Congress is already very close to passing companion bills to censor the internet, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968). This is in addition to the domain name seizures already underway by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

All of these efforts are terrible ideas. Their supporters don’t understand or care about the internet and are happily willing to break the internet to appease the content industry. It is among the very worst contemporary examples of a government that is of, by, and for special interests, and if it passes, it will be a slap in the face of democracy, free expression, due process, and technological innovation. To top it all? It won’t even do much to stop online infringement.

Fortunately, there may be signs that things are turning our way. I’ll get to that further below.

EFF has a great summary of the several ways SOPA can lead to a site getting shut down. Section 102 deals with foreign sites and is the most all-encompassing, but 103 and 104 are actually easier for rights holders to (mis)use, and they apply to domestic as well as foreign sites, so I’ll start there.

Section 103 allows IP rights holders to go directly to a website’s payment processors and advertisers—and to demand that these third parties cease all business with the website operator. These payment processors and advertisers then have just five days to act. The website operator has the right to file a counter-notice that they are not substantially dedicated to infringement, but (a) they may not get the chance until after the payment processors and advertisers have already cut off payments, and (b) the third parties have no obligation to take the counter-notice as final and re-establish a business relationship.

Section 104 takes this “default=censorship” strategy even further. Everyone in the internet ecosystem—registrars, web hosts, advertisers, financial processors, search engines, etc. etc.—gets near-categorical federal and state immunity for any decision to terminate a business relationship with a site (or even to shutter a site) “in the reasonable belief” that the site is dedicated to infringement. Under Section 103, a rights holder must at least file a claim. Under Section 104, even the intimation that a site is infringing might be enough to get it shut down—and the site would have no legal recourse.

The Administration also gets in on the fun in Section 102, which gives the Attorney General the power to use government-mandated Domain Name System (DNS) filtering to stop Americans from accessing “foreign infringing sites.” A domain name, such as Google.com, is an easy-to-remember way to tell one’s computer to go to a specific numeric address (e.g., 74.125.39.147). It is this number (the IP address) that identifies that site’s server (the computer that hosts the website). Everyone enters the domain name into their browser’s internet address bar, but the numbers would take one to the same site. Click on the numbers above or paste them into your browser to see for yourself.

Under Section 102, if a site were found to be primarily dedicated to infringement, the government could “seize” the site’s domain name. More precisely, the domain name registrar—a company that keeps track of which domain names are attached to which servers—would, if US-based, be compelled to stop sending users to the correct server. All domestic ISPs would also be forbidden to take you to the right server (the number behind the name), and advertisers and banks would be forbidden from doing business with these companies.

If the government found a foreign site to be infringing under these bills, the government would try to make it disappear for US audiences.

If this bill becomes law, we will see the shuttering and/or financial starvation of thousands of websites—which are, of course, a form of speech and/or press. They would be silenced and/or starved based on either an affidavit by a rights holder, a mere suspicion by a business partner, or (at best!) a one-sided court hearing with a low burden of proof. Little wonder then that legal scholars from (my friend and) rising star Marvin Amorri to the legendary constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe (pdf) have concluded that the bills are unconstitutional threats to the First Amendment.

By now it should be clear that, if passed into law, SOPA or PIPA would have devastating consequences for innocent actors who are mistakenly identified. The web seizures undertaken by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), beginning in 2010, illustrate this peril all too well. Several websites have been taken down for posting media files that were authorized and even actively shared by the copyright holders or their representatives. Others have apparently been seized merely for linking to allegedly infringing content.

One in particular, DaJaz1.com, has become the cause célèbre of the anti-domain-seizures movement. It was one of a cluster of hip hop websites seized last year. Major voices from Vibe to Kanye to P. Diddy were actively promoting the sites, hardly a sign that they are dedicated to copyright infringement.

Last week, the feds finally gave up on DaJaz1. TechDirt (which has nearly gone all-SOPA, all-the-time) had the headline:

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details…

Their opening clarifies exactly how unconstitutional this is:

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

They go on to detail how DaJaz1’s owners were stonewalled, blockaded, and never allowed their day in court by the feds—for over a year—while the feds managed to arrange a court process during which all court proceedings (including several granting extensions that DaJaz1’s owners should have been able to contest) were secret and all the filings were sealed and not open to the site owners.

Once the details of the accusations came out, it turned out that the allegedly infringing songs were given directly to the blog by copyright holders’ agents in the hopes of promoting the music. The RIAA was the source of the original complaint, and one of the songs in question was not even released by an RIAA label.

Another operation using similar methods but for a different goal—seizing sites with child pornography—mistakenly took down 84,000 sites in one shot, resulting in each of those thousands of sites being down for 3 days. Even worse, each domain was redirected to an ICE notice that the website had been seized for trafficking in child pornography. Nearly all of those sites were not dedicated to child pornography, and to my knowledge, ICE never even apologized to them for the error.

Further, it takes little imagination to picture a devastating chill on legitimate sites that make fair uses of copyrighted content. If I run a news and commentary site, I may be less likely to include portions of copyrighted works, even if such inclusion is very likely fair use and crucially relevant to my discussion of the matters at hand.

In particular, media criticism sites would be in grave peril; how long after the bill’s passage would it be before partisan news outlets started using the new law to silence their critics? How long before FoxNews goes after Media Matters for America? Think that’s far fetched? Witness Righthaven’s efforts to sue bloggers for using even brief quotations. And what was on the list of threats they used to scare people into paying licensing fees? Domain seizure. Among other things, these bills would give a hunting license for those who would like to shutter the sites of upstarts, competitors, and critics.

At least these bills will stop piracy, right? Hardly.

Dedicated infringers will still find infringing sites—especially foreign sites that host infringing files with impunity. Remember, the feds are seizing the site name (e.g., Google.com) but not the number behind it (74.125.39.147). All you need is a small program to tell your computer to go to the right number—and, because the bill will forbid your ISP from getting you there, a proxy server in the middle. The same strategies have already proven successful for dissidents behind government firewalls, who still manage to upload and download forbidden information—despite far more active, on-the-fly, and resource-intensive censorship schemes.

Programmers have already developed tools to work around these restrictions. The law hasn’t even passed yet, and already there is a Firefox plugin that would help users work around SOPA-like restrictions.

You might think that at least payment processors and advertiser networks would be scared off of dealing with these sites. If it were that easy—if we could target the banks and advertisers that support internet scofflaws—then spam and other internet evils would have long since been wiped out.

