Slashdot Mirror
The Coming Digital Presidency
Ranjit Mathoda writes "Marc Andreeson, the cofounder of Netscape, met Senator Barack Obama in early 2007. Mr. Andreeson recalls, "In particular, the Senator was personally interested in the rise of social networking, Facebook, Youtube, and user-generated content, and casually but persistently grilled us on what we thought the next generation of social media would be and how social networking might affect politics — with no staff present, no prepared materials, no notes. He already knew a fair amount about the topic but was very curious to actually learn more." As a social organizer and a lover of new technologies, Mr. Obama could be expected to make good use of such tools in getting elected, and he has done so. What may not be as obvious is that Mr. Obama appears to have a keen interest in using such technologies in the act of governing. And whether Mr. Obama becomes president, or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain do, these new tools have the potential to transform how government operates."
A bit presumptuous to assume that, with Democrats fighting like cats and dogs among themselves now, the "Coming Digital Presidency" won't actually feature a 72-year-old man who probably thinks YouTube is a new type of waterpark ride.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I really like the idea of a presidential candidate who is interested in technology and bright enough to find ways to apply it to reaching a goal. On the other hand, I really don't like the idea of whitehouse.gov becoming a government-run myspace which encourages people to give the government even more personal information about themselves. I guess my problem is that I find this an appealing characteristic in a candidate, but a scary characteristic in a President. How inconvenient.
A nice idea but to stop the inevitable trolling you're going to need some decent moderation. But then you'll probably get risk averse moderators taking down potentially inflammatory comments who will then be criticized for stifling free speech. And then when the people who might want to join in hear that free speech is being stifled over at opengov.com they'll come to /., and similar sites, in their hoards to moan about how repressive their government has become. Flame wars will be inevitable. /. will seize up, I'll have to go back to work. It's just another no-win situation.
I find the entire idea of creating a wired democracy to be revolting. The best government is seen in its effects and not heard. I don't want to think about government or politics in my day to day existence and would much rather just have the professionals that I elect get on with the business of governing competently. I don't want big crusades - I've had enough crusades with Bush. When I elect a President and a Congress, I don't want them asking me my opinion every 30 seconds. I want to know that they thought through the issues and made the best decisions they could, kept the army in powder, the navy afloat, the planes in the air, the satellites working, the bridges up and the roads in good repair. If it turns out that they do something that I politically don't agree with, I can -actually live with that-, so long as they bring a general air of competence to the table.
This is my sig.
That isnt that bad of an idea...
We have unfair representation when compared to prior representative-"voting citizen" ratio of our countrys past.
One way to fix that would be to have 5000 congressmen. But that would cost too much! That is, if we force them to be in House/Senate. Our technology could easily get each and every congresscritter a t-1 to their house and have net-voting. GPG is the PKI that's free to use, therefore congresscritters could post messages with GPG, and conduct publically accountable voting. Aww, no more voice votes.
Since voting could be done from any congresscritter T-1 (ip checks would not allow GPG signed messages from other IPs), it would also allow collaboration if they choose to meet.
And doing this method would eliminate a "central" point of government. I say that cause Washington DC would be easy to bomb, either by air or sea. It's pretty darn close to the shore. How would you disable a government that meets virtually across the whole USA? We in the tech community would agree that eliminating a SPOF would be a good idea.
Unfortunately, whenever politicians start talking about "the will of the people" (see 2000,2002,2004,2006 election results) thats a sign we're moving away from a Republic. When candidates want 51% of the country to rule over the 49% thats a sign we're moving from a Republic to a demagogy. That's what scares me the most about the Obama/Edwards populism is that they are trying to use the power of the mob to gain power. The one thing that makes me fear the end of American dominance is the rise of a demagogue, and the attitude that we can't move forward until everyone else catches up. The one example I can really think of for this is that Obama wants to "delay" the manned spaceflight plans by 5 years in order to increase funding to education. To me that's no better than Caesar buying bread for all the paupers in Rome.
That is not at question however - these technologies are a low-level protocol which will require some higher-level (as of yet undeveloped?) protocol to become meaningful and coherent.
are we perhaps seeing an organized campaign(s) manipulating Web 2.0 sites for their own purposes? With anonymity of site users, who can tell? It's a good argument against trusting anonymous sources, but even Wikipedia with Wikiscanner allows a certain amount of accountability. The problem appears to be tracing back rumour/FUD/misinformation to its source and a relatively (more objective than subjective) trustworthy mechanism to evaluate sources over time. Social Media sites dramatically lower the costs of individual citizens involvement in the political process. That's a Good Thing. Yet if we don't anticipate and accept the manipulation of those sites by external agencies and those with far too much time on their hands, we're bloody damn fools. Agreed - social networking is still pretty darn young as a technology concept though, I predict that by the end of this year we'll start seeing more ways in which we can detect and thwart the devious plot of Company X, Campaign Y or Astroturf Org Z. FWIW, I'm working on one now, and I don't expect that I'm alone.- After the President signs a bill, it is sent to the polls once a year to be voted on by the people. Any bill not recieving 50% of the popular vote will not become law.
- All laws expire ten years after enactment, but can be reenacted if resubmitted and voted on by Congress, signed by the President, and voted up by the people.
We have way too many laws.The idea of using Facebook, MySpace, and Digg as instruments of government is, in some ways, breathtakingly foolish
In some ways?
