RE: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet
Among the questions Nettime folks might consider: where will the radical left come in, or down, on all this? The question that keeps coming up in my mind is Suppose Howard Dean does succeed in becoming the next President of the United States, then what will happen to the broad-based net-savvy network that his campaign created? A non-traditional reform-oriented campaign can acquire a certain buzz and energy when it lies outside the mainstream, is not too interlinked with the conventional structures of power and governance, and particularly when it can be placed in opposition to the current power structure which can be critiqued as elitist and without sufficient respect for ethics and human rights. But what would happen if Dean were to become the epicentre of the establishment? Is it possible that the network that has been created can be misused to become an instrument of propaganda and indoctrination? Should the members of the network think of the possibility that their allegiance is really to a reform-oriented concept of open source intelligence, rather than to a single political personality? Is it possible that left leaning reform works better (or perhaps only works) when it is outside the establishment? In a book he wrote some years ago Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda, David Korten traces the emergence of four generations of voluntary action, personified in NGOs. The first generation was oriented purely towards charity. Realising that this merely created relationships of dependence, a second generation started looking toward empowerment. However empowerment based purely on local practice ran up quickly against bottlenecks and a third generation emerged which had acquired the ability to critique and construct policy. Korten placed his hope on a fourth generation which was beginning to emerge at the end of the 20th century - whose new strength was based on its ability to network. But we also see a fifth generation emerging which is undoing the achievements of the earlier progression - the NGO as contractor. With current philosophy of governance incorporating notions of downsizing, outsourcing and privatisation a new scope emerged where NGOs found an ability to work unhindered in their area of core competence. But this has raised serious concerns about NGOs being co-opted into the systems of power. It has been felt that their traditional dynamism came when they lay outside the establishment with an eye towards gaps in the system, towards critique and repair. Perhaps the future lies in merging two trends - the 3rd and 4th generation NGOs that Korten identifies with the lessons that could be learned from projects such as the Dean campaign. Should we ask whether research in political philosophy should shift its underpinnings in academia and empiricism and move to an evolutionary approach with its foundations in open source intelligence. Prem Chandavarkar # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet
I'd hate Dean's supporters to confuse his popularity with internet-literate voters with that of voters at large. If Dean is doing well by traditional metrics--Gallup or Harris poll figures and amount of money raised--then the buzz is warranted. As well, Iowa and New Hampshire will provide a reality check. Remember the 1936 polling debacle . The Literary Digest, which had correctly predicted outcomes from 1916 to 1932, failed spectacularly in 1936 when it backed Alf Landon against Franklin Roosevelt. Up-and-coming pollster George Gallup predicted not only Roosevelts's win over Landon, but he also predicted FDR's margin AND he predicted The Literary Digest's prediction. Gallup's method of statistical sampling beat the LD's method of mailing ever larger numbers of postcards to people whose names they'd gotten from telephone books and state auto registration records: http://www3.uakron.edu/schlcomm/Caplan/stderr/stderr.html The Literary Digest's sample was skewed heavily toward the relatively well-off, who tended to vote Republican or at least conservatively. 1936, in the Depression, this group was in a majority. Today, the economy is sluggish, and people who care about the internet are in a minority. (Also, don't get too confident in early numbers. In 1948, the pollsters stopped polling a month before the election, and gave Dewey a narrow lead over Truman. Oops.) Carl -- Games are very educational. Scrabble teaches us vocabulary, Monopoly teaches us cash-flow management, and DD teaches us to loot the bodies. -- Steve Jackson # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet [Holmes, Miller, Chandavarkar]
Re: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet Brian Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet E. Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] RE: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet Prem Chandavarkar [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 21:37:16 +0100 From: Brian Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet I find both Michael's observation and Mitch's grain of salt very interesting. I have been wondering for some time how the constituency of the Clintonian New Economy would mount its counterattack. Computer communications technology clearly had to be at the center of it. Well, the Dean campaign is it - the Times article that Michael links to makes that obvious. There we learn that none other than Rheingold is a Dean consultant - a Howard for Howard, as it were. (In fact the article itself is a journalistic artefact that could only emerge from 1990s USA: at one point it depicts the Dean campaign as something like a Grateful Dead concert, where people travel 400 miles not to see a presidential candidate but to see each other: Like, man, wow, good to see you're still part of the campaign, man!). That all this should be neither or a bed of roses or what we could expect from a radically democratic development of the Internet merely stands to reason. The New Economy depended on a meeting of two cultures. One was the emergent elite of flexible accumulation, which lived by the ever-fluctuating rules that Paolo Virno diagnosed in 1980s Italy: