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February 25, 2008

Politics Disintermediated

When I was a child, my Daddy instilled in me powerful emotions for politicians. There were some I should love and some I should hate, but really none to whom I should feel indifferent. As an impressionable sidekick to my Dad, I put every politician on a pedestal, even if that pedestal served only to make them easier targets for ridicule. Richard Nixon was a jerk. But so was the hero of a rival baseball team.

As I grew up, I saw celebrity close up, and my reverence faded. As I began to lobby these politicians and saw their flaws, even just their humanness, I lost my heroes and my worldview was muddied. I spent time wondering whether or not the latest flock of politicians had become less worthy, or whether my older eyes saw the same breed more clearly.

I am convinced, that, in my lifetime, America has not rewarded intellect or passion or humanity in its selection of political leaders. Rather, we’ve rewarded party loyalty, electing a couple decades worth of vainglorious party hacks.

Looking at the current Presidential race, I have some newfound hope that the American citizens are now capable of recognizing merit in our potential leaders. And it is not just Barack Obama. It certainly includes Barack Obama, but it also includes a whole new generation of reluctant leaders, who were first great in their respective fields before stepping into public service. We are now able to harness online communities and communications tools to draft the most talented into politics regardless of whether or not they’ve been recognized by the party bosses as team players, as dues payers.

I suspect that this is in large part an outgrowth of the enabling power of the Internet as the most democratic and pluralistic communications and information distribution and interaction tool humanity has ever known. To me, it all comes down to the Internet’s ability to “disintermediate” – to bring individuals and groups together with other individuals and groups without any intervening gatekeepers or facilitators. With the Internet, everyone gets to be a distributor of information, and even a “trusted source” to someone else. We are no longer captive to the spoon-fed information that the party machinery would will its people to believe. We’ve seen this with the immediate and viral power of YouTube videos to parse through the crap fed to us by the politicians, their handlers, the party bosses and the traditional pundits and distribution outlets. Truth wills out almost instantaneously. To quote Abraham Lincoln -- someone whom history has categorized as a great political leader (although who can say for sure without having had the billion critical eyes of the Internet fixed upon him –maybe he just had a great P.R. agent circa 1863): “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” With the Internet it is almost impossible to fool any of the people any of the time.

There is a profound upside to “Politics Disintermediated” and the instantaneous free-flow of information from one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many. Citizens actually feel empowered. We now think we can participate and make a difference, not just with our votes, but with our personal influence. We become the advertising juggernaut for the truth. We are all now able to run our own mini-media empires where we can freely distribute our views to our friends and audiences within our own respective online networks and across the broader Internet if our views have intellectual, or humorous, or other, appeal.

This is all a long preface to say that I genuinely believe we have the makings of a new generation of politicians whom even the most jaded adults might respect, not just the wild-eyed and impressionable children of political junkies.

Barack Obama is just the most prominent example of this phenomenon. I think he is the first beneficiary of the power of the people to harness the Internet to directly influence the political process. One of the great thought-leaders and communicators of the Internet Age is considering a bid for Congress. There are multiple online social networks committed to drafting Larry Lessig to run for Tom Lantos’ Congressional seat, vacated by his death. If Lessig runs, it shall certainly be the most apparent demonstration to me that the political process might truly be changing to reward merit.

When I first recognized that American politicians were not the great heroes of our age, I started to look abroad. My first impressions were “Why can’t American politicians be as smart as those elected by other countries?” How do we get our own Havel? I assume this is more a “grass-is-always-greener” phenomenon. Havel is just the exception proving the rule that all alleged democracies are still only as free as their distribution outlets enable. For every Havel, the modern world has seen a hundred [insert name of preferred despot]. With a free and open Internet, where each of us may communicate and reach a wider audience, we do not have to accept the options fed to us by party bosses, who might profess some benevolence but really stand to gain the most by preserving special interest and insider politics.

I don’t want to sound too, too Pollyannaish. There is still a stickiness of old media and even a stickiness of new media powerhouses. For instance, it’s quite possible that no more than 3 people will read my blog (and two of those will be my parents to whom I intend to email this entry. I might consider reading it myself at some point). But we have moved a long way in the direction of creating a more perfect marketplace of ideas, where the only thing keeping the idea from the frictionless plane of Internet distribution is the idea’s own momentum.

Tags: Jonathan Askin, Barack Obama, Larry Lessig,
Politics Disintermediated, Internet Communications

Posted by jonathan.askin at February 25, 2008 11:16 AM

Comments

Posted by: kathryn Jones at February 25, 2008 12:21 PM

Posted by: Jonathan Askin at February 25, 2008 02:18 PM

Posted by: Chris Parandian at February 27, 2008 06:30 PM

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