

The Dean community is coming together.  It is starting to experience a new level of emergence, of power.

The Dean community will make itself felt and heard at a new level.

Last summer, Doc asked my why people give money to the Dean campaign and the ready answer was that they’re buying hope, one month at a time. Today they’re buying hope, one ad at a time. Those of us most interested in how social networks form are trying to figure out why Dean can attract so much money but hasn’t received more votes. I’m more interested in how we can use this ideal laboratory, before the urgency dissolves in 9 months, to answer that question. The answer will be the rosetta stone of politics, whether or not it’s discovered in time to save the Dean candidacy.

Perfect Form

I suggest that the secret is to provide a way for the hive mind to grow its own relationships. We see this all the time in nature, whether it’s the insect hive, a nervous system growing its dendrites, or plants which spread by runners or roots, like strawberries or aspens. For about four months, I’ve been encouraging the Dean campaign to formalize what I call strawberry roots. Grassroots grow from individual seeds, sending a few blades out. Strawberry roots are planted by the runners that come from another clump.

Strawberries propagate by sending out runners. In special cases, like this one, the runners can be productive without putting down roots.

The metaphor is that it takes a gardener to plant grass, but a healthy strawberry bush can create many other productive clumps.

I suggest that the secret is to provide a way for the most dynamic political nodes to grow their own relationships.

With just a little structure, it’s probable that the Dean movement can operate self sufficiently yet with organizational forces that approach the efficiency of the Linux or Apache movements. That idea defies conventional wisdom, since open source projects typically need a central figure who brings the code to a point and who continues to lead and inspire the volunteer programmers. That way, the versions are reasonable and coherent.

But for political action, where successful techniques can be forked as desired and there’s a need for millions of actions but no need for a single code base, there may be only one criterion for successful organization. That would be something like the school telephone tree. Many organizations, and all schools, have a telephone tree, by which one family alerts 3-6 others to a snow day, and the message propagates rapidly, like DNS data across the Internet. The enabling technology for all these systems is the explicit connection between an originating node and a satellite node.

This structure may appear to be hierarchical but it’s actually chronological. The first parent in the calling tree is simply the first one to be assigned to a task that any parent is adequately skilled to do. The enabling tech? A POTS line and a calling list. Synchronized group clapping, says Dr. Moore, all you need is the will to clap. Or, in the NFL, merely the idea of doing the “Wave”.

Tim O’Reilly is the instigator of the Digital Democracy Teach-In on Monday (San Diego. Joe Trippi live. $100. You really should go). He describes the central dynamic of operating an ISP, using yet another biological metaphor:

During my tenure at UUNET, I described the real business as operating a giant Petri dish — we kept it warm, we pumped in nutrients, and we made it bigger when it filled up. And people paid us money to sit in the dish and see what happened.

Dishing the Movement

So what’s the ideal petri dish for a net-enabled political movement? Here’s an email I sent to Jim Moore late last night:

Why not try a “Draft Dean” approach? Allow the grassroots to take charge and to prove what they might about peer-to-peer outreach. Let them demonstrate that a pure grassroots effort can work this year, when the tools aren’t right yet, rather than waiting until 2006 or 2008.

In other words: a true end-to-end approach, based on total transparency, a hollowed-out campaign. Expose the budget to the people and ask them to give what they want on an a la carte basis. Let them decide if we want state offices, how many programmers to pay, etc.

…In the 1986 AFC final, with a couple minutes to play, Denver was behind 20-13, on their own 5 yard line. Dan Reeves sent in the play with a lineman, who kneeled in the huddle, looked up and said, “Now we got ’em where we want ’em!” Everybody breaks up laughing, stunning the Browns’ defense and loosening up the Broncos. 15 plays later, Denver scored, sending the game into overtime, and winning with a field goal.

Get creative. Make a big deal announcement that’s so creative, humorous and endearing that we glimpse an entertaining way out of this.

I suggested today that we ought to keep a fundraising graph up all the time, showing upcoming uses of funds, inviting just-in-time sources of funds. Blogfo
rAmerica could track the contributions to Kerry’s campaign and invite the Deansters to raise, say, 125% of Kerry’s funds, as a way of demonstrating where the passion lies.

In other words, perhaps the function of “the Campaign” is becoming more of a support function, like accounting, ad placement, data management, shipping & receiving and logistical support. The real sales and operational arm of the real campaign may have to migrate out to the strawberry roots, as Zephyr has been telling us all along.

11:38:08 PM    

My mentor Howard Bloom teaches that there is a uniform pattern to behaviors, and they extend from the lowest to the highest level of species and that they really aren’t conscious, even though they seem like it.

That’s why I agree with the direction of Chris Lydon‘s latest post, but I’m unwilling to impute consciousness to the lurching media beast as he does:

Big Media came out of its cave to beat Dean over the head with Kerry, and that that this is a Problem.  This was not critical journalism at work, this was an industrial offensive from a declining sector of the information and intelligence business, a corporatized, overconcentrated, underventilated giant that feels itself threatened.  The newsmag headlines, the network cliches about “anger,” the emptiness of the “electability” standard (which newsmags giveth and taketh away, without ever having to show evidence) and that completely mindless, truly Goebbels-esque repetition of the scream tape–all the manipulated frenzy of the last three weeks smacked of a fiercely anti-democratic bullying that I find personally, professionally and publicly offensive.  I confess some naivete here. 

