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Is The Net About to Transform Politics?
It's not going to happen. Washington is the last holdout against the wall-busting power of the Net. They'll go kicking and screaming, but not next year.
The pundits are already hyping the 2000 Presidential election as the year in which the Net transforms mainstream politics.
The Internet, USA Today reported last week, "is a new wave in politics, one that could rival or surpass the impact of TV's."
Gushes Newsweek in a cover report on how the Internet is changing America: "E-campaigning has been upgraded from novelty to necessity in the blink of an eye. Candidates must now compete in the wilds of the Web, a world with its own rules, politics and governing may never be the same."
It sounds breathtakingly significant.
But don't buy it.
The pundits are wrong, especially when it comes to the 2000 election.
They ought to be right. Everything - the people, the technology, the timing - is in place for that Net tidal wave, except for one seminal ingredient: politicians.
Savvy political figures from Kennedy to Reagan to Clinton have always understood that technologies like television, radio and the Net are a powerful new way to communicate their philosophies. Reagan's "Morning In America" campaign was perhaps the best recent use of TV to evoke a successful political ideology.
Reagan, a professional actor, didn't really need to understand the details of politics or government, and never did. What he did understand was TV, which enabled him to reach a vast audience with a powerful philosophy.
In order for the Net to do the same thing, a national politician would have to emerge who really understands the Net in the way Reagan grasped visual imagery. There is no such person running for President of the United States.
Here, George W. Bush's decision to put his list of campaign contributors online is considered a monumental hi-tech political step, sending the Washington pols and their co-dependent reporters into a frenzy. But the information, which was already available to the public, doesn't alter the political system.
Al Gore would like to be Father of the Net, but he's had as much trouble capturing the imagination of the wired world as the other one. Elizabeth Dole is too busy campaigning against pornography on the Internet to notice she's by-passing the biggest untapped political constituency of our time.
John McCain has a savvier grasp of telecommunications issues than most other national politicians, but he's hardly an interactive political figure. Steve Forbes campaign promised to conduct the "first Internet-based campaign" in American history. But vast databases aren't a transforming digital political idea, and Forbes himself has hardly set American imaginations aflame, online or off.
Gore, Steve Forbes, McCain, Dan Quayle and others have already held moderated chats on outside sites such as washingtonpost.com and CNN. Dole's campaign, says she plans on participating in online chats starting this fall. None of these "chats" have made any news, sparked any political discussions, or had any impact on politics or individual campaigns. In the fact, the very notion of a single politician "chatting" with the tens of millions of people online manages to trivialize both the Net and the political system at the same time.
There's probably never been a meaningful live political chat in the history of the Internet. The very form makes the idea ridiculous.
Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura used his pioneering website jesse.net to raise money and round up volunteers, making a successful end-run around well-funded opponents. But Ventura isn't likely to leap to higher office, with or without the Net.
Some people are experimenting with political uses of the Net. Last year, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, husband-and-wife software developers in Silicon Valley, threw up a website - moveon.org -- to protest the Clinton impeachment. Within days generated a half-million electronic petititon signatures that threatened to clog the servers on Capitol Hill. But they didn't slow or stop the impeachment process.
The Democracy Online Project studied 161 Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns last year and found that 84 per cent of employed some form of online politicking. Seventy-six percent used websites to recruit volunteers, and 63 per cent were at least somewhat effective in persuading visitors to vote for the candidates.
Most of these campaigns raised some money online. Given the growth of computers, drooling political consultants believe the 2000 election will see the first significant contributions through computer links. John Phillips, president of the political fund-raising software company Aristotle, estimates that more than $25 million will be raised via the Internet by Election Day. But even if that occurs, it's a drop in the anticipated $600 million Election Year 2000 bucket.
As of September, Democratic contender Bill Bradley had raised only $330,000 of his $12 million presidential war chest online, and most of Bush's and Gore's campaign cash has come through the usual fund-raisers, committees and distinctly low-tech checks.
It makes sense that more and more money would be donated digitally, since more and more voters are going online. But transferring money on the Net isn't the same thing as transforming politics.
Some political and journalistic seers believe the first demonstration of Net power will erupt spontaneously: somebody will give a dazzling speech or perform brilliantly in a debate; voters, increasingly at ease rushing using their browsers for online financial transactions, will donate tens of millions of dollars through political websites overnight, and wake up snoozing Washington.
My own notion is that this may happen outside the context of a formal or traditional campaign, as with Ventura. The first Net candidate will almost certainly be young, someone who's grown up using computers and browsing the Web.
Most Washington politicians and the reporters who cover them are too mired in their incestuous talk show-dinner party, spin-the-news atmosphere to get what the Net is about or figure out how to use it politically.
Some of this is institutional constipation. All during the Monica Lewinsky drama, the U.S. Congress revealed itself as a remote, antideluvian institution unable to read the mood of the American public or respond rationally to it.
Part is journalism's continuing struggle to come to terms with the Digital Age. For many political writers, the Net is a nightmare, since it will inevitably erode their monopoly on communicating directly with politicians, and presenting politics to the rest of the country.
