The Blog

Distributed opposition research is really coming into its own these days – thanks to Micah Sifry for that phrase.  It’s amazing what can be dug up using online comments, tweets, and the long memory of the electronic age.

When you’re inside a phase change, or a hurricane, it’s very difficult to understand what’s going on.  It feels, right now, like an important time for online political participation.  Yet *policy* itself isn’t being made online.  Maybe what’s happening is the growth of the great radar screen of being.  Lots of swarms and seething trails of information – too much for any one person to take in, but taken together and understood by machines and algorithms built for benevolent and other reasons, the radar screen is becoming visible.

The logical construct that is the internet doesn’t think for us. It can’t build anything useful.  But it can do a lot to make more of what is going on visible – graphically-enabled, networked screens can access that visibility and, in turn, change what the radar screen shows.

It was particularly gratifying today to see the uproar in the US over “community organizing.”  There’s a huge new Facebook “We are all community organizers” group, and a real online backlash.

I’d like to be able to do a search right now for that backlash and see it in visual form – like market data – in a way that would allow me to find the hotspots and click down into the picture.  I’d like to see that picture changing and growing over time.  A movie of the backlash – that would be useful.

Here’s the tie-in.  When people can use clips of these pictures as part of their attempts to persuade one another, we’ll be much closer to distributed policymaking.  Right now, it’s a war of words, and there are too many words to cope with. Pictures on pictures, used as tools, could be the phase change.