I am surprised the old devils tried it; I am surprised that they got away with it.

I’m making a fine distinction here, and don’t want to harp on it, but it may be useful to see the difference between purpose and outcome. I don’t perceive any conspiracy or even intention by the media to “get” my man Howard Dean or to suppress the Internet’s grand promise.

Just as we don’t need to believe in a watchmaker designing life forms to appreciate how biology has evolved unconsciously (well, some of us), neither do we need to impute purpose to the outcomes which the media produces. Understanding the biological basis of memes is useful, especially when you remember that the man who coined the term, Richard Dawkins, is a geneticist. So I don’t detect a grand conspiracy behind most actions of the Meme Machine.

Jay Rosen seems to say to me that the individuals in the press are like any knowledge worker, generating words and insinuations mostly to serve their career needs and ambitions. Writers and talking heads and editors and publishers are playing to their individual boss first and to their audience second. That’s just survival of the fittest, in a culture where attention is the gold standard of power and possibility.

In the universal battle for attention,

• The catchiest memes win
• The most prolific producers of catchy memes win
• Outlets employing the most prolific producers of catchy memes win

I’m no Jay Rosen, but I’m confident in that universality of behavior in all fields, including the press.

But something must happen when you get tenure. Otherwise how can we explain Wolf Blitzer and Tim Russert? Might a cynical agenda be on the mind of the real king-makers?

The Tim Russert Problem

My inclination to avoid labeling the press as malevolent is harder to justify in the case of Tim Russert. This morning on Meet the Press, he challenged Howard Dean:

When I was in Iowa, I read a letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register, which caught my attention. And this is what it says: “Now I know how Howard Dean gets his exercise while he’s on the campaign trail. He drops to his knees to beg Washington insiders to endorse him, and then he jumps up to insult them. I’m guessing he does about 20 repetitions of that a day.”.

Russert was reading from one of 53 letters the Register published on Jan. 18 – presumably of 2,000 or so letters over the six weeks prior to the caucus. By what archery is Russert able to retrieve that writer’s cynicism out of so many?

But it gets better. If you Google the letter writer’s name, Jim Bootz, the 3rd item returned reveals Bootz’ day job: Minnesota State Director of . . . wait for it! . . . the John Kerry campaign!

You wouldn’t make this stuff up.

FWIW, Bootz’ planted letter immediately followed this one:

It’s time for a Vermonter in the White House. Someone who will return America to the values that our forebears institutionalized as they created one country united by common interests and beliefs. As a Vermont resident of 35 years, married to a fifth-generation Vermonter whose family was cared for by Dr. Howard Dean, I’ve been thinking about what those core values are and how I have seen Dean live them out as governor. The most important value we New Englanders hold dear is integrity. When I was head of a small Vermont school, my 7th-grade students asked Governor Dean questions like, “Have you ever told a lie?” He answered honestly and thoughtfully (yes, he has told lies). Over the years I have come to trust Dean’s word and his judgment. If he is elected president, he will bring the values of rural Vermont – and of the heartland of America – to the most important elected office in these United States.
Harry Chaucer
Castleton, Vt.

But perhaps Mr. Chaucer’s a plant also. Google says he’s the chair of the Education Department at Castleton State College. Maybe he’s as biased as Kerry’s patsy, you never know. Surely Russert is doing his best to separate the wheat from the chaff for those of us who depend on his objectivity.

Or maybe Howard Dean never should have said that he wanted to break up the media.

2:13:14 AM    

Clay Shirky responded by email today to my pushback on his important Many 2 Many post, Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?

Britt, you say “Let’s spend some cycles on the answers, not on sounding like an expert.”

My apologies for the snarky comment, Clay. Your post intersected with my peeve-of-the-week on the chorus of doomsayers having witnessed the first mile of a marathon, projecting the results on little evidence with a pundit-like urgency. As my man Dean might say, we can do better than that.

Before we spend those cycles on answers, maybe we oughta spend some on questions.

The interesting thing about politics is that it goes from theological to phenomenological in an instant, and the phenomenology of a presidential race is voter turnout. I think you’ve posted a good description of the campaign as it existed a week ago Monday morning, but by a week ago Monday evening, any analysis of the campaign had to factor in the Iowa loss.

Not only did Dean fail to win, eviscerating the inevitability story, and not only did he fail to come in second, he came in a distant third, getting half of Kerry’s numbers, 14 points behind *Edwards*, and only 8 points ahead of a guy who dropped out of the race.

So while the story of politics based on the engagement of the volunteers is interesting, if it doesn’t get people to the polls, it won’t amount to much in the short term.

Of course voter turnout is the point of the campaign. The question to ask is whether there’s a social network around the Dean campaign that can learn how to improve its methods and execution and deliver more votes starting next week in the states that are statistically significant, unlike Iowa and New Hampshire. Clay’s open-ended question in Many 2 Many asked if social software had been bad for the Dean campaign. That’s a striking question from Clay, who believes strongly in the promise of social software.

