Category: Uncategorized

Jim Moore writes today that the Clintons’ support for Clark is bad politics. In saying so, he has dropped an important clue as to why the Dean campaign is different and why that difference matters so much:

“Dean is the only real outsider in the campaign, and the only one who will attempt to reform the party if he wins the nomination.  Read “reform the party” as reducing the influence of big traditional party donors and money people . . .

What makes Dean threatening to the party elite is that he IS electable–and that he owes the elite little or nothing.”

Their lack of leverage over Dean is driving every other politician just nuts. And his freedom from traditional political power is THE political story of the first half of the 21st century. I hope that we bloggers and bloggees can put our heads around this, because every other technical, political and economic navel-gaze is inconsequential by comparison. Need I be more strident?

Sleepers awake! The Internet is hitting its stride, conforming to Paul Saffo’s rule that technology expectations are generally flawed: tech has less impact in the short term and more in the long term than we expect: “the amount of time required for new ideas to fully seep into a culture has consistently averaged about three decades for at least the past five centuries.”

The Internet’s first three decades are barely up and suddenly a Presidential candidate has the means to attract and bond with his constituents as Dean has, and prevail while owing nothing to the political machinery. Like open source software, the Dean campaign is more a result of constituents’ activity than the constituents are the result of campaign activity. That inversion is the point Jim Moore is making when he confronts the Clintons’ insider politics attacking Dean’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington run. Internet disintermediation at its most impressive.

What’s not to like about this populist hijacking (well, re-hijacking) of the political process? Don’t we the (majority of) the people benefit when we’re able to combine to elect our own candidate. If that’s so, why is it not more obvious that the Dean thing is a Good Thing?

But consider the downside. What if the majority of the people somehow take our country in a direction that the minority of the people don’t want it to go? Anyone who mistrusts majority rule is an aristocrat, and aristocracy, like monarchy, is a dead end.

This majority rule idea scares the shit out of most of us, perhaps because each of us suspects we’re in the minority–that somehow we’re at risk from the whims of the mob. And this is the inner challenge we need to face–to just get over ourselves. As we’re learning from the surprisingly good reasoning and openness behind most blogs and the comments to them, common sense is more common than we think. Perhaps we’ve just been misled by the aristocrats, telling us how stupid we all are.

Welcome to the Permission-Free Zone…

…The Twilight Zone of Broadcast Politics. Like a child’s mind wiring itself together, our dendritical connections are forming without permission, authorization or capital to support what our body politic wants to do. It seems that all we need is a set of neural pathways–the Internet–to form the web of common cause and mutual benefit that defines the combining of cells into a superorganism.

This is the point of Howard Bloom, biologist by training, student of mob psychology and author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. He argues persuasively that families and tribes and beehives and nations–and you and me–are superorganisms, living entities composed of smaller organisms that have irrevocably combined. He’ll convince you that this combinatory urge is the norm in nature and that the Clint Eastwood syndrome, the notion of a successful existence isolated from society, is the stuff of fiction, not life.

Paul Saffo and Howard Bloom might say that the Dean surge is to obvious and right on schedule. I say that breakdown leads to breakthrough and that we are in the midst of a classic breakdown. This week brings more stirrings from the adult wing of the Republican party, saying that this administration has been as mismanaged as every other GWB enterprise: a Federal Reserve Bank Chair, the Cato Institute, the key Watergate figure, the CIA. Can breakthrough be far behind?

Jim Moore is the creator of the Second Superpower vision and originated the idea of people contributing a billion dollars to an Internet-based campaign. Now he’s illustrated the gulf between Dean and all other politicians. We’re at an inflection point which combines the populist medium with a candidate who thinks like an American. This is the kind of moment that history often leans on when forming a new pattern.

I’m looking forward to hanging out here for a while.

1:23:22 AM    

Jon Udell has noted a new expertise shortage at IDG, in Ace travel agents available:

In my column a few weeks ago, I wrote:

Why, for example, does Expedia ask you to specify the number of children traveling with you, and even their ages, and then proceed to show you hotel rooms that can’t accommodate the kids?

When I’m traveling on business, I get to bypass this nonsense. I just call up IDG Travel and talk to Bruce or Michael. These guys can hack through the plane/hotel/rental-car system like hot knives through butter. It’s true they have access to privileged information, but I’m sure they could also make better use of public information than you or I. Their ability to recognize and exploit patterns is what makes them so effective.

