Geeks, Silicon Valley, and Politics

A reader wrote to us saying that The Economist has an interesting article/editorial in this week's issue about Silicon Valley and politics. Mostly that they just don't get it, but are finally coming around to playing the game the same old way and trying to change it at the same time. It's an interesting, changing landscape - maybe this is the election that the Internet really starts to matter.

Comments

This is a Good Thing.

[Tackhead]

For years, Washington ignored the 'net. For years, the 'net ignored Washington. It was a happy coexistence, but those days are over. Now that DC has noticed us, we are faced with a choice. Either:

• Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for pedophiles" crowd buy their votes on censorship.
• Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for drug dealers and terrorists" crowd buy their votes on crypto.
• Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a great way to track all customers and send them offers which will interest them" crowd buy their votes on privacy.
• Buy their votes ourselves.

Politicans are for sale. Deal with it. Surely it's better that it be our dollars doing the buying than those of our opponents.

How to REALLY rock the vote

[goliard]

("...Say ya want a rev-o-luu-uu-tion....")

Consider:

1. Geeks make up, on a good day, some 10% of the US population (defining "geek" generously, at that).
2. Geeks are incredibly fractious. Getting a group of nerds to all vote in the same direction is like the probverbial herding of cats

Ergo, at the voting booth we have the political clout of fuck-all. There's not a politician alive who doesn't grok this reality deeply. That's reality, boys and girls.

Buying politicians with political donations is stupid. It's the brute-force solution. Everyone and his mom has a PAC. Our money would just compete on an even footing with everyone else's money. That's pathetic. Not an elegant way to fight, and not sufficiently reliable.

There's an elegant way to fight: we buy our politicians in kind. We pay for them in services they could not possible afford - services they wouldn't have dreamed to ask for - without us. We buy them with hours, we buy them with resources.

We host their web sites. We design their web sites. We set up the kind of informational infrastructure for coordinating volunteers which are a campaign manager's wet dream. We take over their internet presence so they don't do anything idiotic.

Whatever you may think of his politics, Ventura has proved that the net can have quite an impact on politics.

Are we wizards or aren't we? If we aren't kingmakers, we're pretty lame wizards, aren't we?

Once upon a time (turn of the last century, actually) Boston was taken over by a new political force consisting entirely of immigrants. This was done via a form of social engineering called a political machine.

We know about machines, don't we boys and girls?

A political machine is an organization which gets large number of votes out (and pointed in the same direction) when it matters, and it does so (hence the analogy to a machine) reliably and pretty much regardless of who the candidate is.

The political machines of the last century were not scalable, because - get this - networking limitations. The resource cost (mostly volunteers, time, and money) grew linearly with the size of the constituency being influenced. National elections were really beyond the serious influence of political machines.

But we could fix that, couldn't we? If there's any kind of problem we can solve, it's how to route large amounts of information correctly.

One big difference, oft lamented by geeks, between then and now is the extent to which our elections have become a media game. But that's to our favor . We control a medium! We rule in this medium, we can make it do things no one else can.

I'm not even talking about compromising the enemy's services. I'm talking about putting up web sites 1000% better than the opponents:

• e-commerce for accepting donations
• serious content about the candidates positions
• serious content about the opponent's positions (even if no one reads it, a thorough and professional looking site makes the opposition look like cheesy amateurs!)
• a /.-ish forum for the supporters to discuss strategy, tactics, news of note - and thus make the campaign fantastically responsive.
• similarly a /.-ish forum for the uncommitted to discuss issues.

I'm talking about political coordinating through:

• Email lists, sophisticatedly implemented
• Industrial strength db for tracking regional response, w/ extranet for distributed volunteers

What if our candidate were to challenge opponents to an "on-line debate" - NOT in real-time, but in a series of posts, which the public can comment on, a la the way /. collectively interviews interesting people. "On-line" has such cache right now, we could probably pull it off. We geeks may be few, but we're hardly the only literate people. If we can get the newpapers to pick it up and report on it, we'll own that debate, simply because any candidate we advise will look about a hundred times less stupid on-line.

And once we nail them down in print, we have have fun with them. Twenty+ years of flaming on Usenet has taught us nothing if not how to discredit fools in print.

If we control the medium (and we do) we can force the campaign onto whatever rhetorical ground we want. We can make it "issues centered" if we like.

In summary: if we wielded our real power for those politicians we choose to support, we could own them. Money be damned; if we can hand them elections on a silver platter, they'd do anything for us. And our real power is finessing systems.

If we want the world run our way (for any definition of "we"), we need to bring our considerable intellectual prowess to bear on the problem. We understand FUD. We understand networking. We understand image. We understand manipulating media via manipulating the medium. We have the technology. :)
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