My point is the counterpoint: Dean doesn’t have too much social software, he’s got not quite enough. It’s obvious that only social software got him here. If the network learns how to act locally better, and if enough people in each state are attracted to his outsider message, then Clay’s concerns are the kind you have about beta software that’s almost right, not whether software is worth developing.

Clay continues:

Standard political analysis could explain a strong second place showing by Dean, but seeing him come in a distant third suggests to me that something more structural is at work. Dean has obviously unleashed a powerful new set of forces, but his use of them has not translated into votes, and the enormity of the gap between perception and reality suggests something other than a few swing voters changing their minds.

So while the campaign may be terrific at the “issues-based emails and letters” you describe in your post, its been third-place at getting votes. I wonder why that is, and your response does little to answer that question, which is, after all, the only one that will determine whether Dean becomes the Democratic nominee.

Then what should we make of Dean’s strong-enough field-defining second place finish in New Hampshire? Is the social network learning? Was he just the lucky Governor  from next door? Does that mean Clay will now retract his dismissal of of Dean’s Iowa performance?

Running the Numbers

Despite the pundits’ glee at having a horse race to sell, Kerry picked up just 6 more delegates than Dean did tonight: 14 to 8. This reduces Dean’s delegate lead over Kerry from 25 to 19. What’s that? Dean’s delegate lead? WTF?

Yes, Dean’s lead. Because of early commitments by Democratic luminaries called “super delegates”, Dean remains ahead, according to CNN, 115 delegates to 96.

Larry King and Bob Dole and Bob Woodward on CNN just now agreed to the jaw-dropping revelation that New Hampshire’s 27 delegates don’t even budge the needle, being just 1-1/2% of the 2,162 delegates needed to win the nomination. They also noted that Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to win New Hampshire and the Presidency.

Earlier, someone noted that the last senator to win the Presidency was JFK, who only made it because his dad and Richard Daley bought the Iowa vote. Before that, you’ve got to look back a century for a senator becoming President. Governors routinely win the Presidency.

But none of that matters. Let’s stipulate that deference among true believers when approaching voters is hugely important. The Iowa/New Hampshire bounce for Kerry is hugely important. Politics is perception, and there’s plenty of perception to go around.

But also, this is still a mediafest and an election is about votes. A marathoner runs on glucose and a campaign runs on money. Only Howard Dean and John Kerry are allowed by law to campaign during the critical June-September period. That’s because they are not limited by the Federal Campaign limitations. (In 2000, Al Gore was even prevented from even driving in public after he spent the matching funds, since that was construed as spending gas money on campaigning.)

So Dean may or may not inspire his base to renew their vows, pony up more bucks and take the country back

The reason the campaign would be foolish to give up on social software is that it stands a much better chance of making it work than does Friendster or the others. Winning the Presidency is a lot more interesting project than triggering automatic emails to people who don’t want them.

We Netizens believe that blogs and more directed forms of social software have the potential to free us from the assaults of traditional media. Clay’s point is an important caution but it does not dissuade me from the wisdom of promoting working code and frequent revisions.

I believe there is some combination of message, UI, interactivity and coalescing social memes that can attract millions of people to the high-probability candidate – a centrist governor with the most registered supporters and donors and a receptive pool of fast-learning, highly connected people listening for a message galvanizing enough to move them.

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Some Figures

At the JFK School of Government, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy is conducting the Vanishing Voter Project. Their Voter Involvement Index measures, well, voter involvement. You can almost hear their exasperation that the nation is so focused on what is, essentially, the New Hampshire beauty contest for 27 delegates out of 4,315 (obviously, the same applies to Iowa’s 45 delegates):

In the eyes of Americans outside the state, New Hampshire’s presidential primary is more than just a critical first test of the candidates’ support. It is
seen as a decisive contest in the allocation of delegates to the national party conventions. Although the New Hampshire primary selects only about 1% of the delegates, Americans think the total is much larger. When asked in the weekly Shorenstein Center national poll whether New Hampshire selects 25%, 10%, 5%, or 1% of the national convention delegates, only one in eight respondents said 1%. More than three times as many picked a higher figure, and 14% even claimed that New Hampshire selects 25% of the convention delegates.

“This is an indication that the primary system, as currently structured, is simply too complex for most people to understand,” says Marvin Kalb, co-director of the Vanishing Voter Project for which the poll was conducted. “Too many Americans exaggerate New Hampshire’s importance and role.”

The inflated perception of New Hampshire stems from the enormous attention that its first-in-the nation primary receives from candidates and the news media. In recent presidential elections, no primary has received as much national news coverage as New Hampshire’s, and the pattern is unlikely to change this year.

12:33:35 AM    

OK, the system is flexing, both visibly and not. Joe Trippi, the man who planted the seed, is out and Roy Neel will now try to grow it.

I assume they’ll let me retain my corner office (corner of a folding table in the volunteer bullpen), but I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks. This should make the Digital Democracy Teach-In on Feb. 9 even more interesting. For starters, Trippi should come as the patron saint (along with co-saint Joi)

People seem to be looking for insiders to comment on this, and Jim Moore said a lot about this transition just before the announcement, perhaps preparing us for it. Jim’s point is that the campaign has in many respects been about its momentum rather than its accomplishments.

