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A compilation of governance tools that might deserve a programmer’s attention The Revolution will be Engineered
1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist PartyHow do Doc and I do this? On the same day a while back, we quite separately used the term Heart of Lightness. Today, we’re both looking at how extreme the noises are, and he quotes the photodude’s The View from the Fence of Centrism from last August. We’re all describing assertions but talking about them as if they’re facts. As Doc puts it: “Yet reasonable people are quick to label as hate all kinds of opinions that come up quite shy of the mark.” Yesterday he pointed out an important truth: no one’s going to be elected by hating Bush. I’d like a neutral process to allow authors and editors and reviewers flag and tag our assertions so we can line them up and see them in context. Whenever we do the same thing over and over, that thing is begging to be automated. One thing we all repeat is our amazement at an article or blog post or other assertion that reinforces or attacks our biases. We’d like to promote the one and discredit the other, and we’d like to string together a bunch of related stories (or lies) that reinforce our biases. RSS with your Whopper?Slate even has a Whopper feature that in-house Chatterbox Timothy Noah maintains, specializing in the lies that political figures make. Got a whopper? Send it to chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.
Without being hampered by knowing what I’m talking about, I suggest that someone could extend RSS to allow authors, editors or reviewers to annotate such articles to point out the elements that strike them as, well, striking. Such elements cry out to include the reserved words of Journalism 101: who, when, where, what, why, how. It’s the subelements that seem interesting. Who meets with whom when and what common threads are lying around begging to be pulled out of the sweater simultaneously? TheyRule.net does some of the associating, but it’s out of date and limited to SEC data, with links to assertions which 404 as often as not. A centralized site is not the answer, however noble the intentions. If we’re to have a way to scan and aggregate striking assertions, only an RSS feed will do. The Hersh ModelTake this article by Seymour Hersh in the current New Yorker. In it, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre lobs a fact grenade in the direction of NeoCon hawk Richard Perle and Adnan Kahshoggi, a Saudi-born arms dealer. The question is, are they facts or are they traitorous, unsubstantiated charges by a serial prevaricator? Since it depends on who does the reading, the best we can say is that its an assertion grenade and for the purposes of RSS assertion feeds that’s all we need to know. Interestingly, Slate’s Chatterbox maintains an Adnan Khashoggi dossier. Here’s a report from last March, titled “Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi,” Part 6 – Richard Perle’s new pal.:
Mr. Noah even maintains a Khashoggi archive:
Hersh’s Khashoogi article is long – 4,081 words. Who but a limousine Liberal has time to read this stuff?&
You get the idea. Experienced journalists could probably list the useful tags in 15 minutes. The only part of this to take seriously is the urge we readers feel to pierce the veil of artifice that the media uses to perpetuate what Jay Rosen calls their master narrative and that Doc calls the “vs.” story. I want to discuss the Assertion Processor with a journalist who actually knows how to spell “RSS”. 11:05:31 PM |
Category: Uncategorized
B.Y.O. Bias to the Virtual Party
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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,
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 EngineeredI 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 OptionsI was disingenuous when I suggested yesterday that I thought Dean has four options:
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:
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 |
What’s your Point?
