The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) by Micah L. Sifry

Author:Micah L. Sifry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: TEC052000
ISBN: 9781939293510
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

We are maintaining some gatekeeper and curating powers at the center of the web here. It’s as if we’re saying, “Y’all go organize now, do whatever you want to be progressive in your community, but c’mon back because the Tea Party is about to shut down the government, and we have a suggestion of what to do, based on all the things bubbling up among what you are doing locally.” It’s kind of a swarm model, in distinction to the clashing armies of old.

Galland adds, “From where I sit, what MoveOn is trying to do is catalyze and support and capture where they’re happening, these leader-full authentic story-filled moments of emergent campaigning and organizing.”38

Distributed campaigning is also being adopted by more organizations, especially those with big email lists, thanks to new software from a startup called ControlShift Labs that is easy to integrate with existing systems that organizations already use. So far, the U.S.–based groups 350.org,39 Credo Action,40 Democracy for America,41 and Coworker.org42 are all offering their members this option, along with Canada’s LeadNow, the U.K.’s 38 Degrees, and Australia’s GetUp!

According to Murshed Zaheed, the deputy political director of Credo Action, “Distributed organizing takes me back to my own entry into online organizing, when I was helping Howard Dean supporters put together house parties with their own pages on the Dean website. Now instead of organizing lots of parties, we’re organizing petitions.”43

Nathan Woodhull, the coding wiz behind ControlShift Labs, notes that “MoveOn wasn’t launched by professionals.” His goal is to make online organizing easier for ordinary people to do. “Instead of being the people who decide everything, we’re enabling other people to organize themselves,” he says.44 In reality, there’s a wide range of organizing that the distributed petitioning approach is enabling. At RootsCamp 2013, Jackie Mahendra, the director of innovation for the Citizen Engagement Lab, a progressive tech hub, offered a four-part taxonomy to distinguish the variety of campaigns that are emerging.

First, Mahendra suggested, there are “wildfire” petition campaigns. Often these are started by people fighting to prevent a friend from being deported or losing their home from foreclosure. Then there are “franchised” campaigns, where a national organization promulgates a tactic, and then lots of groups adopt it locally around a specific target. The current effort by the anti-climate change group 350.org to get universities to divest their holdings in carbon-intensive energy companies is a good example of this. The third type is the “groundswell,” a campaign that begins around a local outrage like the Trayvon Martin killing, but then rapidly gains attention and goes national. And finally, there are “hyper-local” campaigns that are typically centered on a specific state, local actors, or timely legislation.45

At its best, distributed campaigning has the virtue of lowering the barrier to Big Email, the most effective form of Internet-based political organizing. Giving everyone the ability to send mass emails at zero cost is undoubtedly producing a flowering of hyper-local, local, and mid-level campaigns where victory doesn’t require millions of signatures. Sometimes it just takes

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