May 16, 2008
The elements of interference
The Union of Concerned Scientists has published a Periodic Table of the Elements, except instead of elements, it’s instances of US government interference in science.
Speaker info
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April 23, 2008
Tags vs. identity politics
Ike Piggott posts about the effect of tags ‘n’ such on identity politics. Nicely done. (And, if I may say be so self-centered he seems unknowingly to be channeling Everything Is Miscellaneous.)
Categories: Uncategorized Tagged with: everythingIsMiscellaneous • everything_is_miscellaneous • folksonomy • politics • tagging
My life as a counter-indicator
Apparently, the traits I like in a candidate are the traits most of the country dislikes. I am therefore a counter-indicator. And also pretty depressed.
Pity me.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that the candidate I prefer (= am in love with) has in fact “closed the deal” with the majority of Democratic voters and delegates. So, maybe you shouldn’t pity me.
Yet.
April 18, 2008
First 21st Century campaign?
Ronald Brownstein argues in the National Journal that that’s how we’ll remember the Clinton-Obama race. It’s a nicely done piece…
April 16, 2008
Campaign for President 2008: The musical
Yesterday afternoon, somehow the Berkman Fellows Hour turned into a campaign musical videofest. Ethan has blogged it all, with plenty of links.
For reasons I can’t possibly explain, this is my favorite:
April 14, 2008
Emergent politics: Was Steven Johnson right?
As the 2004 Dean campaign crashed, Steven Johnson wrote one of the more provocative and insightful analyses of why it failed despite all the enthusiasm behind it. In the piece, Steve refines the notion of “emergence” he had popularized in his terrific book of the same name: There’s emergence that clusters and emergence that copes. Clustering is exemplified by slime mold, which creates a crowd without any top-down control. Coping is exemplified by termite nests which result from a bottom-up regulatory regime which is able to adapt. The Dean campaign, under this analysis, clustered people and money but was unable to cope when things started to go badly.
Steve ends the piece this way:
I suspect that such a system may well be fundamentally incompatible with the necessary structure of a national political campaign, at least for the foreseeable future. Emergent systems that excel at coping do so out of truly local information; they take their random walks through their neighborhoods and record patterns in what they find. National campaigns, on the other hand, work at a macro scale, and they are necessarily wedded to the broadcast amplifications of the national media. Whatever local disturbances or opportunities they discover are quickly uploaded to the world of network TV and satellite feeds, where they undergo all sorts of distortions. And national campaigns, by definition, have to have leaders, at least in the form of the politicians themselves…
Is there an emergent politics capable of a more subtle form of self-regulation? If there is, I think it will first take shape, not as a political campaign, but as a more local, day-to-day affair: more polis than politics.
Was Steve right? (Just to be clear: I’m not asking about Steve, of whom I am a giggling fanboy, but about the state of politics.)
April 13, 2008
McCain’s Constitutional scholarship
John McCain explaining — in a disturbingly incoherent way — that this is a Christian nation (found via JedReport):
My favorite part: When he confuses what’s on our money with what’s in our Constitution.
And while I’m youtubing, here’s an oddly inappropriate response from Hillary Clinton to what seems to me to be a reasonable, albeit aggressive, question:
April 1, 2008
The people vote with their clicks
From a terrific piece in the Washington Post by Jose Antonio Vargas:
After Obama’s speech on race, cable news anchors repeatedly replayed sound bites from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, which were uploaded on YouTube and linked on countless blogs. Videos of Obama’s 37-minute speech, however, surpassed those clips in views. So far, Obama’s speech has been viewed more than 4 million times, making it the most viewed video uploaded by a presidential candidate yet on the site.
As Jose has pointed out, YouTube only counts completed views in its totals, which means not only have more people started watching Obama’s 37-min clip, millions finished watching it. (It’s tough to count the total number who have watched Wright clips since there are 1,200 hits at YouTube on “Jeremiah Wright,” but not all of those are the relevant clips.)
This reminds me of Jeff Jarvis‘ comment at a blogging/journalism conference at the Berkman center back when journalists were in denial about the disruption they (and we) are facing. “Mark my words,” said Jaris (although probably not exactly in those words). “The media is going to obsessively cover the Michael Jackson trial, but it’ll barely make a ripple in the blogosphere.” Right on the money.
The corollary of this is: The world is far more interesting than the mainstream media have let on. Blogging is all about discovering just how interesting the world really is.
Anyway, Jose’s article is a great overview of the changes in politics the Net is wringing. He makes a case for hope. Yes, hope is possible, permitted, and perhaps required.
Tim Wu on tech policy
Tim Wu for Head of the Joint Chiefs of Tech!
March 31, 2008
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