The Revolution will not be televised…..
A fascinating book and useful complement to this blog and the current election campaigns in France is Joe Trippi’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised……..”. Trippi is two things: a creative computer geek and a highly experienced US political campaign manager. In 2003 he took over rank outsider Howard Dean’s struggling campaign and was responsible for pulling Dean ahead of the other Democrat candidates – until he crashed. Trippi’s book is a unique insider’s view of how the internet, and specifically Web 2.0, works in conjunction with conventional politics, and more broadly with democracy (not the same thing). The fact that the French are currently experimenting with the same mix of new technology, staid self-interested politicians and grass-roots dissatisfaction makes the book entirely pertinent.
Be warned: Trippi’s is an all-out, all-American view: “Politics and high tech have always sprung from the same well – a balls-out desire for progress, the idea that the greatest force for political and social change in America has always been the ingenuity and creativity of its people.”
“A balls-out desire for progress” may not be the first phrase that jumps to mind when describing French politics, but despite their differences (funding for example) there are enough similarities to make the book well worth reading on this side of the Atlantic. In both presidential republics there is that uneasy mix of naïve, utopic belief in democracy which has been ground down relatively recently into disenchantment by the relentless self-aggrandisement and cynical self-enrichment of so many politicians.
In both countries also, conventional politicians have leant too heavily on television: “in the last half of the twentieth century, television staged a hostile takeover of American culture, in just twenty years going from reflecting American life to altering American life, to dictating nearly every aspect of American life: the products we buy, the clothes we wear, the things we fear….TV is a passive, top-down medium. Sitting around watching television inspires nothing but more sitting around and watching television.” Not just in America.
By contrast, the Internet is an active medium and, as Trippi, who was geeking with the best of them back in the early 1990’s, realised, the Internet creates inter-active communities: Google in the old days, e-bay, Wikipedia all bring people who don’t know each other together for a particular event. That’s what Trippi did with Howard Dean’s campaign, creating a community of over half a million people who cared passionately about Howard Dean. But the parameters have changed, this new community is not a flock of mindless people blindly following, and their leader is not what he thought he was: Trippi quotes Joi Ito, another person who understands this new world: “You’re not a leader you’re a place. You’re like a park or a garden. If it’s comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not about Dean. It’s about us.”
“Tell me and I forget; teach me and I remember; involve me and I’ll vote for you.” Benjamin Franklin’s theory of getting people on your side, up-dated. When the Dean team dried up on ideas, Trippi would put the problem to the blog sites and within hours solutions would be flooding in. Open source campaigning. When they needed funding, it was the the bloggers who came up with the idea of sending in $10 each. When you have around 600,000 bloggers that brings in more than fund-raising dinners with tickets at $2,000 a piece, but almost more important you’ve touched that mass of people who want to help and can afford $10 but not $20. It’s similar to what Ségolène Royal started out doing last year, when she also was a rank outsider, with her participative on-line book. But she (or her campaign manager) didn’t have the courage to continue. So though people backed her, she did not follow through. They were not involved enough. Trippi’s experience is that you have to let the people take over, all those people you don’t know, you have to trust them. But that is hard, especially for a top-down trained French administrator.
What killed the Howard Dean internet campaign was Howard Dean: he didn’t really understand why all these people were mobilised for him. Despite the money it brought him, he didn’t understand the influence of the internet. In Trippi’s phrase “he didn’t get it”. I think the same can be said of the candidates in this French election: none of them really believes. Which is understandable, if foolishly short-sighted (but when were politicians anything else?). Very few years ago if I had written that a search-engine called Google, or a funny write-your-own encyclopedia could all become integrated in our lives, who would have believed? Or that you would soon be quite OK about throwing your money electronically at a private individual you’ve never met in return for a lawn-mower, or a bike or archery set you’ve never seen. Or that just by creating a simple free download a 19 year-old could and would destroy the enormous omni-powerful music empires. Even the people behind them didn’t realize how fast their brain-children would grow nor how far they would penetrate. “It’s 1956 again and we just got the box in the house,” says Trippi. Nobody back then could imagine, as my father made a ridiculous mule-shaped puppet called Muffin jerkily prance about on the tiny pebble-thick screen in the corner of a few hundred homes, that in 12 years John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon would be using the same box but now in millions of homes to debate politics. And by that debate, inspire a generation.