It's no accident that Ventura came from about as far outside Washington as you can get - Midwestern local government and pro wrestling.
Washington's political and journalistic elites are so disconnected from most Americans that any politician who goes online - even an ex-wrestler with a confusing political agenda - automatically becomes a charismatic populist.
But when some future Net-savvy politician does figure out how to use the World Wide Web, he or she will come nose-to-nose with the powerful ethos of interactivity -- and politics will finally be reborn. The most likely time for this to happen: the 2002 congressional elections, well away from Washington, national political reporters, or political conventions and primaries.
American-style democracy dates to an era when most voters never got to lay eyes on their elected officials, let alone participate in civic information-gathering and decision-making. Washington was constructed to do the talking and voting on behalf of constituents unable to join. Technology, especially computer technology, has completely transformed that reality as Wall Street, among others, is rapidly learning.
Voters can connect instantly with their government representatives, gather information, register opinions. Just as wired Americans are re-shaping financial markets, the music industry and retailing, they will inevitably get around to beating down the walls around Washington with their keyboards, and ASDL lines.
Washington may well be the last holdout. The music industry, banking, education, science, medicine and entertainment are all reeling - and changing -- as Internet-driven interactivity threatens their primacy and their profit margins.
How would a pol take advantage of the Internet?
Politicians need to understand the particular characteristics of the young, educated, technologically-centered people working, playing and communicating through networked computers.
In l997, Wired magazine and Merrill Lynch jointly conducted a Digital Citizen survey to discover distinct political values emerging from the online world.
The survey found that wired Americans - people who use computers to access the Net and the Web regularly -- were different from the non-Wired, often in ways that contradicted conventional wisdom.
They tend, for instance, to be enthusiastic and optimistic about democracy. Perhaps because they benefit from it, they love the free market system. They resist labels like "Republican" and "Democrat" or "liberal" and "conservative;" they regard issues one by one, rather than invoking ideological affiliation.
Smart and intensely communicative, they share pop culture as a common passion - they love movies, technology, TV and music in particular -- and are more likely to be talking about the weekend box office grosses at the water cooler on Monday than about anything they saw on "Meet The Press." But they're suspicious of conventional media, with little patience for the self-righteous moral policing or politics-as-wrestling presented on Washington talk shows.
A Net-savvy politician would trumpet the Net as a boon to research, a liberator of information, a spur to community building and new forms of communications.
He or she would bang the drums about preserving freedom online, jump into the ferocious battle over encryption, confront the growing power of the megacorporations flooding the Net, and advocate a competitive business environment where entrepeneurs can also flourish. He might embrace the techno-idealism of online political movements like open source and free software.
He might push for some national discussion of issues raised by supercomputing, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, technologically driven advances with enormous social and cultural implications, good and bad.
The Net pol might favor the equitable distribution of technology, so that America won't split (as it already has) into techno-haves and have nots.
A Net pol would leave moral posturing to preachers, parents and individual families. Enough of laws forbidding indecent language, unworkable and chaotic ratings systems, or copies of the Ten Commandments posted in schools as solutions to complex social programs. The Net is in its second generation, and it would be nice if politicians were as mature.
A Net campaigner needs some smart geeks high up in his campaign as well as slick pollsters. And this is important: he would have to be interactive, rather than pretending to be. Bush made a lot of noise in September by announcing that he'd list every campaign contribution received on his new website (www.georgebush.com), but he's about as interactive as a concrete piling.
Interactivity is a political, not a technological idea. It means sharing, not giving up, power. The Net candidate would not simply go on live "chats" but engage in some running online conversations, browsing the Web, e-mailing voters, downloading files, trawling through ICQ chat message boards where harried homemakers post messages while the kids nap, and teens go looking for MP3's.
Over time, this kind of interaction is transformative, to journalists as well as politicians. Different points-of-view seep into one's consciousness. Isolation and disconnection are tough to maintain. An interactive politician would have known from the first the public wasn't going to go for Bill Clinton's impeachment, no matter what Kenneth Starr found or did.
The candidate of the Net would re-engineer the political website -- from a static advertising and fund-raising vehicle peddling buttons and stickers to a genuinely democratic forum that uses digital technologies to amass continuously - updated information on what citizens want their leaders to address.
Entertainment and business currently top the list of sought-after content on the Net, according to Cyber Dialogue. Politicis isn't even on the list, a sharp commentary on the world's leading democracy.
At the heart of the Internet culture are the programmers, investment capitalists, designers, developers, entrepeneurs and users who comprise the core of the networked computing industry. The first politician who wins their allegiance will have enlisted the country's most powerfully-connected constituencies -and one of its most affluent and civic-minded.
Netizens believe in democracy. They believe in the future, perhaps because they are part of it. They see themselves as agents of change. They embrace the idea of using technology to identify problems and solutions.
They don't want a political system in which politicians and pundits lecture them on morality; they want a different one, marked by straight talk, an exchange of information an rationality in place of posturing, dogma, confrontation, hype and spin.
