WWW Internet

this is sort of a catchall term for digital technology: see also big data, blogs etc

see social media

capt 419

Ctr-cultural tactics of 60's are the commons, the earth's immune system see hawken multitude of NGO, autonomous but united; efficient b/c small w/ few resources.

WWW is a buffer of memory, but also unfiltered, too fast moving, "narrow-casting" so polarizing; all can talk to all, doc films can be shown in enirety and spread at no cost: viral video ambush can ruin a pol with little ability to defend/correct [but pension plan]

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-sociophysicist-explains-how-to-save-the-internet-from-clutter-lies-and-garbage/

Once upon a time, the internet was seen a wondrous fount of knowledge and information, empowering users and spreading democracy. This utopian view resonated widely with early adopters in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, but it resonated much more broadly around the world in 2011, during the Arab Spring. There were always dark shadows noted by observers, as in Gene Rochlin’s 1997 book, “_{Trapped in the Net}_,” but collectively we’ve been blindsided and bewildered by how different the online experience has become — how much of a marketplace for rumor, fear, conspiracy theories and polarized worldviews, all watched over by purportedly neutral platform manipulations bringing us exactly what we’re told we want.

Could it be possible to recover that original promise? In a way, that promise was always naïve, as illuminated by Paulina Borsook’s 2000 book, “_{Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech}_.” As Borsook notes, it took more than half a century of government investment to make the internet’s commercial incarnation possible, contrary to Silicon Valley’s self-serving mythos. But democratic theory, history, philosophy and psychology is far richer than libertarians suppose, and there is a much more sober, realistic version of that promise — one that, for example, scientists collaborating worldwide have experienced for more than a generation now.

So could something like that become possible for all of us? A new paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour strongly suggests that it could, and lays out an initial framework for what it might be like, reshaping things from the bottom up: “_{How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online}_.” As the abstract explains, the problem can be simply put:

The current online ecosystem has been designed predominantly to capture user attention rather than to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. How can transparency and autonomy be promoted instead, thus fostering the positive potential of the web?

Framed like that, this is a scientific problem, susceptible to scientific solutions. Of course, knowing that solutions exist and implementing are two different things: Consider theclimate crisis. For a better understanding of how such a future could come to be, and what some specific steps would look like, Salon reached out to lead author Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. This interview has been edited, as is customary, for clarity and length.

What struck me first on seeing your article was that it’s not reactive, but rather affirms a positive, arguing that behavioral science “can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online.” So before talking about the paper itself, I’d like to ask about what informs your positive approach.

I think a bit of forward-looking is probably necessary. We need to be careful we don’t get into a whack-a-mole game. So, I was searching for more sustainable solutions, and you get end up getting less reactive and trying to find solutions that come from the bottom up, to think about how to change the system itself.

Were there any previous examples in internet history that were resonant for you?

One of the rare examples of online environments that promote truth — one of the shining examples — is Wikipedia. This was an inspiration, to think about how different this website looks, compared to Amazon, how it’s designed and how things are arranged.

Your paper draws attention to the asymmetry between what platforms know about users and vice versa. How do you characterize that asymmetry, and what negative consequences result that you propose to address?

The asymmetry probably comes out of dependencies we live with in this information-rich world. It gives the human brain too much to process, so we must rely on some kind of curation. That’s what the platforms do for us. That’s probably why they are successful. Google and Facebook are skyrocketing, successful, because we really, really depend on them to navigate through this information world.

Additionally, “intransparency” contributes to it. We get recommendations that we cannot really follow where they actually come from, what factors contribute to them. So we are getting increasingly dependent on intransparent platforms, where we have to rely on trust. And the remedy we propose is increased transparency, and giving back a bit of autonomy to the user.

To improve the online environment, you identify available but untapped cues and two kinds of behavioral interventions — “nudging” and “boosting” — that employ these cues. The cues differ in different contexts, so let’s start with the interventions. Folks may have heard of them, but just to be clear, what do each of them do?

They are both classic behavioral interventions, so they’re more umbrella terms. They both interact with the decision process. “Nudges” do that mainly or exclusively through the choice architecture. So whenever parts of the choice architecture are emphasized to steer behavior or influence behavior, that’s nudging. In our case, we just try to draw the attention of the reader to some piece of information that might be good for them — that will be the broad class of nudging.....

https://www.salon.com/2000/10/05/gore_internet/

Did Gore invent the Internet?

Actually, the vice president never claimed to have done so -- but he did help the Net along. Some people would rather forget that.

SCOTT ROSENBERG

OCTOBER 5, 2000

That Al Gore once claimed to have "invented the Internet" is now part of electoral folklore -- one item in a litany of Gore "exaggerations" or "lies" that his opponents trot out to discredit him. At Tuesday's debate the line became the basis for a flatfooted one-liner George W. Bush lobbed to deflect Gore's onslaught of statistics: "This is a man who has great numbers -- I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, he invented the calculator."

The sheer cheek of Gore's purported claim invites mockery. Everybody knows the Internet is an extraordinarily complex piece of engineering that only incredibly smart scientists could have "invented." Politicians need not apply.

But things that "everybody knows" are always worth examining for defects. And the "Gore claims he invented the Net" trope is so full of holes that it makes you wish there were product recalls for bad information.

Gore never claimed to have "invented" the Internet. What he said was:

During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

As my colleague Jake Tapper carefully reported here last year, at worst that statement is a minor exaggeration of Gore's legislative record -- and miles away from the "I built it from scratch!" lie into which it has been twisted.

The life trajectory of the "I invented the Internet" Gore meme has been well traced by Phil Agre back to the original coverage of Gore's comment by Wired News' Declan McCullagh. McCullagh's first report, while never using the word "invent," interpreted Gore's statement as an outrageously false boast, and supported that view with one quotation from a conservative foundation spokesman. (That quote -- "Gore played no positive role in the decisions that led to the creation of the Internet as it now exists -- that is, in the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic" -- offers its own wildly distorted view of Internet history, narrowing its focus to "the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic" as the only significant milestone to shape today's Net.)

From McCullagh, the tidbit got picked up by the TV pundits and became the butt of late-night political jokes. The word "invent" practically leaped into Gore's mouth. News outlets across the board -- including Salon -- have now burned the distortion of the vice president's words into the public mind.

If that were the end of the tale, we could just dismiss it as one more round of election-year spin and counter-spin in which the lies won out over the truth. But this particular snow job springs from a deeper ideological well, and that makes it more interesting.

Several of the people who could claim to have "invented" the Internet, or key pieces of its protocols -- in particular, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- are out there on the Net today defending Gore, asserting that he was the politician in Washington who took the "initiative" to support the Net in its early days.

Implicit in their argument is a broader awareness of what it took to create the Internet. Anything as successful as the Net is not and cannot be successful as technology alone; technology does not exist in a vacuum. And just as the Internet required the services of brains like Kahn and Cerf and all the others who contributed code to its foundations, it also needed bureaucratic and legislative patrons.

It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore's original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.

The Internet didn't spring full-blown out of some scientists' heads, nor did it just grow, like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state. As the Net's parent, the government didn't do everything right; but it managed to nurture the network through its youth -- then get out of the way once it was mature enough to move out of its parents' digs and shack up with private industry.

Libertarians and conservatives are uncomfortable admitting this. Their vision of Net history is a stirring saga of markets overwhelming states, technological imperatives vanquishing stifling bureaucracies and free information "routing around" government blockages. There's some truth in this vision -- but it's only part of the story.

The other part of the Net's history is a complex, and sometimes dull, chronicle of federal research grants, bureaucratic infighting and legislative initiatives that stitched together a messy but functional patchwork quilt of linked computers -- the famous "network of networks" that arose primarily in the 1980s, when the term "Internet" first came into play, and that remained a dark horse in the race to connect the public until around 1994.

Government alone couldn't have built today's Internet, but private industry, left to its own devices, wouldn't have, either. Without the critical spark of government-funded research lighting a fire of networked inventiveness, we'd probably have been stuck with the morass of competing proprietary online spaces that vied for the consumer's dollars in the early 1990s -- when AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, the prototypical MSN and other long-forgotten entrants like AT&T's Interchange and Apple's E-world all stared at each other across unbridgeable technological and business divides.

In those days the Internet was, we were told, too complex and geeky to ever reach the masses. That piece of conventional wisdom died a fast death as, one by one, the proprietary spaces folded or took down their walls and accepted that Internet connections were what people wanted.

Libertarians typically believe that the government can't do anything right, and they prefer to forget or ignore the part government has played in the Net's triumph. Giving Gore credit means admitting the government's role; distorting and mocking his claims helps deny it.

McCullagh, who is outspoken in his libertarian views, argues that, though he didn't use the word "invent," it is "a not entirely unreasonable paraphrase of the vice president's remarks," and suggests that the pro-Gore comments from Cerf may have a partisan basis: "I'm a big fan of Vint Cerf, and I think he's an able defender of the vice president, but let's put his defense of the vice president in context. Cerf is an executive at a large telecommunications company, and I suspect he acts more like a Washingtonian than a technologist nowadays. For instance, Cerf was a guest of honor at the White House's New Year's Eve gala, appeared with the president and first lady at an October 1999 White House 'Millennium Evening' lecture, and joined the president and vice president at a July 1997 event to introduce administration policy proposals."

Well, technologists do have a right to their political leanings, don't they? But the defense of Gore currently underway feels to me less like a party-line effort than like the repayment of a debt of gratitude by Internet pioneers who feel that Gore is being unfairly smeared.

That's what you'll hear from Phillip Hallam-Baker, a former member of the CERN Web development team that created the basic structure of the World Wide Web. Hallam-Baker calls the campaign to tar Gore as a delusional Internet inventor "a calculated piece of political propaganda to deny Gore credit for what is probably his biggest achievement."

"In the early days of the Web," says Hallam-Baker, who was there, "he was a believer, not after the fact when our success was already established -- he gave us help when it counted.He got us the funding to set up at MIT after we got kicked out of CERN for being too successful. He also personally saw to it that the entire federal government set up Web sites. Before the White House site went online, he would show the prototype to each agency director who came into his office. At the end he would click on the link to their agency site. If it returned 'Not Found' the said director got a powerful message that he better have a Web site before he next saw the veep."

