Today's Daily Digest of the Personal Democracy Forum, by Nancy Scola, titled "Defining "Mission Accomplished"", discusses how activists might have scored points that count, even while losing the fight for Barack Obama to lead the opposition to the FISA revisions now scheduled for a Senate vote tomorrow. This story is a very strategic look at how "a new kind of politics" is based on interactivity. How to break illusory paradoxes that used to paralyze the body politic, using communications and feedback to train everyone to get along, without necessarily abandoning our values - or each other. And therefore how netizens are advantaged in leading not just the entire citizenry, but the entire political discourse in America...
The Personal Democracy Forum emailed Nancy Scola's insights into effective modern activism in their daily bulletin:
If we're being honest with ourselves, we should probably admit that the odds that Barack Obama was going to respond to protests of his support for legislation containing telecom immunity with a hearty "Woowee, was I wrong -- thanks for the heads up guys!" were slim to none. But Obama did respond, in a statement posted to the blog account of his new media director Joe Rospars on Friday afternoon, and he tasked three policy advisors with attempting to explain his position. Scheduled to hang out on the blog for 30 minutes, the staffers stuck around for an hour and a half as more than 600 comments poured in. (The post eventually attracted more than 2,400 responses.) TechPresident's Patrick Ruffini suggests that this back and forth between the Obama campaign and the "Get FISA Right" group on MyBarackObama.comis a "fig leaf" if it doesn't explicitly change Obama's behavior. But let's consider an alternate metric. Campaigns are less like vending machines -- where you know that if you put in X then Y pops out -- than they are like dogs that learn how to behave through feedback and repetition. And the lessons learned here? First, that Obama's base is smart and sophisticated on even the most complicated policy issues; check out prominent blogger Glenn Greenwald's dissection and dismissal of Obama's explanation. And second, that that base is now fully capable of attracting the attention of the media when it is unhappy with the state of the campaign; witness the Washington Post's Jose Vargas's coverage of the interaction, the New York Times' Sara Wheaton's blog post on the matter, and most especially, the NYTprint edition's profile of Mike Stark, one of the main organizers of the protest action. One more lesson for the Obama camp: that this is a constituency not easily placated -- the group is right now collaboratively crafting their response to the candidate's response on their wiki. For more, check out Ari Melber's great reporting and analysis for The Nation.
In the same vein is the New York Times's Brian Stelter's profile of Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who now serves as Obama's "online organizing guru." The profile's narrative thread is about exactly that: how campaigns and the people who staff them learn and evolve as the whole process chugs along. Hughes, who had, in Stelter's reporting, a somewhat bumpy transition between Silicon Valley and the world of politics, describes MyBO and its place in the campaign as "still very, very rough around the edges."
This lesson is being learned simultaneously by both Obama's teams and by activists. Nearly all in public, where it's teaching everyone else, too. As the activism campaign continues to support Obama to his victory, we're all learning a lot about interactivism.
Interactivism is the way we break all these false dilemmas. Which usually boil down to something unacceptable like "this statement is false", or "opposing Obama means getting McCain". But which are impossible situations only when evaluated under a binary logic that allows no dynamics. A kind of platonic idealism, where everything is always rigidly fixed and permanent - all we can do is land on one scylla or the other charybdis.
But we live in a more enlightened age, even if few take advantage of it, in which a paradox is not a life sentence. More sophisticated people know that there are nuances between polar extremes, and that excluded middle is where most of actual reality actually lives. The resolution of these false dilemmas is dynamic, abandoning the false notion that a position is forever, and accepting that everything changes, usually cyclicly. This is dynamic logic, popularly called "fuzzy logic": harnessed since the 1980s to autopilot subways, antilock brakes, coffee machines. Political positions are no exception, and political dynamics are most of what makes up politics. Interactivism is the natural state.
This has of course always been true, but behind closed doors. Politicians, powerbrokers and the media have always circulated both among each other and among their mutual interests, more or less adopting and sticking to positions as fluidly as they can within the power structures that they use to gain and keep power. And as they must within the power influence of each other, and as new events and interests orbit and penetrate their spheres of influence. Their associations are interactive, but usually so conservative (because they have the power, and work to keep it and the status quo) that "activism" is usually ill-mannered. So to the excluded public it looks like official politics is mainly stable and permanent.
Daily Kos is here to crash the gates. Its posters are activists. Because all posts, whether stories, diaries or comments, allow responses (comments, ratings, tags, replying diaries, etc), it's all interactive. Therefore we're all interactivists. That is the new kind of politics that Obama is talking about. The Internet plugs us all into each other with an efficiency that the "old boys' network" of actual and "virtual" old boys' clubs could only dream about. The new politics is of an age with the Web.
Even if here weren't before, we're making interactivism Obama's new politics.
Since that new politics gives the politicians a stronger constituency, that goes out and recruits more members without much (if any) cost to the politician (either in money or organizational time), that new politics will quickly dominate all politics. It's already potent beyond its real numbers. Online fundraising is rapidly becoming the norm, not the exception. The mass media all read the blogs, whether or not they are led by them (yet).
This is the 21st Century staring us in the face. We should learn from its successes. And from its failures. And, probably, mainly from whatever we get that's somewhere in between.
---------------------------------------------------------
Note: in this diary's poll, please answer the first response that's true, even if others below it are also true.