The internet breeds decentralized innovation, and innovators will spring into action to help users circumvent ISP and search engine filters as well. This software will also be considered grounds for legal action—with the goal being to ban the tools, as the 1998 DMCA bans DRM-hacking devices. That’s worked so poorly that multiple free circumvention tools are available for most major DRM systems. There are so many DVD rippers that LifeHacker has a post comparing rippers to help you choose the best.

As if all of the above failures and offenses were not enough, these bills would harm our economy and reduce our competitiveness in the internet age. If SOPA were law when YouTube was getting started, the site probably would have been shuttered. The next YouTube will be much less likely to be born in the US if it can be kicked out of the legitimate portion of the web before it has really grown up. The EFF warns that sites like Etsy, Flickr, and Vimeo would be in danger.

Internet innovation is one of the few bright spots in the economy, and major internet firms have warned that this will increase the cost of regulatory compliance and decrease our competitiveness. Venture capitalists have also warned that SOPA would substantially decrease their willingness to invest in US technology start-ups. Union Square Ventures, just down the street here in NYC, even put this link saying the same thing on their homepage.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on PROTECT-IP, and he has even vowed to filibuster the bill should it come to the Senate floor. Because of this principled opposition and his long record of standing up for internet freedom, I made a donation to Sen. Wyden’s re-election campaign—even though my wife and I are watching every dollar as we save to buy our first home.

So these bills are terrrrrible, but they enjoy a lot of support in the House and Senate—30 cosponsors in the House, and a whopping 40 in the Senate. This post is derived from an email I sent to my Senators and Representative, and all three wrote back with disappointing notes to the effect of, “Yeah, but we gotta stop internet infringement.” Surely this is unrelated to the content industries having spent far, far more money on lobbying and campaign donations than their opponents on this issue.

Which brings us back to democracy.

In response to these bills, we have seen the swelling of a major internet movement—nearly the groundswell we saw around network neutrality in 2006. Opponents created a campaign declaring November 16—the day of a hearing in the House that was heavily stacked in favor of SOPA—as “American Censorship Day,” a campaign that went viral in a major way. Over 6,000 sites including Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Mozilla (including the default start page in Firefox), Reddit, TechDirt, and BoingBoing, directed traffic to a single action site, AmericanCensorship.org. At the time, the site said that it had generated over 1,000,000 emails and four calls per second to Congress. To date, AmericanCensorship.org has earned over 650,000 Facebook likes and 63,000 tweets.

This is democracy in action. After all, most people don’t support draconian copyright enforcement, and a solid majority of people oppose government attempts to block access to infringing materials. (40% support, 56% oppose; this skews to 33% for, 64% against when framed as censorship.)

If Wyden’s hold and the opposition can stop this fast-moving train(wreck), then perhaps democratic values and majority opinion can actually shape the future of the internet. Just maybe, a public outcry can stop a terrible idea backed by special interests.

If not, we may be in big trouble—and not just because the internet will be broken.

I’ve also been tracking an equivalent conservative group, Liberty.com, since its inception.  That group is essentially a stand-in for Eric Odom’s e-mail list — when he migrated to the Patriot Action Network, Liberty.com did so as well (to be clear, I’m not suggesting that’s a bad thing.  It seems like a reasonable application of the “post-bureaucratic” trends that Bruce Bimber has been forecasting for years…).  One major difference immediately jumped out at me: the left uses e-mail to mobilize.  The right uses e-mail to persuade.  As an example, take a look at three e-mails I received today:

The first e-mail comes from “Jim Dean, Democracy for America,” and is titled “Scott Walker vs Planned Parenthood.”

“This is it, folks. DFA’s campaign to recall six anti-union, anti-middle class Wisconsin Republican Senators is almost ready to go and it’s the biggest campaign we’ve ever run.

We’re going to be on the air with new hard-hitting television, radio and web ads against these six Republicans for their votes to destroy unions and middle-class families.

(…)

Please contribute $10 now to fuel our biggest campaign ever and fight back in the war on working families.”

There’s more text to the e-mail, of course, but those short segments give you the feel for it.  This is about Wisconsin, they’ve got a commercial on the air, and they want supporters to help fund it.  The link goes to an ActBlue fundraising page, through which they’ve raised over $100,000 already for their Wisconsin campaign.

The second e-mail comes from the “Stephanie Taylor, BoldProgressives.org” and is titled “Dave, Meet Eric.”

“David,

“The last thing we need to send to Washington is a Democrat who is a kinder, gentler version of the Republicans.”

New Mexico state senator Eric Griego said these words when announcing his candidacy for Congress.

And today, Eric Griego is the first House challenger of 2012 that we’re officially endorsing!

Click here to see Eric Greigo’s announcement — and chip in $3 to his campaign before the closely-watched June 30 fundraising deadline.”

Again, there’s more text to the e-mail, and that text includes an explanation of why Greigo is a Bold Progressive, and several reasons why it’s particularly important for supporters to donate to him now.

The third e-mail comes from “Eric Odom” and is titled “Obama Weak, but Could Still Win.”

Friends,

During the past few weeks I’ve gotten a lot of email with lines such as “we’ve got him on the ropes and he’s going down,” and “He’s toast, he can never win now,” in reference to Obama’s chances in 2012. While I agree he is at his weakest point right now, I in no way believe he’s going to be easy to beat. In fact I still think he holds the upper hand.

This week’s report provides a quick glance at Obama’s current standing, his weakness and his strengths going into 2012. Please read the full report and leave comments!”

Odom’s e-mail includes a few links to other articles on the web, but there’s no more text in the message.

…

Notice the difference?  DFA and the PCCC are using e-mail to persuade and then mobilize action.  Odom is using e-mail to offer his perspective on the days events, and then drive readership to his blog.

This is a remarkably consistent trend.  I’ve catalogued over 100 e-mails from Liberty.com.  That includes less than 5 e-petitions or calls-to-action.  It includes about 20 fundraising requests, but almost all of those are concentrated around the Nevada Senate election last fall, when Odom and company were raising money to run issue advertisements.  Since the end of election season, Liberty.com has pretty much solely been an information dissemination list.

Now, it’s possible that this is just a sample skew.  Sketching the ecology of the rightwing advocacy system is a tough gig, they don’t leave the same digital traces that progressive groups do.  But it’s also very similar to what Jessica Baldwin-Phillipi has been finding in her comparative analysis of rightwing and leftwing microsites: the left uses microsites to drive action, the right uses microsites for persuasion (Jesse is great, by the way.  She should blog more, and you should read her stuff).

