January 2004 Archives

Yesterday was a cold day here in Minnesota. The radio, as I drove to work, was full of stories about living with the cold and hourly updates on the descent of the thermometer. Minnesotans have a well-deserved fascination with the weather. The extremes of summer and winter hit us much harder than the rest of the nation, than most of the rest of the world. Such is the beauty of living in the middle of a continent.

Although Wallace Stevens was a resident of Connecticut I would like to claim him as the poet of my winter. No one I know captures the way the weather begins to inhabit the soul, the way the cold shapes a life, better than Stevens. The Snow Man is a perfect example:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The winter seems to clear the senses. It's hard to become wrapped up in oneself when one needs to concentrate on the wordl outside. But there is also an ambivalence, winter reveals the boughs of the trees and hide the dirt of the land, at the same time. And it's that ambivalence that I value.

Intriguing speculations on major issues facing the internet in 2004. "2004: The Turning Point: An overview of some of the issues that will change the way we use the Internet." A list that parallels my own interests.

* Email Redux - end of spam, probably end of SMTP to be replaced with authentication
* A Population in Search of a Community - blogging is too individual, current community tools are plagued by spam, need a way to be heard through blogging
* Blogging without Writing - interesting one tenth of one percent reply rule, that only 1 in 1000 people participate in online communities for the number of people who read. What if spyware was under the users control and could keep track of content explored, leading to the formation of your own library.
* Personalization Finally Works - personalization finally begins to succeed as we are able to consume the information we want from vastly larger number of resources. I have links to 500 blogs but I don't read all of them regularly, suppose I can personalize those lists to find what I want to see.
* Learning Objects at Last - the education world is doomed because the vast amount of learning resources will be free. MIT OpenCourseWare triumphs. But then where does research occur?
* New Hype: Simulations - the only content that can't currently be coopted by the proverbial 16-year-old with a computer and an attitude.
* Attacking Open Content - newspapers, music, television, movies: all the content producers will be trying to close down the analog hole and the digital distribution as quickly as possible. Maybe the communities will end up being the darknets of speculation.
* IP Communications, Finally - VOIP and teleconferencing finally begin to arrive.

The brouhaha over Howard Dean's overexuberent speech after the Iowa caucus continues to grow to absurd lengths. The question I want to know is why this story has so many legs? From the right side of the political spectrum I think their is a lot of schadenfrude. Drudge and others are just happy to see Dean self-destruct. But the "mainstream media" has other motives, none of them particularly sinister but crucial to the continuation of the story.

The media has a well defined picture of itself as being above the fray of politics, reporting nothing but the unvarnished truth. Some self-described media virtues are:

* dispassionate
* objective
* fact-based
* truth-seeking

All of these are the opposites of emotion. Dean's mistake, or transgression, was that he showed too much emotion, whether it be anger or sorrow, the reaction would have been the same - continuous, inescapable coverage. Dean acted against the internal virtues of the press and the press now feels the need to punish him. Of course, the validity of those very same virtues can and should be called into question.

Furthermore, the media's default narrative of politics is that every word, every action is premeditated, calculated, polled and tested before it is ever said or shown to the public. On Monday Howard Dean stepped out of that narrative in a big way and he may never recover. Clearly, there was no premeditation on Dean's part as he let out his yell. He was, as defenders have said, taken away by the moment and the crowd.

The saddest result of this default narrative for politics is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Witness the State of the Union speech by Bush the day after. Clearly, this speech was worked and honed for months, rehearsed in front of audiences and focus groups, until every last word served a political purpose. For his supporters it pushed all the buttons that make them see a competent and trustworthy leader. Opponents don't trust any of the words and spend hours breaking everything down into details that fail to speak to them. Either way the language avoids specifics, and tries to show a single emotion - that strange state of being presidential.

What is presidential? What is electability? They are code words for maintaining an even keel in public, behind the scenes you can be an ass, but pulling aside the curtain is never allowed - leave it for the memoirs. We all know that George Bush can be just as angry, just as emotional as Dean, every person can be caught up in the moment and forget themself. But the secret of politics is to be angry, conniving, and vindictive when the public isn't watching. For the opposite effect witness the revelation of the Nixon tapes. The only other option is to create plausible deniability. It wasn't me, George Bush, who told Dean to take his " tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading . . .body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." It was somebody else, who has no real connection to me, George Bush.

Follow your bliss is common career fodder but politics has become so debased no electable person would admit they have a passion for power. Every American wants to believe that they could become president some day, or that their children might become president. It's a default myth. But there is a counter myth that says power should never be exercised in public. It's both a veneration of humility and a shrewd way of keeping the yokels in their place. If no one ever sees the levers being pulled then they can keep living in the Emerald City of ignorance.

References: George Lakoff - Metaphor, Morality, and Politics; Jay Rosen - Pressthink Weblog

I just listened to Howard Dean's Iowa speech from last night and was reminded of one of my favorite politicians, the late Paul Wellstone. Dean's fire was eerily similar to the one caucus I attended in 1990. Back then the conventional wisdom gave Wellstone little chance against the incumbent, Rudy Boschwitz. Wellstone stormed into the caucus hall and gave one of the most insipiring political speeches I've ever seen. But it appears that everyone in the media echo chamber thinks this kind of passion isn't presidential. It may indeed be true but it is a shame. The reactions to the Wellstone memorial amply demonstrate this antipathy toward liberal passion. The conservatives are much better at spinning this passion as some kind of madness or anger. And people buy it. Why? There's just as much passion on display on the rightward edges of the ideological spectrum. I'm beginning to accept that the political media won't give someone with Dean's passion a chance to become an electable president; it's just another example of the media defending the status quo. This disappoints me but I too will persevere.

So if Dean is out as the electable candidate what happens to the organization behind Dean. All of the discussions about the failure of Dean's organization to reshape politics makes me wonder what will happen to the real innovations he has made in online organizing and fundraising if he loses the nomination. Does it become just another part of the machine? Can the blogosphere really open American politics? Despite how much I wish it were true, I think it unlikely. I'm just as mystified about how all this will come together as Britt Blaser at Escapable Logic.

I don't think there will be a serious third party movement in 2004. Nader could still run but I think the Greens and other progressives feel burned enough by Bush to jump onto the Anyone But Bush campaign. But what happens after that. Congress will probably remain Republican, as this Robert Kuttner article "America as a One-Party State" at the American Prospect amply demonstrates. There is an undeniable conservative trend in American politics over the last few decades. The Republicans have, despite their differences, managed to create a successful coalition to block government from raising taxes or doing much to help our fellow citizens. I'm afraid that the only way to turn it around will be through disaster, whether environmental, fiscal, or otherwise.