In political communication research, we tend to make a hardline distinction between political persuasion and political mobilization.  In simple terms, persuasion is the act of convincing someone to change their position on a topic (which candidate they support/whether climate change is real), while mobilization is the act of convincing someone to act upon their position (turning out to the polls/attending a climate rally).

The central lesson of the Howard Dean campaign was that the Internet is great for mobilization.  This may seem obvious today, but it was a revelation 10 years ago.  The prevailing wisdom before Dean was that the Internet would have very little impact on elections because web pages are “pull” media that only attract existing supporters, making them lousy persuasion tools.  The “Deaniacs” capitalized on that supporter enthusiasm and converted it into tangible mobilization resources — big money from small donors, big turnout at volunteer events.

In the decade since Dean*, a new prevailing wisdom has emerged: the Internet is great for mobilization, but it also supports echo chambers that make persuasion even rarer.  Algorithmic filtering by Google and Facebook produce filter bubbles, with Republicans and Democrats rarely even encountering the same news headlines.

At last week’s Personal Democracy Forum conference, several keynote speakers offered implicit challenges to this perspective.  As social media loses its novelty and is assumed into the background media environment, a new wave of campaigners are figuring out how to harness the Internet for persuasion.

First up is Rachel Weidinger, Director of Upwell.us.  Upwell is a new project in Big Listening – “the art and practice of tracking topical online conversations over time — listening to what ‘the Internet’ writ large, is talking about.”  They combine a few big tech tools with human creativity and intelligence to drive information campaigns that help “condition the climate for change.”

Put more plainly, there are very few ocean conservation activists out there.  Weidinger and company’s mission is to move beyond the usual suspects and get a larger public talking about ocean issues.  The details of their strategy can be found in a 165-page pilot report that, despite the length, is quite engaging.

Next is Sara Critchfield, Editorial Director at Upworthy.com.  I talked about Upworthy in my last blog post.  They now reach 2/3rds of the American public, driving viral attention to content with substance.  Critchfield mentions in her talk that they combine “emotional data with analytical data.”  She also mentions that they test the living hell out of every headline, until they stumble upon language that works.

Both Upwell and Upworthy are focused on persuasion — exposing new people to new information rather than galvanizing existing people to action.  And, to that end, both have refocused attention away from mobilization metrics (views/clicks/action rates) and toward persuasion metrics (retweets/posts/shares/comments).  As Weidinger puts it in her pilot report, “Our primary metric [...] is what we refer to as a ‘social mention’ (or ‘social item’). [...] Social mentions are online acts of self-expression in which individuals, organizations and other entities invest (at least) a small amount of social capital.”

The Internet of 2003 was not built for this kind of organized persuasion effort.  Social sharing of vidoes, gifs, and other viral-friendly content just wasn’t that easy.  The Internet of 2013 is different.  It contains filter bubbles and mobilization-friendly echo chambers, to be sure.  But it also contains simple sharing tools, robust analytics programs, and fast-twitch news cycles with plenty of room for serious content.

The Dean campaign forced us to rethink the Internet’s role in political mobilization.  This latest wave of political startups may force us to rethink the Internet’s role in political persuasion, too.

*Oof, it’s been a decade.  I feel old.

Even from such a less-than-ideal base of knowledge, and even though it will take months or years for everything to come out (if ever), I already believe the following:

What Edward Snowden did is one of the most heroic, medal-worthy acts by an American so far this century. I say this even though I’m also horrified that somebody with his scant qualifications was in such a position.

No mountain of prestigious journalistic prizes can repay the debt owed to the Guardian and Glenn Greenwald by the citizens of this country.

President Obama should immediately grant Snowden a full presidential pardon — and, further, give Snowden his own (prematurely given and, as is now clear, unearned) Nobel Peace Prize as a token of his gratitude.

Concerns about the steady erosion of civil liberties and all-too-quick slide into a surveillance state are finally starting to get a sliver of the traction they should have gotten since roughly the end of 2001.

The erosion of civil liberties via state surveillance has been accompanied by an ever-shrinking capacity for citizens to monitor the state. This ranges from the mundane (e.g., police officers routinely harassing, arresting, injuring, and/or falsely charging people for photographing or recording them in public) to the profound (e.g., charging journalists as “co-conspirators” for soliciting restricted information).

There is perhaps no better test of whether technology activists will be able to mobilize the public en masse on behalf of a desired change — rather than, as in the SOPA blackout, against an unpopular proposed change.

