Leadership under the Internet Thesis

Most of the work done here on political philosophy has covered the past. (To the right, President Richard Nixon and his eventual successor, in Miami, 1968.)

That is now about to change.

With the dawn of the Internet Thesis on Tuesday we are in uncharted territory. Fortunately I have already begun charting it for you.

One important insight, already delivered to those wise enough to stop here regularly, is that with every generation a new central medium emerges. What mass market books were to the Civil War Era, newspapers were to the Progressive Era, movies and radio were to the Liberal Era, and TV was to the Nixon Era just ended.

A corollary to this is that the locus of policy also changes. The Nixon Era was marked by the dominance of think tanks, the Liberal Era by universities, the Progressive Era by publishers, the Civil War Era by bankers and writers.

Today's dominant medium, of course, is the Internet. But this implies more than you get your news through a series of tubes.

It implies a different source of ideas, and legitimacy. As I often write here, you're soaking in it. It's the social network. Ideas percolate to the fore through social networking.

The Obama people have sought to bottle this change in a site called (naturally) Change.Gov. So here's the first big insight of our new era.

It won't work. But they're on the right track.

By that I mean that the work of creating, distilling, selling, and responding to the shifting demands of people won't all happen on Change.Gov. But it will happen here, on this medium, through a variety of social networking mechanisms, of which blogs like this are just one.

There are indications the new President understands this. His first instinct in selling his stimulus package was to respond to well-orchestrated Republican calls for more tax cuts. Then he heard what his own social networks said and reversed course.

This is not, as his critics suggest, evidence of weakness. It is policy formulation as negotiation, conducted in the open, transparently, online and broadcast. By responding to both sides in this way, you come up with a proposal that has already been vetted, and that can win consensus support because a lot of people have participated in its formulation.

Here's the difference between now and before. Even a decade ago only one person could get the microphone at a time. Now anyone can.  Everyone can. Yes, even I can. You can, too. Yes we can.

The easiest way to do this is by joining, and blogging at, Change.gov. This will be one way in which the Obama Administration can learn what its friends are thinking. But it's far from the only way. There are concentric rings of influence extending far out from that site, through elite blogs, news media Web sites, reaching even to individual blogs like this one.

Let's say you dig where I'm coming from. You send a link to this post to a friend, or several friends. They may nod in agreement, and use the point (credited or not) in what they do. More heads nod in agreement as the idea moves toward the center. Support grows both horizontally (more important heads nodding) and vertically (more heads nodding overall).

Not every idea gets through. You can try and shortcut this process by placing an idea close to the center, by advocating continually for an idea, by building social networks around the idea. This is the sort of thing that happens now in think tanks, on college campuses, in business offices, but notice the difference. It's now an organic process that can start anywhere, and one in which the idea can be depersonalized, rising or not on its own merits and the willingness of people to endorse it.

Think of the old style politics as ideas moving through a collection of blocks. Now think of those blocks as being underwater, the water becoming  increasingly viscuous as time passes and the links of this medium become firmer.

Leaders may sit on the top of this water like surfers sitting on their boards. What happens beneath becomes the waves they choose to ride, or choose to avoid. The new President intuits this from his boyhood in Hawaii, where many kids find water as natural as air, and where acceptance of people regardless of color, faith, or politics is a given.

A friend who lives on such an island told me once that it's like "a small town you can't leave." Washington is like that. Digby (right) calls it The Village, but sometimes writes as though the Villagers are independent beings, or controlled from above by a few media masters. 

But that's the old model. Because now Digby herself is part of the conversation. So is Eschaton. So am I. So are you. This is an enormous change in how ideas are born and die, how the polity brings ideas before policymakers, and how policymakers must lead if they are to succeed.

While I've been blogging for over 5 years now, and have been writing online for almost a quarter-century, we are just at the start of this change. The national conversation has just begun. Barack Obama is the first leader with a board and the nerve to try and surf it. 

He won't be the last.