Does this sound like anyone you see popping up in primary states on the evening news?
Instead of clucking about how dangerous movies and pop culture are (Bob Dole), the Net candidate will go see them. Instead of viewing the Net warily from afar (George W.Bush), he'll be on it every day. Instead of claiming to be its founder (Al Gore), the ideal Net candidate will periodically trounce computer companies for their arrogance and greed.
Instead of spouting Millenial techno-blabber about the future (Bill Clinton), the Net candidate will be looking for concrete ways to get computers into the hands of every American kid, assuring not only equality of opportunity, but continued American dominance of the global economic boom.
This may be inevitable, but, strangely, it isn't imminent.
jon's description of a net-savvy politician is just a description of the idealised public servant; working for the good of the people. The net is irrelevant to whether a politician is good, and politicians can (as we've all seen) use the net for evil as well as good.
As for the ease with politicians dismiss electronic petitions: it takes three seconds of your life to cut'n'paste a protest email. They're also a hell of a lot easier to fake.
Surely the idea of a e-politition is somewhat absurd, given that the nature of the net is to transcend the nation state rather than promote it?
OK, a politition with enough commen sense to see thw net for what it is, and maybe even understand the problems it might hold is a nice idea, it seems unlikely to happen. After all, this is a 'semi-regulated anarchy' we're in here - or, as I've heard recently, the ultimate democracy. This seems to rule out the need for a 'Web Presedent'
Mark
I think that the Internet will transform politics. In what way exactly is hard to say, but the 'net allows people to communicate and interact in a broad basis that has never before been available. This interaction leads to new ideas and less known ideas surfacing. This can only be a positive if you believe in control from below (real democracy).
BUT, 'net connectivity is not ubiquitous. There are people all over America, in big cities and in rural towns that have never been online. They have never participated in this Great Awakening that is the Internet. Unless we can bring this collaborative and communicative spirit to people that do not currently have it (so everyone has it), we will merely replace the current political elite with the technological elite.
And since there is probably a real correlation between wealth, income and race and connectivity to the Internet, it will basically be the same people in power.
More access to more people (all access to all people?)is the only way we can solve this . . . otherwise, it's just the same old political game.
I'm not going to argue for or against what Katz wrote, but I find it hard to believe that Reagan would be the sole person responsible for any of the good things that happened during his presidential reign. There are a couple of other branches of government, after all.
~ Kish
We're already making inroads in the more flexible world of non-profits and lobbying groups. Take a look at NetCapitol. They offer a product for webmasters of interest groups to make it easy for their users to email or otherwise contact their representatives about whatever issue the lobbying group is concerned with.
Eventually, I think the net will be a strong force in American politics. We can only hope it'll be a force "by the people, for the people."
----
We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
In reality, he did have to know something about the politics. But Katz does have a point; in our governmental system, the supporting framework of advisors and other politicians is structured such that any one link without superb political knowledge can get by, even do well.
In fact, helping end the cold war could arguably be said happened because Reagan wasn't a bullshit politician, he was a bullshit actor. For any of us other than the idealists, politics is just an extension of acting anyway, and should be treated as such. Reagan could probably have talked his way out of anything.
I don't want to talk trash about Reagan; he was one of the better leaders of our time, and as you pointed out he made much progress. But this doesn't mean he had to fit the typical stereotype of the politician with so much political and economic savvy. Acting is a big part, and Presidents need to be given credit for that.
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
This is a message to Mr Katz.
Please don't feel obliged to limit your paragraphs to one or two sentences.
It breaks up the flow and makes text harder to read.
The idea with paragraphs is they hold one idea each.
So you should group sentences together in the same paragraph, if they are part of the same idea.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Thanks to TV, politics have become more about image and personality and charisma (and some people's ideas of living a "moral" life) than about any issues of substance.
Given the free flow of information on the net, and the scandal-addicted culture, I'm not so sure that having politics transformed by the Internet would be a good thing.
Of course, I could be being unnecessarily pessimistic. The more intelligent folks online tend to value substance over style. But are there enough of them to make a difference in the way this country is run?
I'm not so sure.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I don't see political sites on the net changing the outcome of a presidential race, and there are a few reasons for this.
One is the amount of people on the net. While a lot, it's not the huge amount of people with TV.
Second are the amount of people who would actually go to the site. Unfortunatly, most voters are uniformed, and vote based on party or based on what they see and hear in normal every day activites. They're not ones to seek out information to make an informed decision.
For those of us that like to be educated about politicians and are tech savvy, there's a third problem. Political sites are just fluff. How many times do we argue on Slashdot about sites that make their product out to be the second coming? (ie "Those benchmarks don't mean anything, show us some REAL benchmarks!") Obviously, political sites are going to make the politician look like a saint and make their ideas out to be the universal problem solvers. Most of us are smart enough to see through that crap.