Sadly, as of today, because of a restructuring at IDG Travel, I can’t just call up Bruce Powell or Michael McCarthy. But my loss could be your gain. If you know of a Bay Area opportunity for an ace travel agent, I’ll be happy to pass it along.

And thanks again, guys. You’ll be sorely missed.

This is a great example of the loyalty that buyers have for valued sellers. Jon had formed a bond with Bruce and Michael whose absence will cost him a lot of time and inconvenience. It’s also an indicator that a pleases buyer will not arbitrarily rate a good seller under the Xpertweb rating system.

Behind the Music

There’s a minor back story here. I had an email and phone exchange last spring with Jon Udell that I found depressing,

“I’m certainly interested in the concepts behind XpertWeb. I’m not sure I buy the implementation envisioned in the docs on the website.”

After my best attempt to explain Xpertweb to Jon, he was still unimpressed–testimony to my powers of persuasion. He continued to be skeptical of the Xpertweb requirement that each participant have and manage their own web site. I wrote at the time:

“But yesterday I couldn’t articulate the protocol’s plumbing and its larger promise to a guy who totally gets the Internet and believes it’s destined to connect individuals in unprecedented, useful ways. His commitment to the assumptions behind Xpertweb may precede and exceed mine, but he seems so sated with the failure of people to embrace small procedural changes that he can’t imagine a subculture of process-driven zealots embracing the ritual of an alternate economy, filling in forms to hire a plumber. That view seems to me to ignore our willingness to use a form to buy a $6.95 paperback. Certainly he can’t imagine the protocol growing beyond the early adopters and scaling through the use of their servers. Mitch says it’s exactly the position he took before he dug beneath the surface.”

Whether Xpertweb can work, fortunately is easy to disprove. You make it work and then it’s workable. Of course it might not work to force all those people to get and use their own Xpertweb sites but, like all innovators, I’ll just say I’m still working on it. As Dave Winer says about shitty software, “Still diggin’!”

BloggerCon Xpertweb Demo

Roland Tanglao and I will be attending Dave Winer’s BloggerCon, and will be demonstrating the Xpertweb tools at the Hotel@MIT. If you’d like to have a look, please contact me through the little envelope icon, or contact Roland directly.

10:58:38 PM    

Among the many reasons to blog, one of the greatest is to expand one’s reputation and, unless you’re Mother Teresa, a prime reason for improving your reputation–your personal brand–is to get more business. Any prominent blogger is implicitly available to speak or consult on the areas she discusses on her blog.

This motivation deserves more play than it’s getting. In commerce we discover how to value each other in the way that matters most: exchanging the fruits of our labor for someone else’s. Can there be any greater way to honor another?

We blog not just to connect more but to be worth more and to earn more.

What if there were a sophisticated form of trackback on our blog to aggregate the details of our offline transactions? This would extend our blog’s utility by presenting our real-world activities objectively so our trust of each other might extend beyond how we speak of ourselves. It would also capture how others speak of us, and explicitly how they rate us as they pay us.

Peer-to-peer like the Blogosphere

An Xpertweb page can act as a supplement to a web log tracking your words and another’s words when you do a transaction together. It’s a highly structured trackback that records your effects on others. Every time a buyer submits an order, any data saved on the seller’s site is duplicated on the buyer’s site, by the buyer’s trusted script, in the form of an order confirmation page. Then, as the transaction progresses, the mirrored data store is enriched, culminating with each party’s grade and comment, which is the point of the whole system.

All this data replicates to other sites in the same way that the worthwhile things we say are quoted on other blogs. The blogosphere’s triangulation of our posts is a part of its robustness and its reliability–we simply can’t reverse course too often or our personal brand is diluted. Xpertweb similarly captures and publishes our quality ratings. The hardest part of the system has been to make it as peer-to-peer as the blogosphere. It would have been more straightforward to design it with a centralized data store. But then it would have been too easy to succumb to temptations to charge for the service. Better it should be a protocol rather than a service.

In the agora, everyone can watch each other shopping. The citizens are on display like the melons.

