Transcript

How the Internet is Transforming Politics at the Organizational Level

February 02, 2012

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Media and welcome to another of our ongoing series of Personal Democracy Plus conferences calls that we do with movers, shakers, thinkers and doers, innovators all working at the intersection of politics and technology.

Today I’m excited to be bringing to your ears Professor Dave Karpf who is teaching at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, and we’re going to be talking about a new book that he’s just completed, it’s not yet out though I do have my grubby little paws on an advanced copy called The Move On Effect; The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy.

And I should say that Dave is an unusual sort of I guess you could say a switch hitter for someone writing on the subject because he comes at the topic not just with an academics eye and precision, but also with the experience of an activist.

For a number of years he was on the Sierra Club Board of Directors and also very active personally in the rise of the netroots, so he brings an eye to the subject that is not just kind of informed by the abstractions and the ways that academics will often study a subject, but with a real life sense of how stuff actually works.

So, we’re really pleased to have him and Dave, maybe to start things off, why don’t you take a couple of minutes and explain what you mean. I mean, we’re going to take most of the hour to talk about it but start us out.

What do you mean when you say, “The Move On Effect?” Are you talking about the way you can change politics if you have a big list and can raise a lot of money or are you going after something else?

DAVE KARPF: Sure, and thanks a lot for having this (inaudible) everyone. The Move On Effect -- one thing I want to make clear to begin with -- this is not a book about how effective is Move On, but we deal with that a little bit.

By the Move On Effect I mean specifically is changes in how organizations define membership and how they fundraise, and what that ends up meaning to the types of groups do we get in American politics and what they do in American politics.

So, the thing that I would draw everyone’s attention to is if you’re on Move On’s list then the emails that you get from them say three or four times a week are generally going to start, “Dear Move-On Member.” And that’s actually something -- it seems small but that actually turns out to be a very big deal.

You mentioned I had been involved in the Sierra Club for a long, long time. My instruction to activism came through the Sierra Club in the mid 1990s. I was in high school and (inaudible) throw moment sitting by a lake and decided I wanted to get involved with the environmental movement. And I sent money to Green Peace and the Sierra Club and this is previous back in the 90s, actually they’ve changed a lot since then.

But over the course of that following year, from Green Peace I got five things in the mail all saying, “We’re doing great work, please give us more money.” And from Sierra Club I got -- well those same things, but I also got local newsletters that invited me to come and participate at a face-to-face meeting and (inaudible) letters to do the same thing.

Sierra Club had this hybrid membership model where membership was both giving us money, this check-writing participation that arose out of the 1960s and 1970s once direct mail got cheap enough for non-profits to use it. But Sierra Club also had this old-style of membership of people coming in engaging with one another and participating.

That was an old shift in membership in the 60s and 70s that gave rise to the Green Peaces and the Environmental Defense Funds and all sorts of different advocacy groups to define membership merely by check writing.

And that new set of organizations changed how we engaged in politics. What I started noticing -- I joined the Sierra Club Board in 2004 -- actually while I was in graduate school, and what I was noticing while I was on the Sierra Club Board is that a similar shift is now going on that was led by MoveOn where MoveOn redefined membership again saying, “We don’t even want a check from you, we just want your email address so we can communicate with you.” That does let them raise lots of money from a big list and get lots of people out with the big list for a number of different events.

But more than that what ends up happening means that MoveOn engages with the members differently and they will actually note things about their members that like Sierra Club or Greenpeace can’t (sounds like: know). And that leaves a new generation of advocacy groups like MoveOn.org or like (inaudible)

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campaign committee and other (inaudible), are all like Daily Coast that has people going in and engaging through the blog but also emails to people now.

That allows them on a day-to-day basis to see what emails are tracking -- are attracting people’s cliques. Who’s opening what emails? What do they move to act on? Which means that they’re able to tell on a day-to-day basis what are the issues that their member care about and then direct resources in that direction.

It allows for what I call “passive democratic feedback.” For the older organizations that define membership through mail, they actually are unable to know an awful lot of things that (inaudible) know about what their members want to do.