That sounds like a pretty good description of the kind of "initiative" Gore claimed credit for in the first place. So the next time you hear an "Al Gore, Internet inventor" joke, think about the strange twisted path a politician's words can take in other people's hands -- and be glad we can use the Internet to try to straighten it out.

SCOTT ROSENBERG

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com.

Civil society groups protest the sale of .ORG to a private equity fund and a collection of Republican billionaires

11/19

Earlier this month, management of the .org top-level domain underwent a radical shift: first, ICANN dropped price-caps on .org domains, and then the Internet Societ (ISOC) flogged the registry off to Ethos Capital, a private equity fund, and a consortium of three families of Republican billionaires: the Perots, the Romneys, and the Johnsons. Read the rest

4/19

Internet infrastructure in the US is hopelessly compromised by an oligopolistic telecom industry — that doesn’t want your connection to be fast

Keith A. Spencer / Salon

see Dark Web

Dark Commerce

Louise Shelley examined the growth in illegal trade globally with the emergence of new technologies. She was interviewed by Yaya Fanusie of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-online-comment-sections-must-die

Besides inventing clickbait and downgrading many journalists into curators, Silicon Valley has changed our collective relationship to the news itself. This is because online journalism has presided over a peculiar breakdown in the relationship between writer and reader, and especially between editor and reader – exemplified by the concept of the public “comments section,” common to online news sites and social media pages.

Excerpted with permission from “A People’s History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy,” by Keith A. Spencer, available now from major booksellers. © 2018 Eyewear Publishing.

In the old days of print media, the only way for readers to talk back was to mail (and later email) comments to editors who would then pick and choose the most relevant or interesting ones (and weed out the racist, sexist, or just plain mean ones). Online comment sections usually remove editors entirely. Now, anyone is free to go on any news site that allows comments and post whatever inflammatory thing they wish – or reply angrily to other comments pseudonymously. One can engage in the same exercise on most social media sites, such as microblogging platforms like Twitter, video-sharing site YouTube, or link aggregator Reddit. British think-tank Demos conducted a study of Twitter in 2014 in which they found “approximately 10,000 uses per day of racist and ethnic slur terms in English.” These online spaces are frequently used to cyber-bully, shame and humiliate others – in netspeak, what we call “trolling.”

Though the concept of comments sections likely began as a naïve experiment in online media, such sections quickly became omnipresent. Many people, myself included, are horrified at online comments on news articles, and particularly at how out-of-tune they can seem with regional cultural values and ideology.

Why do media empires tolerate, even promotesuch comments sections? The unsurprising answer is money. “For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it,” wrote Buzzfeed reporter Charlie Warzel:

Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority.

In effect, abuse is easy on most online platforms – you just sit down and type. Yet, moderating abuse is the hard — and expensive — part. Talk is cheap, commenting is so effortless, abuse so simple because it’s also profitable. The more that people feel they are engaged with a media outlet, the more likely they will return, their precious eyeballs lingering on an ad or pop-up that nets a few more pennies of revenue to the host.

Many of the largest forums, news sites, and social media platforms ignore the deleterious effects that an unmoderated, pseudonymous commentariat has upon its users’ emotions. As a result, those who are most frequently victimized – even scared off of these spaces entirely – tend to be women, people of color, and gender minorities. In short, victims of online trolling are also those most likely to be oppressed in everyday society.

If you spend a fair bit of time online, you have probably been harassed online in ways that no one has ever harassed you in the real world. In my previous day job as editor-in-chief of an online Bay Area culture magazine, I dealt constantly with moderating and deleting harassing and abusive comments directed at our writers. (My general rule as an editor is that, if you would not say it to the writer’s face, it doesn’t deserve to be online.) For years, I was shocked at the negative and cruel behavior of the online masses, but over time, I came to understand that, through the written veil of online pseudo-anonymity, people are apt to be much more spiteful, hateful, and cruel than they would be if they were communicating face-to-face. Over an Internet connection, you generally cannot see your interlocutor, and they can’t see you; there is a corresponding dehumanization. It’s hard to empathize with someone invisible: rather than a feeling person with a family and loved ones, online, a faceless individual becomes an inanimate punching bag of ideologies. While most people would never spout racist slander in the workplace, online, away from prying eyes and with no other people around to stop it, many commenters feel empowered to say whatever they want.

Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority.

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-july-25-2018/

7am – Excerpts from the documentary film Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

:{*Digital Disconnect*:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:700"):}: trains its sights on the relationship between the internet and democracy in the age of fake news, filter bubbles, and Facebook security breaches. Moving from the development of the internet as a publicly funded project in the late 1960s to its full-scale commercialization today, renowned media scholar Robert McChesney traces how the democratizing potential of the internet has been radically compromised by the logic of capitalism and the unaccountable power of a handful of telecom and tech monopolies. The film, released in April 2018, is based on the book by Robert McChesney.

BS SITES

http://www.globalclimatescam.com/category/michael-mann/ by minnesota majority http://m4gw.com/

chesser on http://spectator.org/blog/22473/hide-decline-part-doh

After receiving litigation threats from Climategate scientist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann over the use of his image in the enormously popular:{ } "Hide the Decline" video :{,:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{,}:Minnesotans for Global Warming:{'s Elmer Beauregard removed it from the group's YouTube page. This morning they, in conjunction with the}::{ }:No Cap and Trade Coalition:{,}:announced:{ }::{at the National Press Club the debut of their sequel to the original video:}:

When asked why he removed the video, Beauregard said "Right now, the last thing I need is a lawsuit. I can barely afford my electric bill." Beauregard recently converted M4GW's world headquarters (a recreational vehicle parked inNorthern Minnesota) from propane to wood heat. "Mann should be glad to know that we don't burn fossil fuels anymore -- just trees," said Beauregard.

"M4GW was started to poke fun at Global Warming because I knew it was a joke, it's hard to believe in Global Warming when you live in a place likeMinnesota. During last winter we all wished we had some global warming, hence the name of our group," said Beauregard

online tracking, ad targeting, online campaigns

checks and val stealth coal

...

The bizarre but memorable video was bankrolled by America's Liberty, a super-PAC supporting Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). It was just a taste of what's coming in the 2016 race, when memes, GIFs, and other social-media catnip will blanket the internet. As the race heats up, every device you own, from your laptop to your Apple Watch, will become a delivery vehicle for all manner of political messaging. And you may never know which billionaire players or dark-money groups are targeting you—or how they're tracking you.

The amount of spending on digital advertising is expected to nearly double in this election cycle compared with 2012. Online spots cost a fraction of traditional TV or print ads, and political operatives are giddy over the new-and-improved ways to cheaply and creatively bombard voters with their messages. Larry Grisolano, who oversaw paid advertising efforts for the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, predicts that the 2016 presidential nominees likely will devote nearly a quarter of their ad-buy budgets to digital media. Considering that each side could spend more than $2 billion to get into the White House, that's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for grabbing eyeballs.

...

Yet while political advertisers will know a lot about you, you may know very little about them. Due to paralyzed federal watchdogs and antiquated campaign finance rules that didn't anticipate the explosion of digital politicking, there is virtually no oversight of online ads. When it comes to old-fashioned print and TV political ads, the rules are simple: The candidate or organization paying for them must be disclosed. With online ads, there's a major loophole: A disclaimer is required only if someone pays to place an ad on a website. No disclosure is required for material that is posted on a campaign site nor for videos or images that can be distributed freely via social media. In other words, an attack ad can find its way onto YouTube or get retweeted or liked a million times without anyone knowing who made it.

...

Last fall, the FEC had an opportunity to update its rules when it took up a case involving a dark-money group called Checks and Balances for Economic Growth. During the 2012 election, this outfit created ads attacking Obama's coal policies but never reported any spending related to the creation of these clips, which were posted on YouTube. Instead of clarifying the rules, the FEC, which includes three Democratic commissioners and three Republican ones, may have ended up making the matter even murkier. The commission deadlocked on the question of whether to mount a full-scale probe to determine if the group violated election rules. The three Republican commissioners agreed with Checks and Balances that a YouTube video should not be regulated as paid political advertising—then used the case to stoke fears that the Democratic commissioners wanted to censor blogs, parody videos, perhaps even the Drudge Report.

Early this year, Republican FEC Commissioner Lee Goodman penned a *Wall Street Journal* op-ed accusing his liberal colleagues of seeking to clamp down on harmless grassroots political expression. "Free and low-cost Internet postings are not corrupting because no large expenditures of money are necessary," he argued. He also claimed there is no way to distinguish online political discourse from paid messaging. "The specter of government agents reviewing the thousands of daily online political posts is as impractical as it is ominous," he wrote....

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/digital-political-election-ads-dark-money

hedges DLC

death of lib class // shift from print to image; fact no longer basis of public discourse ["reality-based journalism"]; now emotional narrative in which fact and opinion indistinguishable [faux news]; lang requires context; images have the3 appearance of reality but distort it; frags and spectacle; WWW seen as salvation, but Google etc just aggregates other ppl's work, does not pay for it, so creative pll and press decline; herd mentality [jaron hive mind]: privacy, self-reflection, honesty obliterated for image 209 only journalism that gets eyeball will survive, thus sleaze; only print that makes $ is finance ; red slave states connected and getting angrier: jaron. mkts good for ct jellybeans in a jar, but not creativity, or synthetic, or compound reasoning, but rather dull; worst case violence; hypersensitive to pecking order; always someone below you in gp, and designated enemy. // KB hier built in 213

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/can-the-republicans-be-saved-from-obsolescence.html?_r=0

Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?