BloggerCon Xpertweb Demo

Roland Tanglao and I will be attending Dave Winer’s BloggerCon, and will be demonstrating the Xpertweb tools at the Hotel@MIT. If you’d like to have a look, please contact me through the little envelope icon, or contact Roland directly.

11:14:22 AM    

Some interesting pushback from my post on Thursday. Sean Gallagher over at Rant Central has back-ranted my rant:

Well, then, the Eisenhowerian glove has been laid down. Is the government our last refuge from the opression of capital? As the government tries every day to slough off its responisbilities to the private sector, has the time come to reverse the trend?

I don’t think nationalization (that’s what it would really be) is the answer. I think proper stewardship is the answer, and the government has to take a more active role in kicking the ass of ICANN and its vendors when they step out of line with the public interest.

Since the Internet extends outside the US borders, I suspect we might have some problems putting it under government control. What we really need is an Internet like the US interstate highway system–built with federal money, the use of which is governed by regulations designed to promote public interest; but constructed, policed and maintained by the localities it passes through.

If the Commerce Department were to take over the registry of domain names, it would probably treat it like it does the Patent and Trademark Office–as a piggy bank to raid for other projects. What has to happen is that ICANN needs to be made publicly accountable, and made to reclaim its responsibility to oversee the master DNS, supported by royalties from multiple registrars and contract revenue from the federal government based on its adherence to public policy.

Sean’s absolutely right, and my rant should have been more clear. We need less Internet design, not more. I’m not advocating a 50s-era Highway Trust for funding Internet packet forwarding. What we need is a set of prohibitions on what we can’t do to the Internet. Perhaps this is another expression of my Minimalism screed of last month.

Rollin’ Down the Highway

I really like Sean’s Interstate Highway analogy, and it separately occurred to me when speaking with David Weinberger on the phone Friday afternoon. We spoke of I-90, running through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where David lives. It’s also the Massachusetts Turnpike, where they charge you a toll when you leave it, often by scanning a Fast Lane sensor on your car. It may help to think of our little Internet packets as cars appearing and leaving the Internet randomly, pursuant to the owners’ whims.

The Mass Pike really doesn’t care which car-packets enter and leave its collection system, as long as the fare is paid. The cars paying cash are like analog phone calls on a switched phone circuit. The carrier knows nothing about the who or the why of the traversal except its physical start and end. It knows more about Fast Lane cars, since it has a contractual relationship with each owner, limiting the rights of the parties to harm each other.

Presumably the Interstate Highway Commission also has contractual arrangements with the Mass Pike Authority. The tolls are charged because Massachusetts stretch of I-90 receives no federal or state funding (according to their web site), so it can charge tolls on the I-90 traffic that would not dream of paying a toll west of the Mississippi. However, there are certainly constraints on the Mass Pike Authority’s freedom to impede travel by people who are expecting an I-90 level of service, quite separate from any overarching notions of personal freedom. The Feds and the Mass Pike Authority might have a little chat if the Commonwealth started detaining travelers for 24 hours every 100 miles while examining their license at a Patrol HQ next to a $350 per night motel operated by the state. It would probably be a Federal case but not a drawn-out Constitutional battle before the Supreme Court. Contract law can be a lovely environment when you want to get to the heart of a disappointment.

Most of the “improvements” we might make to the Internet are degradations as significant as new toll booths or mandatory overnight stays. The reason such upgrades are suspect is because we really prefer the 1995 Internet to the one that powerful interests are now imagining. Our illusion is that the Internet is an unmanaged pipe, like a water main, into which we pour information and inquiries, and out of which we drink news and answers.

A Straight Wire with Gain

In the world of Hi-Fi, the perfect amplifier is called “a straight wire with gain”: no noise, distortion or unpleasantness, just a pure signal made strong enough to energize loudspeakers. That’s what we expect from Interstate highways and the Internet. The trick for the Internet is to instantiate a way of dealing that restricts the telecom companies from turning packet forwarding into a protection racket (“It’ll cost you to enjoy our new services, like guaranteed delivery”). Better they should handle it forever as a commodity routing project. Like the Mass Pike Authority.