Back in the dotcom days, there was an awful lot of “momentum investing” where a stock was seen as valuable because of its rate of gain in value.  Sort of like being famous for being well-known.

The Dean campaign is no longer a momentum play.  Momentum investors are going to go toward Kerry, or stay with the ultimate momentum stock, George W. Bush. 

The Dean campaign, meanwhile, is now either going to become a solid contributor to our political landscape and society–bringing real value and a return to investors who want to make a difference, or the campaign will wither away.

Pretty candid words from a Dean insider who happens to blog.

The marketplace of political ideas is the fastest moving marketplace in which I have ever personally participated.  This week, this day, feels different from last week, and from yesterday.  Organizational learning is paramount.

So what does this mean for the Dean campaign? We have been criticised of late by our supporters for not telling the news, bad as well as good.  Supporters feel betrayed when they are told things are fine, and then find out otherwise when the votes come in.  “We could have helped” they say in distress, “but you didn’t really ask us!”

Truth and learning is vital–as an organization and as an extended community.  Learning must be built into our values, our practices, and our information and Internet systems.  We need to get the feedback going with our marketplace–a marketplace that truly wants us to exist, and has many many ways to help.

Postmorteming

There’s been a lot of back and forth about what to do and what Dean’s non-winning streak means. Today, Mitch posted some of the stuff he’s been sending to an ad hoc email group formed around Clay Shirky‘s Many 2 Many post on the possible failures of social software and my responses. It’s led Mitch to wonder where the Dean effort might go from here:

Here’s a crazy thought: Could the widespread discussion of the Dean campaign’s current challenges produce a retooling of its software (both the code and the ideas in people’s heads) fast enough to yield an astonishing turnaround that out-turnarounds John Kerry? Not if Dean and camp are defensive about the critiques and refuse to internalize them. If it is true that no corporation can access all the intelligence in the world if it is closed off from the world, it is certainly true that a campaign that sees criticism of its strategy as an attack on the candidate will grow dumber by the minute.

Could the Dean campaign turn on a dime, like Microsoft reacting to the Web browser or Roosevelt’s America, which quadrupled production capacity of planes and ships to win World War II?

Mitch also recalls a discussion he and Doc and I held in Portland last summer (I’ve reversed these graphs for flow):

Last summer, Britt, Doc and I were sitting talking at Powell’s Books in Portland about the Dean campaign. I said I wanted to have a real impact on the campaign, which I think might have been taken as meaning that I wanted to run or be a top advisor to the campaign, but my point was that I wanted to see the campaign take me seriously enough as an individual citizen to argue with me. That’s clued. As a creator of publications and events, I can say with authority that this can be done in a very efficient manner, but when I pointed out this idea, it was ignored by the campaign. They weren’t interested, because they had completely hacked the fund-raising mechanism, which felt like enough. It wasn’t.

Engagement means arguing with, convincing and compromising with your constituency. The Dean system, which emphasized bottom-up organization of a network, but top-down delivery of policy (through a system of small advisory groups that presented the candidate with policies that, once approved, were unveiled to the electorate), remained relatively aloof from the individual voter. Britt may not see it that way, but he was involved day-to-day as a true believer. That’s a great thing.

At our meeting in Portland I described my imminent Steal this Campaign post, a meme whose time may just now be ripe for the picking. I learned a long time ago to listen carefully whenever Mitch Ratcliffe speaks. But I’ve also learned that a trusted observer on the ground is worth a squadron full of conjecturers.

The real reason is far more simple. One thing that’s not obvious from out here is that the campaign is not just some half-assed pickup game. It’s run by real pros with decades of service, who share the values and mutual respect with the programmers and web designers.

Scaling Challenge

The campaign grew by a half million registered users in about 5 months. Simultaneously, it was hiring staff and adding field offices in about 15 states.  Simultaneously, it was creating an entirely new software space, with most of it built by volunteers or underpaid virtual volunteers working even harder than in startups, and building tools in response to a fast moving target market that had never existed before. Jim Moore is correct when he tells us (above) that The marketplace of political ideas is the fastest moving marketplace in which I have ever personally participated. Jim’s been a world-class consultant for a long time. My limited experience tracks his, and yes, I’ve stayed up all night with the troops to finish before the trade show opens.

Everyone knew the field staff was vital and needed primary resources. Everyone also knew that we should do whatever could be done to have a perfect user interface on the software side, but the resources had to go to the field first. Life is choices. Mitch continues:

Now, given that the system as it is designed now has failed to produce a campaign win
, what needs to be improved? I think I’ve made my ideas clear: Build for engagement. Debate with your own supporters and by converting them to your opinions when you are right and adopting theirs when they are or compromising when you can to extend your coalition to create an enduring movement that will get people out on the streets and to the polls. If not this year, then next time. Better, do it for another candidate–there is a political eternity between now and November.

Mitch repeats what many have said. “Take the time to listen; don’t ignore my ideas.”