The anonymity of the Internet, combined with the speed of activity on the Web, seems to lead in many cases to an amplification of our baser instincts
What do you mean "our?" There always have been idiots, always will be. What about the anonymity of the ballot?
Do we want our political leaders receiving input from commercial Web sites, with no means of identifying who or what is promoting certain causes?
Do we want our political leaders receiving input from foreign and domestically owned commercial corporations, with no meaningful input from the citizenry? That's what we have now.
Debates on sites such as Daily Kos revert on a daily base to name calling, ad hominen attacks, and sheer bloody-mindedness
Sounds like Congress.
And you mention diaries? How about journals? Am I the guy you're warning me about?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I know a guy that old.
He was the first to set up a punch-card system for what was new to them: computing.
Oh yeah. They're old so they cant figure out a User Interface. meh.
don't claim "moral" superiority. I claim intellectual superiority, and whatever kind of superiority honesty gives me. You can claim only the lies and hypocrisy that Republicans earn with your projections of all your own worst fears about your own major malfunctions onto the people who care to tell the truth about you, who try to stop the damage you've unloaded that everyone can see is destroying everything you touch.
You don't have either. You are not intellectually better, and you are not honest with yourself.
But par for the course to hear some kind of contrived argument that it's "divisive" for judging people like you whose unregulated guns and trucks are actually killing people every day, and even threatening our entire civilization.
Guns don't kill people. People do. And you are divisive.
And no one but the 25% who still think Bush is god believes you. Zero tolerance for you faithy, crooked Republicans.
See, now that's divisive, because, about 35% of the people still approve of Bush. So, you can't claim zero tolerance for 35% of society, and not call yourself divisive. You just divided society! And then, there are a lot of people who believe in owning firearms as a fundamental human right. There are a lot of people that drive trucks responsibly. Now, you go and divide them too. See, you just keep dividing away, ever blissfully ignorant that your own totalitarian impulses are what is really dividing the country. Me, I just want low taxes and to keep my guns and my truck, but you, you attack me. And yet, I'm divisive for not wanting to change my life for your damaged view of the world. Why, didn't you already say you were a poor, abused victim of the evil corporations? Joining you would be the same as trying to team up with a kicked dog. You need, help, my poor victimized, disenfranchised friend, not political power. Best to leave the country to us, since you can't even pay your mortgage.
This is my sig.
My initial thought (however cynical it may come across?) is: Is this really just another plea of "Hey general public, I'm Obama and unlike the other candidates, I'm hip and in-touch with the current generation! Vote for me!" ?
If you're wondering whether Obama's enthusiasm for the Internet and technology goes beyond "hip and in touch", you might consult Lawrence Lessig's endorsement of him. And after reading Obama's tech paper, I can't say I think any other candidate's compares even in showing awareness of issues.
That said, the fact that I see the net strongly leveraged elsewhere -- including Paul's rather impressive campaign -- makes me *less* jaded about the increasing use of social networking. Nor do I think it's really surprising or affected: to some extent, all politics is (among other things) organizing. Real-world social networks were a huge part of politics before social networks came to the web, it's a completely natural fit now that's here. So to one degree or another, *everybody* is using it. I think part of the reason Paul stands out in his use is his unfortunate and somewhat unfair uphill battle in traditional media -- he really didn't have anywhere else to go.
Now, I'd agree it sometimes seems Obama is using this tool more heavily and talking more about his use of tools than anyone else in the field other than Paul. But I think to the extent that's true, it's largely because up until the last 4 years of his political career, organizing has been a big part of what he does -- his start, for goodness sake, was as a community organizer. It really does appear he has a philosophy that includes bottom-up organization as a component of well-balanced politics. And what the social networking tools do that's new to politics is increase the reach and efficiency of that kind of organizing. They only marginally bolster the traditional political networks, but they're a huge boost at the grassroots level, especially the more you know about grassroots organizing.
I also would agree that not all candidates are created equal on the tech-friendly front, however. In particular, McCain has some issues with not fighting the internet, and while Clinton might have some good progressive impulses regarding it, I don't trust her not to throw it under a bus if some other "expediency" arises.
So while I'm sometimes a bit disappointed we didn't get a race like Obama vs Paul -- one that I think would have essentially signaled a real end to business as usual and a significant shift to digital politics -- I still think Obama stands out as an evolutionary step in the right direction, if not the Paul revolution.
One other thing about a part of the premise of the post ("Hey general public, I'm Obama and unlike the other candidates, I'm hip and in-touch with the current generation! Vote for me!"). This isn't necessarily directed at the poster I'm responding to, but I'm noticing a high degree of frequency in attacks on Obama that are essentially "Sure he SEEMS great, but SEEMING isn't the same things as BEING great and we just don't know what's REALLY behind HIM!" To some extent, I don't blame people for thinking this way. We've been let down pretty severely by quite a bit of our political leadership recently. And it's hard to really know whether what you know about a candidate is image or fact.
But I also think the time for this kind of talk about Obama is past. He's been in the spotlight for a while, there's plenty of material available about him and written by him to get genuinely familiar with the substance of his history and positions. I don't have a problem with people arguing about what they don't like about Obama's stated policies, or a vote he made in the past. But at this point, anybody bringing up this kind of "we don't KNOW" or "he's all STYLE and TALK" rehtoric isn't bringing up an insightful point, they're showing their own need to do homework. Or, in some cases, acting with ulterior motives.
Tweet, tweet.