By ROBERT DRAPER

FEB. 14, 2013

One afternoon last month, I paid a visit to two young Republicans named Bret Jacobson and Ian Spencer, who work in a small office in Arlington, Va., situated above an antique store and adjacent to a Japanese auto shop. Their five-man company, Red Edge, is a digital-advocacy group for conservative causes, and their days are typically spentdesigning software applications for groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Governors Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Lately, however, Jacobson and Spencer have taken up evangelizing — and the sermon, delivered day after day to fellow conservatives in the form of a 61-point presentation, is a pitiless we-told-you-so elucidation of the ways in which Democrats have overwhelmed Republicans with their technological superiority.

They walked me through a series of slides showing the wide discrepancies between the two campaigns. “And just to make them feel really bad,” Jacobson said as he punched another image onto the overhead screen. “We say, ‘Just wait — this is the most important slide.’ And this is what kills them, because conservatives always look at young voters like the hot girl they could never date.” He read aloud from the text: “1.25 million more young people supported Obama in 2012 over 2008.”

In the light of his Apple monitor, Jacobson’s grin took on a Luciferian glow. He is 33, wiry and well dressed and has the twitchy manner of a highly caffeinated techie. “And then we continue with the cavalcade of pain,” he said. The next chart showed that while the Romney campaign raised slightly more money from its online ads than it spent on them, Obama’s team more than doubled the return on its online-ad investment.

Spencer chimed in: “That’s when one of our clients moaned, ‘It’s even worse than I thought.’ ” Spencer, who is 29, possesses the insectlike eyes of a committed programmer.He and Jacobson are alumni of the University of Oregon, where they both worked on the Commentator, a conservative alternative paper whose slogan was, “Free Minds, Free Markets, Free Booze.”

“Then, once people think we’ve gotten them through the worst,” Jacobson said, “we pile on more — just the way Obama did.” He put up Slide 26, titled, “Running Up the Score.” “Obama was the very first candidate to appear on Reddit. We ask our clients, ‘Do you know what Reddit is?’ And only one of them did. Then we show them this photo of Obama hugging his wife with the caption ‘Four more years’ — an image no conservative likes. And we tell them, ‘Because of the way the Obama campaign used things like Reddit, that photo is the single-most popular image ever seen on Twitter or Facebook.’ Just to make sure there’s plenty of salt in the wound.”

Back in August 2011, Jacobson wrote an op-ed in Forbes alerting Republicans to Obama’s lead on the digital front. His warnings were disregarded. Then last summer, he and Spencer approached the conservative super PAC American Crossroads with their digital-tool-building strategies and, they say, were politely ignored. It’s understandable, then, that a touch of schadenfreude is evident when Jacobson and Spencer receive the policy-group gurus and trade-association lobbyists who file into Red Edges’s office to receive a comeuppance.

“Business is booming for us,” Jacobson said. “We’ll double or triple our bottom line this year, easily. But this isn’t about getting new business. We need the entire right side of the aisle to get smart fast. And the only way they can do that is to appreciate how big the chasm was.”

Exhibit A is the performance of the Romney brain trust, which has suffered an unusually vigorous postelection thrashing for badly losing a winnable race. Criticism begins with the candidate — a self-described data-driven chief executive who put his trust in alarmingly off-the-mark internal polls and apparently did not think to ask his subordinates why, for example, they were operating on the assumption that fewer black voters would turn out for Obama than in 2008. Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.” (“It was raised many times with him,” a senior Romney official told me, “and he was very categorical about not wanting to and not thinking it was worth it.”)

Under the stewardship of Zac Moffatt, whose firm, Targeted Victory, commandeered the 2012 digital operations of the Romney campaign, American Crossroads and the Republican National Committee, Team Romney managed to connect with 12 million Facebook friends, triple that of Obama’s operation in 2008; but Obama in 2012 accrued 33 million friends and deployed them as online ambassadors who in turn contacted their Facebook friends, thereby demonstrably increasing the campaign’s get-out-the-vote efforts in a way that dwarfed the Republicans’. While Romney’s much-hyped get-out-the-vote digital tool, Orca, famously crashed on Election Day, Obama’s digital team unveiled Narwhal, a state-of-the-art data platform that gave every member of the campaign instant access to continuously updated information on voters, volunteer availability and phone-bank activity. And despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the Romney television-ad-making apparatus proved to be no match for the Obama operation, which enlisted Rentrak, the data corporation for satellite and cable companies, through which it accrued an entirely new layer of information about each and every consumer, giving the campaign the ability to customize cable TV ads.

“They were playing chess while we were playing checkers,” a senior member of the campaign’s digital team somberly told another top Romney aide shortly after the election. Later, the top aide would participate in a postelection forum with Obama’s campaign manager. He told me (albeit, like a few people I spoke to, under the condition that he not be identified criticizing his party), “I remember thinking, when Jim Messina was going over the specifics of how they broke down and targeted the electorate: ‘I can’t play this game. I have to play a different game, so that I don’t look like an idiot in front of all these people.’ ”

But the problem for the G.O.P. extends well beyond its flawed candidate and his flawed operation. The unnerving truth, which the Red Edge team and other younger conservatives worry that their leaders have yet to appreciate, is that the Republican Party’s technological deficiencies barely begin to explain why the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The party brand — which is to say, its message and its messengers — has become practically abhorrent to emerging demographic groups like Latinos and African-Americans, not to mention an entire generation of young voters. As one of the party’s most highly respected strategists told me: “It ought to concern people that the most Republican part of the electorate under Ronald Reagan were 18-to-29-year-olds. And today, people I know who are under 40 are embarrassed to say they’re Republicans. They’re embarrassed! They get harassed for it, the same way we used to give liberals a hard time.”

It was not long after the election that elder statesmen of the G.O.P. began offering assurances that all would soon be right. But younger Republicans were not buying it. On Dec. 6, Moffatt addressed an audience of party digital specialists at the R.N.C.’s Capitol Hill Club. Moffatt spoke confidently about how, among other things, the Romney digital team had pretty much all the same tools the Obama campaign possessed. Bret Jacobson was shocked when he read about Moffatt’s claim the next day. “That’s like saying, ‘This Potemkin village will bring us all prosperity!’ ” Jacobson told me. “There’s something to be said for putting on a happy face — except when it makes you sound like Baghdad Bob.”

A few days after the Moffatt gathering, the R.N.C.’s chairman, Reince Priebus, announced that the committee would conduct a wide-ranging investigation — called the Growth and Opportunity Project — into the ways the party was going astray. To guide the investigation were familiar names, like the former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, the longtime Florida operative Sally Bradshaw and the R.N.C. veteran Henry Barbour. Erik Telford, the 28-year-old founder of the RightOnline bloggers’ convention, told me that he found himself wondering aloud: “Do you want an aggressive investigation from people who’ve built their careers on asking skeptical questions? Or do you want a report from people who are symptomatic of what’s gone wrong?”

Equally galling to younger Republicans was the op-ed Stuart Stevens wrote in The Washington Post on Nov. 28. In it, Romney’s top strategist struck an unrepentant tone, proudly noting that the candidate “carried the majority of middle-class voters” and that the party therefore “must be doing something right.” From her office near the Capitol, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a 28-year-old G.O.P. pollster, tried not to come unglued. “But you didn’t win the election,” she told me she thought at the time. “I’m really glad you scored that touchdown in the third quarter, I am — but you lost the game!”

Anderson is a fantasy-football fanatic, with the rat-a-tat argumentative cadence that gives her away as a former high-school debater. Upon graduating from college, she became the lead singer of the Frustrations, a rock-ska group that folded, as only a D.C.-based band could, when one member decided to attend law school and another needed more time to study for the bar exam. Anderson, for her part, is now a pollster and vice president of the Winston Group. Like the Red Edge partners and virtually every other young Republican with whom I spoke, she regards herself as a socially tolerant, limited-government fiscal conservative. (Today Republicans of all age groups strenuously avoid describing themselves as “moderate,” a term that the far right has made radioactive.) Camera-ready and compulsively perky — she has twice appeared on Bill Maher’s ”Real Time” panel as a token conservative — she nonetheless lapses into despondency when talking about her party’s current state of denial. During one of the postelection panels, Anderson heard a journalist talk about his interviews with Romney staff members who had hoped to build a winning coalition of white voters. “That just stunned me,” she told me one afternoon over coffee. “I thought: Did you not see the census? Because there was one! And it had some pretty big news — like that America’s biggest growing population is the Latino community! Surprise, surprise! How have we not grasped that this is going to be really important?”

One afternoon last month, I flew with Anderson to Columbus, Ohio, to watch her conduct two focus groups. The first consisted of 10 single, middle-class women in their 20s; the second, of 10 20-something men who were either jobless or employed but seeking better work. All of them voted for Obama but did not identify themselves as committed Democrats and were sufficiently ambivalent about the president’s performance that Anderson deemed them within reach of the Republicans. Each group sat around a large conference table with the pollster, while I viewed the proceedings from behind a panel of one-way glass.

The all-female focus group began with a sobering assessment of the Obama economy. All of the women spoke gloomily about the prospect of paying off student loans, about what they believed to be Social Security’s likely insolvency and about their children’s schooling. A few of them bitterly opined that the Democrats care little about the working class but lavish the poor with federal aid. “You get more off welfare than you would at a minimum-wage job,” observed one of them. Another added, “And if you have a kid, you’re set up for life!”

About an hour into the session, Anderson walked up to a whiteboard and took out a magic marker. “I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.”

“Young people,” one woman called out.

“Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.”

When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

Anderson concluded the group on a somewhat beseeching note. “Let’s talk about Republicans,” she said. “What if anything could they do to earn your vote?”

A self-identified anti-abortion, “very conservative” 27-year-old Obama voter named Gretchen replied: “Don’t be so right wing! You know, on abortion, they’re so out there. That all-or-nothing type of thing, that’s the way Romney came across. And you know, come up with ways to compromise.”

“What would be the sign to you that the Republican Party is moving in the right direction?” Anderson asked them.

“Maybe actually pass something?” suggested a 28-year-old schoolteacher named Courtney, who also identified herself as conservative.

The session with the young men was equally jarring. None of them expressed great enthusiasm for Obama. But their depiction of Republicans was even more lacerating than the women’s had been. “Racist,” “out of touch” and “hateful” made the list — “and put ‘1950s’ on there too!” one called out.

