Reading a lot of diaries over the past few days, I wanted to bring up some past experience and observations, because while I am always impressed with the fervor of the board, I am watching history repeat itself with the certainty of the Kali Yuga Hamster Wheel.
I used to pay a lot more attention to internet based discourse than I do these days, it's affected my personality and outlook in various fashions - my semi-affected and more letter-like writing style is a direct consequence of how I've seen the internet behave, or more precisely, how I've seen people on the internet behave. And I'm seeing it happen in a predictable fashion.
What we have seen in the past two years in particular is two internet-fueled phenomena (the Howard Dean campaign and the Kerry presidential campaign) make an awful lot of noise, seem inevitable and then sputter and die. I don't believe these were flameouts - I believe that they were bigger in image than in reality, and that's where the crux of our problem lies. Given the general pleas for mass suicide, mass exodus, and the like, I want to just talk about a couple of observations from past phenomena.
The first big internet-based hysteria I paid attention to was Y2K (and I'm still sitting on close to 700 megs of data on that, like I'll ever do anything with it). In this case, I watched intelligent, sane and stable people become convinced that unremediated bugs were going to cause the world to end. Thee people were smart, but they spent an awful lot of time posting to Y2K boards (such as the one run on Phil Greenspun's website) and becoming progressively more extreme. I spent a certain amount of '99 playing virtual grief counselor, talking people out of buying stoves or hand-granked grain mills, keeping people from going off the deep end. I'd like to say it was significant, but it wasn't. It was a flash in the pan for both sides. But I see the behavior happen again and again.
Web based communities (and apart from network fossils myself, that's what I mean when I say the internet these days) are generally good at three things: they let people form groups (and I want to emphasize, not communities), they make it easy to buy things, and they let people feel that they're accomplishing a lot with relatively little effort. We've seen all three in the past few years - because it's easy for people to buy things, we see that network fundraising is very effective. Because it's easy for people to form groups, we see sites like dailykos expand hugely, because it's easy to feel important without doing much, we see an emphasis on freeping polls and the like. What the internet is not good at is providing a surface for rational discourse between diverse points of view, and providing a realistic sense of scale. I have to expand this:
The boards we frequent are pull media - we choose to come here, and if it becomes unattractive, we can choose to leave. The difference between dKos and my neighborhood is that the cost to leave my neighborhood is much higher than the cost to leave dKos. This explicitly leads to a 'he who shouts loudest has the floor' problem: the loudest, most extreme voices dominate discussion and more rational voices eventually make a rational decision not to waste time there. Internet communities, without an awful lot of work become virtual gated communities - LGF, strange as it may seem, used to be a left of center kinda sarky blog before September 11th broke everybody's brains.
The LGF problem leads to another issue - web based communities, by virtue of this 'shouts loudest' problem, are very prone to echo chambers. People start out with bad scenarios, people expand no them and before you know iT thE WoRLd iS gOING TO END! When opposing points of view leave, the community petrifies. To the credit of the dKos community, there are a good number of good people who do talk people down from the most extreme scenarios - I just think that it should always be pointed out and recognized.
The second problem, which is only partly ameliorated, is that we end up with an exaggerated tribalism. We all communicate in stereotypes, and without opposing views, those stereotypes become more and more hateful. Over the next four years, we have to build coalitions - we have to reach out. Discarding the South should not be our goal, we want to convert the South.
There is one final problem, and arguably the more important one for us in the long run. It makes us feel that internet based activity is more effective then it is. I mentioned freeping polls earlier - I remember a lot of 'freep this online poll' messages this year, all of which led to skewed results that apart from possibly the original 'torture Wolf' rounds accomplished very little. Similarly, there seems to be a post or two a day about what the denizens of Free Republic are posting about - as if the presence of fools on the internet was news.
I think, believe me, I spend a lot of time thinking about this, that the Internet is a vast untapped tool to restore democratic values in the U.S., but it's usually a misapplied tool. The most effective work, in terms of results, I think has been the stuff Josh Marshall has been doing - in boththe Sinclair case and today, he's been coordinating campaigns of letter writing and activism to make a difference. Either to screw our representatives to the sticking place on their Delay vote, or by leveraging economic power against Sinclair (Sinclair didn't work entirely, but it hit surprisingly well for such a quick effort. We should learn from that and do better). What Josh has realized, I think (not having access to his brain), is that the internet can be powerfully used to coordinate people, but those people then have to get off the email and on the phone, or to the office.
And that's what I want to open the discussion to today - I want to ask a question of everybody. Since the election, what have you done, in the physical world to promote progressive policies, to stop the GOP? I don't care that you've freeped a poll or trolled LGF - have you Have you joined your local Democratic Party to help swing it towards something better? Have you helped form a Union or a Kiwanis club? Your representative is supposed to work for you regardless of his party - does he know and fear you yet? The great secret of the Christian Coalition was remembering that Democracy takes place every day - we used to mock Dobson and company every time they got their knickers in a twist over, say, Married With Children. Why aren't we on TV getting our knickers in a twist over the state of CNN? Is anyone thinking of building an actually objective news source? The opportunity costs for web-based journalism are actually pretty small.
We are not powerless over the next four years - in a Democratic government, power ultimately flows from the population, and will continue to do so long as we remind ourselves of that. I want to talk about the professionalization of politics at a later date, but today, I want to ask everyone what they've done.
And I want to talk about how we use the internet to accomplish it. It's a tool we need, but it's only one tool. I think we need to build more resources like vote-smart, and I think we need to build new ways to coordinate real world efforts. What Josh is doing today on talking points is effectively a giant checklist - checklists, though , can be absurdly powerful.