In response to a comment questioning, in an unnecessarily nasty tone, whether Gov. Dean was the actual author of the posts at the Lessig blog, Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager, wrote:

Seth – can I ask you something – don’t you think that if we were ghostwriting this stuff we would have come up with something better than that?

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the entire Wed summed up in one line. Take it in the micro sense and you have the Web’s Theory of Authenticity with its corollary that Imperfection Is a Virtue. Take it to the macro and you get the Messy Network Axiom with its corollary that Efficiency is the Enemy of Truth.

Dean’s got a hell of a campaign staff, webby to its bones. This is apparent not just in the “end-to-end” architecture that staffer Zephyr Teachout describes at Lessig’s site today but in Trippi’s attitude. Put it together and you have the beginning of the real Internet revolution in politics.

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