Showing a reverence for understatement, Anderson said: “A lot of those words you used to describe Republicans are negative. What could they say or do to make you feel more positive about the Republican Party?”

“Be more pro-science,” said a 22-year-old moderate named Jack. “Embrace technology and change.”

“Stick to your strong suit,” advised Nick, a 23-year-old African-American. “Clearly social issues aren’t your strong suit. Stop trying to fight the battle that’s already been fought and trying to bring back a movement. Get over it — you lost.”

Later that evening at a hotel bar, Anderson pored over her notes. She seemed morbidly entranced, like a homicide detective gazing into a pool of freshly spilled blood. In the previous few days, the pollster interviewed Latino voters in San Diego and young entrepreneurs in Orlando. The findings were virtually unanimous. No one could understand the G.O.P.’s hot-blooded opposition to gay marriage or its perceived affinity for invading foreign countries. Every group believed that the first place to cut spending was the defense budget. During the whiteboard drill, every focus group described Democrats as “open-minded” and Republicans as “rigid.”

“There is a brand,” the 28-year-old pollster concluded of her party with clinical finality. “And it’s that we’re not in the 21st century.”

Of course, many conservatives like their brand just the way it is, regardless of what century it seems to belong to. Anderson did not relish a tug of war over the party’s identity between them and more open-minded Republicans. She talked to me about Jon Huntsman, the presidential candidate whose positions on climate change and social issues she admired, and the unseemly spectacle of his denigrating the far right. To prosper, the party should not have to eat its own, she maintained. Still, to hear her focus-group subjects tell it, the voice of today’s G.O.P. is repellent to young voters. Can that voice, belonging to the party’s most fevered members, still be accommodated even as young Republicans seek to bring their party into the modern era?

This conundrum has been a frequent postelection topic as youthful conservative dissidents huddle in taverns and homes and — among friends, in the manner of early-20th-century Bolsheviks — proceed to speak the unspeakable about the ruling elite. I sat in on one such gathering on a Saturday evening in early February — convened at a Russian bar in Midtown Manhattan, over Baltika beers. The group of a half-dozen or so conservative pundits and consultants calls itself Proximus, which is Latin for “next,” and they seem to revel in their internal disagreements. One of them argued, “Not all regulation is bad,” while another countered, “I hate all regulations, every single one of them” — including, he cheerfully admitted, minimum-wage and child-labor laws. Nonetheless, the focal point of Proximus’s mission is not policy formulation but salesmanship: how to bring new voters into the fold while remaining true to conservative principles.

“This is a long-term play,” conceded John Goodwin, a founder of the group and former chief of staff to the outspoken conservative congressman Raúl Labrador. “This isn’t going to happen by 2014. But we want to be able to show voters that we have a diversity of opinion. Right now, Republicans have such a small number of vocal messengers. What we want to do is add more microphones and eventually drown out the others.”

“And we can’t be afraid to call out Rush Limbaugh,” said Goodwin’s fiancée, S. E. Cupp, a New York Daily News columnist and a co-host of ”The Cycle” on MSNBC. “If we can get three Republicans on three different networks saying, ‘What Rush Limbaugh said is crazy and stupid and dangerous,’ maybe that’ll give other Republicans cover” to denounce the talk-show host as well.

Cupp, who is 33, defines her brand of conservatism as “rational — and optimistic!” She is staunchly anti-abortion but also pro-gay-marriage and a “warheads on foreheads” hawk whose heroes are Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. Like many Republicans today — and indeed like liberal Democrats in the 1980s, before Bill Clinton came along and charted a more centrist course — Cupp finds herself in the unenviable position of maintaining that Americans largely side with her party’s worldview, even if their votes suggest otherwise. “Public polling still puts the country center-right on a host of issues,” she told me.

The problem is that her party’s loudest voices sound far more right than center. The voters in Kristen Soltis Anderson’s focus groups condemned Republicans for their unchecked hatred of Obama and for threatening to take away financing for Planned Parenthood, ban abortion, outlaw gay marriage and wage war. From where they stood, at the center-right of S. E. Cupp’s domain, the party had been dragged well out of plain view.

Proximus seeks to marginalize the more strident talking heads by offering itself up to — or if necessary, forcing itself upon — the party as a 21st-century mouthpiece. “If I were training a candidate who’s against gay marriage,” Cupp told me, “I’d say: ‘Don’t change your beliefs, just say legislatively this is not a priority, and I’m not going to take away someone’s right. And if abortion or gay marriage is your No. 1 issue, I’m not your guy.’ ”

I tried to imagine how Cupp’s kinder-gentler message-coaching would go over with the Tea Party, a group that was never mentioned by the young Republicans I spoke with until I broached it. Still, the influence of the far right on the party’s image remains hard to ignore. When I brought up the subject of the Tea Party to Cupp, she said: “People aren’t repelled by the idea of limited government or balancing the budget or lowering taxes. Those Tea Party principles are incredibly popular with the public, even if they don’t know it. Again, that’s a messaging issue, that’s not a principle issue.”

She went on to say, “I don’t think we win by subtraction” — meaning, by casting out the party’s right wing to entice the centrists. Instead, Cupp and her fellow travelers hope to revive Lee Atwater’s bygone “big tent,” under which gay people and Tea Party members and isolationists and neocons would coexist without rancor. But Atwater, the legendary R.N.C. chairman, did not have to worry about freelance voices like Limbaugh and Todd Akin offending whole swaths of emerging demographic groups. Nor during the Atwater era, when Ronald Reagan was president, did the party’s most extreme wing intimidate other Republicans into legislating like extremists themselves, thereby further tarnishing the party’s image. When I mentioned this to the Proximus gathering, Goodwin explained the dilemma faced by Republicans in Congress. “What forces them to vote that way, 9 times out of 10, is a fear of a primary challenge,” he said. “What we hope to accomplish is to bring more voters into Republican primaries, so that it isn’t just the far right that shows up at the polls.”

The dilemma, Goodwin acknowledged, is that the far-right rhetoric may well repel such voters from participating in G.O.P. primaries to begin with. “We recognize that this isn’t something that’s going to happen anytime soon,” he said.

On Nov. 30, more than 2,000 progressives shuffled into the Washington Convention Center to participate inRootsCamp, an annual series of seminars hosted by the New Organizing Institute, where the most cutting-edge digital and grass-roots organizing techniques are discussed. The shaggy and the achingly earnest are well represented at RootsCamp, which makes it an easy target of derision from the right. A reporter from the conservative publication The Daily Caller attended the postelection gathering in 2010 and made great sport of the “unconference,” with its self-conscious inclusiveness, which the reporter termed “multilingual, multicultural and multi-unpurposeful.”

But the handful of conservatives who attended the conference this past November were in no mood to sneer. One was Patrick Ruffini, a 34-year-old leader of the G.O.P.’s young-and-restless digerati. At RootsCamp, his breathless tweets of the sessions held by top Obama organizers — “In eight years, calling people will be obsolete”; “Digital organizing director and field director will be one and the same” — set off a buzz among Republican techies. Ruffini was plainly impressed by the openness of the experience. “I’m like, Wow, they’re doing this in front of 2,000 people, and the system seems to actually work,” he told me a month later. “The thing I was struck by at RootsCamp was that in many ways, the Democratic technology ecosystem has embraced the free market — whereas the Republican one sort of runs on socialism, with the R.N.C. being the overlord.”

The success of the RootsCamp, and its smaller and more intensive offshoot gathering, the New Media Boot Camp, helps explain the yawning digital divide between the two parties. In 2006, a few holdovers from the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns eschewed lucrative offers from Washington consulting firms in order to devote some of their time to the communal information-sharing ideals of the New Organizing Institute. Since then, numerous Boot Camp alumni have gone on to help run the tech operations of the Obama campaign and throughout the Democratic Party infrastructure, while RootsCamp has served as a crash course in best practices for thousands of lefties.

Young Republicans now lament that no one from their side has stepped up to organize a conservative version of RootsCamp. Michael Turk, a 42-year-old Republican digital guru, suggested that the failure of G.O.P. technologists to do this springs from a uniquely Republican trait. “They all wanted to make money,” he said. “And so as a result, Katie Harbath, who was one of my deputies at the R.N.C., is now at Facebook, and Mindy Finn” — a longtime G.O.P. digital operative — “is at Twitter, and Patrick and I each started our own companies. We all found ways to parlay that into a living for our families, as opposed to just doing it for the cause.”

Several G.O.P. digital specialists told me that, in addition, they found it difficult to recruit talent because of the values espoused by the party. “I know a lot of people who do technology for a living,” Turk said. “And almost universally, there’s a libertarian streak that runs through them — information should be free, do your own thing and leave me alone, that sort of mind-set. That’s very much what the Internet is. And almost to a person that I’ve talked to, they say, ‘Yeah, I would probably vote for Republicans, but I can’t get past the gay-marriage ban, the abortion stance, all of these social causes.’ Almost universally, they see a future where you have more options, not less. So questions about whether you can be married to the person you want to be married to just flies in the face of the future. They don’t want to be part of an organization that puts them squarely on the wrong side of history.”

Many young conservatives also said that technological innovation runs at cross-purposes with the party’s corporate rigidity. “There’s a feeling that Republican politics are more hierarchical than in the Democratic Party,” Ben Domenech, a 31-year-old blogger and research fellow at the libertarian Heartland Institute, told me. “There are always elders at the top who say, ‘That’s not important.’ And that’s where the left has beaten us, by giving smart people the space and trusting them to have success. It’s a fundamentally anti-entrepreneurial model we’ve embraced.”

Erik Telford explained it this way: “I think there’s a very incestuous community of consultants who profit off certain tactics, and that creates bias and inhibits innovation.” Telford was suggesting that many of the party leaders, like Karl Rove and his American Crossroads super PAC, saw no financial advantage to bringing in avant-garde digital specialists, the types who were embraced by the Obama operation. For that matter, Zac Moffatt and his firm, Targeted Victory, enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the G.O.P.’s digital business during the lackluster 2012 cycle, which has made Moffatt an irresistible symbol for all that’s clubby and backward-thinking about the party. As Bret Jacobson said, half-jokingly, “If you have one firm that’s doing the top candidate, plus the R.N.C., plus the top outside group — the Department of Justice, in any other industry, would be actively asking questions.”