What we’re seeing here is a dramatic partisan split in technology usage.  Everybody is accessing the same internet, but they are using it to very different ends.  What makes this particularly interesting is that we’re talking about e-mail – the granddaddy of online communications tools.  If there’s any single online medium where one would expect all actors to converge towards the same “best practices,” it would be e-mail.  That simply hasn’t happened.

I’m not going to argue that one use of e-mail is inherently better than the other.  Rather, I’d say there are two take-home points: (1) e-mail is maleable communications medium, which gets used for a variety of ends. (2) “best practices” among advocacy groups will very depending on the political network and organizing opportunities that the groups are built around.

I had one big “ah hah” moment in the course of reading the book.  “Multidimensionality can be outstripped by improved point prediction.  And that would be a bad thing.”  Allow me to riff on that a bit below:

“Multidimensionality” is a shorthand that I often use when teaching Sunstein’s work.  In Republic.com, Sunstein introduces the concept of the “Daily Me.”  First envisioned by MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte, the Daily Me was a personalized web portal, in which each individual received news and information customized to their interests.  Sunstein raised concern about the Daily Me, suggesting that it could produce “cyberbalkanization,” in which competing ideological communities only receive news that reinforce their own points of view, leading in turn to further radicalization.  American democracy has never been calm and deliberative, but we at least have historically been divided through divergent interpretations of the same events.  In the world of the Daily Me, we don’t even interpret the same events – our news becomes hypercustomized instead.

The Daily Me is a provocative concept.  It’s also clearly limited in two respects.  First, the concept is anchored in a time period when personalized web portals (Yahoo or MSN landing pages) were viewed as the future of the internet.  The developmental path of the internet veered off in a different direction.  Web 2.0 took off, and we increasingly spent our time at sites that feature user-generated content and community activity.  When I log on to the web, I check gmail, 3 blogs, and facebook.  Corporations are behind each of these spaces, to be sure, but they’re different corporations than in 2001, and they’re inviting me to engage in different activities than Yahoo and MSN were.  Rather than a hypertargeted news feed, there’s the socially-derived postings on my facebook wall.  So, for that reason, the Daily Me is a bit dated.  Sunstein himself noted this in Republic.com 2.0, where he suggested we’ve developed elements of a “Daily Us” instead.

The Daily Us can still provide reinforcing views and divergent news agendas though.  Take a minute to scan the blog posts at DailyKos and HotAir, the top political blogs on the left and right.  Depending on the day, you’re likely to find that they aren’t just using different frames to discuss the days news, but instead are talking about different news topics altogether.  Members of these communities, then, are still at risk of cyberbalkanization.

“Multidimensionality” mitigates the cyberbalkanization problem.  Simply put, members of a political online communities have non-political interests as well.  I may only interact with liberals on DailyKos, but I have several libertarian friends through Yehoodi and there are a few Republicans who are active Washington Wizards fans as well.  As a member of several communities-of-interest, I’m exposed to people with cross-cutting views on politics, broadly defined.  Our personalities, interests, and affiliations cannot be reduced to a simple one dimensional (left-right) spectrum, because we also build social capital through a variety of hobbyist communities.  The answer to online communities is …more online communities (cue the recitations of Federalist 10).

For those reasons, I’ve long been convinced that we don’t need to be all that concerned about cyberbalkanization.

And then I read Eli’s book.

The core of Pariser’s concern is well explained in his TED Talk.  Eli is a progressive.  He also has other hobbies and interests.  Thus, he consciously has developed conservative friends, and is tied to them through facebook.  One day however, he noticed that he was no longer seeing their updates in his news feed.  Facebook’s algorithm had recorded that he didn’t click on those links very often.  So it “optimized” his experience by removing those updates.

On the surface, that’s a small issue.  A progressive doesn’t see headlines that weren’t all that appealing to begin with.  But it points to a much bigger problem.  Even at the social layer of the web, multidimensionality is viewed as a type of inefficiency – an engineering problem to be solved.  For the engineers and the third-party advertisers, the goal is better point prediction.  Through improvements in automated filtering, they can reduce the incidental knowledge gains that come through membership in multiple communities.  Facebook, ideally, would like to only show me sports-related updates from my Wizards fan-friends, and only show me politics-related updates from my netroots friends.  Advertisers, ideally, would like to know which elements of those subcommunities most fit my profile.  It’s an engineering problem to them, with an engineering solution.

Of particular concern is that this personalization is going on without our knowledge.  Even if I don’t want it to happen – even if I’d like to hear the contrarian opinions of blues dancing Ron Paul fans – large social media hubs are going to treat those voices as noise and try to remove it.  Unless I decide to put outstanding effort into “fooling the filters,” I’m going to be stuck solely with reinforcing views.  And that increases the threat of cyberbalkanization.

I’m tempted to call this another example of the “beneficial inefficiencies” problem.  Multidimensionality may appear as an engineering problem for social media purveyors and the third-party advertisers who pay them.  But it also serves to mitigate some social problems.  As the social web continues to develop, cyberbalkanization could easily reemerge as a substantial threat.  In short, multidimensionality can be trumped by improved point prediction.  And that would be a bad thing.

It isn’t easy to conduct academic research on this sort of “point prediction.”  The engineers and data industries operate under copyright protection, proprietary data, nondisclosure agreements, and trade secret rules.  This is non-transparent data, and there are strong incentives for the companies and engineers to keep it that way.  Pariser’s interviews with Yahoo and Google engineers, as well as his conversations with dozens of social scientists, represent a substantial step forward in understanding the current digital environment.

—

I’m impressed with Pariser’s book.  It’s well worth reading, and explains these concepts with greater clarity and better examples that I’m providing above.  It’s a nice departure from the normal “cyberskeptic” book (Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr providing two recent examples).  It’s well-balanced, thoughtful, and serious.  In a rapidly changing medium, it helps highlight what the Internet has become, where it may be heading, and why that matters.  Pariser asks us not to fear, criticize, or dislike the digital landscape, but to help make it better.  As he notes in his conclusion, “the Internet isn’t doomed, for a simple reason: This new medium is nothing if not plastic.”

Indeed.

I’ve written once before on this blog about Moore’s Law, the surprisingly accurate 1965 prediction that computing capacity would double every 18-to-24 months.  What I’ve noticed recently is that, while Moore’s Law is common knowledge within the tech community (you see it mentioned in almost every issue of Wired magazine). it’s much less well-understood in the political and social science communities.  Those crowds are aware, of course, that their computer from 4 years ago now seems ancient, slow, and lacking in storage space, but it appears to me that the deep political implications of Moore’s Law (which I’ll be calling “Moore’s Law Effects” in the book, unless someone wants to earn their way into the acknowledgments by suggesting a catchier name!) have largely gone overlooked.

