Mass Defection
go direct to Dean Campaign Purchase instructions
I had some great hang time at OSCon with Doc.
Doc is the metaphor meister, but he's nobody's fool. I emphasize his non-foolishness
because historically
the king's metaphor meister was a brightly dressed fool who was allowed to
say outrageous things that the nobles could not. Many of the fool's
gems were metaphors,
and Doc comes up with more pithy comments than anyone, and also reports
everyone else's. I think of him stalking through the jungle with his metaphor
net and pith helmet.
Yesterday he quoted Jakob
Neilsen: "Cluetrain
was marketers defecting to the customers' side
of marketing." After a week at OSCon, I'm back to report that Neilson's
describing a cultural trend, not an isolated event. We're all defecting from
tired viewpoints to previously inconceivable ones.
On the evening of June 30, I heard Howard Dean speak in New
York. He worked the crowd with his articulate plainspokenness regarding
health care, state's rights to regulate couple's rights, and in a clever
finale to the list, the glory of a balanced budget to secure our future.
He got a rousing, lingering round of cheers and applause. When we quieted
down, he added, "Look what just happened: A crowd of liberal New Yorkers
cheering for fiscal responsibility!"
That's a mass defection. What a contrast to the mass defecation on George Tenet this week!
The Open Source Democracy
Back Story
Remember when people quit asking if you had an email address
and just asked for it? Happened with fax numbers a decade earlier. Here's
a news flash from OSCon: that kind of tipping point is happening with Open
Source software, in the biggest companies in the world. That's not according
to the OSCon presenters, it's from the corporate
IT guys in the audience and hallways.
There were lots of big company guys spreading the gospel,
sounding like evangelists. Folks from Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch,
Ticketmaster and Real Networks and on and on. The people there were IT
guys in big companies, plus big vendors who feel huge pressure from their
customers to get their enterprise-class apps working on Linux.
The sense you took away is that the Open Source genie won't
fit back in the bottle; that the tools are plenty good enough and are only
getting better. Companies are no more likely to back away from Open Source
than we are to stop using email.
Am I just seeing penguins or is this a cultural trend?
- We're tired of waiting passively for software vendors to
make their stuff work right.
- We're tired of waiting passively for professional
educators to fix schools while our children's futures slip away,
so we're home- and charter-schooling.
- We're tired of watching cheery TV news drivel so
we're reporting hard
news to each other.
- We're tired of Network time slots so we Tivo our own channels.
- We're tired of telecoms' last mile roadblock so we're building
wireless networks ourselves.
- And music acquisition? Heh.
Which is why big companies are using open source tools to
do DIY IT, as Doc calls it.
Is Democracy the Killer App?
- We're tired of waiting passively for parties, politicians and pollsters
to forge a democracy they're not interested in.
What would an open source country look like? It's
been done many times before. They're called revolutions, hard reboots
that are really messy, with all those bodies and widows and
orphans.
Usually they end up hacking a Colonel. Those are the lengths people will
go to install an open source government.
Democracy, the killer
demo.
Unfortunately, like our current republic, most of those revolutionary
open source installations suffer from a slow but persistent memory leak.
The revolutionaries
revert to type and act like the old leaders. Think of Castro and the NeoCons
here. Remember the Gingrich
Contract with America?
(Reproduced below for convenience & blog stickiness.
BTW, did anyone else feel a disturbance in the Force when they made a newt our
most powerful legislator?)
That's why Thomas Jefferson
felt that a new open source government should be installed by its
users every generation or so.
The Über Issue
As I said last time, an ad hoc smart mob might be
reaching a critical mass around the Dean campaign. If it is, the mob's
collective sense may be that the key issue behind the movement is their new
sense of empowerment,
not the candidate or issues. That might not even bother Howard Dean. Every
leader wants to leave behind something larger than himself, and open source
democracy
sure would be it.
Make no mistake, these people love Dean
and there are many reasons why they should, the DLC and pundits notwithstanding.
Dean is smart,
human, informed and charismatic. On the main points that people like in a
president, he seems ahead of the candidates of both parties. On his campaign
blog
a while back, a worker commented that Dean had left his notes behind before
a talk, but that, "as usual, he just improved on the notes." Doh. Natural,
coherent speech seems the most presidential of traits.
As
Doc points out in his link to
my Steal this Campaign post yesterday, the candidate is just the start
of the appeal. Beyond the issues and the candidate, which are features,
lies
the
real
benefit. The Dean campaign is facilitating a different character of participation,
by entirely new people, who are not as focused on the candidate and issues
as on the process they want to establish, which looks nothing like the
process we have.
Fix it in the Mix
These new constituents are collectively buying the Dean campaign,
just as big Republican donors are buying Dubya's attention–I'll bet
Kenny Lay has already slipped a couple grand into his old buddy's pocket.