One of several G.O.P. digital whizzes who went unused by Moffatt’s shop in 2012 was Vincent Harris, a savvy 24-year-old social-media consultant whose efforts in Texas helped catapult Ted Cruz to an upset victory over a better-known candidate in the U.S. Senate primary. Harris told me he saw the Romney campaign as “a very insular, closed operation,” symptomatic of a partywide affliction. “There’s an old guard in Republican politics, and that old guard is mostly made up of television and direct-mail consultants,” he said. “And you can say that’s generational — but at the same time, David Axelrod has to be the same age as Karl Rove, right? The old guard in the Democratic Party made the adjustment with the Obama digital operation. There hasn’t been a concerted effort among the established G.O.P. folks to figure this stuff out.”

Harris suffers no illusions that the Roves of his party will turn over the keys to young techies like him. “We’re the second rung,” he told me. “The first tier isn’t going away for another 20 years.”

It is Harris’s last point — that the G.O.P. is stuck with its current leadership for the next decade or more — that incites particular angst in young Republicans. With palpable envy, they describe the forward-leaning impulses of the Obama campaign: Axelrod’s tweeting endlessly; the deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter’s becoming a YouTube dynamo with her sassy Web rebuttals to the Romney campaign; Jim Messina’s traveling westward to receive wisdom from Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg. (From Spielberg, about not trying to replicate their 2008 campaign: “You can only be the Rolling Stones from 1965 once. And then you’re a touring band that has to sell tickets each time you come to town.”) One leading G.O.P. digital operative told me: “We’re looking for someone who comes to us and is like: ‘All right, what do we need to do? I’m going to trust you to do it, I’m going to give you a real budget, you’ll have a seat at the table and will be just as important as the communications guy and the field guy. And you know what, those other guys need to be more modern, too, and that’s the campaign we’re going to run. So let’s start plotting out how we’re going to do that.’ ”

Echoing the opinion of nearly every other young Republican with whom I spoke, the operative concluded sadly, “And we haven’t had that person yet.”

The person they are seeking is the Republican incarnation of David Plouffe — the seemingly unremarkable Hill staffer and itinerant consultant who, like the Howard Dean strategist Joe Trippi before him, recognized that the only way his relatively unknown and underfinanced candidate could prevail over the front-runner would be to muster a guerrilla operation. To accomplish this, in 2007, Plouffe met with a 25-year-old former Dean techie named Joe Rospars and promptly enlisted him to help marshal candidate Obama’s volunteer support through high-tech means. Plouffe, Rospars told me, became the champion of “using digital to build the campaign from the bottom up.” Employing then-nascent social media channels like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, Rospars’s team raised enormous sums of money online while also plugging a nationwide grass-roots network into Obama’s get-out-the-vote efforts. Four years later, Stephanie Cutter said, “Plouffe was a big proponent” of completely reimagining the 2008 effort.

A few days before this year’s inauguration — after which he would take leave of the Obama White House and of politics as a profession — Plouffe met with me in his small and uncluttered West Wing office. He wore a blue shirt and a purple tie and, with his work now done, was uncharacteristically expansive. He told me he was surprised by the Romney campaign’s strategic shortcomings. After naming one particular member of Romney’s high command, he said, “We had 15 people more qualified to do that job than him.”

Plouffe cut his teeth as the deputy chief of staff of Representative Dick Gephardt, whose impressive farm team also included those who would go on to be White House advisers, like Paul Begala, George Stephanopoulos and Bill Burton. Now it was the Obama operation that, he said, “is going to generate a lot of people who are going to run presidential and Senate campaigns.” They were apt pupils of a campaign that was “a perfect-storm marriage between grass-roots energy and digital technology.” He continued: “Not having that is like Nixon not shaving before his first debate — you’ve got to understand the world you’re competing in. Our thinking always was, We don’t want people when they interact with the Obama campaign to have it be a deficient experience compared to how they shop or how they get their news. People don’t say, ‘Well, you’re a political campaign, so I expect you to be slower and less interesting.’ Right? We wanted it to be like Amazon. And I still don’t think the Republicans are there.”

But, I asked Plouffe, wasn’t the G.O.P. just one postmodern presidential candidate — say, a Senator Marco Rubio — away from getting back into the game?

Pouncing, he replied: “Let me tell you something. The Hispanic voters in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico don’t give a damn about Marco Rubio, the Tea Party Cuban-American from Florida. You know what? We won the Cuban vote! And it’s because younger Cubans are behaving differently than their parents. It’s probably my favorite stat of the whole campaign. So this notion that Marco Rubio is going to heal their problems — it’s not even sophomoric; it’s juvenile! And by the way: the bigger problem they’ve got with Latinos isn’t immigration. It’s their economic policies and health care. The group that supported the president’s health care bill the most? Latinos.”

Plouffe readily conceded that he and his generation held no iron grip on political wisdom, but then he flashed a grin when I brought up the R.N.C.’s Growth and Opportunity Project, composed of party stalwarts. “If there’s a review board the Democrats put together in 2032, or even 2020, and I’m on it,” he said, “we’re screwed.”

The Republicans did in fact recently have a David Plouffe of their own. As one G.O.P. techie elegantly put it, “We were the smart ones, back in ’04, eons ago.” Referring to the campaign that re-elected George W. Bush, Plouffe told me: “You know how in fantasy baseball you imagine putting up your team against the 1927 Yankees? We would’ve liked to have faced off against the 2004 Republicans. Beating the Clintons” — during the 2008 primaries — “that was, in terms of scale of difficulty, significantly above beating Romney. But going up against the Bushies — that would’ve been something we all would’ve relished.”

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Plouffe wasn’t referring to competing against Bush’s oft-described architect, Karl Rove — but rather, against the campaign manager, Ken Mehlman. “Mehlman got technology and organization and the truth is — I think it’s completely misunderstood — it was Ken’s campaign,” Plouffe said. He added that he and Mehlman were friends, and that during the 2012 cycle, Mehlman — who had been informally advising the Romney campaign — was also “very free with advice about structure, how they dealt with an incumbent president, how they dealt with debate prep.” (Similarly, the former Bush senior strategist Matthew Dowd told me that Axelrod reached out to him for advice and they sat down together. “Which never happened with me and Romney-world.”)

Mehlman, according to Bush campaign officials, persuaded Rove to invest heavily in microtargeting (a data-driven means of identifying and reaching select groups of voters), which helped deliver Ohio and thus the election. He advocated reaching out to minority voters both as Bush’s campaign manager and later as chairman of the R.N.C., where he also instructed his staff to read “Moneyball.” “I was like, ‘What does a baseball book have to do with politics?’ ” said Michael Turk, who worked for Mehlman at the R.N.C. “Once I actually took the time to digest it, I realized what he was trying to do — which was exactly the kind of thing that the Obama team just did: understanding that not every election is about home runs but instead getting a whole bunch of singles together that eventually add up to a win.”

I met with Mehlman one morning in his office near the Capitol. He left politics in 2007 and subsequently came out as gay — and after that, became a vigorous if behind-the-scenes supporter of legalizing same-sex marriage in New York and beyond. Mehlman is now a partner at the private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, wealthy and free from his party’s fetters. He was nonetheless hesitant to criticize his fellow Republicans, though implicitly his comments were damning.

“There’s an important book by Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon called ‘The Real Majority,’ published in 1970,” Mehlman said as he leaned back in his chair. “The book explains in part how the Republican Party would go on to win five out of six presidential elections through the eyes of the ‘typical’ voter — a working-class couple in Dayton, Ohio. They’re white, worried about crime, feel burdened by taxes and feel like too many Democrats don’t understand these concerns.”

Today’s typical voter, he went on to say, could be that same white couple in Dayton. “But here’s the difference,” he said. ‘They worry about economic mobility — can their kids get ahead or even keep up. Their next-door neighbors are Latino whose mom gets concerned when she hears talk about self-deportation or no driver’s licenses. And that couple has a gay niece and an African-American brother-in-law. And too many folks like the couple in Dayton today wonder if some of the G.O.P. understands their lives anymore.”

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I asked him whether, as even some Republicans have suggested, Ronald Reagan would have trouble building a winning coalition today. “I think he could win, partly because Reagan wouldn’t be the Reagan he was in 1980,” Mehlman replied. “Reagan had an unbelievable intuitive understanding of the electorate, because he’d spent his life as the president of a large union, as an actor who understands his audience, as the governor of the largest state, as a corporate spokesman who traveled — Reagan spent his life listening to people and learning from them and adapting to their concerns. That’s why there were Reagan Democrats — ethnics, working-class voters, Southern voters. So I think a modern Reagan would understand the demography and where the new voters are and would’ve applied his principles accordingly.”

But could a modern-day Reagan, even with Ken Mehlman running his campaign, overcome the party’s angry and antiquated image? To win, a reincarnated Reagan — or a Rubio or a Chris Christie or a Bobby Jindal — would still have to satisfy his base of hard-line conservatives and captivate a new generation of voters at the same time. I ran this quandary by Kristen Soltis Anderson. “It’s a big challenge,” she acknowledged. “But I think that if you can earn the trust of the people, there are ways you can say, ‘Here’s why I take this position.’ I don’t know that someone like Rubio, who may be young and attractive and well spoken, could attract young voters despite his views on gay marriage. I do think that in the absence of a very compelling reason to vote for a candidate, those social issues can be deal-breakers for young voters. The challenge is: Can you make a case that’s so compelling that you can overcome those deal-breaker issues? And I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Bret Jacobson, the Red Edge entrepreneur, insisted that the solution was ultimately a simple one. “I think the answer for a vibrant Republican Party is to make our North Star empowering every individual in this country to follow their own dream, free of legislative excesses,” he told me. “There are millions of Americans who take seriously their religious culture as well as traditions that have been handed down for centuries. And the party has to empower them to fight those battles in the social sphere, not in the government sphere. That’s harder work than taking control of the country for four years. But it’s the appropriate battle.”