And if you look at, for instance, the Wisconsin protests back in last February and March, those protests started as a state’s response to a state policy question and the labor movement got involved right away, but then what happened was in two days the netroots, seeing that this is something that’s important to their members, went and poured energy toward activism into it and really helped to nationalize that issue.

We didn’t see the non-labor, older single issue groups engaging around Wisconsin. They helped (inaudible) reality two weeks later that moved on to help organize. But besides that, they sort of stayed within their issue niche and we’re seeing this new generation of groups, these netroots groups that are multi-issue, progressive organizations and they can (inaudible) members and therefore go and actually engage with politics (inaudible).

So, that’s mostly what I mean by the Move On effect is when you change membership in fundraising, how does that get -- what does that do to groups?

MICAH SIFRY: Just to probe a little further on this; don’t those older groups also have big email lists? I mean, they’re not all relying on direct mail still, are they?

DAVE KARPF: Yeah, so a lot of them have developed email lists. The challenge, and this is (sounds like: Peyton Christensen) is a business school professor at Harvard who wrote a book about disruptive innovation in industrial sectors. This is back in the 1990s, so a very popular work today particularly when we look at how the internet affects all sorts of different fields. We want to understand how the internet affects newspapers, we’ve got to think in terms of disruptive innovation because what we see is the old newspapers do have websites, it’s the newer sites that don’t have a lot of (inaudible), they don’t have a lot of infrastructure that are actually able to engage in a very different and new way with the technology.

And what we see is even though the single issue groups are building big email lists, instead of things that have historically made them strong, also make it difficult for them to engage.

So, again to take the Sierra Club that I personally know best, the Sierra Club has got quite a large email list. Some of those people who receive emails are members of the Sierra Club, they pay dues every year and therefore they’re able to for instance vote in Sierra Club Board elections, but not all of them.

And so that means that Sierra Club and other organizations like them end up having multiple constituencies that they’re trying to juggle. They’re trying to find a way to serve the interests of their membership, people still writing checks, and they need those checks in order to pay for their infrastructure (inaudible), keep their staff working and continue at what they do well.

But it means that they’ve got that existing set of staff, they’ve got an existing membership base and then they’ve sort of got this new email list, which means that they can’t respond just to the email list, they have to pay attention to the different constituencies out there.

It’s very difficult for old organizations to sort of jettison all the things that make them strong for the very reason that it’s difficult for a Washington Post or a New York Times to say, “Well let’s just shut down the presses and move online.”

And in fact, like the New York Times or Washington Post, if they did decide to do that tomorrow it actually wouldn’t be a good idea. A lot of costs would be associated with it and it’s something which actually could go wrong.

So, it’s a lot easier now to start a new organization and really embrace the internet and engage in these new cool ways than for older organizations to re-tool themselves.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, that makes sense. But is this something that older organizations need to worry about? I mean for argument’s sake, shouldn’t there be room for both?

DAVE KARPF: It is something that we need to worry about. Again, newspapers are probably the easy example.

There is some room for both, I’m not sure how much room. And the reason is that the old organizations pretty much all came up through this direct mail era, which means that one of the major things that was helping them to keep the lights on and pay for their infrastructure (inaudible), those are big offices and big (inaudible), was direct mail fundraising.

Along with the rise of this email-based fundraising, we also see the decline of direct mail fundraising. When was the last time you actually read through all the junk mail that you get in your mail box every day?

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You used to write checks to organizations now we as a country sort of don’t do that anymore. Instead we’re paying bills online and also writing email checks online.

So, what that ends up meaning is that the old organizations that have got a lot of sunk infrastructure costs. They’ve got big (inaudible) offices in DC and lots of lobbyists. They’re increasingly finding a situation in which the money that they had as a baseline for building those offices is disappearing. It’s replaced by this online fundraising money, which is great if you want to put a 30-second commercial on the air. You can do a Move On style emailed to your entire list saying, “Here’s something that’s going on right now, we care about it, you care about it, please give us money to put it on the air.” It’s great for those issues to take actions, but it’s a lot less useful for general fundraising.