Whether or not an anti-surveillance movement can effect major changes in policy is not a fair measure of whether and how well such a movement performs as a movement; better measures include people mobilized to action, mainstream coverage, and policymakers and allies recruited.

Regardless of whether it is fair to measure an anti-surveillance movement based on policy outcomes, such policy outcomes may be a fair way to measure the viability of our democracy. If we can’t get people on the left, right, and center to join together to take back the Fourth Amendment, the promises of our Constitution are pretty hollow indeed. (Satire or not, this hits close to home.)

If I were in the position of Snowden, Greenwald, or the Guardian, I hope and believe that I would make pretty much the same decisions.

I say all of this publicly, even though I no longer have faith that I can do so without fear of retribution (yes, I use that term deliberately) by the state.

So, to the snoops that are undoubtedly listening — even though it’s unlikely that any human will ever actually read this tiny speck in an ocean of data — come and get me.

If what Snowden did lands him in prison, being there next to him would be an honor. If blowing the lid off a giant, proto-police-state phone and internet surveillance operation is wrong, I don’t want to be right. If leaking state secrets in the public interest puts one in danger of torture, indefinite detention, exile, or being disappeared, we’re all in danger — and for most people, this will be because too few will be brave enough to take such a risk to protect the citizenry from the state.

So consider me part of the conspiracy, Mr./Ms. Snoop. Tell your supervisors that we have a dissident who needs closer scrutiny and maybe a visit from an agent.

I’d rather go to prison, right now, for the rest of my life than to live in complicity as we slide ever-closer toward becoming a bona fide police state.

And just to increase the odds that a real human does see this: bombs Al Qaeda assassinate infidels fertilizer kill death murder planes airports President Obama Capitol White House 9/11 TNT flying with liquids in containers larger than 100 ml (3 oz. for you SAE holdouts) and not taking off my accursed shoes. So there.

P.S. If there’s one consequence I do fear as a result of this post specifically, it’s being put on the no-fly list — itself a particularly apt illustration of the intersection of terrorism paranoia, unchecked executive branch power, and rank bureaucratic incompetence.

Neil Postman begins his magnum opus, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by ruminating on two distinct visions of our dystopic future, portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophecy the same thing.  Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.  But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history.  As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo the capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.  What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.  Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.  Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.  Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.  Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.  Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.  Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture…  In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain.  In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”

(emphasis added)

On a Thursday afternoon panel at Personal Democracy Forum, Zeynep Tufecki argued that big data in campaigns is paving the way for a future that is equal parts Orwell and Huxley.  The threat comes less from electoral campaigns themselves than from well-financed economic players who will replicate and enhance the new market techniques in other arenas.  Our powers of monitoring and distraction are growing at an outlandish pace.

Through cosmic coincidence, the first news about PRISM broke just after her panel.  Along with monitoring all of our phone calls through Verizon, it seems the NSA is also capable of accessing all communications via Google/Gmail/YouTube, Microsoft/Skype, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Aol, and Paltalk. According to the career intelligence officer who leaked the information, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

PRISM is Orwell’s America. Really, what else can you call it? If, two weeks ago, Someone told me that the government was soaking up all our online data, capable of reading things while we type them, I would have backed away slowly, wondering where they left their tin foil hat. Then the Washington Post told me instead.  The depth and breadth of this domestic spying program is just astonishing.

But Huxley’s vision is the reason this Orwellian architecture can be constructed.  Consider:

RT @AdamKilgoreWP Friday on A1 of WaPo: The govt is reading yr email. Saturday: The Nats’ season has been a real drag http://wapo.st/15JSxGU 

And it’s not just the front page of the Washington Post.  Tune in to your Twitter stream tomorrow, around 9:30PM EST.  I guarantee you that no one will be discussing PRISM.  They’ll be talking about Daenerys Stormborn and Arya Stark.  They’ll be talking about Lebron James and Tony Parker.  They’ll be trading jokes about Don Draper and Joan Holloway.  It’s like Kurt Cobain said, “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Here we are now, entertain us.”

I see room for just a bit of anti-Huxley hope.  Also at Personal Democracy Forum, Sara Critchfield talked about Upworthy.com.  Upworthy has only been around for a year and a half, and it already reaches 2/3rds of all Americans.  Their business model is surprisingly simple: find “socially positive” stories, repackage them with more engaging headlines, and help them go viral.  Eli Pariser founded Upworthy after he wrote The Filter Bubble (see my review here).  It was founded on the premise that people actually want more than cat videos and celebrity gossip.  Provide engaging, inspiring, thought-provoking, or enraging content and people will read it, share it, and discuss it.  We just have to get better at marketing the quality content as well as we market the junk content.