But, I asked him, don’t social conservatives feel a moral obligation to legislate their beliefs? Did Jacobson really expect the Rick Santorums of his party to let a new generation of Republican leaders tell them what to accept and how to behave?

Jacobson did not back down. “Even the Republican Party rejected Santorum,” he said. “He got some attention, and he certainly received votes. But he didn’t win.”

In a sense, however, Santorum and his fellow archconservatives did win, by tugging Mitt Romney and his pliable views rightward. Then Romney lost, and so did the Republicans.

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Two days after Obama’s inauguration, Bret Jacobson flew to Charlotte to attend the R.N.C.’s winter conference and sit on a panel devoted to discussing new digital techniques. “Bret’s presentation was one of the best-received of the panel, by far,” the seminar’s organizer, Ryan Cassin, told me. Still, Jacobson was disappointed to see only 30 people in attendance. President Obama, meanwhile, announced the previous week that his campaign juggernaut would be transformed into an advocacy group, Organizing for Action, that would use the vast social network amassed during the 2012 cycle to advance the administration’s policy goals. The Republican panel amounted to a first step — a baby step — while the competition was lapping them.

Jacobson did not stick around the next day to hear Reince Priebus declare to the conferees, “We’re the party of innovation!” Instead, he left his own panel early to catch a plane back to Washington. Calls were continuing to come into Red Edge’s office from establishment Republicans inquiring about Jacobson and Spencer’s cautionary slide presentation.

Jacobson wanted to interpret this interest as a good thing. But I could tell from his voice that the experience at the R.N.C. conference deflated his hopes about Republicans being well on the road to enlightenment. “My primary worry,” he told me without his characteristic levity, “is that I’m going to become the Al Gore of the right” — meaning, a forecaster of doom, appreciated and unheeded as the clever if somewhat lonely guy who told them so.

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book is “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Editor: Ilena Silverman

http://www.amazon.com/Dollarocracy-Election-Complex-Destroying-America/dp/1568587074/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375811903&sr=1-2

money bomb

Political consultant Ed Rollins said of the moneybomb concept, "I'll tell you, I've been in politics for 40 years, and these days everything I've learned about politics is totally irrelevant because there's this uncontrollable thing like the Internet. Washington insiders don't know what to make of it."^[48]

A 2006 Federal Election Commission ruling, exempting most Internet activity from campaign finance rules, created the loophole for moneybombs, according to Paul Ryan, a lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center: "It's difficult to imagine any threat of corruption posed by an activist sitting at home trying to talk people into making small donations directly to a candidate's campaign .... These small donors are a good thing for the system .... This is the classic example of the modern soapbox."^[49]

Sonia Arrison of TechNewsWorld considered the transparency in pledge and donation amounts to be an important open-source element of moneybomb success: "Those revelations stand in direct contrast to traditional campaigns, which tend to be silent and proprietary about who is donating."^[50]

Campaign finance analyst Leslie Wayne regarded the YouTube and viral campaigning associated with moneybombs as an unexpected new trend in campaign finance. Wayne found the November 5 event a remarkable success because "the Paul campaign never even asked donors for the money. A grassroots group of Paul supporters, via the Internet, all decided to have a one-day online fund-raiser for Dr. Paul."^[51]RealClearPolitics considered Paul's two largest moneybombs to be one of the five moments that changed the 2007 GOP race,^[52] and the "incredibly successful" November 5 moneybomb was awarded a Golden Dot as "Technology Impact Moment of the Year" at the 2008 Politics Online Conference.^[53][54]

The link between moneybombs and polling results is unclear.^{[55][56][57][58][59][60]}

Single-day fundraising comparisons:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important;background-image:none !important"):}::{]}:

In 2000, after beating George W. Bush in the New Hampshire Republican primary, John McCain raised $1 million online in 24 hours.^[3]

When John Kerry accepted the Democratic nomination in 2004, he raised $5.7 million in one day, partly over the Internet.^[41][61]

On January 8, 2007, a one-day call center organized by Mitt Romney raised $3,143,404 in donations^[19][62] ($6.5 million including both donations and pledges).^[63]

An anonymous Republican fundraising strategist found a close comparison between moneybombs and smaller Daily Kos fundraising pushes, and looked forward the possibility of "efforts to replicate this performance".^[49]

In November 2007, the New York Times and the Associated Press stated that the one-day fundraising record among 2008 presidential candidates was held by Hillary Clinton for raising $6.2 million on June 30, 2007.^[19][64] Other sources awarded Paul the one-day record for the December 16 event,^[65][66][67]while the Times and AP did not mention Clinton's total in their December coverage.^[41][42]

On December 15, 2007, Dennis Kucinich raised $131,400 from approximately 1,600 donors.^[68]

On February 5–6, 2008, in the aftermath of the Super Tuesday primaries, Barack Obama raised at least $3 million from 7 p.m. to 7 p.m. EST.^[69] Between September 3–4, 2008, the night after Sarah Palin gave her speech at the Republican National Convention, Barack Obama raised $10 million from over 130,000 donors.^[70]

On November 2, 2009, Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Orlando) raised nearly $570,000 in a one-day moneybomb for his re-election campaign.

On January 11, 2010, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate seat in Massachusetts, Scott Brown, used this method of fundraising to raise well over one million dollars for his campaign.^[71]

On October 19, 2011, Ron Paul campaigners conducted a major online fundraiser to counteract what they saw as a blackout of Ron Paul by the mainstream media.^[72][73]

McChesney’s award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect, McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems and massive indirect subsidies and other policies have made the internet a place of numbing commercialism. A handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners a 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world’s computers. Capitalism’s colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance and a disturbingly antidemocratic force.

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Disconnect-Capitalism-Internet-Democracy/dp/1595588671

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning

by Robert W. McChesney

Excerpted from "The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right"

To borrow a Sarah Palin aphorism, after their election defeat in 2008, conservatives didn’t retreat, they “reloaded.” Instead of finding new solutions to public policy problems or seriously reevaluating Bush’s failures, conservatives focused almost solely on new ways to communicate their old ideas. To do so, they looked to their natural allies in corporate marketing for inspiration — and they looked to the Left for imitation. The result has been a recent and profound turnaround that has allowed the Right the bury Obama’s message and dominate the political debate.

Historical right-wing domination of the media

Traditionally, conservatives have almost always dominated direct mail solicitations, retained the best pollsters money could buy and paid for the most celebrated advertising makers. Message discipline is the first lesson for any Republican politician. Talk radio? unquestionably controlled by conservatives.

Cable news? Fox News couldn’t be more right-wing and popular. The Right had also dominated the Internet for most of the Internet’s fledging history. Throughout the 1990s and for much of President George W. Bush’s first term, conservatives easily ruled online news. And much of that initial sucess stemmed from foundations and entrepreneurial pioneers such as Matt Drudge, creator of the wildly popular headline-aggregating site Drudge Report, and Jim Robinson of the news message board Free Republic. The pair formed a symbiotic relationship. Drudge, who played a role in breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, made waves in the media with scoops on the latest Clinton scandals, and Free Republic provided a platform for conservatives to share conspiratorial perspectives and to organize their own rallies and events. Many of the angry mobs hounding Clinton at public events were mobilized by Free Republic. The impeachment rally that was organized by the Free Republic, “Treason Is the Reason,” featured Republican lawmakers and writer Christopher Hitchens.

Their efforts were enhanced by well-funded conservative investments in Internet technology. The first major foray into purely ideological online news came from theHeritage Foundation, which worked with National Review magazine to create Town Hallin 1992. The Town Hall bulletin board forum on Compuserve required users to pay to dial into a central terminal to share information and read conservative publications. It later morphed into an Internet site with links to conservative opinion pieces, studies and syndicated columns from newspapers. Town Hall helped organize the top conservative arguments, studies and articles. The one-stop shop, similar in utility to Drudge Report, provided direction for various conservative web sites, talk radio and Republican politicians to get on the same message.

Conservatives maintained their dominance by constantly making investments in online news portals. In 2000, James Glassman, previously a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, launched a web site called TechCentralStation with the corporate lobbying firm DCI Group. The web site, with funds from corporations such as Microsoft and ExxonMobil, published reports from right-wing think tanks as news pieces. Glassman, who later became the director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, eventually closed TechCentralStation after a round of criticism that the site was essentially a smoke screen for corporate propaganda. In 2004, Bush strategists hired a number of firms to develop online tools to help supporters place op-eds and letters to the editor, well before MoveOn adopted a similar tactic. As even Karl Rove conceded, conservatives held an advantage in online news through 2004 — but the Right lost its edge after Bush’s victory over John Kerry.

Change in media environment

Conservatives soon slipped to second place in the media war. Comfortable controlling the gears of government for so long, the Right had largely ignored the rapidly shifting media landscape. John McCain, for instance, used an outdated emailing technology and had no functioning social network of his own. By Election Day, 2008, the Republican Party did not even have its own national list of supporters they could reach through text messages. While candidate Barack Obama talked about hope and change, an entire universe of liberal web sites lobbed attacks and criticism every day at the McCain-Palin ticket. There were structural reasons for this decline. During the latter half of the Bush administration, triumphant Republican consultants who had won in 2004 largely with traditional spending on television ads, telemarketing and direct mail had every incentive to encourage the party and the right-wing movement to continue spending on traditional outlets. Many television consultants receive up to a 15 percent cut of an entire advertising buy — which of course can be many of millions of dollars during an election season. Moving to online and nontraditional communications would result in a financial loss for some of these consultants, who doubled as advisors to the Republican National Committee and contractors to major conservative foundations.