I checked through the indexes of several major internet-and-politics books and, sure enough, there’s no mention of Moore’s Law.  Bruce Bimber’s Information and American Democracy, Matt Hindman’s Myth of Digital Democracy, Bimber and Davis’s Campaigning Online, Phil Howard’s New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen.  I’ll check a few others on Monday when I’m in the office, but I’m pretty sure there’s no mention of it in Kerbel’s Netroots, Davis’s Typing Politics, Chadwick’s Internet Politics or either of Cass Sunstein’s books either.  …These are good books I’m talking about here — award-winners that rightly deserve the praise they’ve received.  I’d be thrilled if my book ends up half as good as many of them.  Yet Moore’s Law doesn’t earn a single mention, nor does it show up in most of the influential articles in the field.  It just hasn’t entered the discourse.

The one exception I’ve found is a Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy working paper by Zysman and Newman that eventually became the lead article of a co-edited volume, How Revolutionary is the Revolution.  It’s a political economy treatment of the digital era as a whole and seems pretty promising (amazon should have it to me by mid-week).  I really enjoyed the following quote in the working paper: ”…Information technology represents not one, but a sequence of revolutions.  It is a continued and enduring unfolding of digital innovation, sustaining a long process of industrial adaptation and transition” (pg 8).  That “sequence of revolutions” line is what I think we’ve largely been missing when talking about digital politics.

Take Bimber and Davis’s Campaigning Online for instance.  They conducted first-rate research in the 2000 election cycle on citizen access to campaign websites.  The central finding was that, by and large, the only citizens who visit such sites are existing partisans.  The sites are useful for message reinforcement, rather than message persuasion.  As a result, Bimber and Davis conclude that the impact of the internet on political campaigns is pretty slight.  Web sites simply don’t reach undecided voters, so they aren’t of much use in determining election results.

Their book was released in September, 2003.  By that time, the Dean campaign had already attracted overwhelming media attention, leading observers everywhere to rethink the importance of mobilization.  It was an unlucky sequence of events, having a definitive work on the internet and American political campaigns come out just as the Dean campaign was overthrowing everything we thought we knew about the internet and American political campaigns.

Here’s the thing, though: Bimber and Davis weren’t wrong. The Internet of 2000 wasn’t particularly useful for mobilization.  John McCain raised a bit of online money around his primary, but online bill paying was still in its untrustworthy infancy, and the social web was still restricted to the lead adopter crowd who had heard of Pyra Labs.  The suite of technologies making up the Internet changed between 2000 and 2003.  It changed again between 2003/04 and 2006.  [Pop quiz: what was John Kerry's YouTube strategy in the '04 election?  (A: YouTube didn't exist until 2005.)]  And it continues to do so.  The internet of 2010 is actually a different medium than the internet of 2000.  The devices we use to access it have changed.  Cheap processing power and increasing bandwidth speeds let us access video and geolocational aspects that were prohibitively expensive and technically infeasible or impossible in 2000.  We’ve traveled through five iterations of Moore’s Law, and that means that the devices and architecture of the earlier internet have been overwritten (html to xml being just the tip of the iceberg).

The internet is a sequence of communications revolutions, and that is entirely because of Moore’s Law.  It makes the internet different than previous revolutions in information technology.  Consider: as the television or radio moved from 10% household penetration to 80% household penetration, how much did the technology itself change?  I’d argue it wasn’t much at all.  A television set from 1930 is fundamentally pretty similar to a television set from 1960.  The major changes of the 20th century can be counted on one hand – color television, remote control, vcr, maybe a couple others.  It is frequently noted that the internet’s penetration rate has been faster than these previous communications technologies.  But what rarely gets mentioned is that the internet itself has changed pretty dramatically in the process. (Need further convincing?  Watch the 1995 movie Hackers and listen for the reference to one character’s blazing-fast 28.8 kb modem.  LolCats and YouTube aren’t so fun at 28.8kbs speed.  Or read James Gleick’s 1995 New York Times Magazine essay “This is Sex?” in which he explains that the internet is a terrible place for pornography because search is so complicated and the pictures upload so slowly!)

Transitioning into the political sphere, it bears noting that every election since 1996 has been labeled “the internet election” or “the year of the internet” by a set of researchers and public intellectuals.  The paradox, of sorts, is that they have been right every time.  2012 will be different than 2010, 2008, 2006 2004, 2002, and 2000.  It will be a different medium, in which users engage in modified activities, and this will create new opportunities for campaigns and organizations to engage in acts of mobilization and persuasion.  The cutting-edge techniques of last year become mundane, encouraging organizations to maintain a culture of ostentatious innovation.

Now I’m not suggesting that the internet exists in some state of quantum uncertainty, where we can predict basically nothing in the future based on the past or present.  In fact, as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen points out, the tools that will have the biggest impact on campaign organizations will be the ones that have become mundane, reaching near-universal penetration rates and no longer subject to a steep learning curve.  (As we recently learned with Google Wave, e-mail is much a settled routine at this point.)  Indeed, one of the lessons here may be that we are on much safer grounds when studying individual internet-mediated tools that have reached near-universal adoption (within a given community).  The techno-centric studies of facebook, youtube, and twitter that are a recent fad of sorts are on much weaker ground, because those tools are themselves still pretty dramatically changing thanks to increasing adoption and the ongoing influence of Moore’s Law.

The other thing it tells us, however, is that we should focus attention on the new organizations and institutions being built out of the digital economy.  The continual waves of innovation made possible by Moore’s Law mean that existing industries do not solely need to adapt to a single change in communications media.  Rather, an existing market leader who hires the best consultants, purchases a fleet of state-of-the-art hardware and software, and spends two years developing their plan for the digital environment will suddenly find that the internet has changed in a few important ways, their hardware and software is outdated, and the plan those consultants developed has collected more dust than accolades.

Communications revolutions (or changes in “information regime,” if you prefer to avoid talk of revolution) create a classically disruptive moment for various sectors of the economy.  Rather than advantaging existing market leaders, whose R&D departments let them lead the way in sustaining innovations, disruptive moments tend to lead to the formation of new markets that undercut the old ones (this is classic Christensen).  Startups do better under those conditions, because they have low operating costs and no ingrained organizational routines.  And while individual areas of the internet eventually give way to  monopolies (particularly if we lose net neutrality and let major firms capture markets and tamp down on competition),  those monopolies aren’t as secure as they were in previous eras.  Just ask AOL, Compuserv, Microsoft or Yahoo. The wrong policy decisions can still basically kill the internet, but Moore’s Law creates a scenario in which ongoing disruptions continually advantage new entrants, experimenting with new things.

