Via
Crooked Timber: a great
essay by Steven Johnson on emergent (self-organizing) systems and national politics. Johnson is the author of
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, and the essay is an update of the part of the book dealing with politics, covering the Dean campaign (which happened after it was published). He argues that it showed both strengths and weaknesses of that approach when applied to national politics. What I found interesting is that I think we're already seeing corrections to some of the problems he identifies - here and elsewhere in the blogothing.
The whole essay is well worth reading. This is the bit I'm thinking of particularly. Note: this is not about whether Johnson is right or wrong about the specifics of the Dean campaign. If he's wrong, just change it to "Candidate X".
There was, to be sure, meta-information about the overall state of the Dean supra-organism flowing through the system, but that information primarily took the form of two key indices: people and dollars. The main Dean site - mirrored cheerfully by big media reporters and op-ed writers - was a constant barrage of stats about the number of Meetups held during the past week, and the latest staggering fundraising numbers. All of which created a powerful autocatalytic set, one that seemed likely to propel Dean to the nomination by the time early January rolled around. But as we've seen, clustering usually isn't enough when the environment gets more difficult. You need more responsive, more homeostatic tools to deal with sudden change and challenges. The system needs more than just a positive feedback loop, more than an attractor. It needs to be able to steer.
I'll reserve judgment on what the ultimate cause was behind the Dean campaign's loss in Iowa. The downward spiral of negative campaigning, wasted television ads, a "vast moderate media conspiracy"--choose your poison, the end result was in late January the Dean campaign suddenly had to confront a new reality. It had to cope and not just cluster. It needed information about vulnerabilities in the system, and feedback mechanism that would enable the system to correct itself. But those tools weren't built into the emergent system of the Dean campaign; the tools of the Dean campaign were all about generating increasing amounts of energy: more people, more dollars. They weren't about responding to new challenges, and altering the direction of the supraorganism accordingly.
[...] A clustering emergent system is ultimately focused on doing more of what the system is already doing: how can we get a bigger crowd? How can we raise even more money? A coping system is just as often about patching holes--looking for weaknesses and figuring out ways to compensate for them. When Dean fared so poorly in Iowa--even before the Scream--there was no way for the system to make an assessment about what went wrong, and institute the proper repairs.
Reading that put the conflicts we've seen here - about Kerry's response to Bush on Iraq, or arguments with the DCCC - in a new light. As over-the-top, aggravating, even depressing as they can be sometimes, they're the kind of unspun corrective input you need to be able to steer. Because these sites are outside of the official campaigns, they have no stake in any internal politics or infighting (see Shrum, Bob), and clearly, no hesitation at banging "our side" on the head with a skillet.
Of course the Kerry campaign, and the other national Dem campaigns, are still largely top-down, and all the useful information in the world will do no good if nobody's listening. Undoubtedly, much of the time we're probably not saying anything that they haven't already heard. But even then, I think we're seeing how this big interconnected whatsit can be useful as a tool for filtering peoples' concerns, and focusing attention. As Dave Johnson put it:
I think is the most important ongoing value of the new phenomena of blogging is that bloggers offer observations without the media filter. This is not better or worse than what we get from the media. The value is the difference.
This is a resource for political professionals. Bloggers are able to give the political leadership a way to tap into opinion that is there but is not yet salient. I think bloggers offer Washington and local leadership an additional channel for learning what the public is thinking - or, even better, what the public WILL BE thinking. The huge number of weblogs and the number of people choosing which blogs to read on a given day offers a true "marketplace" method of learning what that segment of the public considers important.
While I think it is important that our readers have access to this perspective, I think that this is especially valuable to the political class.
Look at the improvements over at the Stakeholder, and their "Open House" efforts. And - possibly - the gratifyingly prompt four-star smackdowns of Cheney's remarks implying that Kerry "doesn't have deeply held convictions about right and wrong". I'm not trying to say that they're sitting there saying, "Wow, Atrios is really pissed about this! We better do something!" Just that we might be seeing a few small steps toward real public participation.
Because even if it was premature, I still like that idea of "electing a system, not a candidate."