Dean
supporters, with their $112 average contribution, seem to feel
a collective
confidence
in Dean's
willingness
to
listen
to them
just as
Republican donors feel in their ability to be heard by the candidate they're
buying. Dean's indicated that we'll see a White House blog in 2005, and he's
guest hosting Larry Lessig's blog
next week. It's the transparency, stupid!
If the citizens own this candidate, and there's a
way to aggregate our collective sensibilities into a coherent expression
of policy preferences, then we should be confident we can steer the country
after buying our candidate. Amazon knows all about its users' preferences,
thanks to all those Linux boxes, why shouldn't the president we buy?
Now that's an aspiration greater than mere
presidency: "I am the preferred puppet of the American people. My job is
to understand their
collective
common
sense and make it so." If you have a puppet for president, you know you
can fix problems in post production.
Are Mobs really smart?
All my smart mob talk gives Mitch and some others the willies.
They say that if we get too confident we might fail to get Dean elected,
that elections are won in meatspace, not cyber and so we Netizens can't assume
we'll connect with actual citizens. My point is a different one. If the smart
mob reaches critical mass, it's a fundamentally different animal than the
one that currently elects governments, with radically different capabilities.
Its effect on party machines and mechanics would be like the effect of P2P
networks on the music biz. And it's all about meatspace, not segregated from
it.
I went to a Dean Meetup 10 days ago and wrote 3 letters to
Iowa Democrats. So did about 20,000 other people. I've never written a campaign
letter in my life nor had anyone around me. It gets no meatier than that. This
was an example of the effect of the civic level
of cyberspace that Jim Moore described on
the eve of of Dean's Super Monday:
So the four levels are the infrastructure (e.g. telcos),
the service (ISPs, services, operating systems), the application (browsers,
blogs, RSS and other standards) and the civic level (online communities,
networks of bloggers, wired enterprises, etc.).
Based on a series of digital messages, 60,000 people have
registered to go to Meetups and do things like write letters with real ink
on real paper. The experts who specialize in managing the torrent of money
flowing into candidate's coffers every other year don't like this formula
which is more complicated than buying attack ads on TV. Because it's human.
Let's try a viral mob-forming experiment. I'm dropping
this in the meme pool to see what happens. I know people who can build this
function overnight:
As the salesman says, "Sign here, press hard, third copy
is yours."
Next Problem?
Contract with
America*
1994
An Example of Memory Leak in Partisan Politics
As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and
as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies,
but even
more
important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected
representatives.
That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing,
we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment
with no fine print.
This year's election offers the chance, after four
decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that
will transform the way
Congress works.
That historic change would be the end of government that is too big,
too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money. It can be the beginning
of a Congress
that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.
Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to
act "with
firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore
accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To
make us all proud
again of the way free people govern themselves.
On the first day of
the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority will immediately pass
the following major reforms, aimed at restoring
the
faith and trust of
the American people in their government:
FIRST, require all laws
that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive
audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff
by one-third;
FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs;
FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public;
SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by
implementing zero base-line budgeting.
Thereafter, within the first
100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following
bills, each to be
given full
and open
debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be
immediately available
this day for public inspection and scrutiny.
- THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
ACT
A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative
line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control
Congress,
requiring them
to live under the same budget constraints as families and
businesses.
- THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT
An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, "good faith" exclusionary
rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending
from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison
construction and additional law enforcement to keep people
secure in their neighborhoods and
kids safe
in their schools.
- THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT
Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting
welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC
for additional
children while
on welfare,
cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough
two-years-and-out provision with work requirements
to promote individual responsibility.
- THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT
Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption,
strengthening rights of parents in their children's
education, stronger child
pornography laws,
and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce
the central role of families in American society.
- THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT
A $500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the
marriage tax penalty, and creation of American
Dream Savings
Accounts to
provide middle
class tax relief.
- THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION
ACT
No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration
of the essential parts of our national security
funding to strengthen our national
defense and
maintain
our credibility around the world.
- THE SENIOR
CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT
Raise the Social Security earnings limit which
currently forces seniors out of the work force,
repeal the
1993 tax hikes on
Social Security
benefits and
provide tax incentives for private long-term
care insurance to let Older Americans keep
more of what
they have
earned over the
years.
- THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT
ACT
Small business incentives, capital gains cut
and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk
assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening
the Regulatory
Flexibility
Act and unfunded mandate reform to create
jobs and raise worker wages.
- THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT
"Loser pays" laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform
of product liability laws to stem the endless
tide of litigation.
- THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT
A first-ever vote on term limits
to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.
Further, we will instruct the House Budget Committee to report
to the floor and we will work to enact additional budget
savings, beyond
the
budget
cuts specifically included in the legislation described
above, to ensure that the
Federal budget deficit will be less than it would have
been without the enactment of these bills.
Respecting the judgment of our
fellow citizens as we seek
their mandate for reform, we hereby pledge our names
to this Contract
with America.
11:49:23 AM 
|
|