News flash, gang, the campaign ignores my ideas too, and I’m there a week a month. (I’m not as smart as Mitch, but I have my moments.) It also ignores most staff ideas, from a better idea pool better than any you can imagine.

There is simply no time to listen and, like any company, most ideas from the team itself are not acted on, even if they’re discussed. I sincerely believe that Mitch does have much to offer, and I’m pleased to be writing a chapter in an O’Reilly book that Mitch and Jon Lebkowsky are putting together. But without putting his fanny in a seat up there, his ideas cannot be appreciated.

We Have Met the Campaign and It is Us

Joe Trippi, R.I.P., said it best: The campaign’s out here, not in there.

Mitch does have the experience, knowledge and skills to hatch a great plan, but he needs to tell us about it and ask us to help shape the plan, scope it, resource it and make it work. So do Clay and Dave and Micah Sifry and Joi and Ben and Doc and Weinberger and all of us. And me, with earlier commitment and better access and absolutely no real results so far.

The failure of “the campaign” to do all the right things is our collective failure out here to generate, vet and deploy a superior expression of the social software that Clay feels has hurt the Dean effort. We have far more resources and ingenuity than the campaign, and we’re free from the obligation to wait for permission, which will be even harder to receive, for a while, even if Roy Neel is the answer to everyone’s prayers.

And Logic, Not Or

Could the Dean campaign turn on a dime, like Microsoft reacting to the Web browser or Roosevelt’s America, which quadrupled production capacity of planes and ships to win World War II?
                                                    — Mitch Ratcliffe

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
                                                    — Margaret Mead

If we pool our resources and find our own inspiration we can combine our strengths as a model for the future. We can invent the next America starting now, bolstered by how far the Dean campaign has come, not despairing over its interrupted crescendo. There’s nothing missing from the equation except a declaration we make, writ large so that King George will not need his spectacles to perceive it.

In doing so, we’d combine our strengths rather than piling on our mutual detractions.

The Dean turnaround is imminent, inevitable and overwhelming with simply our commitment to make it so. That commitment will succeed, staffed by so many smart, committed people. It’s time, money, brains and long hours. It’s deploying the capital we’ve sunk into the extra bedroom for these wonderful machines and immense copper pipes and glowing frames of shared enlightenment before us.

The will, commitment and follow-through are the kind of hero’s journey Joseph Campbell described, Luke’s force and Neo’s skills. It will take us as much courage as any Lord of any Ring in any age, even though it’s not physical. Trust me: what looks epic later is just a mental leap at the right moment.

The planet is watching and wondering why we’re waiting. The people at Davos last week can’t do what we can – just ask Joi and Jay and Loïc. And if we social software designers start, the world will never be the same.

Or we can just keep dissecting what went wrong.

Shakespeare said it better, but mythic warriors never had such a bold challenge with such an unforeseen outcome as we can work, simply by deciding to.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

6:30:49 PM    

There’s yet another piece of conventional wisdom developing. Today Clay Shirky said it succinctly: Is social software bad for the Dean campaign?

Finally, when Dean (and Trippi and Teachout and Rosen) came along, we thought “This is it – these are the people finally making it happen!” And in a way they are, by providing the model – all top 3 finishers in Iowa use MeetUp, and they all have weblogs. But the Dean campaign used those things organically, while everyone else is playing catchup. And many of us (self very much included) thought that the inorganic adoption of social tools by Kerry, Clark, et al left them at a disadvantage.

Now, though, I’m not so sure. Maybe the adoption of those tools by a traditional campaign is a better way to fuse of 21st century organizing and 19th century “Get out the Vote” efforts. This would be especially true if these tools, used on their own, risk creating a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that doesn’t translate to driving down to the polls in freezing weather.

As Clay says, the Dean campaign started delighting and amazing us less than a year ago, in a crescendo of overdue good sense, impeccable candidate credentials and unprecedented cluefulness. Its people and money rocket started taking fire from 3 quadrants late last year and landed safely but damaged a week ago. Less than a week later, Clay reconsiders and compares the Dean people to some stoners he once saw grooving in a car:

When I was 19, I remember seeing a bunch of guys in a parking lot in New Jersey absolutely rocking out to Twisted Sister at top volume, “Oh we’re not gonna take it, No, we ain’t gonna take it, Oh we’re not gonna take it anymo-o-o-o-ore” and thinking the song was using up the energy that would otherwise go into rebellion.

Just rocking out to Twisted Sister so hard, and feeling so good about it, made those guys feel like they’d already stood up to The Man, making it less likely that they would actually do so in the real world, when the time came. And I’m wondering if the Dean campaign has been singing a version of that song, or, rather, I’m wondering if the bottom-up tools they’ve been using have been helping their supporters sing that song to each other.

I’m not clear how 3,500 people going to Iowa is the opposite of being proactive. Does he think those people are passively going to other states to avoid the hassle of voting in their home precinct? New Yorkers like Clay and me like to ridicule others for not being sharp or driven or hard-working, but I’m missing this one.

Betrayal?