I just didn’t “get” Lawrence Lessig’s cautionary statements that the Internet as we know it is at risk, presented in CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace almost four years ago, and his every action since:

“Lessig’s chief message is aimed at those who view the Internet as some kind of democratic wonderland, a place of unfettered free speech, business competition, and creativity. Set the euphoria aside, he warns. Government and industry are already stripping privacy, free speech, and other liberties from the Internet in order to suit the needs of online commerce.”
          –The Net at what price? Aaron Zitner, The Boston Globe, March 19, 2000

As I wrote yesterday, the concern so eloquently described by Lessig and Searls has just been reinforced, even more urgently, by John Walker and Ernest Partridge.

My concern this Presidential election cycle is that the free trade of ideas and their stakeholders may be as threatening to politicians as to entrenched commercial interests. That’s why I’ve established the Free the Internet Contribution page at Dean for America. Dean is the only candidate with a vested interest in a free and open Internet, so he’s the only candidate we can trust to defend it against the establishment. If elected, he will see an open Internet as his best hope for re-election, so he’s our best hope for the Internet to which we’d like to become accustomed.
I suggest that we pay the equivalent of $2.74 per day for the next year to secure the Internet for ourselves, our kids and theirs. Aha! That’s $1,000. Fair enough. It’s a grand cause, worth a grand.

Starving Student Backlash

Jefferson Provost suggests that I’m impeding contributions:

Hi Britt,

Great idea, but I think you may be alienating your potential contributors. Setting the nominal contribution at $1000 and then saying, “contribute as an indicator of you clue inventory.” It makes it sound as if those who contribute much less than that are clueless. I’m guessing that’s probably not your intention, but it really makes it sound like you’d rather not have small contributions.

I’m a graduate student, and $1000 is 2/3 of a month’s salary. I sure as hell don’t pay $3/day for coffee. Why would I want to contribute anything, when you make it sound like those who can’t kick in your (totally unrealistic) nominal contribution are clueless? You should be saying “Every little bit helps!”

Jeff

The ringing truth that reinforces Jeff’s point is that this is the first time in several Presidential cycles that the youth vote will be significant. That will probably be the greatest deciding factor in this cycle.

Jeff, my intent is not to discouraged your demographic, the most important in this race, and I think Zephyr, Josh and Zack would concur. What I’m trying to do is to get my generation of its ass and throw in some serious shwag. There are a lot of us who talk about these issues and have strong opinions. I’m trying to get us to vote with relevant dollars. Jim Moore has written elegantly that the NeoCons are getting a hell of a bargain. They throw in about $200 million every four years and then get to play with about $6 trillion dollars until the next time. Jim rightly calls their investment “chump change“.

The question on the table is whether Non-Repubs are willing to make those kind of investments. We’re often long on rhetoric and short on contributions. Do you suppose that’s part of the same restraint that causes Democrats to be so much less strident in calling bullshit on the Repubs? Jim Moore suggests that we should be able to inspire one million people willing to throw in $1,000 to create a Dean war chest sufficient to transform American Politics. Righteous math, that.

Jeff, the news I’m trying to add is that the precious Internet we currently plan to leave to your generation could be as compromised as Our Bill of Rights has been since 9/11.

“The price of freedom is vigilance”, indeed. And some real cash once in a while. I hope some people like me choose to set an example for people like Jeff. This is the quarter to put in the cash and to make our statement.

4:47:24 AM    

As I write this, Dubya is addressing the UN General Assembly. Here’s the view from the back of my monitor:

The General Assembly Hall is on the left with the Headquarters building straight ahead. But what’s most interesting to me are those 41 official vehicles in the UN circle, which is normally empty. At some subconscious level, it’s also what’s most interesting to the people at the top of the New World Pecking Order. Those conveyances are an important part of what makes them important. A portent. When lights flash and sirens wail and traffic stops, you know you’re important. And importance outbids utility every time.

We live a block west of the UN. When there’s a big meeting like this, the east side of midtown Manhattan devolves into an orgy of inconvenience thanks to the Important People who are authorized to tie up traffic, vs. the N’Yawkers who wish they’d just get over themselves.

The vibe we all live with in our little Tudor City ‘hood is the silly self-importance of all the clean-cut white guys with wrist mikes and earnest demeanors defending their precious charges against . . . what? Korean deli and nail salon owners? What you take away from these shows of force is that the whole show is about . . . the Show. The Pecking Order. The Authority to fuck up a high-functioning East Side neighborhood with a show of force out of all proportion to any real threat.