That, frankly, is why my focus has been on the rise of these internet-mediated advocacy groups.  It’s because they represent a disruption of the advocacy group system.  They embrace ostentatious innovation, keep their staffing and overhead small, and otherwise continue to act like a start-up (and are often founded by technologists with a background in startup culture).  They fiddle with membership and fundraising regimes, and develop new tactical repertoires unlike anything found among the older advocacy groups.  And Moore’s Law suggests that the internet is still in a state of becoming, that the emergence of these new institutions is much more substantial than the mass behavioral patterns found among citizens in the internet of 2010, which may very well be altered as Moore’s Law allows the internet to become something else in 2012.

Moore’s Law, disruption theory, and new developments at the organizational level.  That’s what I think has been missing from our understanding of the internet and American politics thus far.

What do you think?

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 this past summer, but there’s a hint of it in Don Green and Alan Gerber’s book, “Get Out the Vote.”  They tell the story of Harold Gosnell’s 1925 study of political mailers.  Back then, he found through randomized field experiment that sending a piece of direct mail before municipal elections led to a 9% increase in turnout.  Today, of course, sending a piece of political direct mail has… well, let’s just say it has less of an impact, shall we?

This is attributable to 2 effects.  First is decreasing marginal returns.  Voters are already getting 15,000 political mailers.  The 15,001st makes very little difference. (This may seem obvious, but it’s overlooked repeatedly by field operations.  I frequently hear Green and Gerber invoked as an explanation of why canvassers need to hit the same door for the 12th and 13th time!)

The second effect is background noise.  In 1925, people received far less junk mail than we do today.  As the value of mail became apparent, various interests (political and commercial) flooded the zone.  People tuned it out in response.  Today, political mailers often go in the garbage.  That’s why we see the parallel phenomenon of Prospect Direct Mail with “urgent message” written in faux-handwriting on the front envelope — it’s a little trick meant to increase open rates.

In the earliest days of political e-mails, e-mail was a novel form of political communication.  There was also less junk mail.  That meant that constituent e-mails had a bigger effect on decision-makers, and citizens were also more likely to pay attention to such e-mail (a puzzle Brewer has also commented upon).  Today, groups send a lot of e-mail, and both citizens and officials have recalibrated in response.

Reading memoirs of political activists gives an indication of the broader importance of this phenomenon.  Former Sierra Club Executive Director Michael McKloskey writes about his education as an activist, how in the 1950s he could personally approach Members of Congress and talk to them about wilderness issues.  That simply isn’t true today (nor was it true 16 years ago, when I first joined the movement).

It’s a phenomenon that I refer to as the “quickening” of American politics.  Quickening occurs in parallel with the “political thickening” described by Stephen Skowronek.  As government gets bigger, avenues for citizen participation get increasingly clogged, and this contributes to a set of strong incentives for new, innovative tactics that move faster, faster, faster.

From the perspective of Political Quickening, Brewer’s “Tragedy of Political Advocacy” takes on a slightly different hue.  Consider his proposal, for instance, that

Advocacy groups can commit to hand deliver all petitions to Congressional offices after they are solicited online (a handful of great organizers like my friend Adam Green do this, and it’s about the only time petitions have an effect).

I agree with him that Adam Green’s tactic is valuable.  But that’s a function of everyone else not doing the same.  If all advocacy groups hand delivered all petitions, Congressional offices would soon develop systems to weed out this tactic.  Astroturf groups can hand deliver a big pile of ginned-up petitions *at least* as easily as grassroots groups.  My guess is that offices would appoint a low-level staffer or intern as the recipient of these petitions, and they’d then be deposited in the circular file as soon as groups left.  As the tactic is widely adopted and background noise increases, we are left with the same problem we had, and the incentive to innovate further pops up once again.

This is a systematic property of the American political system, with political thickening and political quickening driving change.  It suggests that citizen political power/social movement influence can be found in those spaces where either (1) old tactics are used, but at a much larger scale [if a member of Congress frequently gets 100 letters on every issue, send 1,000], or (2) new tactics that mobilize meaningful citizen resources are implemented [instead of another 1,000 emails, bring 50 people to the in-district meeting that never draws any attendance.  Instead of holding your 80th consecutive political march with the same old, tired chants, host a "moneybomb" for a favored candidate who you're trying to convince to become a champion on your issue].

One of the big, recent findings to come out of my research is that the new set of progressive advocacy groups use e-mail far differently than their longer-established peers.  The new groups fundraise differently.  They mobilize around different topics, often relying upon different tactics.   They define “membership” differently, and interact with those members in a VERY different manner.  E-mail isn’t a particularly new medium, and e-mail best-practices are pretty openly shared.  So why are there these differences?  In thinking about that, I was recently reminded of a very old dilemma.

My education as a political organizer began in high school.  It was my junior year, I was the head of the environmental club and was trying hard to make it non-lame (if you ever participated in a high school environmental club, you likely realize that “lame” is the natural state of such meetings).  Pretty early in the schoolyear, I decided that I wanted to plan a hike.  Nothing fancy — I grew up in suburban Maryland, so it’s not like we were talking about Big Wilderness here or anything.  But I thought it would be fun for a bunch of us to get together on Saturday and go for a walk in the woods.

Our environmental club sponsor (a bio teacher) was supportive, but with one major catch.  ”You need to fill out permission slips.  And we’ll need adults present as well.  This has to be planned several weeks in advance.”

That seemed like a lot of work, particularly since the core of the environmental club were friends of mine.  ”We hang out on Saturdays anyway.  Sometimes we go for a walk in the woods.  All I’m suggesting is that other students we know and like should be informed, and should come along.”

“Sure, that sounds nice and all.  But you need permission slips.  There are liability concerns.  If it’s an environmental club event, you need to plan for it appropriately.”

I immediately began skirting the issue, announcing during environmental club meetings that “several of us, NOT associated with the environmental club, will be going hiking this weekend.  If you’d like to come with, stick around *after the meeting is over* and we’ll tell you all about it.”  Eventually the sponsor caught on to what I was doing and warned me that this still was not alright.  What’s worse, we then started hearing about hearings and protests around local environmental issues.  For all of these, the sponsor demanded we get parents’ signatures weeks in advance.