Upworthy’s success gives reason for hope.  Sunday night, I’ll be watching the NBA Finals and Game of Thrones.  But Monday, I’ll probably see some PRISM-related content from Upworthy in my media stream, and I’ll share it and participate further in the public conversation.  How much hope we should have is directly proportional to how large of a niche companies like Upworthy will eventually occupy.  How widely are those diverse preferences for substantive and entertaining comments spread?  Can we sustain national attention around issues like PRISM for long enough to demand answers and action from public officials, or will we quickly flip to the next story?

I don’t know.  But, as we marvel at this newly unveiled Orwellian surveillance state, it’s these Huxley-esque questions that will concern me most.

We don’t arrive at this surveillance regime through a perpetual state of fear.  We get there through perpetual distraction.

I read a lot of technology criticism.  I write a bit of it as well.  George Packer’s article in this week’s New Yorker, (“Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans — and its money — to politics“) is just sublime, the finest I’ve ever seen. It might be the end of technology criticism as we know it. Shut it down.  Nothing left to say here.  Packer’s already covered that.

What’s interesting about Packer’s article is just how much ground he covers in such a relatively small space. Consider the following three passages from Packer’s article, compared to three of the most recent books in the tech-criticism genre:

(1)

“When financiers say that they’re doing God’s work by providing cheap credit, and oilmen claim to be patriots who are making the country energy-independent, no one takes them too seriously – it’s a given that their motivation is profit.  But when technology entrepreneurs describe their lofty goals there’s no smirk or wink.  “Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action,” one young entrepreneur said of his colleagues.  “It’s remarkably convenient that they can achieve their goals just by doing their start-up.”  He added, “They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many of the world’s problems.  It isn’t cynicism – it’s arrogance and ignorance.”

This passage is an elegant version of the “solutionism” critique in Evgeny Morozov’s new book, To Save Everything, Click Here.  Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can have a habit of seeing technology as the solution to all the world’s problems.  Everywhere some look, they see disruption.  Evgeny makes a few very smart points, but his book is a little uneven.  At times while reading it, I wondered whether he was making too much of the lofty language that appears in investment pitches, pursuing his targets with a bit too much zeal.  If you wanted to boil the strongest parts of Morozov’s book down to their essence, you’d be left with passages like this one from Packer.

(2)

“In the past few years, San Francisco’s political leaders have grown close to the technology companies.  Corey Cook, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco, who focuses on local politics, said, “The dominant narrative of the city is ‘What’s good for the tech industry is good for San Francisco.’” Historically, he said, what was good for General Motors wasn’t always good for the country: there was conflict between business and labor, which was resolved by insuring that factories offered middle-class jobs.  He added, “Now there’s no conflict, but there are no middle-class jobs.”

Jaron Lanier is probably the alpha-individual in tech criticism circles.  The godfather of virtual reality, he has now written two books of humanist criticism against his technologist peers.  Personally, I’ve never been a fan.  Lanier’s calling card is his life story, rather than his writing ability.  His arguments tend to be provocative but unedited stream-of-consciousness and poorly researched.  His latest book, Who Owns the Future was described by Morozov as an “eccentric but unconvincing meditation on how the middle classes could survive the menace of digitization.”

It isn’t that Lanier doesn’t have a point to make, it’s that he lacks the drive, prose, and determination to make it artfully.  His new book is focused on the relationship between social inequality and digital technologies.  That’s an important topic, but it’s hard to pluck through the odd tangents to reach the serious ideas.  Packer offers the same insight, but without the sloppy limitations.

(3)

A favorite word in tech circles is “frictionless.” It captures the pleasures of an app so beautifully designed that using it is intuitive, and it evokes a fantasy in which all inefficiencies, annoyances, and grievances have been smoothed out of existence—that is, an apolitical world. Dave Morin, who worked at Apple and Facebook, is the founder of a company called Path—a social network limited to one’s fifty closest friends. In his office, which has a panoramic view of south San Francisco, he said that one of his company’s goals is to make technology increasingly seamless with real life. He described San Francisco as a place where people already live in the future. They can hang out with their friends even when they’re alone. They inhabit a “sharing economy”: they can book a weeklong stay in a cool apartment through Airbnb, which has disrupted the hotel industry, or hire a luxury car anywhere in the city through the mobile app Uber, which has disrupted the taxi industry. “San Francisco is a place where we can go downstairs and get in an Uber and go to dinner at a place that I got a restaurant reservation for halfway there,” Morin said. “And, if not, we could go to my place, and on the way there I could order takeout food from my favorite restaurant on Postmates, and a bike messenger will go and pick it up for me. We’ll watch it happen on the phone. These things are crazy ideas.”