What’s really at work here is a sense of treason and loss. Some Netizens seem to feel betrayed by the Dean campaign since it isn’t fulfilling a Jongian dream of a zipless victory. The Dean campaign may have violated some followers’ tender sensibilities by starting strong but finishing 3rd in the only “primary” that isn’t actually a vote but rather a get-together where older people sit around and debate candidates over bean salad. Surely this means that the best-financed and populated campaign is doomed to failure in every other state where people actually vote behind a curtain rather than a coffee cup.

We fantasize that bloggers – especially the Power Law bloggers like Clay Shirky – are leading edge and visionary. But this feels like criticizing Edison for the flaming filaments or Wilbur and Orville for failed airfoils.

Let’s get a grip, people! The Dean campaign is as close as we’re going to get to one that conforms to the values we’ve been fantasizing since 0 BC (Blogging Commenced). After pining for an Internet-based solution to the old political order, are we going to cut and run at the first hint of a setback?

The more insightful position might be to ridicule the Deaniacs for not being sophisticated about the real nature of campaigns as Tom Steinberg comments:

This supports a theme I’ve been banging on about for a while now, the idea that ‘politics as usual’ is not sclerotic and ossified, but is in fact a fine tuned, turbo injected, iteratively refined wonder-machine powered by The Message. The battle may be New Tech vs Old Tech, but the Old Tech is actually incredibly good at doing what counts – getting enough people out to win elections. When Old Tech starts getting challenged by New we shouldn’t be surprised if the New Tech adoptees have problems – they’re up against The Message, a prize fighter which has won every major political bout for thirty years. This isn’t to say that it can’t win, just that the Old Tech approach is still one hell of a fighter, and we’ll need more than a messianic faith in emergence to beat it.

But that still rings hollow. Is the Old Tech “good at getting enough people out to win elections”? The larger consensus is that there’s not enough interest in politics, precisely because the old tech – broadcast – can’t get people excited about the process. The evidence is that only the New Tech is motivating people, as smallbrain points out:

Iowa – it is important to not confuse swings of public opinion with a lack of organization. As organized as Dean was, the campaign put thousands of activists on the ground from all around the country. Without the social software, none of that would have happened. Those people weren’t deterred from action. And we should really not ignore the significant organization and recruiting that was made possible by his social net.

Granted, Jim Moore points out that the campaign “lost” 15,000 caucusers on the actual night. That doesn’t speak well for the organizing success, but take a look at the thousands of letters sent by supporters, the number of calls made and doors knocked upon. And then think of where Dean was at this time in 2003. Clearly FAR more action was generated by the social network than was lost at the end – after all, the polls predicted Dean was losing ground, and caucuses are notoriously difficult to deal with, as voters can be persuaded or picked off due to the 15% viability requirement.

(FWIW, when the dust settles and the skeptics learn the real story behind those 15,000 missing caucus-goers, the skeptics will understand far better what a transient and capricious matter the Iowa stumble was. We can discuss it over champagne at the Inaugural Ball.)

The Old New Activists

I’ve never been active in politics before, but I’m taking the year off because I represent the Internet Wing of the Democratic Party, and frankly, my
dear, I don’t give a fuck about the Democratic Party.

When I spend my 16 hour days up in Burlington, paying dearly for the privilege of doing so, I’m surrounded by people 14-80 who’ve never worked on a campaign before, communicating with about 2/3 million people who’ve never “joined” a campaign who are sending issues-based emails and letters – about 3,000 per day, which the volunteers dutifully answer as fast as they can. I sit with Wayne and Tommy and Joe in the Policy department, discussing policy more than blogging and marvel at something I thought only happens in corny movies.

During the big December snow, Halley was up in Burlington with us. We got a lot done, but we had a lot of fun, too, attending the Christmans party and walking Doc around the halls and introducing him to Joe Trippi and the rest of the gang. At the time, she told me a story about one of the volunteers, Laurie, who had such a deep and personal debt to Governor Dean that it brought tears to Halley’s eyes, but she thought it too private to blog. Making conversation, Halley had asked Laurie why she was stuffing envelopes. It’s simple, Laurie started, “Governor Dean saved my life.”

Tonight, Laurie Hammond bravely told her story on the Dean Blog. Don’t pay any attention to Clay or me or Tom Steinberg or smallbrain, or to Hammersley who pointed me to Clay’s second thoughts. Read Laurie’s story to keep all this in perspective and glimpse what’s really at stake here.

Then check out Halley’s pointer to Laurie’s story, and then Halley’s This Isn’t a Political Campaign, a post she shelved last December. Maybe because it seemed just a little too real.

Yeah. We pundit wannabes wouldn’t want to get too real.

If you blog it and you know it clap your hands!

As bloggers, we’re perfectly equipped to address politics as a web app design challenge, not an obligation to mimic the pundits’ sophisticated sophistry. This is the Internet and we’re supposed to know what to do with it. Let’s spend some cycles on the answers, not on sounding like a an expert.

At a rally today at Phillips Exeter Academy, Howard Dean closed with a lesson he learned at 17 that I prefer to Clay Shirky’s at 19:

It’s like when I was 17. It took us 6 years to get rid of two Presidents to get us out of Viet Nam – a war we didn’t belong in. Now you’ve got the Internet, you oughta be able to do it in 6 months. I’ll see you tomorrow.

