There is a saying about technology that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The idea is that if you don’t understand (at least in a general sense) all of the technologies that lead up to the iPod, an iPod seems like a magical device. I have been thinking about this quote for close to a week, due to a conversation that I had with a “connected” politician.
He told me that some of his friends that had worked on Bill Clinton’s campaigns had been frustrated by their involvement in the Obama campaign. They had never seen such a disorganized campaign in their lives.
I was floored. Here was a campaign that from all outward appearances was the most disciplined, best organized and best funded in history. It took me a little while to process what he was saying. Then I thought of the magic quote.
I think what we saw here was an evolution of campaigning from the old way of doing things (a top-down organization model run with military precision) to the new model (a grassroots organization with thousands of moving parts and no central control). I think it is analogous to the “encyclopedia” model to the “wikipedia” model.
I think that these old hands showed up ready to write an encyclopedia and found thousands of people putting the damn thing together one random fact at a time. As Donald Rumsfeld said, “Democracy is messy” and I love the messiness that we created this time around in the world of politics.