The Expert Threat

It’s not actually the Important People who are the problem, it’s the Secret Service and cops and SWAT teams and the neighborhood restrictions we suffer. When the heads of state are in town, you get it that what’s really at work here is a full employment program for security professionals. Who do we think designs the security protocols? Do we believe that the Presidents and Secretaries of State and Diplomats sit down and lay out the security measures they require? Of course not. They hire experts who, like all experts, design a system that requires more of whatever the experts are selling. How likely is it that any security expert is going to design a reduction in security based on, for example, Reality? Rather, officials are protected more and more, cost us more and more and, essentially, are driven by their handlers at 45 mph in the fast lane of the lives of the rest of us.

That’s the part that’s grating: the unstoppable full employment program for cops and security professionals. But since their bosses have no say in the design of the protocols, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Sir, you need more of us because we need more of you.”

The dirty secret is that there’s a Security-Industrial Complex that’s a superset of the Military-Industrial Complex that Ike warned us about a half-century ago, and we’re all hostage to the Security-Industrial Complex. When we accept the judgment of experts who are in the business of defending us against incalculable force, we are agreeing to starve our children to pay for the incalculable burden of an unlimited effort to counter an unknown threat. It’s an open debit we bequeath to our grandchildren.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
                                                                               — Dwight Eisenhower

Of course, any politician worth the pejorative will use incalculable threats to dominate our national agenda. Maybe that’s what Samuel Johnson meant when he said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” The architect of that refuge may be the defense imperative.

That’s why we need to beware of pre-emptive attacks on nations that are not an obvious threat to us because in those circumstances it’s more likely that the danger is from within than from without. But there’s a question unanswered. Why don’t we recognize this endless charade we’re paying for so dearly? It’s because we’re no more clued than the officials who fall for the security shell game. All of us have bought into the seduction that life can be without risk and that there are experts who care only about protecting us from real bad guys.

Once we make that Faustian bargain, we get the burden we deserve. We start to rely on anyone who represents that they can defend us from the indefensible.

OK. I know, There’s a real threat out there. How could I so quickly forget the tragedy of the Twin Towers that killed 3,003 of our fellow citizens? Would I be so uncaring as to suggest that that attack was an anomaly, that there is no terrorist threat? No, of course there’s a terrorist threat. Just as there’s a second hand smoke threat. The EPA reports that 3,000 people die annually from second hand smoke. But that’s not as dramatic a threat, since it’s not spectacular and there are no foreign “evildoers” involved. On the other hand, we don’t lose 3,000 civilians annually from terrorists. Over the last five years (the latest five year period for which we have data), we’ve lost 600 civilians a year, on average, from terrorist attacks. A lot fewer than from recreational boating (714 in 1996). Over the last ten years, we’ve averaged 300 civilians per year lost to terrorism, about the same as from campylobacter–bacteriological reactions to chicken.

As my two remaining readers may remember, I’m more interested in the odds of death than the romantic themes involved. That’s partly from my experience on my first night mission in Viet Nam, when a fellow C-130 pilot flew into a large mountain avoiding small bullets. I want to suggest that we have elaborate cultural rituals which focus on trendy threats rather than actual threats. Call me a hard ass, but I have no sympathy for people who die of obvious threats while distracted by inconsequential ones. Far more women die of heart disease than from breast cancer, but we wear pink ribbons for fashion, not effect.

We’ve made a cultural fetish of stupidity because there are lots of visible people who want to leverage their visibility into more power. That includes politicians and talking heads and evangelists who are, essentially, stamping their feet petulantly and demanding to be paid at
tention to. When our attention wanes, they come up with a new threat to stoke our angst and hold our attention. If you’ve ever had a two-year-old, you know what I’m talking about.

12:29:57 AM    

Dana Blankenhorn, via email:

Two words.

Dwight Eisenhower.

A lot of people are going to misread this history over the next few months.

They will write that the “moderate” Clark is going to overwhelm the candidate of the “ideologues,” Howard Dean.

They have their roles reversed.

The 1952 campaign was the first true TV campaign, and Ike was the first true TV candidate. TV adored celebrity. Ike delivered it. And he capitalized it, with the very first effective political commercial on TV.