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

My favorite part of Nicco Mele’s new book, The End of Big, is the attention he pays to the biases of the geek-class.  Disruption is happening in a lot of industries.  It is not always a good thing (and it is not happening everywhere all at once).  This isn’t leveling the social playing field, though.  It’s empowering a new elite — software engineers.

Now, if we’re going to empower some group of people as a privileged elite, I prefer technologists over many of the other alternatives.  There’s more of a rough meritocracy in code-writing than there is in the old power elite.  But we at least ought to examine what biases the new technologist class will bring to bear.  Mele, at his best, offers a provocative argument for thinking long and hard about our newly crowned technology leaders.

Packer reaches the same end, but he does so in paragraphs rather than pages.

—

That’s three books of technology criticism, all published in the last three months — over 1,050 pages in all.  George Packer in 10,000 vivid words accomplishes more than all three.  Bravo.  That’s one hell of an article.

I’m not a frequent Mad Men watcher, but I’m really into Game of Thrones. I’ve been thinking about the gender relations throughout — where Martin and the TV show make commendable moves, and where they fail — and I think this article gives the series too little credit. Ironically, Rhodes paints the series with too broad a brush.

It’s hardly a feminist watershed, of course, but both the novels and the TV series contain a range of reasonably thoughtful — if not particularly insightful — takes on gender. In addition to Arya and Brianna (masculinized), characters Rhodes critiques as obviously masculinized, consider some of the characters she fails to identify — like Daenerys Targaryan, Asha/Yara Greyjoy, and Ygritte the Wildling. Each is both feminine and a powerful warrior; none of them “must either de-feminize or prostitute themselves in order to gain power,” as Rhodes contends. Ygritte and Asha are both trusted warriors, neither without giving up her womanhood. Once Dany’s husband dies, she keeps a small clan together with sheer charisma and force of will. Yes, their lust-worthiness is also an important part of each character (esp. as shot for TV, in Daenerys’ case), but not one of these characters serves primarily as a mother or a whore. They’re warriors — and, in Dany’s case, a contender for the throne.

Yes, the books and show are primarily led by men, told from a male perspective, and well short of a natural 51/49 gender ratio, even in non-speaking roles. (If anything, that ratio should be more female-heavy in a world where so many men are dying in battle…) Still, this is decidedly less so than much of the other literature in the genre (paging Mr. Tolkien…), and women serve many roles other than mothering and whoring.

Yes, it’s filled with tired stereotypes (Cersei, Sansa, and Julia Roberts — er, I mean Shae — come to mind). Yes, the attempts at female perspective and dialog are, um, not strong suits. And yes, more than a token conversation here and there between women (let alone one that is not about men, children, and/or menstruation) would be nice.

Still, this is an over-wrought criticism that doesn’t show a real understanding of the series. In addition to the characters named above, consider Brianna, whom Rhodes does mention. She loves Renly more than life itself — literally — and falls apart as her Romeo dies in her arms. Granted, cutting-edge feminism it’s not (not-particularly-attractive woman hopelessly follows gay man on his adventures; yawn), but it’s another example of where this article leaves me wondering, “Did you pay much attention?” With such a thin understanding of the series, the author can’t get into the somewhat more subtle ways in which Game of Thrones still doesn’t fulfill the wishes a feminist (e.g., me) might have for more accurate and nuanced gender portrayals.

Just as damnably, the article also doesn’t give credit where due. This series is primarily targeted at men, and if there’s one dominant theme about gender relations (at least, to anyone who’s looking at anything beyond all the eye candy), it’s how rough it is to be a woman in a patriarchal society. To me, at least, that message comes through loud and clear. A key theme within that broader message is that rape is bad, rapists are bad, and rape often has and should always have dire consequences for the perpetrator.