Thus, I think the age old notion of seeing a politician in person, and seeing them debate and answer hard questions is really the best way to get your information, and then possibly go to the website to fill out the online form for a donation. It won't change politics as we know it, it'll simply be a different (albiet biased) source of information.
Posted by polar_bear:
Reagan was clueless and did nothing significant to end the "cold war" - the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of an economic system that wasn't viable. That it happened during the Bush / Reagan years is a coincidence. If I recall correctly the country was still in an economic slump when he left office, and tax cuts are nothing to brag about if you sacrifice environmental programs and social programs to do it. I'll be impressed by tax cuts when the cuts are applied to lower income brackets not higher ones. Grandpa Caligula was no prize for this country...not that any president in recent history has been...but Reagan was only popular because he was affable and telegenic. It was comforting (if you turned off your brain) to see Reagan on TV because he had a great personal presence. He was also frequently inaccurate in public statements, presided over one of the most corrupt administrations ever, and was basically a puppet of his administration.
Just my 2 cents...
I think this was a very insightful article, however I think Jon missed the REAL reason that the net won't begin to truly change politics for several more years. That reason is "Political Inertia". Despite the fact that 'cybergeeks' have grown as a force, we're still a very TINY fraction of the population. Mom and pop in Iowa, while happily taking their place in the digital revolution, will still not give up what they see as one of the fundamental facts of American life easily. That fact? Pulling the lever in a voting booth at a polling place. It's a semi-sacred tradition to middle America, and we would all do well to remember that the revolutionary ideas of today do not become matter-of-fact for about 20 years...
:)
The other real issue is the technological hurdle. Well, there are inherent problems in trying to keep anything associated with the Internet "secret". You won't be able to convince the populace that their campaign contributions will be kept confidential if they're transmitted over the Web. Granted, contributions are public record in the first place, but do you think your secretly gay Uncle Roy would be more willing to give to a gay frienly candidate, knowing that his contribution date, time and amount can be instantly displayed for the world to see?? What about the politician's reaction to having it publicly displayed that the Grand Dragon of the KKK just made a MAJOR contribution??
Again, This was a great article, a real thought provoker, but it missed the mark slightly... IMHO
== That terrible green-green grass, and violent blooms of flower dresses, and afternoons that make me sleepy.==
First of all, I think Main Street USA is simply not ready for politics to be on the internet. They see it as a place to look for information, the replacement for their public library's card catalog or the Sunday advertisement section in the newspaper. Although those in the technology industry are aware that the possibilities are endless, the average person still doesn't see this. Every time my mom gets online, she treads cautiously believing that its only a matter of time before she downloads a virus that will make her computer go up in flames. She just doesn't understand the new paradigms. The general public needs to feel more comfortable with using the internet and be more understanding of its capabilities. Until they do things, such as politics will never be able to break the "internet barrier."
Additionally, I used to work for the 12th largest insurance company in the nation, and we had just received desktop internet access during this fiscal year. The powers that be simply saw no need until then. The insurance industry is very slow moving technologywise because its leadership is old and very set in its ways. I think politicians are similar. They don't think they need to revolutionize their jobs. They don't care about the whole contingency of people they are leaving out, beleiving that we aren't necessary for their success in the first place.
The US economy is booming, first federal budget surplus in years (projected anyway, not going to happen this year). The country seems to be doing pretty well. You gonna give Clinton his props? I mean, he pulled us out of the Geo. Bush malaise and recession of the early 90s. He had to raise taxes when he came into office to pay for that big tax cut Reagan begat but it didn't kill the economy.
Now, doesn't sound silly to give a president that much credit for things that happen on his watch?
This article is slanted to display the hideous bias of the author, which can be interpreted as common sence, or sheer ignorance depending on your own personal politcal stance.
They only managed to get two issues out untainted. The first being that washington politco's are horridly disconnected. This is true, whatever side of the 2.0+-.1 party system fence you sit on, strattle, or stare at.
I think he's right that there won't be a huge impact anytime soon. Polititions and their machines will most likely avoid the interactive part of the Net, because it's uncontrollable, at least in the conventional sence.
Personally, other than immedeate and continuing information distribution, and maybe public forums, i really don't WANT the net to have that big an impact on politics.
what? hunh?
Ok, almost the entire world would readily agree that the american public on the whole is rather knee-jerky and ignorant. The passing of law, regardless of the feelings of the public, is a process that needs to be spread over a period of time, so that both the governed and the governors can examine it in it's detail, and it what it's consequences mean.
For example, one thing i never ever want to see, is on-line voting. Let's assume it won't be abusing such a system to vote multiple times. I'll use a rather exaggurated example here of why we don't want a stream-line some of these processes. Some guys walking down the street. A watermelon falls from a 10th story window and hits him. a thousand news sites pick it up, as the guy was on his way to save someone from cancer and suppored a family of 20 by working 4 jobs etc. Big tragidy. Some polition instantly puts up a speech about the horrors and evil of watermelons and they must be banned. Instantly, touched voters hit they're little submit buttons and viola! water melons are banned. Thousands of watermelon distribution channels close. Watermelon farmers are out of buisness, perhaps even jailed for continuing to grow their products. And noone has a juicy delicios fruit to eat in the summer time. A bout a month later, anouther man is killed when a pineapple falls from a 10th story window on his head. Only this time it's discoverd that it was thrown from that window by a serial fruit killer... who also killed the first guy by throwing the watermelon at him...
