proportion. “Seriously,” we asked, “ this is the number-one problem facing America?”
Two software developers from Berkeley, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, were moved to do something about it. What they did followed directly from the background that they had: They started an e-mail list. Because of an innovation in their list technology, they were able to collect the names of the people to whom the e-mail was forwarded. That meant they could track its growth. On the first day, there were a couple hundred followers. The second day, a couple thousand. By the third day there were more than twenty-five thousand. More than a hundred thousand by the fourth. Boyd thought the growth “staggering.” And soon a movement— MoveOn.org —became a cross-partisan player and the only adult on the field, demanding that Congress censure the president and get back to its work. Its real work. The work of a republic, not the game of persecuting a hopelessly flawed, if genius, president.
In that first flicker of life, that first twitch of this sleeping giant, we can see everything in the stories that would follow. The leaders didn’t create any energy; they tapped into it. They were able to tap into it because new technology made it insanely easy to do so. That technology leveraged a passion that was genuine—and cross-partisan. Not just the energy to click and send but also the energy to show up and organize. (Two weeks after MoveOn launched, the team asked for volunteers to “set up meetings with their member of Congress.” The response was “dramatic.” Within forty-eight hours, hundreds of volunteers had shown up at more than three hundred meetings.) At every step, the insiders were convinced that the outsiders were mistaken, until the insight of the outsiders became conventional wisdom for the insiders. As Wes Boyd recounted in an interview for this book,
We got blank stares for years and years and years from most of the professional political people. They had no idea what this was about. … The pros, when we made the mistake of consulting them, would warn very very strongly, “Do not just send volunteers out to do this work.”
But, of course, volunteers became the lifeblood of this new genre of political movement. They constituted the energy in “crowdsourced” politics, and they defined its power.
MoveOn’s wave has repeated itself again and again in the decade or so since. Not just on the tech-enabled Left but also on the traditional Left (Obama) and then on the Right (the Tea Party), then on the Gen X/millennial Left (Occupy Wall Street), and now in the unaligned Internet (the Wikipedia-driven anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign). Each time, the pattern has been the same: A surprising and unpredicted “open-source” energy, enabled by cheap and ubiquitous technology, shows us a part of us, We, the People, that conventional politics had forgotten or thought lost. One movement sets the expectations for the next. The character of each sets the framework of legitimacy overall. Organic becomes more significant than organized. Authentic always beats professional. We begin to celebrate the reality TV in politics, so long as we actually believe it is reality and not just Astroturf.
The most recent wave, the one that blocked SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) on January 18, may be the most interesting. The copyright industries had exercised their enormous political influence to get Congress to consider legislation to radically increase their power to invoke the courts to block sites said to engage in “piracy.” The bill was roundly attacked by Internet companies and academics, but Hollywood had the express commitment of enough in Congress to all but guarantee its passage.
Then came the Internet outsiders: An extraordinary movement of Internet activists began to rally the Net to oppose SOPA and PIPA. An unprecedented Internet blackout, led by Wikipedia, brought tens of thousands to their virtual
Two software developers from Berkeley, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, were moved to do something about it. What they did followed directly from the background that they had: They started an e-mail list. Because of an innovation in their list technology, they were able to collect the names of the people to whom the e-mail was forwarded. That meant they could track its growth. On the first day, there were a couple hundred followers. The second day, a couple thousand. By the third day there were more than twenty-five thousand. More than a hundred thousand by the fourth. Boyd thought the growth “staggering.” And soon a movement— MoveOn.org —became a cross-partisan player and the only adult on the field, demanding that Congress censure the president and get back to its work. Its real work. The work of a republic, not the game of persecuting a hopelessly flawed, if genius, president.
In that first flicker of life, that first twitch of this sleeping giant, we can see everything in the stories that would follow. The leaders didn’t create any energy; they tapped into it. They were able to tap into it because new technology made it insanely easy to do so. That technology leveraged a passion that was genuine—and cross-partisan. Not just the energy to click and send but also the energy to show up and organize. (Two weeks after MoveOn launched, the team asked for volunteers to “set up meetings with their member of Congress.” The response was “dramatic.” Within forty-eight hours, hundreds of volunteers had shown up at more than three hundred meetings.) At every step, the insiders were convinced that the outsiders were mistaken, until the insight of the outsiders became conventional wisdom for the insiders. As Wes Boyd recounted in an interview for this book,
We got blank stares for years and years and years from most of the professional political people. They had no idea what this was about. … The pros, when we made the mistake of consulting them, would warn very very strongly, “Do not just send volunteers out to do this work.”
But, of course, volunteers became the lifeblood of this new genre of political movement. They constituted the energy in “crowdsourced” politics, and they defined its power.
MoveOn’s wave has repeated itself again and again in the decade or so since. Not just on the tech-enabled Left but also on the traditional Left (Obama) and then on the Right (the Tea Party), then on the Gen X/millennial Left (Occupy Wall Street), and now in the unaligned Internet (the Wikipedia-driven anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign). Each time, the pattern has been the same: A surprising and unpredicted “open-source” energy, enabled by cheap and ubiquitous technology, shows us a part of us, We, the People, that conventional politics had forgotten or thought lost. One movement sets the expectations for the next. The character of each sets the framework of legitimacy overall. Organic becomes more significant than organized. Authentic always beats professional. We begin to celebrate the reality TV in politics, so long as we actually believe it is reality and not just Astroturf.
The most recent wave, the one that blocked SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) on January 18, may be the most interesting. The copyright industries had exercised their enormous political influence to get Congress to consider legislation to radically increase their power to invoke the courts to block sites said to engage in “piracy.” The bill was roundly attacked by Internet companies and academics, but Hollywood had the express commitment of enough in Congress to all but guarantee its passage.
Then came the Internet outsiders: An extraordinary movement of Internet activists began to rally the Net to oppose SOPA and PIPA. An unprecedented Internet blackout, led by Wikipedia, brought tens of thousands to their virtual
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