The Robert Taft campaign was directed by old party pros, who distrusted Eisenhower. That’s exactly what the DLC is doing with General Clark. Listen to what they say, their reasoning for pushing Clark. It’s all based on TV, on images — on what is now the old politics.

The turning point in the 1952 campaign came at that year’s Republican Convention, when Taft forces tried to engineer rules changes that would stop Ike’s steamroller, and they were put down by a convention that suddenly knew it was on TV.

Today the Internet and TV stand at the same point as TV and newspapers stood 51 years ago. Few believe that an Internet campaign can succeed. They prefer the TV campaign, the manipulation of simple images. But here’s my main counter-argument. The Democrats cannot win a TV campaign. It’s hopeless.

Democrats can only win by changing the game, and Dean is changing the game. By the time Republicans and DLC Democrats realize they need a real Internet strategy, based on nurturing the netroots, it will be too late.

(Blog this if you want. I didn’t realize how much I wrote until it was done.)

Wins of the Father

So that’s why I like Dean. He’s Ike, without the shoulder stars. My father was a big supporter of Ike, working tirelessly on his campaign. Here’s what I learned at my first meetup, in early June:

Eisenhower Republicans for Dean

George Morin was talking to a friend who, calling himself an Eisenhower Republican, said that Dean sounded to him a lot like Ike. Is Ike the bridge this country needs to return to civil discourse? Consider these quotes:

You do not lead by hitting people over the head-that’s assault, not leadership.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

When you appeal to force, there’s one thing you must never do – lose.

When you are in any contest you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.

There was a time when politics required the ability to form, question and communicate such thoughts. It was once a virtual requirement to have led men into battle and to earn your humanity, as Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated. He governed well by governing little, and led a life so full that he really preferred not to be president. It’s a shame we must send people to Washington who want to go, but if we need an enthusiastic ambition, Dean may be our best choice.

By then, George Bush may have demonstrated so well what we do not want in a leader that we’ll recognize one when we see one. And that may be his contribution to history.

2:05:02 PM    

It couldn’t happen without the kids. The Dean Phenomenon is impossible by any conventional measure of how enterprises function, how work is completed and how power is transferred.

The campaign’s enabling technology is a bunch of twenty-somethings who do projects with little direction and no or little pay, usually with free software that took several hundred thousand hours to write, coordinating among themselves without memos or manuals but with instant, ephemeral indicators and descriptions.

Out of that bricolage they’re forging a revolution that’s as dramatic as the one the Founding Hackers programmed 227 years ago. If Jefferson, Paine and Franklin were alive they’d have found their way to Burlington and be sitting in here too, at two in the morning, hacking code, tweaking interfaces, configuring databases and exchanging staccato messages, woven into a web of shared awareness that’s like a busily productive hive.

The most important thing about this place is subtle but obvious once you get it. These kids know things together and work together in a way that’s fundamentally different from people just a decade older. Their information arrives in spare snippets, morphing and spreading constantly among the members of their collective, by IM, email, IRC, listserve, Wiki, SMS, cross-cubicle chat, RSS, cell phone, SlashDot and Google, but rarely recorded explicitly for private use. They share an assumption that whatever knowledge needed will be instantly retrievable and that the hive will produce required resources at the time needed, no earlier or later. If it’s not available, they just use what is and press on. They don’t theorize that perfect is the enemy of good, they live it.

My generation, and probably a couple after me, was taught that each of us is responsible for all the information we encounter. We’re obligated to capture, archive, organize, index, format and present it, on demand, to whichever audience needs to be straightened out so they see things as we do. This is the process that’s been used since, like, forever, and look how successful it’s been. It never prevented one of the greatest intellectual societies in history, Germany, from savaging the world twice and suffer ignominious defeat both times. And it didn’t keep the US from its hubris-driven adventures in Viet Nam and Iraq.

(This morning on Meet the Press, Russert played a 1956 video of John Foster Dulles describing why it was so important to avoid engaging an indigenous force in the Middle East. He cited the French experience in IndoChina [Viet Nam] as his justification!) But then he hadn’t reckoned with the ability of Robert McNamara to Rumsfeld the country into a war that killed 58,000 Americans with no significant geopolitical payoff.