Here’s the thing: the sponsor was right, but so was I.  For an established organization (particularly a public school… particularly when dealing with minors), there’s too much risk on the line to let people just try something new.  If one of those kids sprains an ankle, their parents could sue.  If one of us got introduced to drugs (or something much worse), parents would rightly ask “who was in charge” and demand accountability.  Formal institutions take precautionary measures to protect their resources and meet the needs and expectations of stakeholders.

That said, we just wanted to go hiking.  High school kids can do that.  They can attend rallies and protests too.  The onerous bureaucracy of massive organizations need not and should not get in the way of a walk in the woods.

My solution was to start my own new organization.  Montgomery County Student Environmental Activists (MCSEA) was founded in my living room in March 1996.  For a year and a half, we met there every Saturday.  We planned  hikes, played frisbee, hung out at coffeehouses, ran petition drives, lobbied our state Senators, canvassed neighborhoods, planned rallies, re-planned those rallies after they got rained out, and won more than our fair share of environmental victories.  The group is still active today, and enjoyed quasi-legendary status in some segments of the student environmental community.  MCSEA alumni formed a majority of the Sierra Student Coalition (SSC) Executive Committee for several years.  My work as Trainings Director largely revolved around trying to glean what had worked so well with MCSEA, and how that could be passed on to others.  That’s also how I ended up joining the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors at age 25 — already an 8-year veteran of the organization.

I offer this reflection because its so similar to a pattern I see among advocacy groups today.  A new generation of political associations have embodied a culture of ostentatious innovation and are fashioning new tactical repertoires that prove tremendously effective.  Older organizations have tried to adopt these techniques, but often are unable to do so effectively.  There’s a developing cottage industry of “new media evangelists” who essentially tell these organizations, “Embrace the internet!  Become more networked and less hierarchical!  Use new media platforms!”

I am not a new media evangelist.  I think the evangelists have a few things right, but what’s missing is fundamentally equivalent to the disconnect between 16-year-old me and my (supportive) environmental club sponsor:  Old organizations take an incremental approach to new media platforms because they have significant reputational and organizational resources to think about.  They are right to be cautious, even as new activists are right to work around them and build something new.

That’s the dynamic I see among political associations today.  It’s a dynamic tension — one where both sides can, in fact, be right, but the gap between them creates the need for new associations to be formed.  And the good news is, the process of forming them can sometimes be kind of life-changing (and fun, too!).

This is a bit about the story of Cereality, a still-in-business restaurant chain that sells cereal. Here’s a Time story about Cereality’s IP strategy that gives some background.

The story is obviously friendly to the Cereality perspective, but you’ll see critiques of their use of IP against competitors farther down. Here’s a good link criticizing Cereality’s patent strategy. Also, look for the first comment at this link.

As a former member of Free Culture, I’m obviously on their side here on the patenting issue. For a more ongoing battle against patents that are, frankly, on more important subjects, see the EFF Patent Busting Project. They just claimed a big victory, getting an initial ruling of invalidity upon reinspection for a VoIP patent.

Back to Cereality. The company’s three patents were ultimately rejected, and while I haven’t done the research to make this claim with certainty, I can only assume that this business model’s obviousness had something to do with the patent being denied. Here’s one of their three patents (patent application # 11/518,374) that got everybody riled up. It’s funny right from the beginning:

A method of providing breakfast cereal in a quick-serve restaurant setting, the method comprising:

at the quick-serve restaurant, displaying to customers retail-sale packages for multiple competitively-branded breakfast cereals, wherein the multiple competitively-branded breakfast cereals are manufactured by at least two different cereal manufacturers;

at the quick-serve restaurant, receiving a request from a customer for a first portion of a first one of the competitively-branded breakfast cereals and a second portion of a second one of the competitively-branded breakfast cereals, wherein the receiving of the request is performed at or near a point of sale device positioned at the quick-serve restaurant;

at the quick-serve restaurant, in response to receiving the request from the customer, combining the first and second portions of the first and second competitively-branded breakfast cereals together in a carry-out container as a to-go order; and

at the quick-serve restaurant, presenting the carry-out container to the customer in exchange for payment.

That’s your invention? Something that belongs alongside the light bulb and the telephone? Really? This may not be the most scholarly comment, but LMAO. The US Patent & Trademark Office agreed, and none of the three patents were approved. (See a bit more in the postscript below.)

One of the criteria for patentability is that an invention be non-obvious, and mixing breakfast cereals definitely counts as obvious. Making a restaurant based primarily/exclusively on this model also isn’t inventive enough to justify a patent.

My first reaction on hearing about this case was: Have they never been inside a college dorm cafeteria? When I was living in Colorado State University’s dorms in 1995 and 1996, combining Frosted Flakes and Cracklin’ Oat Bran–with the milk of my choice, or maybe some fruit-flavored yogurt from the salad bar–was simply “dinner.” Dessert? Add gummy bears. And I was hardly the only student to see this as part of dorm life.

While the patents were a joke (all were given up in process by the filers, presumably because they had no case), I have no problem with Cereality having their trademarks. That includes marks on their brand, slogans, and quirky service characteristics, though I think their enforcement of TM was overzealous. A consumer at CerealCity should know that this is not the same experience as one has at Cereality—though really, the more important trademarks (markers of quality) here are held by the likes of General Mills.

The patent story is hardly a simple happy ending, though. Being threatened with a lawsuit is scary and expensive. At least one would-be cereal restaurant folded up shop in response. Filing a patent and then having your lawyer issue nastygrams can have the intended effect—stopping competitors from competing—even if the underlying patent has more holes than a box of Cheerios.

While I’m an expert in neither patent law nor computer science, I’m glad EFF is on the case, and I suspect the VoIP victory is a big win for all of us. But Cereality is something we all understand, making Cereality a good example of patents, patentability, and part of what’s wrong with our patent system.

P.S. Researching patents is now pretty easy thanks to the magic of the internet, though some of the legal language and the process is still intimidating to those without patent law training.

If you want to look for a specific patent or patents covering a specific area, start with Google Patents.

They’ve turned the publicly available PTO database into something infinitely more searchable, since searching is Google’s core strength.

If a result has a patent number, then it’s been issued. Unfortunately, if it’s still an application, one thing a result won’t tell you is its status. Once you’ve found a patent application, you then have to go to the PTO Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) database.