The man has spoken. Excuse me, I’ve gotta get back to work on mydeanpeople.com.

11:17:52 PM    

Doc responded kindly to my Punditocracy post with his Democracy vs. Crockracy riff, and perhaps not only because he was our guest this week. We had, as he suggested, a swell time. (I use these archaic expressions purposely. They seem charming enough to be worth repeating, and perhaps resonant with our deeper, archaic selves).

If my point last time was a caution against certainty in the presence of inconclusiveness, I’d like to encourage each of us to embrace and extend that restraint by modeling another archaic virtue: commitment.

Around the core of each movement, there’s a less committed interest group attracted by the movement but not committed to it. The old saying about bacon and eggs is that the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

Each of us should be aware of whether we are committed or involved. Both are OK, but commitment seems a little more scary and a lot more fun.

To paraphrase Clint Eastwood: If there’s something we believe in, we have to ask ourselves if we’re committed to our belief or do we feel lucky. If you believe in luck, then you don’t need commitment, since surely everything will turn out just great. If you’re a fan of civil liberties and responsible government, our collective superficiality during the 2000 election may convince you that luck isn’t always on your side.

Nothing happens without commitment. Heartfelt commitment seems Capraesque, more common in midwestern and New England communities.

In an election campaign, the direction of the energy seems important. If the individuals are committed, then they are sending their energy to the candidate and are a producer of the result – of democracy, if you will. If the individual is not committed but merely being entertained by the involvement, the energy is flowing the other way. In politics as in life, it’s more energizing to give energy than to feed off it. Or, as Margaret Mead famously advised:

“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Early Mourning Lite

Doc’s got lots of fodder for me today, as he points to Micah Sifry’s lament for what Micah sees as a failed Dean campaign. My last post about creeping punditocracy was inspired by a visit Doc and I had with Micah, when he laid out verbally what became his Mourning Dean’s Promise post. I’m infatuated with Micah’s skills and sensibilities but I feel he’s giving up on Dean even though he’s actually ahead in the delegate count due to commitments made by so-called “super-delegates.”

The evidence is that Mrs. Sifry didn’t raise any dummies, so I’m looking forward to a resolution of the commitment/involvement dichotomy, as we fly to the Digital Democracy Teach-in together in two weeks.

Bigness and Badness

In responding to Micah’s points, and sharpening his own criticism of what I call the Bush kleptocracy but he never would, Doc recalled our conversation driving back from Vermont. He expressed in his post, as he had on our trip, his distaste for corporate-bashers.

I responded that there seems to be something about the corporate form that allows a kind of economic metastatic process that eats up adjacent life forms.

For about an hour we worked (I thought) toward central ground. Today, in New mourn or new morn, he lumps me in with the corporate bashers whose sentiments I admire but whose proposed remedies seem just silly.

I thought we reached agreement that the corporate charter is simply a legal mechanism, of no great significance except for its nurturance of passive capital by shielding investors from liability. Now that was a brilliant invention.

We seemed to agree that larger organizations, whether companies or churches or governments, seem to behave more badly the bigger they get. But size is not the direct problem. There are marvelous organizations with thousands of people – Doc cited Johnson & Johnson, which loses money on bandages because it’s their mission to make sure that everyone who needs one has one. But there are also small organizations which bend every rule and monopolize their market space using egregious measures.

No, it’s not size or the presence of a corporate charter that transforms an organization into an unresponsive, ruthless force. That’s about as far as I we got, I think, driving along the western shore of Lake George.

Upon reflection, I think I do perceive a fundamental element of the corporate form that allows an organization, if so inclined, to behave in ways that all but a neocon would describe as sociopathic. That element is the fungibility of a corporate life form, which can be bought and sold at will, for whatever reason. Coupled with the extreme malleability of employees with a mortgage and college-bound kids, a corporation has little in common with its customers, its natural environment or its individual component cells – its employees. That makes it a very strange amalgam, because a successful one like Microsoft and Wal-Mart can accumulate and deploy assets so fast that it behaves precisely like a metastatic tumor in its host, the larger economy.

The Tipping Point

And yet we have the example of Doc’s former client, Johnson & Johnson, where the employees speak specifically of the teachings of Mr. Johnson, and continue to sell Band-Aids at a loss.

I think the tipping point for any organization comes when its mission is no longer what it does but becomes what it is. When its actions are about growing (greed), or not shrinking (fear), then its actions have abandoned the compass that the founder gave it, and has gone over to the dark side of the corporate force. I get that feeling when I see Gateway and Dell selling TVs.

Doc likes to tell the story of Steve Jobs remark when describing what he doesn’t like about Microsoft: “They have no taste.” Apple without Steve Jobs drifted slowly as its central nervous system lost the Jobs and Woz DNA, and became irrelevant. Doc feels that Wal-Mart, while clearly not adrift, was transformed on the day that Sam Walton died.

(The Apple experience is almost a corporate clinical trial, where good practice says that you have to change an input and see the effect, then reverse the effect by negating the change. When Jobs returned to Apple, Shazam!)

So I suggest again to Doc that corporations can never escape their core problem: The founders always die.