No, it’s clear that the top-down, hierarchical model of social organization has failed us consistently.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of adults organizing things in traditional ways in Burlington, but the rapid give-and-take is the secret sauce, concocted by the kids. And we’re learning how to do it, though it’s a struggle.

The Higher Archy

Every age needs its -archy. The Greeks had their oligarchy, the Middle Ages their monarchy, the Industrial Age its hierarchy and McKinley’s assassin sought anarchy. Kids today follow an organizing principle with an instinct for the higher good while allowing any participant to take whatever role feels right. Those who do more do not look down on less spectacularly performing teammates any more than the quarterback disses his right guard.

This new way of dealing is totally natural to them and foreign to me. I’m barely able to even recognize the profundity of the differences in how we acquire and process information. I suppose it’s like the difference between a Jazz musician and her manager.

Zen Master

Joe Trippi is the Phil Jackson of Presidential campaigns. He doesn’t so much tell his players what to do as he tells them what to pay attention to. Like Jackson, he creates an environment and then works on his team’s attitudes and insights. On Wednesday he emerged into the bullpen outside his office where the web team and Media Miners, about a dozen in all, twiddle the bits that describe Howard Dean to the world, where they host the Web Application called the Dean Campaign.

“Listen up, people! Who can tell me what’s on Kerry’s page right now?”

Silence.

“What have I told you?! You need to know what’s going on out there all the time!”

That’s it. Back to the Bat Cave. You could almost hear Kerry’s server logs churning as the Dean Hive browsed to it and started diddling with a silly little Flash widget that gives you access to the Contribution Page only after hitting a carnival bell with a hammer.

Joe’s point wasn’t that the animation was lame, though it was. His point was that all his people need to be thinking like a Campaign Manager! He didn’t hold a meeting with his Commanders to produce policy for the Lieutenant Commanders to brief the company commanders on the directions to give to the troops. No, this campaign hasn’t time for that. Everything will work out fine if everybody keeps thinking like the coach.

Holographic Intelligence.

Hive Mind.

The Smartest Network Wins

…as David Weinberger said.

Trippi said in his Lessig interview that this is an open source campaign. He spoke freely Thursday night at a classic Vermont-style town meeting in Waterbury with folks who came to hear Joe and Zephyr describe the campaign and the cultural struggle that lies behind it. Joe spoke passionately (counter to type) about a three-decade decline in individual influence, as people power was ceded to corporate interests. He told these Vermonters that they have an obligation to do what’s possible to bring their old American values to a nation that has forgotten how to come together and thrash out the issues and disagree on core principles for hours, but still get coffee afterwards. These people have known Howard Dean for decades, some have been his patients. Their admiration for him is immense and their passion to right the wrongs they perceive has them cheering for his Campaign Manager and Internet Outreach Director like the rock stars they’re becoming.

The lessons we’re learning from this network is not that hive mind diminishes the intelligence of its individuals. Rather it amolifies their capabilities, just as a hive is so much smarter than the bees are.

So if you’re wondering what the Dean buzz is really about, it’s about the hive. 412,791 and growing.

11:59:51 PM    comment [commentCounter (201)]

Startups are fun. They attract people who want more than a job, they want meaning. As I suggested months ago, we all want to be of consequence. When I catalyzed the Dynamac project in 1987, we had people who came to work for free just because it was so new and exciting and well-publicized.

The Dean Campaign vibe is the inspiring tech start-up, cubed. Smart people, so committed to the mission that there’s no visible friction between a good idea and a better idea. The tactics of retail politics and the overarching passion for a better society are all jumbled together into a collage of issues, ideas, tech, fundraising, friendraising, organization, User Interface, Campaign laws, fiscal responsibility, health care, best practices and everything else that a West Wing viewer could ask for.

It’s 2 in the morning, and here’s Zack and Gray and Andrew and Josh being interviewed by Samantha Shapiro of the New York Times Magazine:

Samantha’s trying to figure out all the threads and interconnects among bloggers, campaign staff, Internet tools and all the rest. How does Emergent Democracy and Cluetrain and Social Software and free software and what’s open source and what do you do for the campaign, and how is Joi Ito and Andy Rappaport and Music for America and David Weinberger and Larry Lessig and Jock Gill and Michael Cudahy and how’d you meet Zephyr and Josh and Zack and What are you doing here anyway?

