Matt Bai's article on YearlyKos [1], Can Bloggers Get Real?, has some on the lefty blogosphere atwitter.
Susie Madrak [2], Jeralynn Merritt [3] commented favorably about it; but it's comments by bloggers not affiliated with DailyKos like George Nemeth [4] and Jill Miller Zimon [5] that I find particularly important. Especially when read before Barbara O'Brien's reality check [6]. I also liked that John Holbo picked on the same quote as I did [7] but for purely onotological reasons.
The quote in question follows :
The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm.
The way I read it, Bai can't make up his mind about this thing he calls these netroots and speaks in forked tongues as a man who is getting paid to be a double agent. He's going in as both an invited speaker and paid representative of the enemy.
The enemy being that fourth branch of government we call mass media.
Barbara nailed this perfectly when she wrote, via The Mahablog � Getting Real [8]
Sure there is still plenty of politicking going on in banquet halls and airport hangars. But these days most politics happens in media, not in the flesh. And the biggest part of that media is electronic --television and radio-- with political hacks and professional insiders serving as the self-appointed proxies of We, the People.
In the mass media age political discourse devolved into something like puppet theater. We turn on the little puppet theater box in our living rooms and watch representative partisans bash each other like Punch and Judy. And we know their strings are being pulled by more powerful forces hidden behind the scenery. The performance may be entertaining, but the audience can only watch, passively. The audience has no part in the script.
Exactly how is that more "real" than the Internet?
Which is why I have my qualms about the DailyKos crowd of readers and satellite blogs [9]. They are a phenomenon that, just as Betamax [10], floppy disks [11], Netscape [12], Napster [13], Silicon Alley Reporter [14] and Suck.com [15] --to name a few disruptive innovations--, are bound to bring earth-quaking change at the risk of being swallowed whole by the very establishment they seek to change ... and not before burning out by their own hubris.
It's the curse of the "first one out".
I read about this curse on a Wired article about Microsoft [16]; which I am sure Steve Ballmer and Billy himself must have read over and over again since today they cannot get enough of that thing called the internets(tm).
"When you're the first one out there and you're ubiquitous - especially in an industry that involves networks - people inevitably will start talking about antitrust. The first and biggest company is the one in the bull's-eye."
- Peter Huber, Manhattan Institute
When I read the New York Times article, I thought about how for the political establishment YearlyKos, is in a way an "anti-trust" move. Ironic, yes, given the convention is meant to be another step into building trust and cooperation among the netroots. But journalists in particular cannot help but secretely wish the days of net neutrality were over so someone, either the government or free-market, would get those pesky wannabe fifth estaters out of their way.
So, if you read the article closely you can see that Bai points at how, to politicians and mass media journalists like him, YearlyKos is an "anti-trust" move away from the power of the internet. With YearlyKos, DailyKos ceases to be the outsider. It's become one of them and, seemingly with them, all of the political blogosphere ceases to pose a threat by this analog kiss and make-up party in Las Vegas.
That's why I consider Bai's article not only written in forked tongues but a cautionary tale coming from a piper for the paper of record.
All of this suggests that for all the philosophizing about the meaning of online campaigns and the passing of the 20th-century political model, this next iteration of American politics won't really look so dissimilar from the ones that came before. Just as the liberal social activists of the first television generation overthrew the urban bosses who had ruled the Democratic Party, so, too, the Gina Coopers of the world, a decade from now, may very well be running for Congress, managing campaigns and lobbying for legislation. This is as it should be. Technologies change and movements flourish, but the essential process of American politics endures. And those who lead the most consequential revolts against the status quo never really vanquish the party's insider establishment. They simply take its place.
Why would he want a 36-year-old Memphis native named Gina Cooper, who until recently taught high-school math and science, reinventing herself as the directrix of the first convetion of We The People media in the country? Why would Matt Bai care for the political disruption of a 36 year-old Latino-Greek-American who has been reinvented on the web as one of the most important political writers in the country? [16]
Bai, as a good representative of mass media, is really hoping the DailyKos crowd to bow to the status quo and just join their omerta. He's just joping they serve the same shit. He's just expecting them to serve it with a more home-made kind of dressing.
To wish to become part of the mainstream of politics is to obviously have no comprehension of what the power of networks can afford. Are blogs then are just an electronic version of paper, nothing more and nothing less? What's worse? To look at politics conventionally with bleeding edge technology is to miss completely the way in which every single aspect of humanity is being changed by digital and networked technologies.
Digital media is radically transforming democracy and capitalism by taking personal autonomy and augmenting it through larger power meshes the largest being the internet. It's what James Surowiecki calls "The Wisdom of Crowds". And it's what's changing every single aspect of our culture [17]; from the way we mate to the way we die.
The CIA, NSA and FBI now this. So do Microsoft, VeriSign, RIAA, Monsanto and others. There is power in databases and so in digital identities. There is power in participatory media and open-source systems.
The problem with these new wells of power is that they are hard to exploit through scarcity. You can't just easily limit access to them and hence weild the kind of political and financial gain military-industrial complex [18] has been able to do since well before Eisenhower [19] coined the term. If it weren't difficult to limit, we would not have software encryption systems or digital restriction technolgies or internet and wiretapping infrastructures being pushed everyday upon us.
Which is why I keep telling fellow bloggers : Technologically speaking, this is just the beginning.
For true democratic change we need to have systems in place that amplify each voice while aggregating each and every one of them into the collective well of the movement. In the progressive blogosphere we have nothing like that at the moment. We're running right now solely on the grace of a fre popular blogs; not on the power of net-wide networking.
If I were wrong, a new wave of Chuck Pennacchios [20] and Matt Browns [21] and Paul Hacketts [22] would have been washing over Washington in November. The truth is, they are not. We were not successful at putting candidates out because we have yet to find effective ways at using our networks to get people elected. It makes me want to scream:
It's the databases, stupid!
The Republicans now it. That's why the spend millions mining data on 168+ million people. They're voters vault [23] is legendary.
Bloggers have databases too. We have millions of blogs waiting to be networked and tended to as a garden for this new digital ecology. New ecologies bring social, politica, but more importantly economic change. We have yet to tap into that.
There is a lot of work to do and YearlyKos may become the launch pad for some of that heavy lifting. Honestly though, developing technology for the kind of networking that needs to be done takes time and money --and in the political blogosphere we have not been good at putting money into our technologies.
I disagree with Bai --there is so much that has not been tapped technologically speaking. The net is uncharted territory where anything is possible.
It is actually not a bad thing that people can reinvent themselves on the web through blogs the way they do so on Second Life because it proves my point.
We have not even scratched the surface in how whole progressive communities, needless to say worlds.
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