Which brings us back to Arya. She did not proactively seek to pretend to be a boy; she did so (at the very strong urging of, yes, a grizzled-but-caring adult man) in order not to be identified and/or raped during her clandestine journey. That’s kind of an important detail that complicates the analysis.

It’s a series whose characters are painted with very broad brushstrokes. (See: Baratheon, Joffrey.) The books, written for men, are by a nerdy manchild who doesn’t have a particularly rich understanding of how women think, speak, and behave. The TV show is on a channel known for catering to the male gaze.

Those don’t add up to Toni Morrison. Duh.

Still, Rhodes goes overboard here. The series makes an obvious, honest effort to identify the constructedness of gender roles and the unique struggles of women in a patriarchal society. It also screams to its male audience, “RAPE IS BAD!”, a lesson that (quite sadly) still needs to be taught.

TV and broader society are still places where victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and “Back in the kitchen with you!” are not only common, but even proffered as insightful commentary on the day’s affairs. Especially against that (oh-me-how-far-we-have-to-go) backdrop, Game of Thrones is okay by me. And that’s not just my inner 13-year-old talking.

Bachmann has been one of my favorite topics at ShoutingLoudly.  She first appeared on my radar in 2008, when her neo-McCarthyite meltdown on Hardball with Chris Matthews produced an avalanche of netroots fundraising for her Democratic opponent.  In the summer of 2007, she enjoyed a brief moment at the top of the Republican Primary electoral field.  A lot of smart bloggers reveled in the moment, suggesting that the Tea Party would propel her to victory.  Others noted her political savvy, arguing that progressives had best not underestimate her.  Personally, I was still underwhelmed:

Bachmann struck me in 2008/09 as a politician who loved the media spotlight, but wasn’t very good at handling it.  Staying on message is lesson one in media relations.  But she has shown no capacity for learning lessons 2, 3, 4, or 5.  She often sounds wooden.  She makes basic mistakes like looking into the wrong camera.  She buys into blatantly false internet rumors.  Nothing she has done since then would lead me to alter this impression.  Message discipline simply isn’t enough.  Anyone can learn that skill.

Another line of thinking in progressive circles is that we should cherish the Michele Bachmanns, Sarah Palins, and Alan Wests of the world — that their outlandish brand of offensive conservatism is fundraising gold for the Democratic Party, and that they provide good tv fodder that educates the public about the Republic Party’s policy agenda.  From that perspective, Bachmann’s announcement is a cause for mourning.  I can’t agree, though.

We have a superabundance of wacky conservatives in positions of power.  Lose Bachmann, Palin, and West and you’re still left with Louis Gohmert, Steve King, and Ted Cruz.  And the scary thing is that their behavior is rewarded in the digital media environment.  The most partisan, outlandish political candidates generate the most blog coverage, the largest social media followings, and the largest online small-donor hauls.

When candidates like Bachmann succeed, it signals to other politicians that their behavior is acceptable and appropriate.  That moves our country further into “ungovernable” territory.  When candidates like Bachmann beat a hasty exit in the dead of night, it signals to other politicians that there is still such a thing as “too crazy.”

So let’s enjoy this last entry in the Michele Bachmann files.  I’m sure she has a future as a Fox News personality, but she’ll no longer be on the House Intelligence Committee.  Politics just got a tiny bit saner.

News broke today that Change.org has raised $15 million in outside funding, mostly from Pierre Omidyar.   From Liz Gannes, who broke the news:

Omidyar Network is taking a minority and non-controlling stake with the explicit disavowal of a future payday from a sale or IPO, two things Change.org has promised it will never do. [...]

Though Change.org may sound like a nonprofit, it is actually a for-profit, mission-driven company that is certified as a B corporation.

Omidyar’s investment here isn’t a normal form of venture capital.  It is premised on the explicit promise that there will be no big payday.  But it also isn’t quite philanthropy, like Omidyar conducts through the Omidyar Network.  It’s a low payoff investment, but an investment nonetheless.

That’s part of what makes Change.org such a fascinating model.  It’s nonprofit-like, but avoids some of the harsh limitations facing nonprofits*.  Big donations to nonprofits are “major gifts.”  Donations to Change.org are “investments.”

I’ve offered my share of criticisms of Change.org’s model in the past.  The organization decided last October to adopt an ideologically neutral advertising policy, extending its business to some sketchy characters.  I think that choice carries more risk than reward.  The organization’s core model also is better-equipped for leveraging a thousand small-scale victories than creating a thousand points of pressure for a single large-scale victory.  And the issues I care most about need large-scale victories (congressional legislation, international treaties, etc).

