I had been a professional Internet reporter for a decade before the Web was spun. I was like a TV reviewer in 1947 who had covered Philo Farnsworth and owned a Philco. I’ve been there since before the beginning.
By 1996 I had even seen what the Internet could do, in terms of driving the emotions that become politics. I grew furious at trolls in CompuServe discussions about Michael Dukakis in 1988. It was only after I logged off that I saw the power.
We are now 8 political cycles in on the collision of politics and technology, and the relationship has turned now upside down. Technology now dominates politics.
Websites
1996, of course, came just two years after the Web was spun. Static web sites were still the rule. Clinton’s site was better than Dole’s, but it made little difference. Dynamic addressing was still in the future. Hope was in the air, with Al Gore’s talk of an “Information Superhighway.” (He didn’t realize what can happen in cul de sacs.) Basic laws had not yet been passed. Campaigns were still built on TV, the ‘free media” of news seen as equal to the “paid media” of ads.
Webrings
2000, for those who don’t remember, was the year of the Webring. These were loose affiliations of personal web sites, coalescing around a candidate or movement. Bill Bradley had a good one.
Bush lawyer Ben Ginsburg killed them by having regulators (remember regulators?) classify them as campaign contributions and expenditures. This scared off both the ring runners and the campaigns.
Blogs
2004 was the year of the blog. Howard Dean’s blog was the year’s top story. It cost almost nothing to produce, was run centrally, so Ginsburg couldn’t touch it. Blog entries would be followed by hundreds of comments. It was intimate.
But it wasn’t scaled. That’s why Dean failed. An effort by Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong to have Dean invest in newer technology was unsuccessful, so the crowd in orange hats scared off Iowa primary voters. Yeeaaaarrrghhh! By then, Markos had founded his own discussion blog, Daily Kos.
In 2007, after being hosted in an all-hands meeting by Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, Barack Obama was able to build a scaled, Google-like online presence. It could collect vast amounts of information from volunteers and direct those volunteers to meaningful campaign work.
The self-service site even had Google’s look and feel. TV reporters covering the campaign paid no attention and were blindsided when this worked.
The year 2012 was the springtime of social media. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, wow. Campaigns spread their wings and mass participation grew. No one knew exactly how to handle it. The “mainstream” media of newspapers and TV certainly didn’t. They still don’t.
The Dark Web
Then came 2016, the year of the Dark Web. Vladimir Putin infiltrated the U.S. through the Internet and subverted the election, electing Donald Trump. How he did it still isn’t properly understood, but the vulnerabilities remain in place.
Other countries have no sympathy given how the U.S. routinely interfered in their politics going back 200 years, to the Monroe Doctrine.
The Web as Video
I originally titled my section on 2020 as “everything, everywhere, all at once,” but that movie didn’t come out until two years later. The big story was the use of video. TV coverage of big events was endlessly cut, spliced, and reworked by formal and informal campaigns. Memes proliferated. Hilarity ensued. So did tragedy, drama, and propaganda, leading directly to January 6.
The Death of Media
In 2024, reporters for “mainstream media” are screaming that candidates won’t talk to them anymore.
Why should they? It’s so much easier to stream with Howard Stern, Joe Rogan, or Elon Musk. Their questions are easy, and they like you.
Today you use TikTok to boost your vibes and deride the other side. Even the choice of online media is now a political choice. The Harris campaign is on Threads, guys.
Where this is going is toward regulation. By next year, everyone in government will be Internet literate. Everyone in politics will understand how to manipulate opinion online, and how their adversaries do it, including our nation’s adversaries.
The result will be Balkanization. The Internet is too important to not be under local government control. Other countries figured this out years ago. Now we have. The result is hard to predict, but I hope the impulse comes from the bottom up. I don’t think it will. Expect mistakes.