The thing that made direct mail kind of unique is that you were asking people for a $20 or $30 check for general overhead costs so you could use it to keep the lights on or pay for a (sounds like: training) department. Online fundraising is fantastic for those 30-second commercials, it’s less fantastic if what you need is big offices and a lot of field organizers.

MICAH SIFRY: We’ve seen some funding for field, too but what you’re saying is it’s harder to raise money for general purpose than it is to raise money for an urgent purpose.

DAVE KARPF: Right, yeah, and the times that we see funding for field -- what I hear from the organizations is that funding for field is really tough. And the time when you can fund well for field are like an organizing for America situation where you’re list is so huge and people understand so well that, “Yes, we need to win in Florida so I understand you need people in Florida,” that -- it’s a sort of unique situations where you find that happening. Whereas in general, online fundraising is fantastic when something has just happened in the news and you want help people react.

Now my guess is a set of organizations are doing great online fundraising right now around this decision by the Susan B. Komen Foundation. But you know, there’s probably also an email that just got sent out by National Organization for Women or some other women’s rights organization saying, “Hey, we do good work, please give us money for the year.” And my guess is the return rate is a lot lower on that than on the Komen email.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. So, you seem -- by the way, I should say I think the book is fantastic and full of really interesting insights. And so to some degree here I’m playing a little bit of the devil’s advocate to draw more of your ideas out. I don’t necessarily disagree.

But you seem very kind of optimistic about this transition, right? So, the Move On affect, if I had to summarize it, isn’t just that organizations that are primarily built around this sort of light online association, can be very nimble and can actually move affectively in close to real time in way that legacy organizations now are both -- have never had that ability and now even worse for them, the old way of raising money for their extensive overhead is starting to dry up.

Now, I think to some degree you are -- you know, your tone is that this is a good thing. And I wonder if you would defend that and furthermore, how do you respond to the people who say that Move On style activism is just clique-tivism; it’s just a very thinned out kind of commitment to political action and the Move On affect not only should be scaring these legacy organizations because it’s in effect -- they’re foundations are rotten timber eaten by email termites -- you know, the kind of activism that sort of comes up as a replacement is a much weaker kind of commitment.

So, don’t celebrate what Move On’s doing, mourn it.

DAVE KARPF: Right, so there’s a couple of responses I would give and I appreciate the question; it’s exactly the question to be asking.

In terms of am I optimistic or pessimistic, I say on balance I’m more optimistic than pessimistic but it’s only on balance. And the thing that we should -- back in politically like the 1990s, I’ve seen a lot of us who were studying the year in politics were very hopeful that this was going to be a revolution, that the internet was going to dramatically change how citizens engaged with politics.

And certainly I entered graduate school as the Dean campaign was happening, which is part of the reason that got me motivated for these questions. And that was looking like people are all rising up and (inaudible) power. And what we’ve sort of found instead is that the demand curve -- this is to borrow some language from Chris Anderson and (inaudible), the lower transaction cost of the internet gives us a fuller realization of the demand curve for political action.

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But what we found out with that demand curve is that it’s actually kind of disappointing. So, people are going online and engaging with groups more often than they were before. That I think is a good thing. Most of the groups that they’re engaging with are talking about basketball games or about television or about cat photos. So, that what we had sort of hoped that once we lower the transaction costs of engaging in politics, everyone’s going to throw off the shackles and engage in politics and what we found out is that an awful lot of politics -- like (inaudible) reform has very, very important and fundamentally kind of boring. Rachel Meadows did some great reporting about a year ago about just how boring that senate procedural material is.

And since it’s boring, we do get more people following it and more people in engaging with it before, but it’s not as many people as we had kind of hoped a few years okay. And so I think realizing the end curve a little better, it can be sobering but it’s also a positive.

The other thing I am concerned about it I think there’s an awful lot of -- the infrastructure of the older organizations that we really need and that I personally don’t know how to pay for. I (inaudible) training for the Sierra Club because of the (inaudible) arm and I think there’s few things that political advocacy groups can do that matter more for imparting citizenship than teaching motivated citizens how to effectively engage (sounds like: a community organizing).

