WC Archive

The Washington Post published this last Sunday one of the more interesting pieces on current politics I've seen in quite awhile. In an article awkwardly entitled "Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below," Everett Ehrlich argues that the rise of political parties was due in part to the need to have a massive organizational structure to handle the various manifestations of information required to push candidates. With the spread of the Internet, which drives the cost of information towards zero, such massive bureaucracies are no longer the most efficient way of accessing, distributing, or manipulating information. A small, heavily-networked team can be far more effective, politically.

He cites the Howard Dean operation as the key example of this:

For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy.

It's an interesting argument, one which I've heard in various forms numerous times over the last decade. When I worked as a consultant in the mid-1990s, the assertion that small, nimble, 'mammal' companies were going to eat the collective lunches of big, lumbering, business dinosaurs was so common as to be a cliché. While that certainly stroked the egos of managers of small companies and scared managers of large corporations into looking at that Internet thingie, it wasn't too accurate a prediction. Most big companies seemed to spend the last decade getting even bigger, devouring the nimble mammals and slower-moving dinosaurs alike.

The notion that small & networked can be at least as effective as big & mighty becomes less amusing when we look at the arena of modern global politics. Warnings about distributed, networked attacks didn't just happen around 9/11; thoughtful strategists were sounding off about the possibility back in the mid-1990s. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt's 1996 book, The Advent of Netwar (available as PDFs for each chapter), remains one of the best introductions to the topic.

Ehrlich paints a fascinating picture of how the use of the web can and will shape electoral politics. I think that many of his observations about how Dean's campaign functions are on-target. His scenarios of how the big parties will respond to web-enable insurgencies are less convincing, however. Big corporations didn't hold firm against the rise of smaller companies by simply battening down, twisting rules to make life hard for the non-dominant firms; they also lifted good ideas wholesale from the up-and-comers (sometimes by buying them, sometimes not), took advantage of their comparative strengths (in money, in global access, in ability to absorb losses), and figured out how to play the game like small companies without having to divest themselves of their size and power.

It remains to be seen whether modern political parties will prove to be too sclerotic and hidebound to learn from networked insurgent movements. They may simply be so big and entrenched that they are able to withstand passing trends in Internet politics. If Ehrlich is right, though, and campaigns like Dean's represent a fundamental shift in American politics, the choices for traditional parties are few: either ignore the new forces and wither or embrace them and be transformed.