And Josh, could you explain again how you found Britt on Doc’s site and connected with Zack and the 20 or so people working on DeanSpace and can this really be the fastest development and deployment of a few hundred dynamic content sites?

Pulling the Thread out of the Sweater

Imagine if you were in the dead tree publishing business with one of the best publications in the world. That’s Samantha. You’re smart, educated, connected, and young enough that you use Google and the web and email a LOT and you’ve read some blogs but you’ve not been following the blogging echo chamber. Or open source software or smart mobs or all the rest. How the hell would you even begin to connect all the dots? I suggested to Samantha that her situation is like Tom Wolfe’s when he wrote The Right Stuff. He wanted to write about the cultural phenomenon of the original seven Mercury astronauts and found that, to those guys, being an astronaut was fine, but what was really important to them was that they were Fighter Pilots. And so he had to learn what that meant and discovered the entire world of the right stuff, which was more important to the heroes than the cultural event.

It’s impossible to understand the Dean campaign without understanding blogging. You can’t understand blogging with out looking at the issues that bloggers care about, and Samantha’s starting cold. I’m glad that’s her problem and not mine.

It’s a Quarter to Three…

And there’s no one in the place except you and me and a dozen or so high-energy people doing what most people who sign up on DeanLink say they’ll do: “Whatever it takes.”

Time to go home. But it looks like these guys aren’t going anywhere. Miles to go before CPUs sleep.

6:49:34 PM    

Josh Koenig and I are headed for Burlington Vermont for the week. We’re the first installment in the IT Nirvana program, under which a pair of geek volunteers spends a week with the campaign to help out with whatever the campaign’s support staff needs to do but which they’re too busy for.

All this week, Josh and I will be co-blogging on  our own sites and on correspondences.org and greaterdemocracy.org. If there are particular issues IT and Web/Blog issues, let us know.

A little background’s in order.

Josh and I met in May when we noticed each other’s passion for the Dean phenomenon. That’s when I learned about the DeanSpace project that Zack Rosen and Neil Drumm and Josh were brainstorming.

Driving While Aware

After Josh and I first spoke last May, I checked out his blog, OutlandishJosh, where I discovered an open and honest young man dealing with being aware and involved and without much of an outlet for his political sensibilities and energy. It made me realize that there are many life situations that set you up for, well, more than the usual challenges, and awareness is as great a barrier to a peaceful and happy life as the one that so many people face: Driving While Black.

Fast-forward 4 months and Zack is working full time at Dean HQ in Burlington, Josh is working full time for Music for America and I’m being drawn into the Dean campaign gravity well.

And the Sun Shone Third Forth

We had a great drive up to Burlington, Vermont, which is in the far north of the state. It was cloudy all the way up with occasionally heavy rain. But as we drove down the west spine of the Green Mountains into Burlington, the skies brightened dramatically with lemon light flooding the Champlain valley, Jesus rays everywhere. It’s easy to see how a doctor who’d spent his career caring for people in this valley would see answers where others see problems. It’s a place that seems to encourage optimism.

Josh and I have great conversations, riffing on each other’s points and finding themes in stories that sound merely reportorial. We stopped for a while in Middletown, CT, where I attended college at Wesleyan University. I described to Josh what it was like to be in that place in the early 60’s, before all the institutional structures were de-organized. Like Burlington in 2003, Wesleyan forty years ago was a place where all things seemed possible, where issues were taken seriously but not too solemnly. It seemed a contrast to his experience at NYU in the late 90’s.

On the Champlain Trail

We stopped by campaign headquarters about 8:30 and found it easily in a four story office building notable for its collection of employee cars and bikes after dark on a Sunday night, and the pizza truck heading back for more rations.

Zephyr and Zack joined us for dinner at a quite good Italian restaurant with outdoor seating on the pedestrian mall. The food was great, the conversation geekily stimulating and the weather perfect. I expected to hear Sinatra warbling Autumn in Vermont, which seems to have the same tune as Moonlight in New York.

Afterward we went to one of the campaign’s several Staff flop houses to watch Howard Dean appear on the first K Street episode. This crowd would have loved him if he’d sat on a whoopie cushion, but he actually was entertaining and impressive.

And so the odd couple’s wonky Adventure Camp begins.

1:08:04 AM