This is how I confirmed that all three Cereality patent applications were rejected or abandoned. (Abandoning a patent mid-process is common, especially following an initial non-final rejection, after which the applicant decides it isn’t worth the continuing expense for a losing cause.) These are:

Application # 11/119,337, claiming to have invented a method of

providing a menu to a customer in a quick-serve restaurant setting, the menu including at least one menu item that allows the customer to select two different, competitively-branded breakfast cereals from a list of competitively-branded breakfast cereals. …

and application # 11/119,336:

A quick-serve restaurant comprising:

multiple above-counter cabinets having see-through doors;

multiple commercially-recognizable, retail-sale packages for competitively-branded cereals, wherein at least some of the competitively-branded cereals are from different manufacturers, and wherein the multiple retail-sale packages are positioned within the above-counter cabinets for viewing by customers of the quick-serve restaurant. …

These are all fine if obvious ideas. Especially in combination, it’s a clever business. (Sell the part of the dorm cafeteria that keeps the 19-year-old guys eating despite Mystery Meat Tuesdays, and give it a hipper feel and more focused design.) But a clever combination of ideas is not necessarily an invention, especially when all of the ideas individually are transparently obvious.

MICROMEDIUM

We can think of digital interfaces like Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other virtual platforms as “micromediums”—media that are:
1. Private
2. Unique
3. Convergent

Private

Televisions, radios and telephones are distinct mediums that could be produced by a variety of manufacturers.  The programming that came through these as either one way (radio and television) or two way (telephones) could be produced by a variety of communicators and bore no direct relation to the manufacturer.  But digital interfaces privatize mediums. You may have hundreds of “friends” and “followers” but there is a unitary Twitter, Facebook etc.  When the popularity of these micromediums fade, as fade they must (remember when everybody you knew was on Friendster?), then the micromedium itself will fade.

Unique

Micromediums are so unique in their capabilities as to often bear little resemblance to one another, even within categories like microblogging and social networking.  Despite their clear lineage and similar function as “social networking sites” Friendster and Facebook are worlds apart.  They have unique terminologies and tools that define not only how the user interacts with them, but how the user understands communication.  This is why a company like Squidoo insists on calling its user generated webpages “lenses.” This is why Twitter “Tweets” and Facebook “Friends”.  In naming a thing, we both mark it as our own and distinguish it from similar products.  The highly competitive, global and growing nature of the web demands that these differentiations manifest through both unique language and function.

 Convergent

Micromediums are not so unique as to be truly distinct mediums (in the way that the telephone was).  They are often variations, remixes and evolutions of preexisting mediums that come together in new and changing ways.  The open source nature of applications that may run on these micromediums only increases this blurring and converging of technologies.  This technological convergence, combined with corporate conglomeration leads to walled gardens of compatible technologies such as the Google owned Blogger, which integrates the Google owned Picasa/Gmail/YouTube/etc. into a single format that is both recognizable as a micromedium but still belongs to the larger medium of the blog.

MONOMEDIUM

While digital interfaces have fragmented and become highly specialized, the physical objects on which we access them have changed as well.  Mobile computing tools like the iPhone are characterized by their flexibility rather than functionality.  They cede control of their interface to the digital micromedia that they channel.  A heavily mechanical device like the Blackberry, with its tiny keypad and other strong physical attributes is looking antiquated in comparison to the blank and fully plastic interface of the iPhone.

As microcomputing brings our screens and processors closer together and physical objects like mice and keyboards cede to touchscreen technology, we can look forward to a future in which our virtual interfaces are more real and recognizable to us than the physical interfaces through which we access them.

 *

Anyway, these are a few thoughts I’ve been having.  They aren’t fully matured to the point where they might constitute an article.  I’d love to hear your feedback, thoughts and suggestions for evolving this subject.

Professor Lessig likes to introduce three ideas to frame his talk today: 1) influence, 2) independence and 3) responsibility.

Relying on his framework of the four modalities of control that he used in Code, Professor Lessig explains how the law, markets, norms and architecture together exert influence, and that depending on your policy objectives, these four forces can be complementing or conflicting. He suggests that together they form an “economy of influence” that we need to understand if we want to make effective policy.

He continues to explain “independence”, in the sense that something is not dependent on something. Independence matters, because it means that you try to find the right answer for the right reason, as opposed to doing so for a wrong reason you might be dependent on.

Independence, however, does not mean dependence from everything. Lessig reframes independence as a “proper dependence”. In legal terms, it means that a judge depends on the law for her judgment. So independence is about defining proper dependence, and limiting improper dependence.

Responsibility is the third concept Lessig goes into. He tells us about a case he represented in 2006: Hardwicke vs ABS. It was a case that focused on a series of events concerning child abuse, all perpetrated by a single person. The question that was raised: Who is responsible? Lessig makes the argument that responsibility does not lie with the individual, that this individual has no power to reform, and that this is pathological. Instead, he makes the case that responsibility in this case is all the people who knew about the wrongdoings, but refused to pick up the phone. Nevertheless, the focus of the law was on the one pathological person. Lessig suggests it is more productive to focus responsibility on those who have the power to make changes, instead of those are pathological and are not in a position to reform. He notes it is ironic that the one person who is least likely to reform is held responsible, while the one entity who could do something about it, was immune.

He raises another example of “responsibility” gone awry. He cites Al Gore and his book “The Assault on Reason”, and lambasts its narrow perception of responsibility. It focuses on former president Bush, arguably the man least likely to reform, and instead forgets those who could have done something about it, suggesting that they also have been critically responsible.

His argument is one of “institutional corruption”. What it is not: what happened with Blagojevitch; it is not bribery, not “just politics”, not any violation of existing rules. Instead, institutional corruption is “a certain kind of influence situated within an economy of influence that has a certain effect, either it 1) weakens the effectiveness of the institution or 2) weakens public trust for the institution.

He explains the system of institutional corruption using the White House. Referring to Robert Kaiser’s book “So Damn Much Money”, he argues how the story of the government has dramatically changed in the past fifteen years and how the engine of this change has been the growth of the lobbying industry. He illustrates this with numbers: Lobbyists pay with cash which members use as support for their campaigns. The cost of campaigns have exploded over the years, and subsequently, members have become dependent on lobbyists for cash – he cites that lobbyists make up 30-70% of campaign budgets! This is not new, he carefully explains, but citing Kaiser again, what is new is the scale of this practice has gotten out of hand. Members /need/ and take /much more/, becoming /dependent/ on those who supply. This is only during the tenure, but institutional corruption also needs to be understood as something after tenure: 50% of senators translate their senate tenure into a career as lobbyist, while 42% of the house do the same. This suggests a business model, focused on life after government, that perpetuates itself, and influential people who end up becoming dependent on this system surviving, both during and after their time in Congress.

