Joho the Blog
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April 25, 2004
It's been a week of light blogging because of my 2-day trip to Portugal and then a set of, um, computing setbacks that involved technical support groups on several continents and the reinstalling of anti-virus software. Then, for the past couple of days, I've been working on two presentations I'm giving on Monday in DC. Both are new and both are important to me. In the morning, I'm keynoting a conference of research librarians and am doing a mainly-new presentation about how we managed to "informationalize" the world so that it consists of thin gruel, and how it is (I hope) now being re-thickened and double-good ambiguated again. While that presentation has new material and a ton of new slides (I tend to eschew text in favor of over-animated graphical slides), I'm more concerned about the lunchtime keynote I'm doing for the FieldWorks Technology Politics Summit. I have half an hour. Here's an outline of what I think I'm going to say: 1. I want to address two questions in a roundabout way. A. Why is it that when Dean supporters met, we'd frequently talk about what we didn't like about Dean, even while remaining fully licensed Deaniacs? B. WRT the Dean slogan, we have the power to take our country back from whom exactly? Why did that slogan work? 2. These questions are obscured by the rapid consolidation of inappropriate lessons we've taken from the Dean campaign, including that the Net is only good for raising money and all that social networking stuff was for naive girly-men. 3. So, let's accept (for the nonce) the view that politics is naught but a specialized form of marketing in which the only successful market share is 50% + 1. So, what's happening with marketing? Marketing is war waged against customers, but we're in revolt. Marketers no longer have control over corporate information. Networked markets are smarter than the companies they're talking about. [Yes, this is overtly Cluetrain-y.] 4. At the heart of the revolt is the human voice. We get to sound like ourselves in the new public world known as the Internet, rather than having to listen to the monotonous, inhuman, too-perfect voice of marketing. 5. Taking blogging as an example. It looks individualistic, but it's really about conversation and links. To see how unusual it is, look at the Dean blog: We've never before had someone who speaks for the campaign but in his/her own voice. This isn't good marketing. It's anti-marketing: It succeeds insofar as it stays off message. 6. To see the importance of comments (i.e., the blog wasn't simply a new type of broadcasting), you have to understand the Net's architecture. It is not a broadcast or publishing architecture. It's end-to-end. It succeeded by removing the controlling center, and by keeping the center as empty as possible so that innovation would happpen at the edges. The Net is the opposite of marketing. It is profoundly democratic. And it explicitly provided the model for the Net portion of the Dean campaign. (Meanwhile, Washington and Hollywood seem hell-bent on destroying the Net by misunderstanding it.) [I'm sneaking in World of Ends stuff because there will be people in the room — including Tom Daschle — who I want to yell this at.] 7. No wonder we're so eager to go wrong about the role of the Net in the Dean campaign. Campaigns are about top-down control of message. Kerry said ten words off mike and there was a firestorm. But blogs are always off mike. (We forgive ourselves preemptively.) 8. Back to the two questions. We talked about why we disliked Dean because it affirmed that this campaign wasn't about top-down marketing. It was about us. We were encouraged to go off message — that is, to appropriate the message in our own way — because the campaign is about us, not only about Howard Dean. That is, we are taking the country back not just from the lobbyists, corporations and Republicans. We're taking it back from the campaign marketers. We're taking it back from our own alienation. And that's a good thing. Posted
by D. Weinberger at April 25, 2004 08:05 AM
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Comments
When you talk about the crime of informationalizing, you have to mention the major culprit: TV--the unblinking, one-way medium that is losing its credibility.
Someone wittingly said that it qualifies as a medium because it is neither rare nor well-done.
Posted by: Bill K. | April 25, 2004 09:55 AM
I would like to apply for the position of JOHO staff support technical adjunct. You have an apparently rewarding and exciting itinerary (although all are bugged with dread, as we all well know--that just-below-the-surface scary eerie voice of the infinite cat). Dang, if I were a lady, I might flop across your big brass bed as well. My resume is posted on the link below. Thank you for your consideration, and good luck in telephilosophy for the masses. Do you have a private jet yet? Yours always--B.W.
Posted by: bw | April 25, 2004 10:00 AM
They'll love you, don't worry!
In related thoughts, Micah Sifry just said some interesting stuff about what bloggers do: http://www.iraqwarreader.com/archives/000181.html
He quotes his editor that big media have given up on telling the "truth", preferring the fake objectivity of he said/she said. Blogs are the new home of truth-speaking--or, at least, of truth-claiming.
Posted by: Betsy Devine | April 25, 2004 10:54 PM
For a politician to buy into your meme, cluetrain / politician successful by hosting (blogging) conversation / dean campaign as a successful model, they have to trust that there is an emergent Democratic majority, and that if allowed to talk together we will converge against GWB and with them.
This goes against how most politicians got where they are today - they were successful at raising money and hiring clever word/media smiths so they could good buy ads pointing out how bad the other guy was.
You are asking them to make a huge leap of faith -- even if we do successfully converge against GWB, what guarantees that we will want them as our leaders?
The WP had an article today on how Bush's continued repetition of lies about the Iraq war, such as that there were WMD and that Saddam Hussein supported Al-Quaeda, have kept support for his war on Iraq from falling below 50%. Sadly, the Washington Post, always more interested in the game of politics than in policy, cites the effect of Bush's lies approvingly. It works. This is the mindset you have to get past. I'm not the clever wordsmith, so I don't know how to do it.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck. If anyone can do it, you are one of the few who can.
Posted by: Tim | April 26, 2004 01:23 AM
P.S. I notice that GetActive is listed on the program. If you haven't met Bill Pease of GetActive, and you get a chance to hook up with him, I highly recommend doing it. I heard him speak earlier this week at the 2004 Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Berkeley, and he was one of the sharpest of the lot talking about Politics and the net.
Posted by: Tim | April 26, 2004 01:28 AM
Here's how very well your speech went:
I've never heard of you before (though I'm sure I've at least heard the phrase 'clutetrain manifesto'). I was just channelsurfing and got to your speech, live on C-SPAN.
I was riveted. Both by your ideas and your flamboyant speaking manner. I stopped surfing and watched you to the end of the Q&A. Then I went searching to see how I can obtain a tape of the speech, which I want to sit friends down in front of, to stir up some thoughts and discussions. I haven't found yet where I can do that, but I got here to your blog and just wanted to say Major Thanks; you did a superb job and got a lot of ideas not only out of your mouth but actually into my head.
Keep up the great work!
Posted by: Jim Moskowitz | April 26, 2004 02:12 PM
Message from Sweden:
What a great speech!
Posted by: Sven Cahling | April 26, 2004 06:20 PM
"That is, we are taking the country back not just from the lobbyists, corporations and Republicans."
David - lots of great points. Is there any reason you feel it necessary to conclude it with a message of contempt and division?
Posted by: Mike Sanders | April 27, 2004 08:52 AM
At the heart of the revolt is the human voice. We get to sound like ourselves in the new public world known as the Internet, rather than having to listen to the monotonous, inhuman, too-perfect voice of marketing.
This is exactly why I built the Clark Community Network. A network of supporter blogs is much more powerful than a single blog (or a couple) in allowing people to interact and have conversations with each other.
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