Steady Flash Mobbing...
Reason piece on Howard Dean and how he is using technology to spread his message (as horrible as it is) and to recruit for his election efforts. On the whole, you have to give the guy credit (plus he is a blogger and took over for Lessig for a week), it is just a shame his message is so bogus. Note -- Lessig is a prof at Stanford's law school and a big-wig on intellectual property law.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. Maybe people really want to hike the minimum wage, repeal President Bush's modest tax cuts, bail out crumbling, mismanaged municipalities, and keep shoveling money into Social Security. You never know.
The kicker though is the final paragraph...
And suppose lightning strikes and Dean takes the Democratic nomination. That's the end of his high-tech organizational juggernaut, right? Karl Rove executes a massive TV air campaign for George W. Bush and Dean does an amazing impersonation of George McGovern circa 1972. Except just like the Net that was built to survive nuclear airbursts, Dean's smart mobs might be hard to defeat without meeting them on the ground. Bush TV ads might be dissected and neutralized in real time in every market they are run in.
Or all the mobsters might all be out playing duck-duck-goose in the park or pretending to be robots, an inherent risk when your campaign rides the bleeding edge of culture and tech.
Reason piece on Howard Dean and how he is using technology to spread his message (as horrible as it is) and to recruit for his election efforts. On the whole, you have to give the guy credit (plus he is a blogger and took over for Lessig for a week), it is just a shame his message is so bogus. Note -- Lessig is a prof at Stanford's law school and a big-wig on intellectual property law.
"When we send you stuff, you send it to your e-mail list. A hundred people on everybody's email list here, that's four hundred thousand people!" Dean said at a rally on Monday that dwarfed the response other candidates received.
Is Dean nuts or is he onto something? Probably a little of both, which makes him dangerous to status quo assumptions about how 2004 will unfold. Maybe people really want to hike the minimum wage, repeal President Bush's modest tax cuts, bail out crumbling, mismanaged municipalities, and keep shoveling money into Social Security. You never know.
The kicker though is the final paragraph...
And suppose lightning strikes and Dean takes the Democratic nomination. That's the end of his high-tech organizational juggernaut, right? Karl Rove executes a massive TV air campaign for George W. Bush and Dean does an amazing impersonation of George McGovern circa 1972. Except just like the Net that was built to survive nuclear airbursts, Dean's smart mobs might be hard to defeat without meeting them on the ground. Bush TV ads might be dissected and neutralized in real time in every market they are run in.
Or all the mobsters might all be out playing duck-duck-goose in the park or pretending to be robots, an inherent risk when your campaign rides the bleeding edge of culture and tech.
posted by Champion at 11:18 PM
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