MICAH SIFRY: This is the (sounds like: Bagdad) bureau argument for older organizations then?

DAVID KARPF: Yeah, so that’s certainly an argument for older organizations, but the challenge is there’s just not an awful lot we can do to help those organizations pay for training. The ideal would be if major donors on the left, like -- major donors on the right have spent -- for years and years have spent money on fundraising. Major donors on the left have never sort of really signed on for fundraising trainings. Major donors for the left have never actually put that much money into that sort of thing.

So, if my book leads to some major donors, the Democracy Alliance or some other step like them, realizing that, “Wow, there’s an awful lot of really important function through older organizations that aren’t going to pay for themselves anymore so we need to start writing checks,” then I’ll be tremendously happy with how the book is done. Because that’s the swing that we need, but it’s not (inaudible) come from people en masse deciding, “Rather than giving $10 to responding to the politics of the day,” again the Komen Foundation decision, “rather than that, I’m going to give $10 so an organization can go use it for whatever it think -- what they need it for.” That en masse is probably not going to happen because we also need to give money to the Komen Foundation and to (inaudible) around that. And there’s good reasons why people respond to the politics of the day.

So, that’s the first answer. The second regarding clique-tivism, you know the thing I always try to caution people in the clique-tivism conversation is we need to keep in mind what the MoveOn.orgs and the (inaudible) campaign committees and the Daily Coast are actually replacing.

I personally -- I prefer politics at the local and face-to-face level and there are some examples (inaudible)for America is a good example of organizations -- (inaudible) that’s sort of a general state that people have used, (inaudible).org has done good work as well.

We have examples of people using the internet to engage in face-to-face politics more, sort of on the cheap, and that I think that is an unvarnished plus. I just think that’s a good thing for democracy. But the thing the Move Ons are replacing with their emails are the mail tacticians. In the 1970s, we got this rise of arm-chair activism and membership stopped being about going an attending local meetings and it started being about, “I’m going to write a check and maybe I’ll sign a petition but besides that I’m not going to get involved.”

So, given that and given that when we actually look at the campaigns that Move On runs, (inaudible) groups (inaudible) run, they often are translating offline. They’re not just asking people to sign a petition but they’re saying that as a first step and then after people sign a petition then they send them an email saying, “By the way, there’s going to be a local meeting in your area, would you like to host a house party? Would you like to attend a house party?” and trying to get people involved at higher levels. That I think is a plus.

It’s not as good as the old federated civic associations that allowed for the movement activism of the 1800s and early 20th century, but that went away a long time ago and what they’re actually replacing, these single issue groups. Again there’s some functions that they perform very well, but in general when we say, “Oh Move On, that’s just clique-tivism,” what we’re forgetting is that they’re replacing something that we weren’t all that happy with either.

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MICAH SIFRY: So, is this a critique that you think only applies -- I mean, you focus on progressive groups, right? Move On, Sierra Club and so on. But for folks who are listening who may come from the other side of the spectrum, how true is this on the right from your research? And what is similar? And what is different?

DAVE KARPF: Right, great. Yeah, so the second to the last chapter of the book deals with the right. But what’s interesting in that chapter is it’s actually a study of the lack of a conservative Move On, the lack of a conservative Daily Coast, the lack of a conservative -- say, (inaudible), which is the fundraising site that the leftists use that’s phenomenally successful.

I set out wanting to study groups on both sides and then what I was finding is sort of this consistent pattern where every eight months to a year or so there were these newspapers articles about a newly-founded conservative organization that was going to be the Move On of the right. And then six months ago, about a year would go by and there would be another article saying, “Oh well, they collapsed.”

And so it actually turned into a chapter about why is that the case? Why is that when you look at Red State vs. Daily Coast -- Red Coast is the largest community blog on the right -- what we find is dramatically lower traffic lowers, dramatically lower participation levels.

And my explanation for that, which is different from some explanations out there, there’s still this instinct amongst a number of analysts that the internet is sort of a fundamentally liberal media; that it’s fundamentally progressive because it allows people to go and participate in a manner that maybe accords to the left somehow. And I find that actually to not to be the case.