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Malcolm Gladwell lifted the phrase “tipping point” from epidemiology and ensconced it in the cultural lexicon:
Gladwell’s 1996 Tipping Point explained his, well, point by showing the similarity in the mechanisms behind the drop in NYC crime, sales of Hush Puppy shoes, contagious yawns and Paul Revere’s ride. Morris LessDick Morris is another visionary and Bill Clinton’s indispensable political guide until he was forced out of the White House by his own Clintonesque scandal, got religion, went on Fox News and started vote.com. As you’d expect from a Clinton confidante, he understands the detailed history of what works and fails in Presidential politics. In the current Chris Lydon interview, Morris tells us that the Internet is bigger than we have imagined in politics as in everything else, and that the Dean campaign has changed politics forever by routing around the cynical mechanisms the DNC designed into the primary system this cycle… …and that Howard Dean is dead meat. Listen to the interview and come back for more revealing insights and colorful graphics. Now. Go. Later…You can hear the shock and dread in Lydon’s dulcet tones as Dick Morris tells him that Karl Rove and the Republicans have been gathering 20-30 million email addresses while Dean’s grabbed a half million or so. Lydon’s summary:
… and that it will be a battle of the extremists the presumptive Dean “liberals” vs. the real rightists. We Deaniacs, according to Dick Morris, are living in a naive echo chamber where bad news is unwelcome and our breathless enthusiasms insulate us from the harsh realities of the political marketplace. He’s saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape and the Republicans are Microsoft. Done deal. Next question. That doesn’t mean that old-time politics will carry the day because the Internet is irrelevant, but that the new tools are agnostic and that the Republicans understand them as well as or better than the Deaniacs. When Chris asks him how he responds to people who don’t get it, who don’t know what a blog is, he turns Rosenesque:
Pointing the WaySo Morris agrees that this election cycle is a tipping point and that some sort of smart mob has formed around the Dean campaign and that there’s an analogous Second Superpower waging peace around the globe. But we’re still not giving up and letting the force take us where it will. But what are people fighting for? Let’s look at our available tipping points:
My work for the next year is to take the Green Line, and anything else will be a sorry disappointment, since it may be the only way to win the presidency. This is far more possible than it seems, if the Dean revolution does what it would in any earlier age, which is to form a new political party with a broader political spectrum. Thanks to the Internet, we don’t have to go to all the trouble to form an actual party, with offices and budget and staff and cronies and a cigar box. What we can do is form a virtual party and give a hat and a kazoo to every American who’ll hold still. If we succeed in forming the GCP–Great Centrist Party, we can reduce the Rs and Ds to mere labels It’s the Community, Stupid!What people want is to reach out to their neighbors and have an agreeable conversation. A real connection with a human trumps Morris’ vision of mechanical intermediation by his own Internet startup, vote.com. His analysis is spot on, but his vision is a business plan. I’m searching for the web applications that, like meetup.com, connect me with you so we can find agreement on the issues that matter and discover how trivial are the things that seem to divide us. The Revolution will be EngineeredTomorrow I’ll suggest some web applications so the experts can have some specifics to dismiss out of hand. 9:08:20 AM |
Heartwarming the Public Policy
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Today brings news of technology that’s unexpectedly heartwarming. David Pogue sings iChat video’s praises today following a heartwarming trans-Atlantic session with his family a couple of weeks ago when he was Lonely in London:
And Samantha Shapiro published the New York Times Magazine article she started researching last September. It’s such an intimate look at the campaign staff that Zack and Clay felt exposed and, frankly, uncomfortable. but it’s a masterful story, full of humanity and the voice of authentic people doing important work based on heart and belief. Though there’s heartbreak in their story, it’s mostly heartwarming. Heartcore MediaIt’s an aspect of the campaign that we don’t associate with our preconceptions of hardcore power politics, where fat cats in smoke-filled rooms decide which of them will be offered to the public and how much money will be invested in their packaging and coronation. There’s a different kind of power in politics now, unwelcome in Washington. Peer power is, literally, the power to peer into the hearts of real people taking unexpected actions for improbable candidates. These Internet media allow us to drill past dull or phony appearances into the heart of lightness. Blogs and comments and RSS feeds and video calls and all the rest give us X-Ray vision into the heart of what matters. Plato would be delighted. 8:02:44 PM |
Follow the Suicides
