A great victory. Not for the Democrats, mind you, and certainly not for the Republicans, but for me. I won money on the election. A certain ex-college roommate turned science fiction author let his natural pessimism flare up again and he swore up and down that the Dems wouldn’t flip one house of Congress.
He really should learn not to bet with me. Remind me to tell you about the bet he made regarding the premiere of his DS9 episode.
As far as for who else this election is a victory, it’s the Internet.
A decade ago, Declan McCullagh and I were bringing a book proposal around to various publishers entitled “Digital Nation: How The Online Community Became The Most Powerful Political Force In America… And Why” where we spoke about the birth of the new social paradigm and how it was showing up in legal venues, etc. It centered around the ACLU v. Reno lawsuit to outlaw the Communications Decency Act, but touched on the various cultural and social battles that sprang up around it, from Marty Rimm to 24 hours in Cyberspace. Taking a piece from our proposal:
…this is a book about the digital revolution– not the one everybody “predicted” where everybody would have a computer on their desk linked to a pager on their hip, but an old-style political revolution where old governments were overthrown, subverted, or simply made irrelevant to the new age. This is the story of how the online community became the most powerful political force in America.
The online community is the largest voluntary organization in the world. Bar none. Currently estimated at 40 million users worldwide, it crosses national, ethnic, gender, age, and ideological lines. And it is growing at an exponential rate– it is accepted as a general rule of thumb that the user base doubles every ten to twelve months. In the United States alone, current users outnumber the population of New England. By the time this book is published, they will outnumber New England and New York.
I predicted at the beginning of the year that 1996 would be the year of the Net as a political force, on a par with the Black or gay vote– and the Net is now very angry. And if you don’t believe the Net as a whole has power and influence when it gets angry, ask Intel about what happened to them when they said “So the Pentium makes a few math errors. Big deal! Who’s going to care? Nobody listens to those geeks on the Internet!” The Pentium disaster ended up costing them over a billion dollars.
For the most part, Net users were content just to be left alone, and we wouldn’t get in anybody’s way– we’d just sit in front of our monitors developing vision disorders and carpal tunnel syndrome. But instead, we’ve been told to shut up. We’ve been told that others know better, and we get orders that come from outside the borders of cyberspace. And I don’t want to think what’ll happen when some legislature tries to tax our transactions… the roar will be deafening.
Think about this: If the Internet ages in dog years, it was settled 182 years ago. It began to get heavily settled in the last 50. It is now having laws imposed on it from outside sovereigns, willy-nilly and without representation. It responded to this with a revolt that darkened whole sections of the Net.
The Jamestown colony was settled in 1607. The Revolutionary War started 158 years later.
Now, a decade later (seventy years in Internet time) we have entire national elections that turn on what happens on the Internet.
The First YouTube Election, and Not the Last:
RUMS FELLED
You gotta love the New York Post.
Thus today’s headline reports Rummy’s demise, encapsulating in two words the entire changing of the guard now under way in Washington after Tuesday’s game-changer elections.
And we owe it all not to the mainstream press, which, as far as I can recall did not break a single investigative piece of news that mattered to the voters on Tuesday.
It was, rather, thanks to YouTube.
For it was on YouTube that Virginia Senator George Allen was shown to the world, his shirtsleeves rolled up, microphone in hand, clearly unnerved by the presence of an observer with a video camera recording his off-the-cuff remarks, attempting to turn the tables by pointing to the cameraman and saying,
“Let’s give a welcome to macaca here, welcome to America”
And it was on YouTube that Montana Senator Conrad Burns was shown to the world, eyelids flickering, elbows slipping, as he tried to stop himself from dozing off in the middle of an agricultural hearing.
His campaign slogan? “Delivering for Montana.”
Democrats complained last time around when bloggers discredited pieces of John Kerry’s self-styled Vietnam heroics and flat-out dismantled the forged document Dan Rather somberly presented as fact on National Television.
So too Republicans will complain this time around that their precious Senate majority was lost thanks to wise-guy video-tapers looking for “gotcha” moments.
But if the mainstream press isn’t going to keep things honest—and they have proven they can’t, or won’t—then why not give that power to individuals?
Which is exactly what the internet has done.
(Via Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up.)
There were also the inadvertent stars of YouTube, like Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann, whose commentaries were getting more viewers on YouTube than they were on their own network broadcasts. And of course, we have the blogs, the netroots, and on and on and on…
The country is becoming connected in ways previously unimagined, and we’re beginning to see how the other 99% lives, just over the river or through the woods. And more and more, as we all network, we’re all remembering, or relearning, or even learning for the first time– we’re all in this together. Or, as they like to put on the money, e pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
For a while, we’ve beaten back a bit of the “Fuck Everyone But Me” mentality that has pervaded this country–
Fuck international obligations, norms and laws, even where we were the ones that established them. Fuck our own history. Fuck the air. Fuck the water. Fuck science. Fuck the planet. Fuck the poor. Fuck the weak. Fuck tolerance. Fuck the Constitution. Fuck Jesus.
–or we’ve gotten smart enough to realize that it’s simply enlightened self-interest if we all make each other better. Network effects work on the social level too.