It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to repeal a law than to get one passed in the first place, and even with a stream-lined kneejerk voting process, that is very hard to change. Bingo, you've ruined 100's of peoples lives for lack of facts, facts that indead may not have been able to be discovered quickly enough to support good voting in an instant process. Lets not even talk about the metal processes of the voters (long known to be rather retarded)
Thats a rather extreme example, but apply it to something more mundane and think it through and the ugly consequences flow forth. If you think i'm pessimistic, think on this; One bad law, historically, ALWAYS causes more harm than the good done by 6 good laws.
For a more indepth fictional look at what can happen to us if we alter our law-making and polition electing processes to quickly, to irresponsibly, read Tracy Hickman's book _Immortals_.
-Tilde
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Katz's description of the "net pol" reminds me a lot of all of the "look at what you could do if only you took advantage of our wonderful technology" that we've heard countless times from countless sources (Jaron Lanier with virtual reality, Bill Gates- time and again- with OLE, multimedia computers and a million other things, Scott McNealy with Java, to name a few). But that argument doesn't really compel anybody- to compel people to use your technology, you need to actually do something compelling. So far, I know of no political "killer app" of the internet, and if there isn't one, it would be dumb of politicians to waste their time campaigning here.
Think about it- yeah, it would be really cool if George W. Bush posted a follow-up to this article, but would you base your vote on that? And even if everybody who read it immediately decided to vote for him, how much does that really buy him? (Not to mention the fact that in popular culture, being a Slashdot denizen might hurt his popularity rather than helping it...)
And in the past, politicians have done that very thing, with little effect. When Bush Sr. was campaigning against Clinton, he answered questions on Prodigy (did do the same thing on AOL?). Did it help? I think the fact that nobody remembers it is answer enough. You might be able to show a tiny effect, but certainly nothing compelling enough to make everyone jump on the bandwagon.
Now, had Clinton and Bush gotten into a Prodigy flame war, that would've been awesome... =)
-jacob
"Reagan was clueless and did nothing significant to end the "cold war"..."
I beg to differ. The military run-up was planned in advance as a way to break the cold war stalemate since it was not expected that the Soviet economy could sustain a build-up on anywhere near the scale that the US could. And, yes, Reagan did play a significant role in that.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
We've moved from a typographic society to an image based one in just 30 short years. Politics as entertainment. Religeon as entertainment. Life as amusement.
Television has reduced us to a nation of drooling idiots who can't do anything but sit in front of the dull blue screen getting our buttons pushed.
In the ruins of this anesthetized disaster there is a faint glimmer of hope and that is the net. Media corporations are fighting it tooth and nail: they want to turn the net into entertainment, a glorified TV. For them, the net is not the opposite of TV but it's crowning jewel - interactive entertainment.
I still have a little faith that the net can turn this trend around but people have to be aware of the danger of being entertained by information.
support gun control: take guns from cops
(sorry about the double post, things went funky)
this is slightly skewed on Topic
Visit FCC Commisioner Kennard's Home Page
This guy has fought hard to try and level the comm. playing field in the deregulated environment (an impossible task if you ask me). There is a form to e-mail him (which I did yesterday about the proposed Viacom/CBS merger-I felt pairing MTV/VH1 with the second largest radio network will severely limit music choice/variety), I don't know if it gets there and he reads it, but he is more 'Net savvy than other politicians.
I wish Katz had mentioned some of the 'Net legislation that politicos have tried to push through (hatch-feinstein anti-drug linking law) to illustrate their overall cluelessness. The 'Net will change politics, hopefully as much as it is changing business (guy runs for senate out of his garage), and I think it will, mainly 'cause the vast majority of us geeks want it that way.
Now is when we must fight the hardest as the old guard tries to use its power to help uphold the status quo, even as more and more people see how corrupt and inefficient that quo is. Knowledge to the people, Power to the people, that's what the 'Net brings. (now if we can just get everyone to use Linux as the default OS, they'll see what freedom is, and the price you have to pay... constant vigilance)
+&x
Reagan did cut taxes (or rather the congress did at his urging) but he also increased spending (almost all on the Military) this where we got the infamous $90 hammers from, he just pissed money away on a huge military build up, not caring how efficiently it was spent.
The argument about his spending the Soviets under to win the cold war is nonsense, and if there were any truth to it, it was completely inadvertant on Reagan's part. He justified all this spending by scaring the public about the Soviet "Evil Empire" that was poised to take over the world if we didn't get ready to fight back.
If the Soviets were so strong & agressive a military build up wouldn't have put them under. Of course the military, who should have known better, went along with this as they got lots of shiny new toys and $500 toilet seats out of it.