That said, it’s really easy for me to get excited about this news.  The single issue that concerns me most in the field of political advocacy is “how do we pay for movement infrastructure in a time of declining beneficial inefficiencies“ (for those reading along at home, this is a theme in chapter 7 of my book).  Change.org employs a ton of talented organizers.  Omidyar’s investment will allow them to hire more, and put better tools in their hands.   The investment will fund tactical experimentation, technological innovation, and the spread of social change infrastructure. And it’s an investment that wouldn’t have otherwise gone to some scrappy nonprofit.  Rather than fighting with nonprofit allies for a bigger slice of the philanthropic pie, Change.org is building new revenue streams that otherwise simply would not exist. That cannot help but be a good thing.

Congratulations to Ben Rattray and his team.  I’m looking forward to seeing where this leads.

*And no, the horrors of filling out extended IRS questionnaires when applying for C4 status doesn’t count as a harsh limitation.

What a crock.

Lanier is apparently incapable of stepping back from technological determinism and looking at the actual causes of our ballooning economic inequality — which, to cut to the chase, is primarily a result of our policy choices. Yet the role of government in determining the overall shape of the economy is too often understated or outright ignored by those who wring their hands about growing economic inequality.

With some noted exceptions, those who criticize Lanier still mostly point at the old standby twin bogeymen of automation and outsourcing. The HuffPost chat in which all of the guests are willing to challenge Lanier’s conclusions is typical on this count but hardly alone. To his credit, Buffalo State College economist Bruce Fisher starts heading in the right direction with his concerns about fostering and preserving the political and social engagement of those who are being left out, but he fails to take it the next step and discuss the major policy changes and political neglect that have brought us to this point.

The best explanation that I’ve seen of America’s growing wealth inequality is Winner-Take-All Politics, in which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson start with a simple look at other industrialized countries to show that inequality isn’t an inexorable outcome trade and automation. The Germans and Swedes certainly have similar chances to outsource their manufacturing and use technology to reduce labor forces.

Not only does the rest of the industrial world have the internet, too, better telecom policy means they generally have faster connections and cheaper prices. Yet as measured by the Gini Coefficient, a measure of economic inequality, their economies have far more equal distributions of income in take-home pay and wealth.

The wealth distribution in particular is just shocking — the US has a wealth Gini of .801 (where 1.000 is “one person owns everything”), the fifth highest among all included countries and almost exactly the same as the distribution of wealth across the entire planet (.803). Think about that for a second; we have the same radically unequal distribution of capital within the US as among the entire population of the world across all countries — from Hong Kong and Switzerland to Nigeria and Haiti.

With our paper-thin social safety net and highly unequal distribution of income and wealth, we’re left with an economy where tens of millions struggle to get by while wealthy Manhattanites are hiring handicapped “relatives” for $1,000 per day to be able to skip the lines at Disney World.

Across countless major policy areas —health care, education, financial regulation, taxation, support for the unemployed, and many more — the rest of the industrialized world generally does far more to make their societies fairer for all. Our shrinking protections for workers may be the greatest single cause of the shrinking middle class. Of course, this can be done badly — I would certainly not want to swing as far as Italy and Spain, where it’s nearly impossible to fire somebody once they’re a regular, fulltime employee. Yet we should not allow employers to fire union organizers with near impunity. We should not force organizers to wait for months between card check and votes to unionize so that employers can “educate” their captive audience workforce with the most pernicious disinformation and intimidation. We should not sit idly while nearly half of states fail to meet even “minimum workplace-safety inspection goals, due to state budget cuts and reduced staffing.”

It’s true that the middle class is being gutted in the US, but this is primarily due to how our political system turns the act of surviving and thriving into a high-wire act for an ever-larger slice of the population. Laid-off baby boomers, even those with desirable skills, are having a devil of a time finding work in a country where age discrimination is only nominally illegal. Meanwhile, our children attend public schools with an unconscionably unequal distribution of funding, so moving or being born into a more affordable neighborhood may cost kids their futures, too.

Teens and laid off workers alike are told that college is the route to a better future, but the cost of education is skyrocketing as states and the feds slash public investment in higher education. Many families — even many families with health insurance — are one major medical problem away from unemployment and bankruptcy. Since it’s totally legal to use credit reports and current employment status in making hiring decisions, being laid off or losing one’s job after a medical problem can quickly become a death spiral. None of this is due to outsourcing or automation, but is instead the result of a noxious combination of deliberate policy changes (the privileged seeking to strengthen their own hand) and policy drift (the rest of us sitting idly by or being ignored when we do speak up).

