Platner, Technology, & Happiness
So for months, Ames has been sending me things about Graham Platner running for Senate in Maine. I would glance. However, the NYT had a recent interview. I looked closer because he had beat Chuck Schumer's candidate without a vote, not that that's difficult. In the interview, Platner made a couple of astute and serious political observations.
First, he understood the protest politics that came out of the 1960s was only a tool, a tool that needed to lead to greater organization to have any value. “Turning people out into the streets, protests, that’s part of it. But it needs to be deeper. I think one of the problems is that we haven’t had that in quite some time” – a long, long time.
He mentions Labor and the Civil Rights Movement as last examples. Labor was always and remains an insufficient politics for meeting the challenges of industrialism. It is even less capable of dealing with compute and information. Whatever organizational corpse that presents itself as Labor today, well, trying to revive that as any solution should be a nonstarter.
The Civil Rights Movement was ephemeral, but what a beautiful democratic moment it was. Anyone trying to revive democracy in America has a treasure trove of democratic experience to dig into – Democracy, Organization, Violence: Lessons From the Civil Rights Movement.
Platner then offers the nut, “Whether it’s money, whether it is the way our democratic systems have been subsumed by corporate power, we need to change the structures of how this thing works.”
If we want to revive, reform, and evolve democracy in America, things need to be restructured – politics, government, the corporation. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t quite there yet even as all sorts of forces continue dismantling our old democratic structures to satiate unquenchable avarice and ever greater concentration of power.
Unfortunately, election campaigns aren't the place to launch such reorganization. Besides being largely systemically broken, election deadlines themselves compel a certain rigor that doesn’t facilitate democracy as currently structured. Just like protest, campaigns are only a political tool, one that has come to overwhelm and subsume the rest of the democratic process with the very undemocratic mechanisms of PR, marketing, and advertising. In Platner’s words, we need something deeper.
He can at least use the campaign process to talk about issues of restructuring, for example the desperate political need for Americans to meet face to face. Or, that local government needs to be reasserted as the foundation of democracy in America. For that to happen, power needs to be pulled from DC and placed in township, county, and city governments and those entities horizontally networked. Platner can talk about that, but as one Senator he will have no ability to do anything about it. He can talk about that too.
Next, a couple other thoughts about my recent dabble in Michigan township and AI politics. I was thinking yesterday it was not my first Michigan political experience. Back, way back, in 1980, at nineteen, working on Teddy Kennedy’s presidential run, I spent a month just outside Detroit. Michigan had a presidential caucus. I ran the campaign's state phone bank and organized direct mail. Having spent two years in high school working at a mail house, I knew how to zip code-sort mass mail to get the cheapest postage. That was a valuable asset.
It made me think again about how the ability to control technique, any technique, gives a certain power. I remember in ‘92 asking Caddell how at such a young age did he get so much influence on McGovern and Carter campaigns? He replied matter of factly, “I had the numbers.” It is far too little appreciated that control of technique, technology, and information creates levers of power. I should add, in April, 1980, we won Michigan. I then went to Los Angeles for a month, where we won California. A different political era, where taking on the incumbent president of your party wasn’t considered verboten, but at times, a necessity.
Malevolently or stupidly attempting to control technology was one of the first lessons I learned about compute. I became familiar with computers with my campaign experience in the 1980s. PCs slowly, though in retrospect quite quickly, were introduced onto the campaign process. I did a lot of the computer work myself. In 1989, I managed a San Diego City Council race where we beat the two-term incumbent. Voter contact was largely the candidate walking door-to-door, mail, and phone banks, all organized through a voter file on a PC data base, spreadsheet, and word processor. We burned through three laser printers in three months.
At various times, needing greater computer programming experience, I noticed how programmers I'd bring in would try and keep control of certain info, attempting to leverage control of other things. It would drive me nuts. In the years following, I continually confronted similar idiocies in all sorts of settings. Now, as a society we confront the same thing with several corporations controlling compute and information, seeking to leverage this power across every aspect of society looking in the name of profit to gain unconstrained power and control.
Finally, in rereading Tocqueville, I found a great thought regarding today's underlying current unease in America. This is most especially felt with Americans impotence in their own lives and their complete inability to in any way impact society around them. In 1835, Tocqueville wrote,
“From the moment when an American were reduced to occupying himself only with his own affairs, he would have been robbed of half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in his days, and he would become incredibly unhappy.”
He footnotes the historical precedent with the Roman republic’s fall,
“The same fact was already observed in Rome under the Caesars. Montesquieu remarks somewhere (On the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decadence, XIV 12) that nothing equaled the despair of certain Roman citizens who, after the agitations of a political existence, suddenly reentered the calm of private life.”
Today, Americans don't even remember a public life.