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The Whole World Is Networking: Crafting Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

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The Whole World Is Networking: Crafting Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama The Whole World is Networking: Crafting Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama Daniel Kreiss Ph.D. Candidate Department of Communication Stanford University Paper presented at the session “Artifacts, Institutions, and Practices in the Production of Contemporary U.S. Politics.” Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. October 29, 2009. Kreiss, The Whole World is Networking In the classic The Whole World is Watching Todd Gitlin argued that by the early 1970s the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and with it much of the New Left, had come apart at the seams under the gaze of the mass media.i The professional press had extraordinary power to frame the movement on its own terms, focusing on highly symbolic forms of protest such as draft-card burning. In the process, the media not only shaped perceptions of the movement for the outside world, they came to define it and the grounds upon which it acted for its leadership and members alike. For Gitlin, this meant that there was no longer any representational space from which to critique the dominant power structure. Social movements were forcibly subsumed within a vast cultural industry and yet needed it to pursue their social objectives: “Just as people as workers have no voice in what they make, how they make it, or how the product is distributed and used, so do people as producers of meaning have no voice in what the media make of what they say or do, or in the context within which the media frame their activity”.ii The picture that Gitlin paints is unrecognizable to the activist who came of age in the digital era. As this paper demonstrates, networked digital media provide organizational channels that afford symbolic and social action in ways unthinkable during the time of SDS. In electoral contexts, for example, progressive activists have greater opportunities to both represent and make themselves communicatively visible to each other in ways that were impossible in Gitlin’s time. They can, in turn, coordinate action through new media platforms to an unprecedented degree. This is precisely the story that many scholars of new media and politics focus on. Theorists, including a number of the most prominent in the field, proceed from the narrow assumption that falling information costs drive the potentials for and forms of collective action available online. In these perspectives, digital media offer new avenues for electoral collaboration to occur outside of the boundaries of formal political organizations. Many scholars 2 Kreiss, The Whole World is Networking in turn celebrate this as bringing about leveled participation and the undermining of political elites in ways that empower citizens to produce political culture and action. Yet, these paradigmatic accounts tell us little about what campaigns call upon digital citizens to do, the institutional context within which this occurs, and the cultural work that manages networked politics. Powerful social and financial networks shape much of the online electoral campaigning that scholars consider uniquely peer driven and leveled. These networks, and the cultural work that legitimates them, in turn produce new elites and organizational intermediaries that deploy new media platforms to connect citizens to organizations and institutions. While scholars are right to point to collective action occurring outside of the boundaries of formal organizations, the literature has generally overlooked how campaigns use digital media to dramatically extend their reach, allowing consultants to facilitate processes of control across vast geographic distances and independent of formal management structures. These tactics, systems, and the data that make citizens digitally visible enable campaigns to leverage social networks, intimate details, and psychological processes for institutionalized ends. All of which extends the ability of citizens to participate in electoral politics, but in sharply delimited domains – from fundraising to canvassing. Thus, where Gitlin’s narrative told of the rise and fall of the New Left as it encountered the culture industry, in many ways its ideological descendents joined social to discursive action on new media platforms while extending their work through powerful organizational intermediaries. However, they do so in ways that look nothing like the deliberative and consensus-based processes that much of the New Left espoused. Indeed, the contemporary progressive organizational and technical infrastructure extends practices of professional management. While there are new forms of citizen agency, especially in the context of collaborative electoral practices, these are largely defined by political institutions and structured 3 Kreiss, The Whole World is Networking by formal organizations. Meanwhile, in exchange for the expanded social and symbolic power afforded by new machine-human collectivities, campaigns monitor and track citizens on an unprecedented scale. These forms of campaigning, in short, are not only far from the participatory and decentralized claims of many scholars, they would be unrecognizable in practice, but not rhetorically, to many activists of an earlier era. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, I show how cultural legitimation and social networks enabled a number of staffers from the 2003-2004 Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to found a host of organizations that shaped Democratic electoral campaigning after the general election. To do so, I trace the history of one particularly influential political consulting firm, Blue State Digital (BSD), which gained a number of Democratic organizations and candidates as clients and developed the most sophisticated online tools in electoral politics. Second, I adopt a narrow focus and analyze BSD’s work for the Obama campaign. I show how consultants incorporated networked tools into electoral politics as part of sociotechnical assemblages premised on data and the leveraging of networked social relationships, tactics that the Dean campaign pioneered. I show how this work encompassed techniques of ‘digitally selling the president’ through psychology, intimacy, and sociality, and the creation of electoral human-machine systems that instantiate new forms of political collectivity. These practices extended citizen agency in institutionalized domains while foreclosing other forms of participation in electoral politics. Finally, I turn to the ways these consultants and staffers used a set of cultural resources to motivate and manage citizen participation. I discuss one site where this occurred: in the symbolic deployment of technologies such as MyBarackObama.com. Evidence for this paper is drawn from my larger dissertation research project. Over the course of the last two years I conducted open-ended interviews with over thirty political consultants active across three presidential campaign cycles: 1999-2000, 4 Kreiss, The Whole World is Networking 2003-2004, and 2007-2008. I also extensively used the Obama campaign’s suite of social networking tools as a participant observer during the 2007-2008 primary and general elections. Digital Political Consultancies and Web 2.0 Politics In this section, I briefly provide an overview of the macro-changes in the industry of online, Democratic political consulting before tracing the history of BSD to illustrate shifts in networked electoral campaigning and demonstrate the direct connections in personnel, tools, and practice between the Dean and Obama campaigns. In the process, I reveal how these firms helped usher in a qualitatively new style of online Democratic campaigning that combines the technoculture and entrepreneurialism of Silicon Valley, ideological fervor of partisan politics, and rigorous focus on electoral victory of political consultants. After a bleak January 2004 Dean staffers had little left in the nomination calendar to look forward to. Joe Trippi resigned as Campaign Manager after being demoted in favor of Roy Neel, a longtime Al Gore aide, given Dean’s lackluster showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Staffers at headquarters in Burlington, Vermont felt sadness and exhaustion after the campaign’s fortunes reversed in a dramatically short period of time. Some just drifted away, heading back home to make up for missed classes and neglected families. Others took up last stands against John Kerry, the presumptive nominee, in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. And yet, even as comments on Blog for America tapered off, fundraising fell to a trickle, and their guru headed for sunnier climes, the phones of the staffers that developed Dean’s online campaign were ringing. Michael Silberman, Dean’s National Meetup Director, recalls that in the midst of a wreck of a campaign the future was unexpectedly bright as everyone in the political world wanted the Dean 5 Kreiss, The Whole World is Networking “magic”: “We all received calls from people trying to poach us….We were all pretty well marketable at that time, probably more so than we knew.”iii In the months after the campaign ended Dean’s new media staffers capitalized on these phone calls. Despite the fact that Dean only won a single primary, and that it was in his home state of Vermont, the campaign’s association with cutting-edge technological innovation helped ensure these staffers were in high demand. It seemed like every Democratic political candidate and advocacy organization was looking for help navigating the bold new world of “open source politics.” As such, a number of new
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