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An interesting question is whether any government employees at any level believe they are rulers rather than mere employees. The next question is whether We the People are willing to put up with those kind of employees. Or should we ask such questions of people who decide, globally, who dies to advance our national interest? Or whether the mainstream press should report such things? The next question is whether we believe that there are people in our government who are capable of killing others to protect their political interests. Our presence in Iraq suggests the answer. The administration’s willingness to withdraw hastily before the election is another answer. Or whether the press would kill such a delicious story to protect publishers’ interests. The following article wonders how a State Department intelligence expert in the bureau involved with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction does the following:
OF STATE DEPT. OFFICIAL by Wayne Madsen © Copyright 2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only. November 20, 2003 (FTW), WASHINGTON — In a case eerily reminiscent of the death of British Ministry of Defense bio-weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly, an official of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Near East and South Asian division (INR/NESA), John J. Kokal, 58, was found dead in the late afternoon of November 7. Police indicated he may have jumped from the roof of the State Department. Kokal’s body was found at the bottom of a 20 foot window well, 8 floors below the roof of the State Department headquarters near the 23rd and D Street location. Kokal’s death was briefly mentioned in a FOX News website story on November 8 but has been virtually overlooked by the major media. Interestingly, the FOX report states that State Department officials confirmed Kokal’s death to The Washington Post yet the Post – according to an archive search – has published nothing at all about Kokal’s death. A subsequent search revealed that the Post had made a short three-paragraph entry the death in the Metro section on November 7, 2003. However, the Post entry stated that Kokal did not work in intelligence and the story does not show up in the archives. Kokal’s INR bureau was at the forefront of confronting claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Washington police have not ruled out homicide as the cause of his death. Kokal was not wearing either a jacket or shoes when his body was found. He lived in Arlington, Virginia. However, a colleague of Kokal’s told this writer that the Iraq analyst was despondent over “problems” with his security clearance. Kokal reportedly climbed out of a window and threw himself out in such a manner so that he would “land on his head.” At the time Kokal fell from either the roof or a window, his wife Pamela, a public affairs specialist in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, was waiting for him in the parking garage. Mrs. Kokal had previously worked in Consular Affairs where she was involved in the stricter vetting of visa applicants from mainly Muslim countries after the Sept. 11 attacks. State Department officials dispute official State Department communiqués that said Kokal was not an analyst at INR. People who know Kokal told the French publication Geopolitique that Kokal was involved in the analysis of intelligence about Iraq prior to and during the war against Saddam Hussein. Another INR official, weapons expert Greg Thielmann, said he and INR were largely ignored by Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton and his deputy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud neo-conservative who recently became Vice President Dick Cheney’s Middle East adviser. Kokal’s former boss, the recently retired chief of INR, Carl W. Ford, recently said that Bolton often exaggerated information to steer people in the wrong directions. A former INR employee revealed that some one-third to one-half of INR officials are either former intelligence agents with the CIA or are detailed from the agency. He also revealed it would have been impossible for Kokal to have gained entry to the roof on his own. INR occupies both a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on the sixth floor that has no windows and a windowless structure on the roof that has neither windows nor access to the roof, according to the former official. The other windows at the State Department have been engineered to be shatter proof from terrorist bomb attacks and cannot be opened. INR and other State Department officials report that a “chill” has set in at the State Department following Kokal’s defenestration. A number of employees are afraid to talk about the suspicious death. It also unusual that The Northern Virginia Journal, a local Arlington newspaper, has not published an obituary notice on Kokal. (Wayne Madsen, a frequent FTW contributor, is a former US Naval officer and intelligence analyst who is currently an author, freelance writer and commentator in Washington, D.C.) 12:51:33 PM |
Electable?
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Halley comments this morning that most Democrats are waiting on the sidelines but are committed to voting for someone who is “electable.”
I’m on both sides of Halley’s fence. One of the reasons I pitched my tent in the Dean camp is precisely because he’s so electable. However, my suggestion last June was the one Halley makes:
It continues to be clear to me. Pick the candidate who’s not unelectable and with whom you have the most influence. Do we need a long conversation to determine which candidate is most open to blogger/bloggee input? If there’s a secret to building this alliance, it would be confidence–we could just do it. We need to feel as confident in an imminent blog-based White House as Jeff Bezos was in selling books on line. This delicious sense of burying the kleptocracy under a blizzard of votes and small contributions is the most democratic upheaval we can imagine. But who is we?
