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Monday, December 8, 2000
ICANN't, cont'd 
| | How can you take seriously a piece like this in the Times when, just for starters, it calls ICANN "the Internet's semi-official governing body." |
| | Perspective comes from Kevin Werbach, who says the Times statement "isn't correct but is sufficiently well-accepted that it hardly matters." |
| | Leaders from almost 200 countries will convene next week in Geneva to discuss whether an international body such as the United Nations should be in charge of running the Internet, which would be a dramatic departure from the current system, managed largely by U.S. interests. |
| | I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just end it there. |
What was that?
| | The windows just shook twice, as if from the shock wave produced by some distant exposion. I thought I felt the ground move, but I'm not sure. Hmm... |
| | [Later...] These things have been continuing throughout the day. Weird. |
Bug reblog
| | Betcha this one gets fixed fast. |
| | If it does, it'll confirm my belief that the problems here are matters of implementation tweaking rather than of What's Wrong with RSS. |
Same Times
| | In case you weren't reading blogs over the weekend, or in case you weren't reading the New York Times either, you probably missed The Dean Connection, by Samantha M. Shapiro in the paper's Sunday Magazine. |
| | I found out about it early, around midnight on Saturday, when I got an instant message from David Sifry that turned into a phone call. "Did you know you're in the Times?" he said. I said no, and he sent me a link to Page 2 of the piece. Here's the paragraph: |
| | Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, says the campaign's structure is modeled on the Internet, which is organized as a grid, rather than as spokes surrounding a hub. Before joining the campaign, Trippi was on a four-year hiatus from politics, during which he consulted for high-tech companies, and he can be evangelical on the subject of the Internet and its potential to create political change. (A team of Internet theorists -- David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Howard Rheingold -- consults for the campaign.) Trippi likes to say that in the Internet model he has adopted for the campaign, the power lies with the people at ''the edges of the network,'' rather than the center. When people from the unofficial campaign call and ask permission to undertake an activity on behalf of Dean, they are told they don't need permission. |
| | I posted something brief about it (disclaiming employment by the campaign) and moved on, first to sleep and then to the rest of my Sunday. |
| | Last night at a big dinner I sat next to a recently retired gentleman whose son, a lawyer in New York, had sent him an email pointing to the Times piece. The son's intent was evidentiary: a way of helping explain The Dean Thing to the old man. There were other conversations at the party, around the piece, and the Dean Thing, and (among other things) the distance between What's Covered and What's Really Going on. |
| | Anyway, got a pointer this morning to It's The Same Song, by Chris Nolan. I went back and read the whole Times piece (which I didn't the first time). And I gotta say, she nails it: |
| | Why can¹t Big Media write about Howard Dean¹s campaign without sounding like a bunch of clueless but well-meaning 19th century explorers debating the source of the Nile all the while breathlessly reporting back on the wonders of Africa? |
| | ...the sort of political activity that Dean¹s people are channeling isn¹t just technical or web-based. The Times¹ dwells on the mechanics of Deanworld Friendster and meetup are explained in wondrous detail. But the amorphous and evangelical role that that the Cluetrain crowd has with many Dean supporters is boiled down inaccurately into terminology used by political insiders. They¹re described as ³consultants." |
| | As anyone on the web knows, that¹s not the role that Doc Searls and Howard Reingold play. But the description, an attempt to get their relationship to the Deanheads into a neat category, pretty much sums up the problem here. Dean is turning people on to politics because he is speaking their language. The Times also dwells for a bit on Dean¹s willingness to talk to a local organizer the Howards for Howard Dean guy just as if he were a representative from AARP, one of the nation¹s more powerful lobbying groups. Yup. Courtesy to less-than-loaded supporters. Now there's a concept. |
| | By the way, if Gore had won in 2000, you can betcha we'd be seeing the same kind of grass roots business going on among Republicans today. Network effects are network effects, regardless of their causes. |
| | Bonus link #1: Molly Ivin's We have a winner. No surprises, but well-said, as always. The pull quote line: |
| | This year, the Internet is to politics what television was in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race. |
| | This is not just about a weblog, or social software. It's the combination of those and other online tools, animated by a campaign culture, that creates the networked campaign. |
| | The Dean Media routes around the conventional press, but also piggybacks on it, feeds off it, critiques it. The mainstream media is still very important. But the Dean campaign doesn't have to rely on it. |
| | Dean Media has its own newspaper -- the weblog -- that updates in real time and lets anyone contribute. It has online audio and video capability. It uses multiple electronic channels, from email to social software, to communicate with its troops, giving them marching orders and allowing them to organize themselves. Everyone gets a weblog. And the DeanSpace environment links it all together. |
| | There's a different kind of power in politics now, unwelcome in Washington. Peer power is, literally, the power to peer into the hearts of real people taking unexpected actions for improbable candidates. These Internet media allow us to drill past dull or phony appearances into the heart of lightness. Blogs and comments and RSS feeds and video calls and all the rest give us X-Ray vision into the heart of what matters. |
| | Interesting to read what Ed and Britt write about the Times' focus on The Young People in the campaign: |
| | Ed: Yesterday's NYT mag story covered the social software angle, but was too heavy on the young-lovers-online conceit and thus missed what these young lovers are actually getting done. |
| | Britt: Samantha Shapiro published the New York Times Magazine article she started researching last September. It's such an intimate look at the campaign staff that Zack and Clay felt exposed and, frankly, uncomfortable. but it's a masterful story, full of humanity and the voice of authentic people doing important work based on heart and belief. Though there's heartbreak in their story, it's mostly heartwarming. |
| | One more thing, Dean has picked safe people to advise him on the Internet. They're nice. They say nice things. But they're not fighters. Another way to say "let's lose this election but we'll be really nice about it." |
| | I think Dave sells Dean and his supporters short on that one. I also think Dave gives Dean insufficient credit for stuff like his Principles for an Internet Policy. But I think Dave's absolutely right to challenge candidates to stand up for the Net. Standing up means more than being "The Intnernet Candidate." It means defending the Net and the principles that produced it, and that it continues to stand for. |
| | That means calling for a repeal (or at least a rewrite) of the DMCA. It means standing against all the UCITAs, ACCOPs and CBDTPAs that special interests (from which Dean has been immunized, no?) keep lobbying through the lawmaking mill. It means standing up against our insane patent system, calling for an end to business method patents, at the very least. |
| | Lots of grist for the campaign mill there. So what if none of this is a mainstream issue yet? Or that lots of the bad-guy lawmaking was initiated by fellow democrats? Trust me, Bush is for the status quo on this one. |
| | And if Dean doesn't take the opportunity, who will? |
| | Hint: Here's your chance, Wes. You want to out-Dean Dean? You've still got room. |
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