Frankly, I’m glad that Lanier has released this book, sloppy though it may be. (The people raving about this book as a carefully wrought masterpiece are deluding themselves — and not, as Lanier accuses others of doing, “diluting themselves”.) This is not primarily because he has some insights here and there, but because we need to talk about the gutting of the middle class as loudly and as frequently as possible. We must do so, however, in a way that examines how our collective decisions have gotten us to this point. That includes making international comparisons with other “laboratories of democracy” to see how we can do better.

After even a cursory glance abroad, we will see that we should stop returning to the too-easy explanations based on globalization and technology. These forces are at play across the world, and the other wealthy industrialized countries have generally not had the same dismal results. The more likely culprit is in the halls of government.

Lehmann is trafficking in a pretty standard critique of modern-day political organizing.  ”They’ve traded outsider movement-building for insider access.”  Theda Skocpol offers approximately the same critique in her Scholar Strategy Network paper, “Naming the Problem.”  It’s a tempting critique, but it’s also wrong.  The environmental movement has attempted to engage in movement-building.  If the outcomes haven’t been what we’d hope for, it isn’t for lack of trying.  Building a large-scale social movement, it turns out, is not so simple.

Here’s Lehmann, talking about the failure of the 2010 climate bill:

The environmental movement had certainly believed that it was playing the big game [in 2010]. Bartosiewicz and Miley estimate that the groups behind the climate-action partnership spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the effort to pass their bill. The organizers of Earth Day never would have been able to get a substantial group of corporate chief executives to sit down with them and negotiate, even if they had wanted to. Today’s big environmental groups recruit through direct mail and the media, filling their rosters with millions of people who are happy to click “Like” on clean air. What the groups lack, however, is the Earth Day organizers’ ability to generate thousands of events that people actually attend—the kind of activity that creates pressure on legislators. (emphasis added)

In October 2006, 6 recent Middlebury college graduates and 1 Middlebury college professor launched the Step It Up climate day-of-action.  On April 15, 2007, six months of organizing — most of it facilitated through the Internet — produced the “Step It Up” day of action, which featured 1,410 events across the country.  Step It Up later became 350.org, which regularly plans massive global days-of-action that feature 4,000-5,000 simultaneous events.

350 is not one of the old environmental lobbying groups that Lehmann and Skocpol criticize.  But organizations like the Sierra Club helped Step It Up succeed.  Sierra sent email blasts to those supporters who “click ‘Like’.”  Sierra devoted field staff to help organize events on the ground.  And the Sierra Student Coalition has been a key actor in the Energy Action Coalition, which regularly brings tens of thousands of college students together for the annual PowerShift conference.  That all sounds an awful lot like the movement-building Lehmann is asking for.

The real problem with the Lehmann piece is the ceteris paribus* assumption that he sneaks in.  (1) Earth Day felt like a movement and created pressure on legislators.  (2) The 2010 climate movement failed to create pressure on legislators.  Therefore (3) The 2010 climate movement wasn’t enough of a movement.  The trick is, American government in 2010 is exponentially more broken  than American government in 1970.

Here’s another key passage from Lehmann:

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, blasted the environmentalists’ political ineptitude at a private meeting. (Bartosiewicz and Miley obtained a tape recording.) The big environmental groups had promised the White House that they could deliver a few key Republican votes in the Senate. Instead, Emanuel said, “They didn’t have shit. And folks, they were dicking around for two years. And I had those meetings in my office so it was not that I wasn’t listening to them. This is a real big game, and you’ve got to wear your big-boy pants.”

Rahm Emanuel insulting the “professional left” ain’t news.  So let’s step back for a second and think about the actual threshold environmentalists were being asked to pass:

we had to deliver “a few” Republican Senate votes.

In 2009-2010.

If we had the Senate of 1970, I think the modern environmental movement would have proved “movement” enough to get it done.  And if the environmental movement of 1970 had faced the Senate of 2009-2010, I don’t think a single one of our bedrock environmental laws would have passed.  When all is said and done, Earth Day 1970 was a bunch of campus teach-ins.  If you think campus teach-ins, even big ones, would have broken the lockstep unity of our present-day Senate Republicans, then you haven’t been paying very close attention to the news.