No one would argue against the point that, if a couple of million people put up $100 each, Dean’s coattails would carry a lot of congressional seats. With 2 million contributors, the total would probably be more like half a billion bucks. Reaching Critical MassFew of us are persuaded by Mr. Kelley’s argument. In our oversaturated age, it’s impossible to separate the mass of compelling but fraudulent messages from the truly stunning truth when it unexpectedly shows up. You’d think that by now I would have had all my friends sign up at the Dean site and put up their $10-100. Until I do that, maybe I’ll quit bitching about how passive others are. 10:38:04 PM |
Voice of Experience
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This post will make the most sense for those who have witnessed war and are not freaked out by the cold calculus of accepting death as a constant and the loss of buddies as gut-stirring but as inevitable as taxes. Most of the rest of the world has been forced to experience war first hand. Perhaps that’s why the rest of the world is unimpressed with this administration’s gung-ho attitude, so typical of raw recruits and so uncharacteristic of adults who’ve peered into the abyss and lived to describe it:
I hate to diss fellow bloggers, but the warbloggers seem to have a paucity of combat experience. We would never entertain the views of programmers who’ve never hacked code, or historians who’ve never read history. Why would we listen carefully to warbloggers who’ve never watched tracers arcing toward their position? Every warrior knows that perfect safety is a fool’s paradise. The premise of the current war on terror is that we can entertain our way out of the terrorist threat. It’s entertainment to feel an illusory omnipotence that will hunt down every evil-doer and infidel–a kind of adolescent road rage, really. The old heads in your squadron know to protect such greenhorns from their enthusiasms, at least until they learn or die. “There are old pilots and bold pilots. There are no old, bold pilots.“ The warbloggers’ broad lack of combat experience is so obvious a disqualifier that I apologize for not pointing out this disconnect last winter. The Bush Administration dismissed European caution last winter as a malady of “Old Europe,” as if cultures which include Dresden and Hiroshima bring nothing to the dialogue. Reflecting on this, and the consistent disapproval of our unilateral course, emanating from the lands that all of us hail from, I wonder what the people of those cultures might bring to our current election cycle. Second Hand SmokeIt must be frustrating to be a rational non-American. One suffers from a kind of secondhand smoke, a victim of behavior you can’t stop. Or like a neighbor to an appealing but uncontrollable, rowdy and violent adolescent. While non-Americans can’t vote, I know many feel the same urgency so many of us do, and may be even more anxious to help, their energies otherwise constrained. Aid and assistance from non-Americans can be galvanizing to the conscientious objectors to unilateralism, who often feel cut off from informed discourse and often seem numbed by what has happened. In addition to tech support and assistance, here are some projects that anyone in the second superpower can contribute to: Fact collectionsWho, when, what, where, why, with attribution. A fact is simply what an authoritative source reported. True authority is part of the research, including background like how Rev. Sun Myung Moon set up the Washington Times to look like a legitimate newspaper, or Murdoch’s Fox News. Though conservatives seem fact-averse, a year of unfolding revelations might help some see the breadth and depth of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that people laughed at when Hillary labeled it, but now has been well documented. Armed with the right sets of facts, someone could build a series of timelines, contrasting spin vs. reality. I imagine these to be a vertical web page, a very long table, with a center column being the solid timeline, presumably just a background color, with links among the discrete areas reported. Others will think of better ways to do this. The Virtual Anti-Spin RoomProperly organized, these “facts” can also be a resource for people watching a Presidential debate or Fox News. A researcher could constantly “push” fact-based web pages which the viewers could compare with what is being said. Debates are now accompanied by “Spin Rooms” of partisans, so we should build a virtual non-spin room. They could also be archived as a post event video with interleaved sound bites vs. facts. A pressing project is to give a voice to people who feel disconnected from each other. We need to expose our best thinking, starting with individual blogs. Because the campaign issues are reasonably clear-cut, a straightforward taxonomy is available to form the basis of a knowledge aggregator. That capability could persist after the election to inject fact-based opinion into the American political dialogue. Technorati has some enabling technology for this purpose. Finally, there may be entrepreneurial opportunities. If we are serious about building extramural governance tools, enterprises must be formed using the pool of passionate, under-employed American techies. These activities may be as important to our democracy as voting-machine companies but more resonant with the Constitution and good practice. There are better ideas than these. Whatever we do, we must overwhelm the contrived urgency of the war on terror with our own passion and intensity. Many Americans feel these are extraordinary times requiring unprecedented actions. They are right, but the actions are not a crusade against disenfranchised Muslims. We need a global convergence of knowledge and novel economic tools, obviously Net-based, that lead the world out of its nearsightedness toward the common destiny we all understand but which politicians choose not to give voice to.
