Archive for December 30th, 2008

Ari Melber, writing in The Nation, discusses the options Obama’s administration will have given the persisting digital connections between voters and his presidency – the phone numbers, email lists, MyBO members and the existing desires, manifest on Change.gov, to be involved and heard by the transition team.

He touches on a worry I’ve had, given Obama’s support and his unprecedented network to them.

Many Obama supporters want the network to turn from electoral politics to lobbying. After the election, half a million activists responded to an e-mail survey about the road ahead. The most popular goal was to help the administration “pass legislation,” according to campaign manager David Plouffe. If Obama’s initiatives stall in Congress, these activists will presumably back him instead of their local representatives. Combining the White House bully pulpit with constituent lobbying could have a dramatic effect on Obama’s presidency. Previous presidents have gone over the heads of Congress by appealing to the public, of course, but never with a parallel whip operation targeting representatives in their backyards. If the pressure works, the experiment could even alter the conventional balance of power. After all, citizens typically lobby the legislature for their own policy goals–not on behalf of another branch of government. While George W. Bush boosted executive power by routing around Congress, Obama may fortify executive power by mobilizing citizens to roll right over Congress.

The worry is that because local representatives do not have the digital Rolodexes stretching into the millions, they will not be able to motivate their constituents to the same extent Obama will. Any basic civics course will teach why slow deliberation is desirable, but Obama’s potential ability to force the hand of legislators will continue the consolidation of power in the executive branch that George W. Bush has so forcefully done.

Melber rightly points out, though, that the network isn’t merely a push medium – as Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler have so convincingly shown in Here Comes Everybody and The Wealth of Networks, respectively, digital tools empower the individual, as well. He points to MyBarackObama members using the campaign’s social network to protest against Obama’s support for warrantless wiretapping. The example, though, points to the unfortunate reality: although Obama heard the dissidents, he didn’t change his upcoming vote.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether other political offices can take advantage of the same tools. Are local representatives able to attract widespread attention for their social networks? It certainly makes sense to have an agora where all politicians could hear the voice of the people without CNN’s filters or Fox’s bias. Does it make sense for Congress to have a social network? Or, as the article points out, will that only be one more node that organizers have to address? Perhaps data portability can become a democracy 2.0 theme?

What do you think?

My friend Ben’s new post musing about the commons reminded me that I never posted a review of Michael Heller’s “The Gridlock Economy” that I read over Thanksgiving weekend. Unfortunately, I’ve neither my book nor my notes, so this will have to be brief.

Heller is a law professor at Columbia and writes one of the most important books that the free culture movement has ever received. The subtitle of the book is, “How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives” and Heller does a terrific job of providing an approachable explanation of why private property is not an absolute good, but instead a institution whose prevalence must be tuned to the happy medium.

Since the 1960s, the idea of a “tragedy of the commons” has been well-known to economists, lawyers and policy makers. A commons, where no one owns private property, is threatened by overuse: if everyone’s cow can use the local field, people will not manage the property correctly and the commons will be tragically over-grazed. This observation, generally applicable to many domains, was a part of the reason towards privatization – if not enough property is tragic, more property must be good! Or so the reasoning went.

Heller, however, realized that too much property can be bad. He first noticed this in post-Soviet Russia as a World Bank analyst. While the store fronts were empty, just feet away thousands of street vendors sold every good imaginable (but mostly just vodka and Tolstoy… just kidding). The reason, he realized after speaking with the vendors, was that to set up a formal brick-and-mortar store required jumping through numerous hoops. A street kiosk only required 1-2 bribes to be in business.

Heller calls this the “tragedy of the anticommons” and it shows up all over:

• Competing property claims stops nearly all airport expansion in the U.S., leading to innumerable delays.
• Patent thickets stop the development of new drugs
• The wireless spectrum is poorly allocated due to an anticommons
• African-American farms are split up over generations into smaller parcels until they are worthless and sold

The list goes on and causes serious economic and social ills. One of Heller’s main goals with the book is to raise public awareness of the problem because it can be solved, but only if it is correctly diagnosed as gridlock. So, go buy, borrow or rent the book, and read it!