Following is the essay you can designate as Volume 10, Number 19 of
This Week’s Clue, based on the e-mail newsletter I have produced since
March, 1997. It would be the issue of May 7. Enjoy.
There is an important point about political communities such as DailyKos which is always missed by journalists.
The power of interactivity, which is intimacy. Scaled intimacy. And the business models arising from that intimacy.
I first saw this on the Dean blog four years ago. People responded to what was written, other people responded to their comments, and all these people felt heard. They felt validated. They felt important, perhaps for the first time. A major candidate for the Presidency, or at least his campaign, was hearing what they were saying, and using it to change America.
The failure of the Dean effort, I believe, came down to bad technology choices. Markos Moulitsas, who had already founded DailyKos, was briefly on the Dean payroll. (He worked alongside Jerome Armstrong, a founder of MyDD.) They suggested Dean switch to a Community Network Service platform, like Scoop or Slash, in order to scale the intimate experience people got in the summer. Dean’s campaign staff rejected the suggestion. But Kos took his own advice, which is how we got to where we are.
In some ways, Dean was wise to ignore Kos, even though it cost him a shot at the Presidency. Were this immense community under the control of the party, or a candidate, its costs and value would become matters of political controversy. As a candidate product, it might have died with the candidacy. As a party product, it would have become dependent on the party’s spin-of-the-moment. Either could have been fatal.
So now you’ve got a system, supportive of the party but outside it, which had 16 million site visits last month alone. Not page views, site visits. That’s over half-a-million per day. That’s an enormous organization, at least a magnitude larger than what Dean had at his peak.
More important, as Kos himself noted recently, this is not a passive group. The word he has for it is leaderfull. On any subject of interest, there are Kos members who have made themselves experts, who have studied the subject, and who can bring real expertise to bear on it. The community grows organically even in the absence of its titular leader — Kos notes in his post that his traffic went up in April while he was on paternity leave.
DailyKos has also been able to extend itself into "meat-space," licensing his nickname to an annual convention, which this year may have a pivotal role in choosing the Democrats’ 2008 nominee. Or not. It may just be a chance for people who spend time on the site to put names to faces, to share a drink, to enjoy one another’s company, a sort of left-wing Elks meeting. It might also evolve into a sort of liberal version of Comdex, with exhibits hawking products, services, and causes.
There are other, somewhat more specialized communities, abounding in
Left Blogistan. Jerome Armstrong and his crew have built one at MyDD, focused on practical politics rather than policy. Josh Marshall (above) has built one at TPM,
concentrating on policy and also on practical journalism. Because of
TPM it’s no longer possible for any Administration to dump a bunch of
documents, or a major resignation, late on Friday afternoon expecting
it will be ignored. Thousands of people pore over those documents,
catalog them, analyze them, and pull out what’s important, then get
that out to the world in a form reporters can treat as they might a
press release.
Other sites, built on the blogging metaphor, do equally important work. Firedoglake gets credit for following the Scooter Libby trial. Jesus General is among the sites which bring snark to the party. (That’s one of their ads to the left. It goes to the site’s Cafepress page, where you can buy his merchandise.) One-man think tanks abound, such as Juan Cole at Informed Comment and John Robb at Global Guerillas.
Note that I don’t count the Huffington Post
on this list. It’s too diffuse and star-driven to have that kind of
wallop. Arianna Huffington made choices on who she would let write for
the site, and how she would organize it — its intimacy fails to scale.
Many of the sites I have mentioned also have business spin-offs. DownWithTyranny has become a virtual ad shop. Cliff Schecter has become a minor TV celebrity, showing liberals how they should get into the faces of conservative talking heads. Other products — books, podcasts, videos — abound. All these brand extensions have both financial and political impacts.
I haven’t mentioned many thousands of other fine sites, no doubt
including several very large ones, in this brief review. What they have
created, over the last four years, is an immense intellectual
infrastructure, an automatic rapid response force which can go after
politicians, the media, even their own friends, and change minds on a
host of issues.
This is what I mean by Internet Politics.
Will this energy exist if, God willing, Democrats succeed in 2008,
and Republicans leave office? Or will the intellectual energy and
organizational force then switch sides?
I don’t know. But it would be fun to find out.
