Start Making Sense

Don Hazen and Lakshmi Chaudhry; An AlterNet Book

Excerpt

The Blogging Revolution
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, The Daily Kos

The words open source were once the domain of the techno-geeks—a counterculture movement driven by the radical notion that software development should be a collaborative process, with source code freely available to anyone for manipulation and improvement. The kicker? Any changes made to that software must be rereleased to the public. For free.

The software that powers the vast majority of Web servers doesn’t come from Microsoft. It is called Apache, and it’s open source. So is Linux, a complete operating system. The Macintosh operating system is based on open-source software. Firefox, easily the best browser available to Web surfers, is proof that open-source developers can develop user-friendly software. There are even open-source office suites (offering spreadsheet and word processing software) and open-source blogging tools (DailyKos.com runs on one).

It’s not just the egalitarian ideal of free software at work here. Firefox is far more secure than Internet Explorer because hundreds of thousands of hackers worldwide can patch security holes in it within hours of discovering them. At Microsoft, such holes must wind their way through the Redmond office bureaucracy for weeks or longer before they get patched.

The key lesson here: more input is better.

Open Source Journalism

In early February 2005, a handful of bloggers at DailyKos.com started to look at a White House correspondent named Jeff Gannon, who was employed by an organization called Talon News. Gannon had come to their attention after media watchdog group Media Matters put a spotlight on softball questions he lobbed at White House spokesmen and President Bush himself.

Suddenly, hundreds of DailyKos readers and other bloggers, like those of Atrios and AMERICAblog, starting peeling away layer after layer of lies and deceit. “Jeff Gannon” was actually “Jim Guckert,” and Talon News was merely a front organization for GOPUSA. And the situation got uglier. Guckert was found to own various domain names for military-themed gay escort services and was actually a male escort.

So we had a prostitute pretending to be a journalist, working for a Republican group pretending to be a news organization, who was given access to the White House and the president to lob softball questions at press conferences.

The revelations offered a good insight into the depths and reach of the White House propaganda machine, but the whole episode revealed something else: that hundreds of people had worked collectively to expose the various threads of the story. It was an achievement without precedent, carried out by the open-source investigative crew. Guckert may have been the first target, but he won’t be the last.

Open-Source Activism

Street activism is old school. It wasn’t too long ago that an industrial economy encouraged top-to-bottom hierarchies and prized those who followed orders. Activism followed that model, too, with a few leaders controlling the levers of street activism. If I wanted to start a boycott effort, I had little recourse other than to perhaps convince a Jesse Jackson type to join the effort. Anyone without connections, and without years of work within activist communities, was shut out of the process.

A few weeks before Election Day 2004, Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., the owner of several dozen television stations, ordered its stations to preempt their programming to air an anti-Kerry documentary the day before the election. Establishment activists met this outrageous act by a corporation given use of the public’s broadcast spectrum with hand wringing, but little action.

However, a couple of DailyKos readers rallied on the site, recruited the necessary talent, and created BoycottSinclair.com, a site dedicated to targeting and boycotting Sinclair’s advertisers. Then hundreds of participants documented commercials airing on their local Sinclair stations, while others researched those advertisers, dug up their contact information, and published it. At that point, thousands of others called and wrote letters to those advertisers to express their displeasure. These actions helped tank Sinclair stock, and the pressure forced the company to scale back its plan and air a vastly abbreviated version of the controversial documentary.

The BoycottSinclair.com participants had no pedigree, nothing to give them “cred” as activists. But it didn’t matter. Technology now allows those with the necessary skills and dedication to affect change in ways previously out of reach for the amateur activist.

Open-Source Politics

Political campaigns still prefer to work in that industrial mode—top to bottom, with worker bees following the orders of a small set of “strategists” calling all the shots. It’s a model that has alienated people in our modern information age. Why would people schooled in the virtues of “self-initiative” and being “proactive” want to perform the electoral equivalent of screwing two bolts on Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line? The idea of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes does not inspire many would-be activists who crave a real challenge and want to contribute to a greater cause.

Joe Trippi, looking for a way to maximize the limited resources of the insurgent Howard Dean presidential campaign, had the “idea that changed everything”—using the Web as a place to organize and, even better, allowing those Web-based supporters to take charge of their little bit of turf, whether it was organizing locally or providing solid advice that the campaign could then implement. It was chaotic, it was sometimes ugly, but it was about as open source a campaign as has ever been seen. And Dean’s movement survived the cataclysm of his and Kerry’s devastating losses. Once people had a taste of being valued contributors to a political campaign, they were not about to let go.

Unlike Dean, Kerry enjoys no lasting legacy from his presidential run. Kerry’s was a traditional top-to-bottom campaign that gave supporters little to do beyond the standard political fare—licking envelopes, canvassing door to door, watching thirty-second spots, and voting. Meanwhile, the emotional connection Dean made with his supporters has landed him at the top of the Democratic National Committee.

Open-Source Limitations

While it would be nice to claim this new open-source movement as the purest manifestation of democracy in our politics, that’s not necessarily the whole truth. The movement is heavily dependent on people who are online and excludes a great number of people—especially the poor and nonwhite—who don’t have access to a computer. And because it also requires at least a basic comfort level with technology, it excludes the elderly and those with lower education levels.

Open-source politics isn’t the be-all and end-all of politics or a replacement for traditional journalism, activism, and all aspects of a political campaign. It’s merely another tool in our toolbox.

Yet it’s a tool without limit. It’s impossible to guess how it will evolve over the coming years, and what impact it will have on the political process. Open-source politics is not something that anyone can plan, not even those of us in the middle of this revolution. It is driven by the ideas, hard work, and initiative of thousands, potentially millions, of people turning their home computers into genuine political weapons.

excerpted from Start Making Sense | Chelsea Green Publishing | 2005.