Yet, while Republicans were expanding their traditional marketing strategies, some of the most cutting-edge corporate advertising campaigns of the 21st century intentionally abandoned using billboards, television commercials and other traditional forms of branding. Ironically taking their cues from the socialist writer Naomi Klein — whose book “No Logo” detailed a world alienated by the over-abundance of corporate brands on every T-shirt, building and bus — brand managers skillfully slipped their products into the background of movies, seemingly amateur blog posts and the most popular YouTube channels. The corporate public relations firm Edelman, one of many advertising and marketing behemoths that specialize in this form of stealth salesmanship, carefully chronicled how the public shifted toward trusting “peer-to-peer” endorsements of ideas and products. They found that one of the efficient ways to mediate peer-to-peer marketing is through impersonal social networking and online content platforms. The USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism found that 80 percent of Internet users considered the Internet to be an important source of information for them in 2008 — up from 66 percent in 2006 — and already higher than television, radio and newspapers. By 2010, USC found that over 82 percent of Americans were regular Internet users.

Edelman published a study, “The Social Pulpit,” revealing the various ways the 2008 Obama campaign wove campaign engagement into the social media habits of his supporters, from ethnic social networking web sites like Black Planet to innovative campaign widgets for local bloggers. Ironically, the study was written in consultation with Mike Krempasky, an Edelman executive who also helped found the conservative blog Redstate (a blog that duplicated the diary system of the left-wing blog DailyKos). Krempasky would later assist various corporations and right-wing blogs in deploying Obama campaign tactics to boost the nascentTea Party movement.

However, out of power in 2006 and 2008, it was the Left that had a greater incentive to experiment with alternative methods for organizing and delivering their ideas to the public, and it was the Left that took the lead in the tactics proposed by Krempasky and others. Simon Rosenberg of the New Politics Institute and other left-leaning think tanks contributed resources to developing best practices for new communication tools as well as opportunities for incubating talent. Democratic campaigns sought outsiders adept at online strategy. Progressives developed online fund-raising schemes, such as Act Blue, and experimented with new ways of connecting with voters, such as targeted SMS text messages. The Obama campaign’s decision to announce the selection of Obama’s running mate via text message netted an additional 2 million cell phone numbers to its database, which could then be used to plug voters into other election season notices. The unprecedented investments from the Left coincided with rapid shifts in the media landscape. Perhaps most important, much of the institutional assistance simply buoyed left-wing initiatives that began organically, like Dailykos or MoveOn. As the progressive “blogosphere” swelled with traffic and influence during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, the momentum gave the impression that liberal bloggers would always be the prevailing force on the Left.

“Don’t retreat, instead reload!”

Much of the right-wing’s resurgence is due to its intense investment in technology and communications. Republicans, as well as right-wing conservatives, realized that their image could be salvaged if repackaged properly. And the most discussed post-2008 election concern was the advantage held by the Left in communication infrastructure. In a December 2008 reflection piece titled the “Roots of Defeat,” Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini wrote in the National Review that progressive news sites, like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, were the constant purveyors of “attack memes” against the conservative movement and its candidates. Talking Points Memo had led the liberal blogosphere’s mobilization against President Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005. In addition to its rapid news coverage, the web site posted the phone numbers of Democratic politicians who had indicated support for Bush’s proposal and encouraged readers to call. The groundswell of opposition from bloggers, then the general public, marked the first significant policy defeat for President Bush. As Ruffini noted, the defeat punctured Bush’s “aura of invincibility and presage[d] the death spiral to come.” ThinkProgress, where I began working in 2009, had helped expose much of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s relationship with the Bush administration, and Talking Points Memo broke the story of the Bush Justice Department’s systematic political firings of U.S. Attorneys around the country. As the 2008 election unfolded, the McCain campaign’s positions and statements were instantly fact checked and scrutinized by leading progressive web sites. Ruffini observed that progressive blogs did actual research and reporting while most conservative bloggers were “generally commentators and not reporters.” He also noted that the Right lacked many of the technological innovations employed by Barack Obama’s campaign, and, more important, lacked a powerful online megaphone for its ideological goals.

As conservative writer Ross Douthat noted in a post-election interview about the future of conservatism, the Internet also served as a vital organizing platform for progressives. DailyKos, Douthat said, was one of the main sources of “left-wing populist anger against the excesses of the Bush Administration.” The DailyKos system allows the public, after registering, to post blog entries, which are either selected by moderators or voted up to the “Recommended” list by other users. Other organizations, from MoveOn to Democracy for America to the message board Democratic Underground, had helped feed the surge in leftist populism through the Internet by providing opportunities for like-minded people to find each other instantly.

In more apocalyptic terms than usual, Media Research Center founder L. Brent Bozell III addressed the Council for National Policyin February of 2009 and warned of an entire media revolution the conservative infrastructure had “missed.” He rattled off a series of negative stories about Barack Obama, and claimed that during the course of the 2008 campaign, only two stories had been written about the Tony Rezko scandal, and by the time the national networks ran “a single story on Reverend Wright, 42 states and the District of Columbia had voted.” According to a search of transcripts supplied by Nexis, the major networks ABC, CBS and NBC ran at least a combined 57 segments or mentions of Obama’s controversial pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright well before November. Countless news stories were written about Barack Obama’s relationship with Chicago developer Tony Rezko: the Associated Press (41);Washington Times (13); Los Angeles Times (6); the Chicago Sun-Times (78).

The gross exaggeration notwithstanding, Bozell went on to complain that these stories “weren’t told” because the Right had failed to continue to build its communications apparatus. “We have Fox News,” Bozell said, “we have mastered talk radio,” referring to the fact that nine out of ten talk radio programs are conservative. But on the Internet, Bozell said that Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report — “our top guy” — barely had half the readership of Arianna Huffington’s liberal-leaning Huffington Post. He then went on to run down a list of technologies from podcasting to text messaging to YouTube and on to blogging where the Left had gained a strategic advantage. More important, these were areas where the American public increasingly was turning for news and information. With enough investments, Bozell said the Right could compete. If “any of us have made the Internet a top priority and made the information world a top priority,” then the American public would see Obama as a “socialist,” he concluded.

Bozell closed his remarks to the assembled group of conservative leaders and donors with a futuristic vision crafted perfectly for his audience of former Reaganites. “Do you realize that we have the technology actually to hologram ourselves? This is not Star Wars stuff,” Bozell exclaimed to the group. “Did you know we can have a three-dimensional image of [Focus on the Family founder] Jim Dobson standing right next to me talking to you,” beamed Bozell. He closed on an optimistic note. “The technology is wondrous that we have out there.”

Bozell was a true pioneer in media technology. Although he is best known for using his well-funded think tank to conjure the “liberal media” myth, Bozell also started some of the first conservative news web sites in the nineties. In 1998, Media Research Center founded conservativenews.com, a unique site with its own staff of reporters and editors, funded with a three-year budget of $5.46 million. The site later rebranded as CNSNews.com, which became a popular newswire and reporting outlet for conservatives. In 2008, Bozell began touting a web site his organization created called Eyeblast, which he hoped would be an “alternative” to YouTube. YouTube, according to Bozell, had a pernicious liberal bias. Bozell stipulated that Google, Facebook and even Wikipedia were “run by liberals” and are “openly hostile to conservatives.” To combat this, Bozell asked for money — lots of it. (In 2009, Bozell’s Media Research Center raised over $10.5 million from over 80 family and corporate foundations, as well as from donations from a number of individual contributors.)

Ruffini, like Bozell, had a financial stake in demanding that the Right stock up its communications arsenal. His EngageDC political consulting firm specializes in new media technology, and a shift in resources to the Internet would be a boon to his business. But they were both correct to argue that the Right had skimped on investments in technology during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, and in doing so, were losing an opportunity to communicate with millions of Americans.

Meanwhile many progressives were taking a laissez-faire approach to developing online tactics. From the 2008 election through the 2010 midterms, there were few, if any, serious innovations or new online breakthroughs for the Left. Some, like political science professor Russell Dalton, argued that the decentralized nature of the Internet allowed liberals to naturally outpace conservatives on the medium. Dalton reasoned that because conservatives philosophically embrace ideological loyalty and are generally more comfortable with authoritarian, top-down communication, they would never really harness the potential of new media. Liberals on the other hand automatically flourish in environments where users are granted freedom to communicate with infinite possibilities. According to this line of thinking, liberals would inherently succeed online, and investments weren’t quite necessary. The Right’s ability to effectively harness the Internet to achieve tremendous political goals after Obama election, however, demonstrates the weakness of this theory.

As Patrick Ruffini recalled later, “in the wake of the 2008 election, after four years of aloofness from most of our party’s leaders about the role of new media and technology in electoral politics, we took a break from the day to day of campaigns and thought seriously about how to help our party move forward.” The series of targeted investments and strategic nurturing of new communication vehicles bore fruit quickly. From the rise of the Tea Party to the upset victory of Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts, Republican operatives outmaneuvered their counterparts on the Left by imitating and improving on the online approach of Obama’s 2008 campaign. Moreover, the right-wing noise machine became more sophisticated in its ability to smear Obama and his policies, again making use of the Internet and broadening its reach in the media. The Right not only convinced their ideological funders and the Republican Party to invest in creating the next wave of communication tools, but corporate lobbyists desperate to manipulate public opinion against reform aided in the process.

Attack of the clones

One of the most defining differences between new media and traditional media is the role of the user. With new media, anyone with Internet access has virtually unlimited power to comment on, modify or discuss content with which they come into contact. Traditional media — whether it is broadcast television, print or newspaper — does not allow the same type of instant, unrestricted interactivity, although some television shows are increasingly finding ways to better incorporate their audience’s feedback. Fundamentally, traditional media delegates power to the broadcaster, the editor or the radio host. Conservatives seeking to take control of the media spent years under the traditional media paradigm creating their own media outlets while casting doubt or public skepticism on ones outside their grip.The “liberal media” myth was one of the most potent strategies to discredit outlets that reported critically on Republican politicians or did not generally skew toward the right. Many of the early Internet innovations from conservatives relied on simply creating new models of one-way content distribution. But the rise in Internet culture, in which users expect decentralized networks and user-created content and control, has forced the Right to adopt more sophisticated strategies to reach the public.