11:58:10 PM |
And he’s not just fuckin’ around
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My good buddy Josh has some sound advice for us: Reclaim the dignity of your own experience. It’s an MP3 verbal assault on mediocrity that will make you think more than our culture usually requires. 10:50:02 PM |
Threads of our Fathers
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Amy Harmon called tonight doing early research for an article, seeking a deeper insight into the Dean campaign. Amy’s beat at the New York Times is technology and culture, and we laughed as it occurred to us that nothing integrates tech and culture better than the Dean campaign. Consider with me the deepest, most satisfying theme that might help us define the Dean phenomenon. It would have to be the resilient message of what American democracy means to its people. Like Robert Pirsig’s discovery about excellence, we all seem to understand the core of American freedom without needing a detailed definition. In every age, we Americans suffer the current compromises of our freedoms, in confidence that they are merely clouds obscuring the imminent sun we hold as our birthright. We are cynics and innocents, mistrusting our politicians while assuming that they seek the same sunlight we do. What is the core of the Founders’ beliefs, and what core values do we hold so dear that our leaders trespass upon them at their peril? The Founders’ breakthrough was their audacious assertion, which they held to be self evident, that the people collectively are more important than their rulers. This had never been stated before, and it was such a powerful idea that it inspired the French to come to our aid with a zeal in excess of their hatred of the English. (There’s a fabriqué en France statue on a little island four miles south of here, testifying to that belief and the support the French gave us in the 1770’s, without which we would not have won our freedom.) This notion of popular sovereignty is a product of the Age of Enlightenment, that flowering of humanist rationality and idealism arising in the 17th-18th centuries. I’ve suggested before that this enlightenment grew out of two catalysts.
Those cheap presses were the blog firmware of the eighteenth century, freeing voices from the hollow cadence of church and state, training the newly literate masses in clues never uttered before. For the first time, historic rites of succession were questioned, wondering what was, exactly, the divine right of thugs. All of this had been going on at the same time as the settling of the New World, when a family might see a penniless son go off on a ship and return a millionaire, beneficiary of slavery and plunder and land seized from American aborigines (those marvelous British country mansions were won the hard way). It was a precursor to the Internet boom, when anything was possible and the old rules seemed less binding than they had been for centuries. And then, in the New World, came a bandwidth revolution. Each of the colonies had started as settlements, divided from each other by an impassable barrier of wilderness. Their communications architecture was hub and spoke, a hierarchical command economy driven by old world masters who were the only source of the manufactured goods they needed to hack out a living from the forest. With time came expansion and roads and inter-colony trade and local foundries and mills and a slow realization that a very nice living could be had without reference to the masters now so far away. Physical distance was a metaphor for the attenuation of hierarchical control, and a clue that this newly flat society was giving more than it was getting. The metaphors with our age are stunning and inspire us to pick up that old thread the Founders started and Emerson continued and Thoreau and Whitman and Clemens and Steinbeck and Kerouac and all the rest. We’ve been so busy lately that we’ve quit talking about ways while focused on means. But that hasn’t dimmed our collective sense of how we’re meant to live. To paraphrase what the rustic said about art, we may not know freedom, but we know what we like. Somehow the Dean campaign dropped a little of this latent genetic sensibility into the nutrient pool called the Internet. Contrasted to an assault on freedom as we like it and a radical foray into preemptive war, we seem to sense an unprecedented disturbance in our collective force, as if a sister blue-green planet had been obliterated far, far away. If there’s a larger meaning to the Dean phenomenon, that is it. Call me an idealist (please), but the character of people’s response counts as much as its quantity, at least in the early going. Consider the code produced by a few hackers at the open source conference in Philadelphia in 1776. Relative to the population of the colonies, there were fewer of them than there are Deaniacs among us. They haggled over it, signed it with a flourish, and let the power of their words carry the day. If I had to pick a theme for the Dean phenomenon, that would be it. 3:25:10 AM |
Escapable Logic 