I think that what we need to think about is the example of Talk Radio. So Talk Radio, we all know in America that Talk Radio is a right-wing dominated medium. And the explanation for that goes something like, “Well there are all these working class conservatives who are driving to work, listening to the radio and calling in and so it just sort of appeals and accords to conservative activists and conservative participants. That explanation never made sense to me because the last time I checked there were some working class democrats, too.

But what actually happened with Talk Radio it seems -- Talk Radio got big; Rush Limbaugh for instance was on the air but really didn’t get big until he had Clinton to beat up on. And what we see with the blogosphere is actually the right was pretty much leading online and Matt Drudge was this proto-blog that was far and away ahead of anything else out there in 1990s. And it’s not until the left is in power -- I’m sorry, the right is in power, the left really gained the foothold online.

So, what I tell -- and what I talk about in the book is the story of “Out Party Innovation Incentives.” I talk to a republican consultant who’s been involved with Personal Democracy Forum, John Henke, and he has this great quote where he said, “Well yeah, and the difference between left online and the right online is it’s a lot more fun storming the castle.” And throughout the Bush years when they were building these political blogs and they were building these organizations, the left was storming the castle, they were battling against the Bush Administration and the right didn’t have anyone to really battle against.

That was the story that I was writing around the 2008 election, when I was writing this as my doctoral dissertation. And then of course, Obama takes power and immediately we see the rise of the Tea Party who are arguing against taxes that actually hadn’t been -- in April when they made that argument, they were arguing against our tax levels when they hadn’t actually gone up yet.

No, that’s not meant as a criticism of the Tea Party, per se. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s how like some material thing changed and it led to this big outcry in (sounds like: text) policy. It said, “Once there was a democrat in office, that gave an awful lot more energy to conservative activist and they use technologies available to them.” So, it’s the left that those same technologies are available to them than the previous eight years.

So, what we’ve seen is conservative leading the online space that have developed since Obama took office. So, they lead on Twitter. They’re leading (inaudible) now. So, as you’ve found on (inaudible) Personal Democracy Forum on Tech President, (inaudible) is not as big as they sometimes claim. It’s just very hard to count those numbers well. It’s -- everything if very difficult to count when we’re counting online metrics.

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But we see them leading in those spaces, we see them (inaudible) the gap in terms of building their own Move On or in terms of building their own fundraising system or in terms of them closing (inaudible) on (inaudible). (Inaudible) the blogosphere authority and that trashed the top 25 blogs on the left and the right, and what I found consistently even though attention to conservative blogs did go up after President Obama took office, the left still leads (inaudible) across the board.

So, that’s --

MICAH SIFRY: So that would suggest the storming the castle theory isn’t quite explanatory enough.

DAVE KARPF: Yeah, the storming the castle theory gets us most of the way. It tells us under what conditions does one side start leading with the technology; what it doesn’t tell us is when do they close the gap and when don’t they close the gap because again, it’s -- the internet is still developing and so what we’re seeing it the side out of power is the side that we see great big innovations from with the newest online technologies.

I don’t have a good explanation, actually. I’m still a little befuddled by why they can’t build their own Move On. The latest attempt that I tracked was a site called Liberty.org. I was just (inaudible) by Eric (sounds like: Odem) I guess about a year-and-a-half ago and they again rolled themselves out saying, “We are going to be the conservative response to Move On,” and so I signed up for the email list and did the same sort of email tracking with them that I’ve been doing with Move On and all these liberal organizations.

And what I found is there’s some very basic stuff that the net groups do as best practices and teaches the best practices that have (inaudible) Nation that don’t for some reason get picked up by the right. So, things like action alerts; you know, if you want to build an email list then it’s a good idea to ask people to take action and forward it to their friends. And they send out surprisingly few action alerts.

There’s other sort of things which -- again, it’s not that they can’t do these things it’s that these are best practices that get taught amongst the progressive netroots that apparently don’t get taught amongst conservative netroots. I guess they call themselves the rightroots, so (inaudible) taught amongst the right groups at this point so we have this gap.