12:05:25 AM    comment [commentCounter (257)]

It’s hard to know if we’re at the twilight of Broadcast Politics, but it’s interesting that so many of us feel we need to sound like the talking heads on TV.

The characteristic of PunditSpeak is certainty in the presence of open issues and single mindedness when confronting complexity. Nuance is reduced to serial certainty.

There are two kinds of people who have no knowledge of what the outcome will be: people who are paid to be expert and people in their audience.

It’s laughable when the pundits have convictions about the unknowable.
It’s kind of sad when we the audience mimic their uninformed confidence.

That’s why I was struck by the explosion of certainty about why Dr. Dean didn’t sweep the field in Iowa and how he’d do from here out.

The Illusion of Control

Howard Bloom, my reliable seer into human behavior, teaches us a lot about our all-too-human need for control. Apparently, it’s not control we seek, but just enough of an illusion of control and hence of a reliable future. A reliable future does not seem to require a lock-in. Rather it depends on a shred of plausibility. People buy lottery tickets because they want to entertain themselves with the thought of controlling their future, which is not a lot different from the RIAA suing teenagers under the illusion that they can control their destiny.

Bloom tells a story about three tribes in Africa. They are, respectively, farmers, craftspeople and priests. They trade with each other for what they need: food, pots and implements, and . . . spells. The farmers and craftspeople live reasonable lives, understanding rough parity between food and goods.

Of the three tribes, the shamans live the best because, when someone’s sick or dying, there’s no price too dear for a spell to ease their burden. If the initial spell fails, then the victim’s family is told to bring more offerings to pay for a stronger spell. If the spell works, its because the priests’ magic is strong. If not, it’s because the family ran out of offerings to up the mojo. Perhaps its where we learned our system.

Hopeware?

Is that why most of us feel compelled to hold an opinion about the unknowable? In one moment in his role as his team’s Player-Coach and Dean is declared finished. Even some Dean supporters seemed ready to throw in the towel (though most of us just threw in more money). Doc just read me a NY Post N.H. Debate report declaring that Edwards and Clark are toast because they did not do as well as expected. Not satisfied with just any horse race, the press is compelled to jiggle the lead every half-week.

The capriciousness of some Dean supporters really threw me off. Unbridled enthusiasm melting into terminal gloom in 3 hours. Yet we all know it just doesn’t work that way. It’s as if Dean had let them down, failing to maintain the crescendo of hope and optimism they’d been investing in for 6 months. Where’s the conviction? Where’s the gumption?

It feels to me like a vague analogue to how we once regarded desktop apps and how we now seem to. Productivity software once seemed a bright promised land of power and promise. We couldn’t wait to master the next app and add it to our toolkit. Now someone releases a new widget and we greet it with a collective yawn.Where we once sought power we seem now to simply avoid complication. Is that what’s at work here? As long as Howard Dean maintained a steady arc of promise, our work and contributions seemed their own reward.

But the prospect of work without assurance attracts a smaller crowd than easy pickings.

12:17:34 AM    

Doc’s got a great take on Howard Dean’s Iowa meltdown. He’s sitting over on the couch, making more sense than the rest of, as usual, the sumbitch:

My take is that the Iowa story comes down to looks. Kerry and Edwards present themselves very well. They’re attractive on TV. Media-friendly. Telegenic. Watching Edwards right now, he sounds so much like Bill Clinton, talking about “hope and optimism,” it’s like some kind of re-run. New stars, same ball game.

Dean is the only star of a whole new ball game: one that’s all-grass-roots, no special interests. Great game, but not one that’s playing on TV. And most of us still watch hours and hours of TV every single night.

Further, Doc quotes Matt Stoller over at BOPNews:

What a disaster for the new politics. Dean could play in the new world, but as JFK showed in 1960, it wasn’t enough to be great on TV. He had to win the machines first. Dean won the internet in July, but lost Iowa in February.

‘Splain, Please

I honestly don’t know what to make of this, but here’s my instinct. People who are outside the Internet religion resent we who have it and want to peddle it to them. Frankly, our orange hats may have worked against us, making the conversation about our movement, not Iowans’ interests. Kids brimming with enthusiasm and inexperience can seem irrelevant to graybeards like me and the many people I know in Iowa. Here’s a message Doc just received and posted:

How is this for a theory? (I’m serious about this.) The Dean volunteers and troops contacted and nagged and pushed the same potential caucus-goers so repeatedly that people just looked for a way to “punish” them by voting for someone else. I honestly think that’s how I would have felt…so sick of upbeat, orange-hatted people calling, knocking, etc.

Most of us gauge others by their appearance first and their ideas and skills second. Bush proved that in 2000. We Netizens are confident that the ‘Net changes everything. But it’s not certain when it changes politics.

I believe we can affect that date. It doesn’t have to be 2008: It can be 2004. But changing politics via the Internet isn’t easy, and – amazingly – it won’t happen online, at least not yet.

Internet politics doesn’t happen online? Nope. In the real world, where the votes are, it happens over back fences and at soccer games and water coolers and PTO meetings. It may happen online for 20-somethings, but not for most of us. So how do we use our amazing Swiss Army Knife to inspire and inform and transform those offline conversations?

I’m still working on that.

12:08:09 AM