I was on the Sierra Club Board in 2009-2010.  We thought we could pass a climate bill because we thought the Senate was less broken than it actually was.  We also thought health care reform would eat up less of the Senate’s clock (in a reasonable universe, it would have).  And we thought we’d get more leadership help from Obama than we did.

Should the environmental community have invested more in organizing?  I think so.  But I would think that regardless.  I think organizing is how you build power.

Should some members of USCAP have been less obnoxiously compromising and insider-focused?  I think so.  But I’ve had the same critiques of those organizations for 17 years.

Can the environmental movement pass a climate bill if it starts acting more like a movement?  …Probably not.  Should it try anyway?  Well yeah.  If something is vitally important but pretty damn unlikely, you take your best shot regardless of the long odds.

But let’s be clear: “building a movement” is not as simple as investing in movement-building.  Scholars and activists alike are too quick to assume that we have direct agency over our own political power.  Ask yourself this: what force would cause 60 Senators — including coal-state Democrats and moderate Republicans — to override a filibuster and pass major climate legislation?  What force would make the cause of climate change more popular than the cause of closing background check loopholes so that criminals find it harder to purchase guns?  Climate change is divisive and complicated. Background checks are unifying and simple.

I say all this because I badly want to agree with Lehmann and Skocpol.  I agree with their aims, and I know they’re trying to help.  And it is not as though either of them imagine the Senate to be a warm, friendly, or functional place — part of Skocpol’s aim is explicitly to make clear that environmentalists were not close in 2009, so they don’t trot out the same strategy next time.  She’s right about that.  But by harkening back to the movements of the 1970s, both authors are also wishing away the intervening buildup of dysfunction.

We have a broken government that cannot pass the easy, popular stuff.  We have a slow-building cataclysm in global warming.  It is in everyone’s long-term interest to address the crisis, but that runs counter to the short-term interests of assorted powerful actors.  Passing climate legislation requires fixing the broken Senate while simultaneously building a broader social movement.  Both of those tasks will take a lot of time, and we have precious little time left.

Casting blame at advocates for not trying hard enough to build a movement is the easy way out.  We were trying to build a movement in 2007, 08, 09, 10, and onward through today.  The movement is, in fact, building.  I’d like it to build faster, and I’d like to see major organizations devote more resources to those goals.  But, to be perfectly honest, more organizers in 2010 wouldn’t have made a difference.  The dysfunction that scuttled the climate bill is far beyond the environmental movement.

*for those who didn’t take a ton of constitutional law classes in college, “ceteris paribus” = “all else being equal”

You can buy 1,000 followers on Fiverr for $5.  It took me a couple years to reach the 1,000 follower threshold.  …I’m such a sucker.

Perlroth’s post highlights a phenomenon that I’ve discussed elsewhere.  In “Social Science Research Methods in Internet Time,” I phrased it as a general rule: ”Any metric of digital influence that becomes financially valuable, or is used to determine newsworthiness, will become increasingly unreliable over time.”*

The drivers of this process are abundantly clear.  Attach value to a digital metrics (hyperlinks, followers, retweets, site visitors) and you create an incentive for talented coders.  There’s money to be made in spam blogs and fake twitter accounts.  It isn’t particularly honest money, but it isn’t particularly dishonest money either.

Those coders will introduce noise into the system.  Another set of coders will work on proprietary counter-methods that help cut through the noise.  But that isn’t much use to researchers who are reliant on the publicly-available data itself.  The result is an ever-deepening GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) problem.  Academics often decide to treat follower count, retweet count, site traffic, etc as direct indicators of influence/success/prominence.  But those indicators were more accurate in 2009, than they were in 2011, than they are in 2013, than they will be in 2015, etc.  The data itself becomes less reliable over time.

This is a systemic property, which means we should be able to plan around it.  Theoretically, that is.  Practically, it’s devilishly hard to do so.  Our best options include (1) relying on metrics that fly under the radar, and thus (potentially) attract less spammer-attention, (2) thinking carefully about what biases to expect (which Twitter-users are most likely to buy spam accounts?  Presidential candidates > Physicists), and (3) developing partnerships with proprietary coders who can offer you higher-quality, constantly refined data.  Each of those options carries its own set of risks and problems, though.

Consider this your semi-regular reminder that the future of Big Data is going to involve just as much messiness and muddling-through as the past and present have.

*Self-quoting is weird.