It was inevitable that online political organizers would find innovative ways to use social media during this election season, but I am part of a project that’s got me incredibly excited about the organizing potential of Twitter. If you haven’t heard about the election cycle’s most controversial issue–voter suppression–you’ve been spending too much time reading Mashable and not enough time following the news. I’m not talking about the Republicans’ tarted up ACORN voter registration fraud “controversy” (something altogether different and much less serious than voter fraud), I’m talking about tactics deployed by political operatives to keep people from exercising their right and responsibility to vote.
Enter Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that limits you to individual entries of 140 characters or less. Individuals use Twitter to share short messages with friends and family and whoever else they give permission to “follow” them. Now marketers and businesses are using Twitter to network and communicate with their customers and political organizers have begun using Twitter to spread important messages throughout their activist base. I wrote about the #dontgo movement, the first large-scale Twitter political activist campaign earlier this year, and it was only a matter of time before someone found a way to turn Twitter into a critical online political organizing tool for elections.
I may no longer be in Nevada, but the beauty of the Internet is that one can keep some of the good bits. :)
And pass them along.
This, by the by, shows exactly what a powerful tool for truth-telling, fact-checking and sub-lethal social insurgency this brave new world of information warfare brings us.
Sometimes you just gotta roll your eyes. This is one of the rather more reasonable comments. Most are along the lines of "dugg down for coming via HuffPo.
"Digg really sucks when it comes to politics. Obama is like Jesus and McCain is the spawn of Satan and Hitler."
No, Obama is like JFK and McCain is the spawn of Cantor and Segal. Dudes and dudettes; this is no longer about "fair." Or rather, it is precisely about "fair." Digg folk are overwhelmingly coming from a technocratic mindset. They tend to understand the processes and procedures of anything they talk about. Most of all, they understand GIGO.
If Garbage comes out, it must have been Garbage when it went in. One inarguable FACT is that we are all hip-deep in garbage. The only intellectually respectable viewpoints are ones that argue FROM that essential reality, going toward "well, what shall we do about it?" But in order to win or lose such an argument, you have to actually participate in it.
When you come and say that it would be "fair" to say that this pile of toxic sludge filled with used needles and UNused condoms is Bush's Sacred Legacy of Organic Compost That Will Fertilize The Sacred Future of Our Family Values, you are not being being seen as a conservative, you are an obvious Luser!
As the T-Shirt Cited Above implies, Lusers are a waste of precious photons.
Pretending to respect their viewpoint in order to reason with them is fruitless, their respect for process is non-existent and their comprehension of the system their stupid ideas would be implemented on are on the order of Ted Steven's Internet Tubes.
A "Luser" is someone who does not understand the system well enough to be permitted a user account on the network. If their job requires such access, well, there's only one rational response - arranging their sudden unemployment.
One does not accommodate them, one ensures they will be replaced with someone smart enough to believe the IT Manager when he or she says that it's a bad idea that cannot be usefully implemented. Should the firm be stupid enough to fire their IT manager for telling them that what they want is impossible (not unlike, say, what happened to Gen. Shinseki), and hire one that will, you are the sort of person that is given as a reason why a network node gets suddenly "black-holed." Your proper fate is not political - it's to meet the BOFH in a back alley. But in practice, the network simply ignores you, with decreasing increments of tolerance.
In this case, "The Network" is both the internet as a whole, and more significantly, those who use the Internet to make significant decisions about economics, religion, politics, climate, public policy, education, defense, drug policy, disability, diversity, race relations, gender issue are starting to realize that the people who propose any intelligent, fact-based approach, any approach that makes any sense from any fiscal or ethical perspective are being opposed by the same pack of mal-informed lunatics. Here's one guy who "hates autism" and thinks that everyone who disagrees with him is part of a conspiracy to poison children. He's got equally valid opinions on politics, too. The people who agree with this guy - they hang out at Free Republic, in Dominionist and Evangelical churches - anywhere that will provide simple answers that involve blaming and punishing other people for the issues they see as being critically important to Fixing Our Nation.
Those of us who oppose their ideas ideologically or who simply observe that correlation does not equal causation, or that "but, um... the Bible doesn't actually say anything of the kind," well, we are subjected to hate speech of that order, faithfully treated by our useless MSM as being "an opinion as good as any other."
