[Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky

[Art McGee]

> I find it implausible that people who are using the
> internet to retreat from offline life would choose a
> political action online community in which to do so.

That's never been asserted. What's been said is that the
dependence on online technologies can lull some people into
a false sense of security.

Look folks, this isn't aerospace engineering. There are a
whole range of factors that determined why Dean is where he
is, and none of them are simple. I don't understand why
people assume they are.

I have some questions:

1. Why do we assume that Iowa and New Hampshire speak
for the entire country? I live in California, and don't
understand why other states get to decide the field of
candidates before I've even had the chance to vote. For all
we know, Dean could have 100% support in other states, but
due to the nature of the primaries, people get knocked out
before we can discover that. Anyone here done some research
on the flaws in that?

2. Most of the focus on Dean was about the internal
organization of volunteers and core supporters, but little
was said about voters not a part of the campaign (that
includes people who didn't have time to waste going to
MeetUps). Dean's strength was his staff and volunteers, but
that can't be equated with votes. Too many people made the
assumption that one would lead to the other or that they
were one and the same. Why?

3. Dean would be nobody without the net. Why is there an
assumption of failure? If Bill Clinton was running with the
same figures as Dean, that would be failure, but that would
also assume that he was somebody already. Dean was a nobody,
who used the internet to become a somebody. That's not
failure, that's incredible success. Why do the idiots like
Clay Shirky and all of you smart researchers wholly swallow
the false paradigm of failure that Capitalist media feeds us?

4. Why is everyone ignoring the politics? Why do people
assume that the reason people didn't vote for Dean was
something other than his politics? Lots of the people
who were assumed to be Dean supporters don't really like
him or even know who he is. Remember the article talking
about the lack of support among African-Americans for
Dean? Did Clay Shirky and the rest of those blog idiots
have much to say about that? Well, African-Americans are
one of the core constituencies of the Democratic party.
If they weren't all that enthused how do you think other
people might have felt?

5. Too much of the focus on and of Dean's campaign was
about youth. That's nice, but youth don't vote. Youth aren't
stupid, they're just rightly cynical about the lies fed to
them by Capitalism. While Dean had tremendous youth support
that doesn't mean that he had lots of eligible voting-age
support. Too much high-tech focus on youth and gadgetry and
not enough on the offline old folks who actually go to the
polls and those city council meetings consistently (which
are important, whereas a MeetUp don't mean shit to them).


Art