It can be argued that the Soviets made us needlesly spend more, after the cold war ended it was revealed that some of the big scary rockets paraded past Lenin's tomb on May Day were fakes. In at least one case a fake long range nuclear rocket caused the US to spend billions on countering it!
Of course Reagan's fiscal policies tripled the national debt, so that even now the biggest item on the budget is interest payments on the debt. Thanks Ronnie!
At the same time Reagan was borrowing and spending he had the Education Department re-define ketchup as a vegetable so that a few $ would be saved on school lunches for poor kids.
What an American Hero!
Voting for any political figure for such is reason is a foolish thing. It's the same as the person who sees a politician in a public place and shakes his/her hand. (plenty of people do this) You need to vote for someone because you agree with what he says and what he supports. (even if he is actually lying and goes back on it once he's in office) If a politician can write USB drivers for linux in his spare time, that may make him a good coder, but does not mean he'd be a good president/senator/grand PooBah.
On the other hand, if he fought against net censorship, and stopped some of the boneheaded net related laws from being passed, i might support him, but i can compile my own kernel, and need my president to do other things for me.
-Dan
The Net's 1960? by Jacob Weisberg
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Use Slashdot's standard question and answer format. The level of questions posted here will probably cause most political candidates to broaden their horizons.
Perseverence is a strong will; Obstinacy is a strong won't.
I think the future of politics isn't letting us tell the representative what we want, or in letting us choose between representatives more easily, but in getting rid of the representatives.
For most issues we don't really need a representative. Most of their time is spent meeting with special interest groups, campaigning, etc. It wouldn't be hard to keep as up to date on the issues as the average representative.
Electronic voting, either via telephone or the internet would let people directly vote on the issues.
Being able to proxy votes to other people (anonymously, and without a direct count available to the proxy-holer, to prevent forced proxying) would get past the issue of having too many issues to vote on. With a little setup you could proxy everything, everything except certain issues, or everything related to certain issues. For instance, you could vote internet, encryption, and constitutional issues yourself, proxy IP law issues to the FSF or ESR, proxy drug issues to the ACLU, etc.
A test, similar to that talked about in the recent electronic polling thread, where you had to read a text about current issues and answer a certain number of fact-based questions correctly (or take another test, until you finally learned enough about the issues to score high enough) before being able to vote would stop people from simply endlessly proxying their votes to someone without actually participating in the process at all.
To be eligible to receive proxies, a person would have to make their votes public, as well as details as to who they proxy certain issues to. This would let you choose someone to represent you without having to trust them to not change their mind, and without having to wonder about secret deals.
Perhaps people voting proxies could even vote a day early to give news agencies a chance to review their votes and warn people who might be unhappy with their decision to revoke proxies before the final counting.
The drawback of this system is that voting blocks would be fairly powerful. The religious right wouldn't have to count on members going to polls to vote correctly when they could easily get them to proxy votes on the desired issue. But this also works in favour of the moderates. It's easier to bus 100k fanatics to the polls, but how about the pro-choicers who aren't so fanatical? Now they can vote their choice on the issues without compromising on an otherwise lousy representative, or missing work, etc.
Some public figures would be very powerful. Oprah wields a Slashdot effect when it comes to directing people to books. She'd probably have a similarly huge block of proxies. This is countered by the fact that 1) politicians are already votes in based on their hair as much as their ideas, and 2) proxies could be withdrawn if abused.
To prevent voting in of nightmare laws, constitutional ammendments could require a higher percentage of votes. To raise or lower a tax could requrie 51%. To modify the constitution could require 85% and a similar ratification after a 1y cooling-off period before being implemented. This system of higher requirements and cooling off periods could be used to stabalize policy where flip-flopping would be harmful, such as in building a new highway (start it, spend a lot, stop it, rip it up, start it again, etc) or foreign policy.
To similarly provide consistency, the positions now filled with elected politicians, such as the senate, and various senate commitees, which are deemed to be useful (public debate on CSPAN would be more useful if people had a stake in watching it and controlling the political futures of the people arguing) could be filled by selecting the people with the most proxies over the last however many months. Similarly a commitee would be filled with the people with highest number of proxies on specific issues.
This has a snowball's chance in hell of ever happening, but why should we be happy simply letting our 'representatives' rules us more conveniently by letting us elect them on the net when we could go all the way and get rid of the representatives.
I think the future of politics isn't letting us tell the representative what we want, or in letting us choose between representatives more easily, but in getting rid of the representatives.
For most issues we don't really need a representative. Most of their time is spent meeting with special interest groups, campaigning, etc. It wouldn't be hard to keep as up to date on the issues as the average representative.
Electronic voting, either via telephone or the internet would let people directly vote on the issues.
Being able to proxy votes to other people (anonymously, and without a direct count available to the proxy-holer, to prevent forced proxying) would get past the issue of having too many issues to vote on. With a little setup you could proxy everything, everything except certain issues, or everything related to certain issues. For instance, you could vote internet, encryption, and constitutional issues yourself, proxy IP law issues to the FSF or ESR, proxy drug issues to the ACLU, etc.