Well, aside from being vile, hateful, disturbing, disgusting and evil, leading inevitably to violent reactions by those who've been told that it really WOULD be a good idea of a few "liberals" were shot or hung, every single idea they have is of the same idiot level, so any vaguely credible source is of course going to displease them.
So when they get onto dig and dig things down BECAUSE they come from a credible source, it is definitely time to hark back to the values of OUR founding fathers, succinctly put in one message here.
Intelligent vertebrate humanoid lifeforms, generally dismissed regardless of their views as liberals because of their Unchristian and Unamerican Habits of Critical Thought; such "liberals" as myself have largely "Killfiled" anyone still supporting bushista values.
To the extent that they are still allowed to emit spam and carrier-based "Denial of Services Attacks," we as "Global Node" are about to get "black holed." To validate such fool ideas by bothering to even read them, much less displaying personal or professional courtesy to someone who is such a willfully damned fool contributes to that nigh inevitable Giant Sucking Sound.
I personally do not care to see this happen - but on the other hand, it might be time to consider switching to an ISP that doesn't confuse "Make Money Fast" spam with a political platform. I'd never mistake the Huffington Post for being anything other than gleefully biased - but on the other hand, it's impossible to pretend that you can go to World Net Daily and get an equally well-researched take from the Other Side.
The problem these days is that The Other Side doesn't have any legitimate, credible foundation, due to fratricide. Those permitted (and generally well-compensated) to participate in the Noise Machine are vetted with an eye toward never letting facts inconvenience their assertions.
And since they tend to do everything they can to damage those who disagree, and those of supposed like minds are closest, the largest pile of casualties has been within the Republican party. When Bob Barr feels unwelcome in that tent, it's not a tent any more. It's a pointy white dunce cap.
Persons of wisdom tend to remain silent regarding matters where speaking up will force you to utter provable absurdities. I don't know where all the smart people on the "other side" have gone, but as the years have gone by, it's become clear that "Reality has a well-known Liberal Bias."
"Now I know there's some polls out there saying this man has a 32-percent approval rating," Mr. Colbert said a few moments later. "But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking 'in reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Colbert's unmerciful accuracy in assessing the political acumen and respect for differing opinions of the Brush-Grubbing Boob and at the same time, putting it sqarely within the frame and in the language of the eutraphied trickle that is what remains of "Mainstream Conservatism" is a softball quip in retrospect.
"Liberal" is a code word in those narrow and lifeless confines for those who respect cause and effect and who know which end of the gun goes "bang."
That's all it takes to be deemed a "liberal" these days. Well,"If this be liberalism...."
Let's re-read this again... It's so marvelous in it's clueless Luserness.
Digg really sucks when it comes to politics. Obama is like Jesus and McCain is the spawn of Satan and Hitler.
Oh, that's an unfair comparison. Satan is characterized as being frighteningly competent at tempting fools and leading them toward destruction. That makes those who can be inadequately compared to him deluded fools by definition. Nonetheless, a certain degree of cleverness is required, a certain jaded cynical resignation - and the one common characteristic of the Dead-Enders is their unmistakable, utterly sincere volitional ignorance and stupidity.
Well, that rules out Hitler and hell, most all Nazis, save the SA Brownshirts - who were "The first against the wall."
Hitler was a genius in many ways; most significantly, he was amazingly good at picking people as good or better than he was to support his agendas and ridding himself of those who proved unreliable.
I simply cannot imagine Hitler saying "Heckuva Job, Brownie," unless it was an ironic percursor to a bullet behind the ear.
To him, ideology was a means to an end; he rarely made the mistake of believing his own propaganda.
Most critically, HE was The Leader. The great corporations - including firms such as Standard Oil and other firms entangled with Prescott Bush were beholden to him, not the other way around. It's a damn insult to Hitler to compare him with Bush or McCain. Goddess, it's like confusing Pinky and The Brain.
"Hitler and McCain, Hitler and McCain, one was an evil genius, the other's McSame..."
Don't even bother to compare McCain either to past presidents and founding fathers; certainly not Abe Lincoln, the essential Republican. The FAILURES of Lincoln worked out better than things his living successors claim as successes!
