Wampum

Two Years (internet-tyme) Before the Mast

Having collectively spent way too much time on the internet properties of three campaigns, and some high-traffic unofficial campaign properties, there's something I'd like to share, er, get off my chest. They are not effective tools.

Each is filled in the center with flows of momentary gook, puncuated by "look at thats" and "here's my letter to foo", trolls, and monkeys pounding on ratings buttons, trying to submerge or suface some skiff of fools or another. A few issue-nexii manage to retain longer-term coherency, e.g., committed-scientists-4-foo, and policy-wonks-4-bar, but that's about it. Each property that attempts political geography -- an Iowa caucus nexus, a New Hampshire nexus, a ... Maine nexus, fills it with "first" and "Foo Rules, Bar Drooles" contributions, leavened by some nice first-hand experiential writing "I met Foo and he said a bunch of wicked good things ...", but the overwhelming bulk of internet textual contributions to these properties is refried horse-racing, pundit- or candidate-haigography (plus or minus an order of haggis), and unsollicited-advice-to-candidates-lacking-staff.

If the intent of these internet properties is to provide some sort of auto-stroke machine for couch potatos, sort of a sink for a inverse pop-ups, the political pop-backs, an indifferent bed pan for all the urine streams on the net, incidental to putting PayPal buttons and credit card friendly dialoge boxen next to some fairly static content and whatever staff tosses to communications to get rid of, then these things are working. Campaign has internet face, content is dynamic, contribution flows are sunk consistent with FEC compliance requirements, and the rubes pretend they are carnies and part of the show.

If the intent is to end with functioning caucus and GOTV organizations, the bread and butter of politics before the invention of highly asymetrical unicast (broadcast) and mostly asymetrical multicast (web), and you know, winning, these DotCom political bubbles are not working as planned.

The bboard doesn't scale, netnews has passed, poli-spam does moveon well, but moveon hasn't won a single precinct, though it is as effective as the NRA's direct mailings.

In the IETF we have a basic test for "good" ideas -- does it scale? References to fish are allowed, but when you are asking "will foo work when every cell phone does bar?" or "what is the limits behavior of the system as the number of nodes grows linearly? if growth is exponential?" the space of allowed answers does not include a reference to tuna. You can tune a fish, you cannot tune a system with poorer than log response to linear or greater growth.

If that seems hard to get your head around, put a gym coach's whistle in between your lips, stick your head in a beehive, and start blowing as loud as you can. Refreshing, neh?

Reading Atrios' "I'm going to be in the talkies" post link brought this on. The right answer is Ve-R-Changink-de-Welt-Ja-Sure. The wrong answer is that grabbing the B2B flotsam and jetsam that the retreating DotCom seas have left to dry, which managed to work for some long floundered vessel of petty e-com looks pretty bad right now, appears to have no roll in the win/place/show problem space right now, and will explode long before the first Tuesday in November, when 50,996,116 state-machines executing a "vote" program may be attempting to augment the paid and free media outlets for that last bit of state that toggles them to complete their programs -- and all that is going through a bboard implemented in perl, Akamized for throughput performance.

This problem, or rather, a scalable resource allocation system that supports the semantic of political geography has been solved. The words replicated, distributed, database, consistent and hierarchical, are a sufficiently unique identifier for the technology.

But I digress. The campaigns this cycle are run by people who think Windows works for some non-zero value of "work", that "open source" sounds cool, and actually have honest-to-god experience in IT. People who's resumes don't even make it to my desk or the desks of my peers who run the businesses that look most like political campaigns -- national ISPs and NSPs who wholesale backbone to local access providers.

Burger flippers at the edge-devices. Not my first choice for a new model. Maybe Atrios and the other content digeratti have a better answer. I guess I'll have to tune in and listen to the fish.

Posted by at January 23, 2004 12:09 PM | TrackBack