A central dynamic created by the growth of new media is the proliferation of virtual communities. The Obama campaign in 2008 tried to harness this trend by creating MyBarackObama, an interface for campaign supporters to create online identities, connect with other supporters and publicize their campaign activity. The technology was based on Howard Dean’s successful use of the web site Meetup, used in 2004 to network and find fellow supporters. By showcasing their own contributions in the form of pictures, videos and “points” for volunteer service, MyBarackObama did more than simply foster engagement. They created a social premium for volunteers to share their contributions with others. Also, users of MyBarackObama, like the Obama campaign generally, saw themselves as insurgents fighting against entrenched powers, from the Democratic establishment during the primary with Hillary Clinton, to special interests and Washington insiders during the general election. The online community gave Obama campaign operatives a wealth of information about its supporters, and the seemingly walled structure (although it was open to anyone) of such a network provided a sense of togetherness for people inside that community.

Just as insurgency helped the large MyBarackObama community create tight bonds as an ideologically coherent community, Obama’s victory undid them. Shortly after Obama took office, Democratic planners moved the MyBarackObama listserv and online community into the apparatus of the Democratic National Committee, converting it into Organizing for America. The social capital of the community evaporated quickly as the DNC ordered the community to support conservative politicians like Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, or to simply fall in line with the agenda of the president, even when policies drifted from ideologically pure campaign promises that had brought people to the web site initially.

While MyBarackObama died a quick death as a functional community, the Right went to work building communities to oppose Obama and his agenda. Republican consultants flocked to Ning, an easy tool to create entire social networks for niche communities. Ning replicates common features of any social network: Users may create online identities, send messages within the network, post links and news articles, and create events for offline activities.

Template Ning networks provided the Right with the ability to quickly assemble Tea Party groups without the appearance of top-heavy Republican partisanship. Eric Odom, the former new media director of Sam Adams Alliance, used his consulting firms Strategic Activism and American Liberty Alliance to create dozens of ready-made Ning web sites to cultivate the early stages of the Tea Party movement. Some Tea Party groups he created, like the Patriot Caucus, were geared toward a national constituency, while others catered to specific localities, such as Lehigh County in Pennsylvania. Although the web sites appeared to be citizen generated, all of Odom’s sites were actually centrally planned and operated. Every major Tea Party organization got in on the act: Smart Girl Politics, working with Odom’s colleagues, created a Ning for Tea Party women; Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, used her Liberty Central group to help local Tea Party groups in Florida build Ning web sites; and the lobbying firm Libertas Global Partners created Regular Folks united using Ning to organize Tea Party groups. Grassroots Action Inc., a company that thrived by building huge email and petition lists using conservative outrage over immigrants or gay rights, operated as a business by selling its lists to corporate or politics interests. After Obama’s election, Grassroots Action redesigned their network as a Ning, called ResistNet. EvenGlenn Beck, with his so-called 9/12 movement, used Ning to develop local and national communities of supporters.

The power of Ning is the illusion of open, democratic communities. Republican operators and consultants in control of most of the Tea Party Nings set the agenda, administer the talking points available on the main page, and have the ability to censor information they disapprove of. Tea Party Patriots, one of the largest Ning communities of over 100,000 members, was regularly fed action items by lobbyist-run entities such as FreedomWorks. So when members of Tea Party community web sites received emails from web site administrators to call Congress to oppose a student lending bill or hold a rally against a Democratic member of Congress, the orders appeared to come from community members of their respective Ning networks. To the casual user, the site appeared to be maintained by citizen activists, but in many cases the actual online organizers worked for right-wing corporate fronts or a Republican campaign. Functionally, the Ning social networks provided grassroots cover for the oil interests funding FreedomWorks or Republican campaigns paying Odom.

Republicans in Congress also seized upon a similar Internet technology to create an illusion of popular support for their corporate-friendly agenda. The best example would be a program touted by House GOP leadership called America Speaking Out. America Speaking Out offered the public the ability to submit policy ideas, and then vote them up or down. Republicans promised to campaign and eventually legislate on the most popular policies using the web site’s results.

The campaign document Republicans produced shortly before the 2010 midterms, supposedly based on the America Speaking Out voted ideas, actually ignored the will of the people. First, any idea to raise taxes was censored from the site. But even the most popular ideas did not make the cut. In one section, four out of the five ideas with the most votes concerned marijuana decriminalization and legalization. In the economy section, the top idea was the legislation, proposed by Democrats, to end tax loopholes for companies that ship jobs overseas. In another section, ending earmarks ranked as one of the most popular ideas. However, the final Republican “Pledge to America” contained boilerplate Republican campaign pledges like repealing Obama’s reforms and reducing the deficit. It omitted many of the most popular ideas from their web site, even earmark reform. Regardless, the House Republican leadership hailed their pledge as revolutionary because of the America Speaking Out voting system. Shortly before unveiling the pledge, Representative Mike Pence (R- Ind.) declared, the “Democrat [sic] majority isn’t listening, but House Republicans will.”

This trick deflected the fact that Republicans in 2010 failed to produce any ideas to address climate change, energy independence, job creation, rising inequality and poverty, or America’s health care crisis. America Speaking Out was more of a public relations gimmick than an actual way to incorporate public opinion into policy making. Similarly, Congressman Eric Cantor (R-Va.) created a web site called YouCut for the public to vote on federal programs to eliminate. Many of the programs were simplified or distorted with wasteful-sounding names. One such program targeted by YouCut, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Contingency Fund, created 240,000 jobs in a matter of months, but YouCut falsely characterized it as a job-killing welfare program. Another item on YouCut, the Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program, had already been eliminated by Obama’s budget, yet the Republican web site claimed killing the project would be a YouCut idea. The first few months of YouCut targeted only 0.017 percent of the federal budget for elimination, but the online vote platform gave the impression that Republicans were serious about incorporating the public’s ideas for eliminating “waste.”

Excerpted from “The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right” by Lee Fang. by Lee Fang. Reprinted by permission of The New Press. http://www.thenewpress.com

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NEWSPAPERS HAVE WEB PRESENCE, AND AGGREGATORS FUNNEL/FILTER NEWS TO PPL:

If it is held unfair, or naïve, or both, to ask faltering news organizations to take up the slack left by our corrupt, self-dealing, shortsighted institutions, then it remains for start-up efforts to embarrass the established journals.

Online efforts matter. It’s a good sign that the dot-connecting site InsideClimateNews.org was :{just honored:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: with a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

But tens of millions of readers still rely on the old media, either directly or via the snippets that stream through Google, Yahoo, and other aggregator sites. Given the stakes, we dare not settle for nostalgia or restoration, or pray that the remedy is new technology. Polishing up the old medals will not avail. Reruns of His Girl Friday, All the President’s Men, and Broadcast News may be entertaining, but it’s more important to keep in mind that the good old days were not so good after all. The press was never too great to fail. Missing the story is a tradition. So now the question is: Who is going to bring us the news of all the institutions, from City Hall to Congress, from Wall Street to the White House, that fail us?

Koch launches RightOnline, an effort to train right-wing operatives in using technology, to mimic the success of the left, particularly in blogging. thinkprog

new bob mcchesney book digital disconnect cf norman solomon kpfa interview 3/30/13

targetted online ads:

But these same dark money groups are also quietly expanding their online advertising efforts, using sophisticated targeting tactics to send their ads to specific kinds of people.

Who they’re targeting, and what data they’re using, is secret.

Online advertising companies have amassed vast quantities of information on what individual people read, watch, and do on the Internet. They collect this data using small files called cookies, which allows them to track Internet users as they move from site to site.

These anonymous profiles of information are used to customize advertisements��like sending casino ads to someone who just bought a plane ticket to Vegas.

But these profiles are also increasingly used by political groups, which can decide which people to target with a message��and which people to avoid—based on the kinds of articles they read and the kinds of sites they visit.

Many Internet users who see these ads may not be aware they’re being targeted. ��

As we’ve detailed, both the Romney and Obama campaigns are using advanced tracking and targeting tactics. Working with our readers, we found two examples of dark money groups using this kind of targeting, as well: one ad from Crossroads GPS and one ad from Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit linked to the politically influential Koch brothers.

How many of these ads are dark money groups sending out? It’s hard to say, because it’s not easy to track exactly how much Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity, and similar groups are spending on different kinds of advertising.

But these politically influential organizations are moving more of their efforts online.

While Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio said he couldn’t get into the specifics of their budget, “Crossroads will certainly spend more in the online space in 2012 than it did in 2010,” he said.

Americans for Prosperity did not return multiple requests for comment.

Even when Internet users are sophisticated enough to spot a targeted ad, as Lauren Berns did, it is almost impossible for them to find out why a certain organization is targeting them—or what data about them is being used.... http://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-political-groups-target-voters-based-on-their-internet-habits

Fox-piven: For a responsible journalist and a responsible media outlet, such an incident would have spurred a process of intense self-scrutiny. But this is Glenn Beck and Fox, and as is evident from the campaign against Piven, nothing of the sort occurred. In the hundreds of posts about Piven on The Blaze, there is not one admonition to tone down the violent rhetoric, not one clear instance in which an editor intervened to moderate the thread. In fact, commenters seem at liberty to egg one another on [amplifying, no dampening moderation]: one poster pointedly noted that Piven lives in New York City and teaches at CUNY; another then linked to a website that listed Piven's home address and phone number. "Why is this woman still alive?" asked capnjack. "Mainly because you haven't killed her, I imagine. See, someone that really cares and has the courage of their conviction must actually DO SOMETHING," responded Diamondback. And the calls for assassination are not limited to Piven. As Civilunrestnow put it in a post that perfectly captures the tenor of right-wing eliminationist fantasy, "I say bring it. 90 million legal gun owners with over 220 million legal firearms, MOST in the hands of people who claim to be center RIGHT. :{I think it's time to reduce the surplus population of leeches, lay abouts, left wing nut jobs, the main stream media, liberal politicians and MOST defense attorneys." runaway mode vs a true community?

:{==