Satan and Hitler were at least worthy of respect. And comparing Obama to Jesus might be over the top, but he's been known to admit that Jesus had a point or two in the Beatitudes, so it's not a completely invalid assertion.
Which leader seems more likely to fix this country; someone who could be expected to fail to live up to the standards of Jesus, or one who can't be expected to live up to Hitler?
Feel free to dig up reality-based, factual and inherently interesting stories that speak to McCain's solid, consistent, selfless and heroic defense of the Constitution that, should he win, he will swear to preserve, defend and uphold. Hell, I'll go a step further - don't just dig it up, SHOUT it to me. Please.
The problem for reality-based conservatism is that nothing that Bush has done, and nothing that McCain talks about doing ties into anything that is genuinely Conservative. Indeed, you only need to read the title of a bill, figure out the absolute opposite, and presume that's what's going to happen, because most often that's the case.
Like, say, lowering taxes. That would, in a non-bizarro Conservative universe have led to more disposable income, leading to an invigorated ecoonomy, with manifestations such as a growth in small buisiness, home ownership, personal savings and investments. Right? Those are the reasons given justifying the tax cuts.
But what we have is the complete opposite. And if you look at what's happend, that's because, in actual effect, that for all but the bizarrely rich, effective taxes went UP.
By taxes, I mean things like gas prices, debt driven inflation and the cost of doing business. A "tax" is a cost imposed upon us by government fiat or by consequence of it's policies that we cannot avoid paying. It really doesn't matter that taxes used to benefit the nation as a whole, and now benefit the few and the wealthy, since under this administration, the net result would be the same, no net benefit to me and you in the very BEST case.
And of course, in States dependent on federal dollars to balance budgets, inflationary taxes turn into very damn REAL taxes. Here in Nevada, No Child Left Behind, which is largely an un-funded mandate, has absolutely cut the guts out of our state budget.
A suspicious mind might come to the conclusion that the whole point was to destroy the current public education system, so that for-profit "private" schools and curriculum providers tied to the Republicans could make huge profits delivering less at even higher cost. Rather like Kellogg, Brown and Root, and it's parent, Haliburton.
It's not a choice between a Democrat and a Republican, it's a choice between a Democrat and a Kleptocrat. Given the track record the Kleptocrats have in stealing elections - we won't even be sure that is anything more that a cosmetic choice.
This is the video that rocked the world of apathetic, porn-consuming, uninvolved teen-agers the world over, and just incidentally reveals exactly why "Belgum" became a swear-word in the mouths of the distant ancestors of Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Now hundreds of thousands, if not literally millions of people have become aware of what they probably thought was a boring technical issue that was too inherently complicated to care about.
Well, whatever you think of Athena - and to be honest, I haven't figured out what to think myself - they bring forward two good reasons why anyone with a pulse and functional hormones should care. And they also have put down some supporting sweat equity, starting up a new social network site called I Power. What the hell... I signed up. Google, Yahoo and Teh Intertubes themselves were created by boob-obsessed dorks just such as these. The .gif protocol was invented so geeks just such as these could look at porn. And OH, the problems that they solved in order to work out how to create mechanisms to transmit kilobytes and kilobytes of grainy porn over 1200 baud modems...
Yep. Stuff Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wanked to back in the day. NEVER underestimate the power of horny net geeks. It took a decade or so to figure out that all this clandestine conversation could be made profitable, and the geeks practically had to jump up and down to get the attention of people with real money.
Like, say, Playboy Magazine, Hustler, etc. Yep. E-Commerce was developed by pornographers in order to bring us all better and more abundant porn.
And now, of course, that time is past, we all have to be adults - and therefore restrict our internet consumption to things that make money for the people that matter telling us the things they want us to know for the sake of their bottom lines and bonus packages.
Now, of course, that all the heavy lifting seems to have been done.
You will find lots of people trying to suggest that it's not even technically possible to usefully proved tiered access. Wrong. It's been done by Rogers Cable in Canada for years - simply by running their access to the unregulated, wild Internet with, if I remember correctly, a shared T1 access from their servers to Mae West. (this may have changed since I unplugged to move south.) This meant they had a captive audience for all their Intense Multimedia Content - All of it both Family Friendly and Intensely Lame, I might add.