He goes on to give example after example of institutional corruption. He mentions the important work done by maplight.org that tracks money in politics, who have shown that members who voted to gut a bill had 3x times the contribution from lobbyists than those who voted against. Simply put, policies get bent to those who pay. He cites a study by Alexander, Scholz and Mazza measuring rates of return for lobbying expenditures, who conclude that ROI is a whopping 22,000%! He again cites Kaiser, who suggests that lobbying is a $9-12 billion industry.

Why does this matter? It matters if it
1) weakens effectiveness of institution or
2) weakens public trust of institution

In the first case, he argues how lobbying can shift policy. He cites a study by Hall and Deardorff “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy” on how the work of congresspersons shift as a result of lobbying. Imagine you’re a congressperson and you see it as your goal to work on two issues: one is to stop piracy, the other is to help mums on welfare. The line of lobbyists that will happily help you with stopping piracy is long, whereas not so many will help you with the latter – so work of the congressperson shifts, and thus work of Congress shifts.

Lessig suggests it also bends policies. Does money really not change results? Citing the Sonny Bono case of October 27, 1998, he shows how in copyright lobbying power had a powerful influence in getting the copyright term extended for another twenty years. Does this advance the public good? A clear no. Lessig backs this up by telling how in the challenge at the Supreme Court, an impressive line-up of Nobel Prize winning economists, including Milton Friedman, supported this and that it would be a “no brainer” to sign the support that copyright extension did not advance the public good. But he concludes that there were “no brains” in the House. An easy case of institutional corruption. There are two explanations: Either they are idiots, or they are guided by something other than reason. He suggests of course it’s the latter. It is not misunderstanding that explains these cases.

Lessig continues to explain how corruption can be seen as weakening public trust. He tells us about how the head of the committee in charge of deciding the future of healthcare is getting $4 million from the healthcare industry. Or how a congressperson ended up opposing the public option even though the majority of his constituency supports it. The idea is not that there might be a direct link between the money and the vote, but that if you take money to do something that is against the public interest, people will automatically make that link, and this weakens public trust. If you don’t take money and you go against the popular vote, that won’t reek of corruption.

Lessig goes on to discuss different fields: medicine and the healthcare industry, citing research by Drummond Rennie from UCSF that shows how there is an overwhelming bias in favor of sponsor’s company drugs. How there are 2.5 doctors to 1 detailer (a detailer being someone who is like a lobbyist for the pharmaceuticals, promoting the drugs to doctors, often giving “gifts”). How the budget for detailing tripled in the past ten years.

Lessig asks us: how can we find out whether these claims are true? Do detailing practices either weaken the effectiveness of medicine, or weaken the public trust for it? What would it take to know?

There is also the issue of “the structure of fact finding” that Lessig suggests is corrupt. Again, he argues we need to understand whether this is a process by which results are affected or trust is weakened. He cites how sponsor funded research can cause delay, and mentions the case of “popcorn lung”.

Lessig makes a strong case that we need more than intuition. That we need a framework or metric to know for sure. Because we all have ideological commitments, that we need to escape this in order to have a proper understanding of corruption. This is, in short, the aim of his new project: The Lab. It should be a neutral ground with a framework that determines whether and when institutional corruption exists, to develop remedies for institutional corruption when it exists. He sees the initial work having three dimensions: 1) data – necessary to describe influence and track its change; 2) perception of institutional corruption and understand how it has changed;
and 3) causation – what can we say about what causes what in these contexts in alleged corruption. Having this information, we can then design remedies.

Consider: when I was in college a decade ago, I carried around a spare floppy disk for saving files and transfering them from one computer to another.  It could store about 100 megabites, which was a lot more storage than you’d find on campus webmail.  A few friends of mine had new computers with a whole GIGAbite of space.  It wasn’t entirely clear to me what one would do with all that space.

Today, my iPod has 120 Gigs.  I save my files to gmail and they reside in the clouds.  Wireless networked computing means I can access them anywhere, even on the road from an iPhone.  My computer, bought 4 years ago, is antiquated and slow.  It’s a mac that doesn’t even have embedded video.  And therein lies a disconnect for businesses and governments in the digital age.

Let’s say that the University I work at decides to invest in a complete upgrade of their computer systems.  This includes hardward and software, a new fleet of computers; custom-built e-learning tools.  (full disclosure: this post was inspired by the “MyCourses” e-learning training I attended this morning)  In so doing, they incur some substantial sunk costs.  Those computers and those software programs have got to be useable for several years.  Organizations and governments don’t move seamlessly up the line presented in the figure above.  They move in a stepwise fashion, investing in new tools every few years which they are in turn saddled with as the technology continues to evolve.

Why is this important?  Well for one thing, it helps to explain why large bureacracies will virtually always have outdated websites.  Purchasing a fleet of new computers or moving into a new area of web-related activity caries a cost, and no organization can afford to keep pace with the rapid expansion.  Sunk costs are a reality of egovernment and organizational adoption.

Particularly in terms of software, however, it seems to me to be a strong argument in favor of partnering with organizations like Google or, better yet, relying on open source software platforms.  Learning today about Brown University’s “My Courses” software platform (it is similar to the “blackboard” site at Penn… a password protected site for students to access the syllabus, readings, grades, etc), I couldn’t help but think that the more advanced functionalities could be accomplished for free with a Ning site.  I’m sure “My Courses” was cutting edge when Brown first made the investment, [well... I'm not sure, but I'm willing to believe it] but companies like Ning have been free to innovate — incentivized to do so, in fact — while Brown has incurred the sunk costs.

In a digital environment that evolves as quickly as the internet, we can draw a hardline distinction between the entities who have an incentive to continually create and innovate (tech giants, startups who hope to challenge tech giants, and open source communities) and the entities who proceed in stepwise fashion, incurring sunk costs, staying pat for several years, and then incurring another round of sunk costs.  It then follows that one of the benefits afforded to informal networks (policy networks, activist networks, political networks, communities-of-interest… Clay Shirky’s “organizing without organizations”) is that their lack of resources also leads to a lack of sunk costs, meaning that any online action they engage in is likely to be, and essentially remain at, the cutting edge.

Those are just a few early thoughts on the topic.  E-gov hasn’t been one of my major research areas thus far, but I’m warming up to it.  Thoughts/reactions/feedback would be appreciated (as always)