p2pnet - rss feed: The Dean Machine
That was the year, that was. And it’s been great for the Net.
Because the World Wide Web is forcing radical changes and as a major part of that, the entertainment industry is also being forced - to acknowledge that its customers actually exist beyond its spreadsheets and marketing scenarios, and its pathalogical lust for money and power.
The people who work within and for the many and various Hollywood components, in particular the recording and movie studios and their ‘trade’ organs such as the MPAA and RIAA (Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America) lie, groan, writhe, whine, moan, threaten, sue and generally do everything they can to avoid having to actually be what they claim to be - good corporate citizens.
But Marshall McLuhan’s global village is here and now and people are logging on by their millions. Through the Net and p2p - peer-to-peer communications, which means a lot more than merely ’sharing’ movies and music - they’re linking up and uniting. Through the Net and p2p, they’re talking to each other and passing amazing amounts of information along - almost instantly.
Before, the the international corporate community, of which Hollywood is only a segment, had the luxury of time and space. Its members could get away with murder - quite literally.
Now, their every action is immediately in full view everywhere, which terrifyies the former movers and shakers. They and their conglomerates are losing control - in North America and Europe, at least - and they know it.
Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy ‘became’ chiefly because they had access to the public through the media - something which had never happened before.
Now Howard Dean, a small-state governor and a virtual unknown, "has elbowed his way into serious contention for his party’s presidential nomination," as Wired’s Gary Wolf writes here.
"As every alert citizen knows, Dean has used the Net to raise more money than any other Democratic candidate. He’s also used it to organize thousands of volunteers who go door-to-door, write personal letters to likely voters, host meetings, and distribute flyers."
And how did he manage that?
Mainly through Meetup.com "and hundreds of bloggers".
"Meetup is a Web tool for forming social groups," Wolf continues. "In early 2003, Dean himself was lured to an early New York City meetup where he found more than 300 enthusiastic supporters waiting to greet him. Meetup quickly became the engine of Dean’s Internet campaign. Back then, the leading group on the site was a club for witches. Zephyr Teachout, Dean’s director of Internet outreach, describes sitting across from campaign manager Joe Trippi in the early weeks and hitting Refresh again and again on her Web browser. "I was obsessed with beating Witches," she says. "Witches had 15,000 members, and we had 3,000. I wanted first place."
"Three thousand is a small number. But all campaigns depend on a feedback loop, and 3,000 passionate supporters who are connected via the Internet are influential in a way that an equivalent crowd would never be if you had to gather it via direct mail or a telephone survey. Dean’s Meetup members quickly recruited others, and by late March Dean had beaten Witches. Growth followed an exponential curve; Dean’s new supporters contributed money, his piles of money won respect from the media, and media attention pushed Meetup numbers higher. Most of the Democratic candidates who polled in the low single digits a year ago still poll in the low single digits. They never gained momentum. Dean’s early use of Meetup lowered the feedback threshold, just as a good supply of kindling makes it easier to light a fire. In the third quarter of 2003, Dean raised nearly $15 million - most of it in small donations - setting a one-quarter record for a Democratic candidate in a presidential race.
"By mid-November, the Howard Dean group on Meetup would have more than 140,000 members, though Meetup would matter less. After demonstrating his fundraising prowess, Dean bagged endorsements from two of the country’s most powerful labor groups, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.
"But for today, the Internet remains the key engine of Dean’s election bid and he has yet to merge his grassroots movement with the traditional Democratic power structure. I’m here to learn more about what makes his Net campaign work."
Politics in America is about money, not what the people want, and America’s leaders aren’t so much elected as acquired by the ‘business interests’ which really run the country - interests such as Hollywood.
Or, rather, that’s how it used to be.
2004 will be an extremely interesting year ; )