opportunism, cynicism and fear (that great text is in the Radical Thought in Italy book). Clinton-Rubin (because these are the two men who shaped the 90s in the USA) represented the attempt to impose those rules on a world scale, the scale of financial globalization. The other culture was the far more utopian and uniquely uncritical breed of individual that could only (re)emerge in places like California, where the livin' is easy. In Europe we knew them through Wired, but maybe you have to live there to know how strangely deep - and how absurdly shallow - their relation to the political countercultures of the 60s really is. As the Democratic heavy-hitters are gradually forced to recognize Dean, we can expect the class composition of the campaign to increasingly reflect this obscure marriage of fundamentally opposed dispositions. There is a difference, though, from the New Economy days: the techies and deadheads who spontaneously cheered at the moment of Seattle have now had the chance to see what imperialism really is when the gloves come off, and what down-home protofascism looks like too. And they've had some catatonic time to think about it. Expect San Francisco - the San Francisco of the antiwar protests - to make another contribution to national culture again, very soon. Since you all want predictions I'll make the obvious one: everything depends on what happens in Baghdad. When the neoconservatives first took stock of the popularity Dean had gained on the antiwar stump, they were supremely confident: That's the man for us, they said. Because nobody can win a presidential election on an unpatriotic platform, when our boys are at risk. Now everything depends, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck figured out long ago, on the public's evaluation of where the risk lies, what its causes are, how it's likely to evolve in the near future. The real struggle is there: in the definition of the risks. And in the media used to define them. But the right have their blogs too. best, Brian -- Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:39:21 -0800 From: E. Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet The interesting thing about the Dean Internet initiatives is that they really do get what appeals to young people about the 'net and the blogosphere in particular. There's a degree of reciprocity in these nascent systems, whether its the blogosphere or a political campaign; a flattening of hierarchy, a petri dish of ideas, a sense of we're all in this together that is reflected in Dean's You have the power! tagline. It appeals to young techno-libertarians who are jaded about advertising and messages but are still idealistic about new communicative mediums changing society...that is, as long as you define 'society' as upper-middle-class technically literate culturally homogeneous people with college degrees. The hierarchical communicative nature of the current administration as well as the other campaigns (Here's our message. Eat it.) irks young netizens just as they were irked by the hierarchical administrative nature of traditional businesses. Now whether or not this new model is congruent with the human
nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet
Nettimers: Howard Dean , by the current looks of things, has done something amazing in American political history . Without being President or Vice President he apparently has sewn up a major-party nomination before the start of the election year. Things could come unglued, and part of the earliness of his success may simply result from campaigning starting earlier and earlier in successive election cycles. Still, considering Dean's having come out of nowhere (well, Vermont) much of his success seems to be based on his highly sophisticated use of the Internet: as an organizing tool; for building support; as an extremely successful means of fundraising; and to hold his supporters together. Further, as the New York Times Magazine ( http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/magazine/07DEAN.html ) points out, his campaign has a sort of technological coordinator who has volunteers writing new kinds of software for new modes of Internet connection. This has apparently helped him develop a far more flexible, complete and complex organization in early primary states than any predecessor or competitor. For non-Americans, I should add that the primary system as it now exists is extremely weird, unrepresentative, and dominated by a handful of small states. It is generally thought that if one candidate wins both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, this candidate is essentially guaranteed nomination. However, a front-runner who somehow does not do as well as expected, especially in New Hampshire, can sometimes be viewed as the loser even if actually ahead in the vote there. The guess is though that Dean's support is so much stronger and deeper in both places than anyone else's that such a turn around is quite unlikely. He also seems to be ahead among Democrats in South Carolina, even topping the charismatic Senator Edwards from neighboring North Carolina. I bring all this up in the hopes that nettimers will discuss this model of politics via the Internet and what it might portend/teach. -- Best, Michael Michael H. Goldhaber # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime The Dean campaign and the Internet
Michael H. Goldhaber has this to say concerning Dean and the Internet I bring all this up in the hopes that nettimers will discuss this model of politics via the Internet and what it might portend/teach. What is really astonishing is how much money the Dean has raised over the Web. However, I still have yet to receive anything via the Internet asking for a donation, and I'm on a million mailers. What also amazes me is that Dean is no better a public speaker than Bush, yet he remains the Democratic front-runner. I would just hate to see the Internet create the same political environment as television advertising - It reaches out to groups who are more or less uninformed of the issues and vulnerable at every turn. Mitch Pellecchia FusedOnline.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
