Oh, I just love this post from Britt Blaser, writing on Steal This Campaign!! Thanks to Doc Searls, writing on Networked Democracy at Work
Excerpts don’t do Blaserco justice, but here goes:
Steal This Campaign
OK, we can’t steal it, but we can buy it. Cheap.
All the campaigns are talking about money, which is what politicians care about. We can put an end to that foolishness with a simple strategy: Buy a campaign by showering it with so many $50 contributions that they won’t have to worry about corporate contributions. Apparently the Republicans are raising $200 million from their closest friends based on a single cynical premise:
You can buy people’s votes
The back story on that cynical assumption is that they need to be bought because they never manifest themselves other than through big time TV marketing.
But someone said recently that, if a million people give $1,000, the Republican’s cynical assumptions go out the window…
..Scale
Everyone seems to agree that 6/30/03 will be written about for years since it was the first spontaneous expression of political will by self-organizing voters talking each other into caring more and donating more through the Moveable Type Comments function. That inspiring day caused the campaign to believe more strongly in its core aspiration: to somehow get nominated and then to give the Republicans a decent challenge. If 6/30 is as important as it seems, the campaign is making a mistake: It should re-calibrate its goals.
If the campaign doesn’t see the potential in the Internet, then the smart mob phenomenon just might. And a smart mob functions at an entirely different level than conventional hierarchical structures. Its force is nuclear and 20th century politics is just gunpowder.
Do the Math
Internet-equipped people caused $802,000 to be donated to Dean on 6/30/03. They did it by chatting each other up as the new totals were posted every half hour, and as the goal, depicted as a baseball bat, was increased as goal after goal was surmounted through the afternoon.
A freely associating mob is forming around the Dean campaign. Its communication tools will soon transcend the Campaign comment archives, by organizing its own tools. The campaign can’t stop them nor should it want to, though there are surely consultants who would just as soon all this went away. Too late.
Metcalfe’s Law says that this mob’s value and power will grow with the square of its population, attracting more people and volksmoney as an accretion disk in space sucks in matter from the systems around it. I believe this phenomenon is a social force too powerful to be stopped, and that historians will be more interested in 6/30/03 than 9/11/01.