A test, similar to that talked about in the recent electronic polling thread, where you had to read a text about current issues and answer a certain number of fact-based questions correctly (or take another test, until you finally learned enough about the issues to score high enough) before being able to vote would stop people from simply endlessly proxying their votes to someone without actually participating in the process at all.
To be eligible to receive proxies, a person would have to make their votes public, as well as details as to who they proxy certain issues to. This would let you choose someone to represent you without having to trust them to not change their mind, and without having to wonder about secret deals.
Perhaps people voting proxies could even vote a day early to give news agencies a chance to review their votes and warn people who might be unhappy with their decision to revoke proxies before the final counting.
The drawback of this system is that voting blocks would be fairly powerful. The religious right wouldn't have to count on members going to polls to vote correctly when they could easily get them to proxy votes on the desired issue. But this also works in favour of the moderates. It's easier to bus 100k fanatics to the polls, but how about the pro-choicers who aren't so fanatical? Now they can vote their choice on the issues without compromising on an otherwise lousy representative, or missing work, etc.
Some public figures would be very powerful. Oprah wields a Slashdot effect when it comes to directing people to books. She'd probably have a similarly huge block of proxies. This is countered by the fact that 1) politicians are already votes in based on their hair as much as their ideas, and 2) proxies could be withdrawn if abused.
To prevent voting in of nightmare laws, constitutional ammendments could require a higher percentage of votes. To raise or lower a tax could requrie 51%. To modify the constitution could require 85% and a similar ratification after a 1y cooling-off period before being implemented. This system of higher requirements and cooling off periods could be used to stabalize policy where flip-flopping would be harmful, such as in building a new highway (start it, spend a lot, stop it, rip it up, start it again, etc) or foreign policy.
To similarly provide consistency, the positions now filled with elected politicians, such as the senate, and various senate commitees, which are deemed to be useful (public debate on CSPAN would be more useful if people had a stake in watching it and controlling the political futures of the people arguing) could be filled by selecting the people with the most proxies over the last however many months. Similarly a commitee would be filled with the people with highest number of proxies on specific issues.
This has a snowball's chance in hell of ever happening, but why should we be happy simply letting our 'representatives' rule us more conveniently by letting us elect them on the net when we could go all the way and get rid of the representatives.
That having been said, I think there are a number of reasons why we won't see someone like this anytime soon, and really, probably not ever at all:
I think a large part of the problem falls on us. As a wired society, we have spent too long amongst ourselves arguing over the finer (and not so fine) points of Internet regulations and laws, and less time making sure that the politicans who made these laws know loud and clear how we feel about their work, not only in the voting booths, but also on a day to day basis. For example, many politicans won't touch Social Security benifits. Why? Because they know that if they do, they'll be attacked (and as Sen, John Glenn can tell you, I'm not only speaking metaphorically here!) by seniors. And how do they know? Because the AARP is telling them they will. Every day. Right after they hand over a nice big check for the politican's next campaign.
So, if we want politicans to acknoledge us, and the things we see as benifical to the future, we should probably recognise that the Internet doesn't exist in a vacuum. WE should be out there, making our voices heard in ways that the politicians can hear, and we should make sure that when we're speaking about the future of the internet, we're all speaking in unison.
Because if we're only talking here on the Internet, no one outside the Internet can hear us. And if we all start talking outside on our own, it shounds like white noise. But if we're all saying the same thing, at the same time, it sounds more like a large part of America, and that voice is what the politicans are going to hear, and more importantly, listen to.
But, given the naturally chaotic nature of the Internet, I don't think that would really be feasable.
$.02 dropped in.
That's the way it works in theory, but in fact the Internet will not transform politics, but rather become a mere extension of the political arena for both citizens and politicians.
On the citizen side, the Internet would be chiefly a tool for discussion and debate. This will not bring about a revolution in politics if existing examples of net-based discussion count for anything. People tend to use the Internet more to broadcast their own opinions and experience rather than for any serious exchange of ideas.
The fact is that most people who are old enough to vote and actually do so have already decided what their basic political philosophy is and their minds will not be changed by discussion or debate. Have you ever known a person to, in the midst of a storm of rhetoric, suddenly see what you're saying and agree with you? Very few (none that I know of) have switched parties (political or otherwise) as a result of open-ended discussion.
On the politician's side, the Internet becomes merely another media for advertising, like television and radio. Granted, the Internet does allow them to communicate more actual information than a thirty second commercial, but again, nobody's mind is going to be changed even by hard, undecorated facts they see on the site of a politician they dislike. Also, any information published on a politician's site is likely to be presented with such a partisan slant that everyone will be taking it with a grain of salt.
That leaves independent analysis and the media, which will not cause any more ripples in the pond through the Internet than they do already. There is nothing magic about pixels that makes a news report or a study appear any more objective and credible than it does on your local newspaper.
