Nerd party needed to replace 'left-wing' Democrats, says area man

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Mon Nov 8 06:15:11 PST 2004


<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/05/net_nerd_party/print.html>

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT


Nerd party needed to replace 'left-wing' Democrats, says area man
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 5th November 2004 17:20 GMT

Election 2004 A newspaper columnist has called for the old-fashioned, "left
wing" Democratic Party to be replaced by a new, emergent party of computer
nerds.

Free-marketeer Dan Gillmor of Silicon Valley's San Jose Mercury urges the
Democrats to abandon "old, discredited politics", while an "increasingly
radical middle" needs a new party with some "creative thinking". From where
will this come? In a column
(http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10086652.htm) published the
same day, he tells us.

Writing before the outcome was known, Gillmor enthuses about "the most
exciting development ... the new world of cyber-politics," where the
"expanded horizons" on offer should cancel out the groupthink, which he
briefly acknowledges, and lead to greater accountability and participation.

Such settler rhetoric - "new world", "horizons" - is familiar stuff from
techno utopians. So too is the hope, amongst many intelligent, impatient
people with a reluctance to develop their social skills, that we must be
able to do better. (Bill Gates doesn't have the patience or inclination to
watch TV, and many internet activists don't have the patience or
inclination to persuade a stranger, which is a lot more difficult and
unrewarding.) We briefly heard about "Emergent Democracy" last Spring,
although it disappeared in about the time it takes you to say "Second
Superpower". But we're sure to hear more about this itchy, push-button,
"interactive" version of democracy, a kind of thumbs down at the Roman
Coliseum, in the future. Maybe Dan will become its Arthur Schlesinger.

But for now, how can a computer-savvy nerd party help? We don't see Eliot
Spitzer, the New York attorney general, having trouble being re-elected,
and the man's been described as a "one-man socialist Torquemada." Because
politics is n-dimensional, based on values and not some right-left scale,
his "old fashioned" efforts to remind corporations of their social
responsibilities may well be very popular if put to the public. [*]So it
isn't clear that the Democrats must abandon the idea that we're happier
when the corporations are left to manage themselves. Nor is it clear that
the internet is a net civic good, yet, or that it increased voter turnout
more than other factors did in the 2004 election. So the conclusion that
we're then invited to draw - that the Democrats are doomed because they're
lagging in some kind of technological arms race - doesn't necessarily
follow. But let's take each one of these ideas in turn.

Man machine

Such settler rhetoric flourishes where a sensible grasp of what humans can
do, and what the machines can do, is out of kilter. Wild and improbable
visions often follow.

When something good happens, people are quick to praise the machines. "If
people are more moved than ever to participate, I'm betting that the Net
played a big role," writes Dan. But if something bad happens, we blame
stupid humans for not "getting it". Voters in Texas using machines from
Hart InterCivic, discovered that their votes were nullified when they
browsed the ballot by turning a wheel. "It's not a machine issue," Shafer
said. "It's voters not properly following the instructions." And you might
ask, who's fault is it that the Jim Crow boxes were so badly designed?

(Dan, to his great credit, urged Californian voters to demand an auditable
paper ballot this week, and castigated election officials for not making
voters aware that they had the option.)

But the echo chamber effect won't go away, because it's a defining
characteristic of computer-mediated communications everywhere, and not just
in this deeply polarized country. My colleague Thomas Greene puts it most
succinctly. "You can say something someone disagrees with at a party, and
they'll talk to you. Try doing this online." Where the barriers to
participation are low, the barriers to making a hurried exit are equally
low. There are no social obligations to sticking around, unlike in the real
world.

(There are subtle factors within the overall trend. Today's thin-skinned
ego-driven weblogger may simply have been yesterday's Usenet faint heart,
for example. And well-designed software can encourage better online
participation: the DailyKos abandoned weblog software for the much more
community-orientated Scoop system, and became the Slashdot of politics -
only one where people say interesting things politely.)

The settler iconography is no accident: the idea that everything "old
fashioned" must be discarded, and everything is new again.

"Like the American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was
no politics before they arrived," Will Davies pointed out, in a brilliant
talk at NotCon this year. They needed to do this to ignore the fact that
the land was already occupied. "To the same end, internet settlers choose
to ignore the historical and sociological facts of how the internet is run,
and who can't get on to it and why, and the mechanisms used online to
divide people." Gated communities substitute group for social, and "cease
to question the macro institutions and systems around them." The gated
communities have already gone up, on the internet. One of its founding
engineers, Karl Auerbach told your reporter earlier this year that
physically, as well as sociologically, "The internet is balkanizing.
Communities of trust are forming in which traffic is accepted only from
known friends." Remind you of anything?

What this leads to is a false sense of reality. Howard Dean supporters had
a tremendous disappointment when man and message failed to resonate in
Meatspace. The noise of online participation isn't a very reliable
indicator of what people are really thinking or doing. "Everyone I know
voted Democrat," people asked yesterday "How could this happen?"

In fact, voter turnout rose little in prosperous areas with high broadband
penetration, but dramatically in areas where broadband penetration was
lowest: up over ten per cent in Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming
and New Mexico. Meanwhile, the cornerstones of civic life - community and
church groups - were far more effective in getting out the vote. These
delivered a Republican victory.

So for Doctor Gillmor to prescribe the ailing patient 'more internet' is a
strange choice. For him to advocate abandoning the US left's organizational
vehicle (with one current useless owner, but a proven track record of some
moderate success, if you look at the log book) makes senses only if, like
Dan, you don't think think the left should have an effective vehicle at
all. (He wants a "radical center", remember . On being asked to abandon the
project, progressives might be tempted to echo Gandhi, who when asked what
he thought of western civilization, replied "I think it would be a good
idea!" Giving up barely after we've started, on a center ground defined by
others, or by nothing but technology, isn't an adequate replacement.

For some people, technology is the answer, no matter what the question may
be. But Gillmor's reasons for wanting a new net party are rather like, to
paraphrase Kennedy, asking not "what can the machines do for me?" but
asking "what can I do for the machines?" .


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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