It's not a particularly sophisticated solution, and you could literally network around them - if you had some combination of arcane knowledge and money. Or you could just accept that some of a t-one was better than dial-up. But I didn't even bother with their "interface," any more than I bother with Charter's. If I want to know what they have, I can get it at their website. I've never felt the need to even bother - and that, of course, is exactly why your cable provider would love to be able to narrow your range of choices.
Here's the problem. The suits are in this to keep control of "their" markets, their ability to influence your buying decisions and "lifestyle choices." You know, like whether or not to watch "Survivor" or "Something Else." They want to dynamically target advertisments at you based on their server records - and not have to scramble all over and pay money for independently collected data.
The last thing they want is for you to actually communicate to other people on your own and discover that actual duplex communication is empowering, interesting and useful. They would probably loved to have strangled eBay and Amazon at birth, had they even understood what they were looking at.
These are entirely new markets. And the suits are finding out that they are very profitable, and think they can make even more profitable markets if they can "control them."
But neither service would or could work that way. They work because people come to the market voluntarily with things that come from sources no central provider would ever think of providing. And along with the commerce, parallel with it, or utterly entangled with it, is communications, independant trust networks, entire new ideas and products and associations and co-operations, all of it making it possible for me to have fun and or do business with you or anyone else I want without any need for centralized bullshit, permissions, approvals, meetings or much else that is beloved by control freaks and Central Planners.
It's anarchy! Sheer anarchy! People are exchanging information (and of course, music, pictures, video and, God forbid, Ideas) on peer-to-peer networks!
Hell, you might actually discover an issue that matters to you and connect to some other people and cause real problems. You know, like that whole Ron Paul embarrassment.
Oh, yes, if you are reading this, I'm sure you can think of other examples.
Now think back to how things were before you got online. What did you know to be true then that you have come to realize was not exactly true, or even exactly not true? How much have you personally profited by having the internet instead of the means of communication we had before? How many things have you done that no amount of wealth would have made practical?
Oh, yes, life was simpler then. Well, no, not really. We just had the luxury of thinking that it was. Oh, and that Commies were out to kill us in our sleep, blissfully unaware that those so-called commies thought the same about us.
Now the same scam is being run upon us - but this time we can, if we want, actually fact check it, and while most will not, enough will that such schemes just don't work as well. Of course, this is the underlying motive for the whole unholy alliance between the Republicans and the Social Conservatives. Both long for the day when we actually did sit down, shut up, got a haircut and did as we were told.
Well, most of us. Some of us would not, could not do as we were told. Betcha at fifty I have outlived a disturbing number of people who thought that going along was the way to get along, though. Heart attacks, alcoholism, suicide, overwork - just plain stress as every implied promise was repudiated and we all took a decades long plunge into our current near-peonage and debt-slavery.
The people that want to "own" the internet are perfectly sincere in trying to do it, and it would not be an issue being seriously discussed if they thought they could not achieve their goal. It's been tried before. Hell, it's no different than building a castle beside a river so you can charge a "passage fee."
Is it fair? Yeah, if you keep the channels dredged and free of pirates. But if you do it so that you can make sure no competing traders can use the river... not so much.
In days of yore, large firms on Madison Avenue used to actually pay people to sit around tables and "brainstorm" slogans such as this program generates randomly, no doubt using some simple table lookup system. Now, such simple tools have been available to even the half-bright since the first PET computer appeared on the market, but of course, one would traditionally secrete a printout of the best slogans in one's briefcase before the client meeting.
Nobody ever imagined a day when such tools might come to the awareness of the client! Horrors! Sacrelidge! The End of the Gravy Train! I mean, how can a wealthy public awareness firm provide it's staff with Eames chairs and Gucchi briefcases when it must compete with slogans of this quality - slogans you may actually recognize from cereal boxes, computer products and even maxipads.
«Graphictruth - be ready.» «The Power of Graphictruth.» «Graphictruth for you!» «Graphictruth - to feel free!» «Graphictruth is what the world was waiting for.»
Their next logical offering is a Logo Generator that will create a selection of cutting edge corporate definitions from any scanned image - like a coffee stain, an ink blot or a photocopy made of a drunken executive secretary's buttocks at the last corporate Christmas party.