Remember, the underlying principle here is that people will interpret information in a way that fits a political model they have already accepted. This is true on the Internet as much as it is anywhere else.
From the point of view of the soviet union things only got worse since the end of the cold war
You probably mean 'since the collapse of the socialist system'. But, in any case, that statement is quite doubtful.
10 years ago all soviet citizens had jobs
Well, not having a job used to be illegal and punished by imprisonment in the USSR. There always were jobs in the labor camps...
You also forgot to mention KGB, party line, mandatory work in agriculture, etc., etc.
Then capitalism was introduced and the whole country collapsed
You've got both the temporal and the causal sequence wrong. Actually, first (the cause) the socialist system collapsed, and then (the consequence) on its ruins a very strange mixture of robber-baron capitalism and a corrupt third-world statism developed.
Corruption has entered all layers of power
Yep, but what does this have to do with capitalism? Corruption is basically a consequence of Russia being a third-world country without any checks and balances on huge and powerful government bureacracy.
Many people in the former soviet union haven't got enough money each month to buy even the most basic stuff to stay alive
That means that they all die each month, right? Your statement makes no sense.
Alcoholism is a major problem and the average life expectance is about 20 years lower than in the western world.
That was the case under socialism, too. Life expectancy did decrease after the collapse, but again, the cause for that was not introduction of capitalism, but rather the collapse of the socialist system.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
A counterexample to the Monica Lewinsky scandal is Salon's coverage of far-right politicians "conspiring" against President Clinton. In this case, the President publically acknowledged the e-zine for news that may never have been seen outside of your local free alternative newspaper.
The media has long been considered to be the fourth branch of the the US government. They cover the bully pulpits of President and the Legistature and keep the public abreast of political happenings. With the arrival of the Net and CNN, the media has become reporting on a 24 hour cycle which meant more invasion of politician's lives and their motives. The consant need for new news forces the media and the media pundits to continue talking, trying to find new scandals, trying to finds new angles on old scandals, trying to tittlate, and letting finding solutions fall onto others.
Katz tries to convince us that the new political "Max Headroom" will change American politics via the Net. But there is no Max Headroom, no entity that exists only on the Net who can show as much charisma as a live/taped politician with party support. It's hard to convey that sense of charisma over the Net and no reason to do so. I can think of few people who get their primary political information off of the Net. Increasing interactability doesn't necessarily mean a net chat when doing a radio talk show will reach so many more people (something politicans are loath to do). I don't expect to vote for someone because of their website anymore than I would vote for them because I got their junk mail. However I can be influenced by a variety of news websites.
The Net has already changed politics, but not in the way that Katz thinks it has or will. It has become another media filter, but one that is improved by not just being another corporate newsmill. It allows disperate views to have their say on a more level playing ground than any other form of media. It's more alternative than your local alternative rag and has more POVs than a cocktail party. As it expands, there will be even more opinions and ideas. The question is if people will listen to them.
-S. Louie
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
In an otherwise decent essay, Jon Katz manages to get this point nearly backwards:
The small kernel of truth in this statement is that the U. S. Constitution deliberately sets up a republic rather than a direct democracy. This is for reasons both practical (the country has always been too big to run via direct vote) and ideological (the founders were concerned with the problem of mob rule, or "tyranny of the majority").
But otherwise, this is sheer hogwash.
At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, town-hall democracy was well-established in New England, giving citizens more experience in "civic information-gathering and decision-making" than most citizens get today.
Given the smallness of most communities in those days, the idea that voters "never got to lay eyes on their elected officials" is nonsense. Perhaps for the President, or their state's Senators. But, the Constitution originally established that there would be one Representative per 30,000 citizens. Now tell me, do you really think that a polititican, who needs to run for office every two years, can stay out of sight for the majority of voters in that small of a district? This doesn't even count the variety of State and local offices, which in the days before telecommunications, interstate highway systems, and immense growth in Federal bureaucracy and power, had much more effect than they do today.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglass debates, it has been estimated that more than half of the voters of Illinois attended at least one debate. These debates were over six hours long. When was the last time that more than half the voters of a state heard their senatorial candidates in person engaging in substantive debate for more than a few minutes of media sound-bites?
Technology, for the most part, has not helped. Oh, sure, it's tough to avoid seeing candidates mugs on TV during the election season. Great, so know I know what they look like at their most photogenic and hair-styled. What is their political philosophy? How is Tweedledum different from Tweedledee this year? TV campaigning takes us further away from those answers, not closer.
And the internet? I have to admit that the ability to check pending bills, voting records, etc. without having to be physically present at the site of the legislature can be nice. But that is subject to how timely that legislature's web site is. And, if the "real" politicing is done the old-fashioned way, via face time, dollars, and grass-roots vote-gathering, then the "wired"-ness of legislative or executive bodies is not particularly transforming. At best, it's a nice bonus. At worst, it provides the illusion of public access and accountability without the reality.
It is vain to rule if your subjects can and do disobey you. It is vain to vote if your delegates can and do disobey you.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Great Shipwreck as Analogy"