2008-10-08»
freeeeeeee; and a wired whitehouseยปSo you may have noticed that I’m not quite posting here daily. That’s because I’m exercising my precious new freeedoms. The second month finished a while back (on the 17th?), and I’ve been running on inertia and the powerful fumes of trackbacks and comments since then. As everyone says it does, the blogging has helped out in a bunch of other areas. I’m writing better and faster in other spaces, I’m paying a bit more attention to the world, and I end up finessing ideas instead of going “huh, maybe I should write that down somewhere, one day.”
Most of all, I impressed by the magical power of public guilt. I am thinking about other potentially humiliating things to do to get ORG more members; I am also thinking a little of new beginnings. It looks like I’ll be moving apartment again pretty soon (sainted flatmates’ toddler is getting very walky, and they want more room). I might have a studio on the top of Bernal Heights to look down on the city. My work is picking up again, too: for a while, one of our team was telecommuting from the East Coast, which is good for the fact that we have to deal over lots of timezones, but not so great for co-ordinating between us. He’s been here in SF now for less than a week, and we’ve already picked up a little pace. I like to keep work out of this blog, but the issues do wriggle so, begging me to form half-baked opinions, if only ones highly tangential from what I do during the day (where we spend much of our time baking our opinions until they are perfect).
I also, God help me, have been thinking about what the next administration will actually be like. I keep thinking back to the local campaign manager for Howard Dean in San Jose, sitting with me in a cafe crammed with Dean-fans writing letters and exchanging email addresses, back in August 2003. Months before the election, his movement had already shown the others what was possible with the Net, and carried him to the frontrunners table by fundraising and publicity. A year or so before the election, I asked the campaign manager: suppose Dean does get in. Suppose he becomes President. What happens to all of this, I asked. Do you just put it in mothballs for the next election?
The campaign manager’s eyes got all dreamy, and he said: well, think how having this communications network works for a Whitehouse. Think about being able to explain your side of the story to your base like this; build on them to work with other candidates. Report back on how they feel the country is going.
Me, I’m not sure that’s something you can really achieve and stay Presidential. American Presidents are supposed to be folksy, but then ascend into Whitehouse heaven and live apart from the mortals. Not mail them every four hours like MoveOn. And it would feel a little Chavez to have the Obama fans still wired into the secret messaging while he’s also running everyone else’s country.
But the question still remains: when you have a wired campaign, do you run a wired whitehouse?