shouting loudly

Apparently, the folks from AdBusters will be descending on Wall Street tomorrow afternoon to, I dunno, create a big revolution.  I hadn’t heard about it in over a month, which doesn’t bode well.  I’m not on the uber-radical listservs, but I’m on plenty of progressive lists.  There has been no publicity beyond the extreme left [...]

Sigh… Micah White just came out with another “assault on clicktivism” article.  This one is even more absurd than the last.  (My previous response to White is here.) I’ve never met Micah White.  But he strikes me as the worst type of leftwing activist.  He’s like one of those fifth-year-senior college socialists who *still* think [...]

Allow me to be cranky for a minute. Jeff Jarvis had some fun on twitter this weekend.  After a day spent reading news about the debt limit, and a nice  pinot noir with dinner, he tweeted, ”Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.”  Encouraged by some of his replies [...]

Last night was the kickoff of the Rebuild The Dream movement.  Spearheaded by Van Jones, Natalie Foster, and Billy Wimsatt, Rebuild The Dream is designed to be a progressive “meta-brand” —  a counterweight to the Tea Party movement, that helps unite a variety of progressive causes under a shared banner.  The kickoff went well, and [...]

There are a lot of different ways for advocacy groups to use their e-mail lists.  They can mobilize. They can fundraise. They can educate or persuade. They can request feedback or user-generated content submissions. They can announce upcoming events.  Last year, I conducted a study of netroots and legacy organizations on the left, and found [...]

It’s been fascinating to watch the Wisconsin protests unfurl over the past 10 days.  Governor Scott Walker has chosen to stuff his budget repair proposal full of Trojan horse provisions, including “emergency” power to sell off state assets through no-bid contracts to his favorite corporate backers and an end to collective bargaining rights for all [...]

Warning: this will be another one of those long, reflective posts.  If you hate reading people blog about the good ol’ days, skip this one. I just had a new article come out with Policy & Internet today.  It’s all about e-petitions, the role they play in the tactical repertoire of advocacy groups, and what [...]

At a recent book talk, I heard Clay Shirky speak about the internet as “mostly producing sins of commission, rather than sins of omission.”  His point, roughly speaking, is that the lowered communication costs mean that we get more of many things.  Some of those things are negative, and when we see them, we tend [...]

Note: I’ll be spending the next few months writing a book about the new generation of internet-mediated political groups.  This post will be my first “book blog,” in which I try out new ideas that I’m planning to include in the manuscript.  Book blog pieces will be less tied to the politics-of-the-day, and will be [...]

Jake Brewer has a fantastic essay up on the Huffington Post today.  Go read it.  Now.  Seriously. You back?  Okay, here’s what I want to add: The puzzle Jake identifies isn’t actually about digital activism.  Or, more specifically, digital activism is only the latest instantiation of the puzzle.  I told this story at Netroots Nation [...]