MICAH SIFRY: Could it also just be -- I mean, just to stick with the political ecology metaphor that there was a different kind of gap or vacuum on the progressive side than whatever gap or vacuum may exist on the conservative side.

I mean my sense is that you do have a lot of strong conservative, you might call them single issue organizations or they work on issue clusters, and thus not nearly as much space for some multi-issue group to kind of come in.

And secondly, Move On -- I mean, I think they’ve done a very good job of listening to the changing attitudes of their “membership,” and they also gained a lot of members when they endorsed Obama and -- because Obama was pulling younger and a more diverse group into the online arena.

But there hasn’t been -- you know, first -- I mean, when I think of like the big online conservative list, first of all I think they’ve got between the gun groups and the churches, they’ve already got quite a bit of local infrastructure, veterans groups as well. And then you think of things like Sarah Palin, right, who -- I mean, there’s a bit of a competition right now among a number of different actors on the republican right to figure out who will be the one to rule them all.

But there’s a lot of individual entrepreneurs there. I mean Newt has a huge list, too, right? And it’s just that they’re more tied to personalities than they are to an attempt to sort of build an over-arching -- but presumably the older conservative groups that are raising lots of money from direct mail must be facing the same problem that you’re describing for liberal groups, no?

DAVE KARPF: Yeah, they must be, yeah. Now again, part of this gets into the ecology metaphor is the right metaphor, it’s (sounds like: difficult) as an academic to take it beyond a metaphor because so much of what we would actually need to look at, things like details of peoples’ budgets aren’t just public so it’s kind of a non-starter for me to go very far with it in the book.

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But to trace it out because it is the right metaphor, the groups on the left don’t rely entirely on direct mail, it’s one of their fundraising streams and it’s an important one. And so with that fundraising stream fading away they need to either cut infrastructure costs or find other ones that can replace it.

My impression again just based on what I know of the differences in habits among these conservative big donors and liberal big donors is that conservative big donors have historically been more comfortable writing big checks, big general checks and entrusting to organizations, think tanks for instance, to sort of do good work with them.

And donors on the left have been a common critique amongst the left for about at least 15, 20 years is that they don’t make those same investments long term. So, I would expect that the long-standing conservative groups -- if that expectation holds true, and again nobody’s opening up their books publicly for plenty of good reasons -- no good reason for them to do so just so I can have a satisfactory answer for myself. But if I’m right about their state about their funding ties then that’s going to mean they’ll feel this Move On affect a little less strongly than the liberal one.

MICAH SIFRY: So, they’re being propped up more by larger donations already. Yeah, that makes sense.

DAVE KARPF: They’re able to fund on it, yeah. Now there’s one thing I want to note about what you just said for intra-party competition amongst the conservatives, I think that’s actually -- my impression is that’s very important.

One thing we need to keep in mind is that it wasn’t like George Bush took office and three months later, Move On was gargantuan and we had a bunch of other new groups that have appeared. Daily Coast got started in 2003; Move On existed since 1998 but didn’t get big until it became the hub for Iraq war activism.

And what we actually saw was 2004 of course, the left fought hard and lost and after that there was an awful lot of calls both in the blogosphere and in print. Amy Sullivan’s great print article titled, Fire the Consultants and sort of within the last -- because they lost multiple elections in a row, that led to this internal -- let’s call it a conversation where they said, “We can’t keep on investing in this same old groups as they keep losing.” That’s because they lost multiple elections. After one election they weren’t ready to say, “We need to kick the old people out and bring somebody new in, and bring some new people in,” it was only after they lost multiple cycles.

So, one difference that we see certainly with the Tea Party rising up so fast is that we didn’t see that same throughing up -- organic throughing up of resentment amongst conservatives because they lost one election and they went and invested and won the next one.

I think if we had seen them lose in 2010, then actually we would probably see the rise of more conservative style Move Ons because that would have led to an awful lot of discomfort amongst those players within the republican party and that would have led them to go fund different things and go start different things.

Since they won so quick, that’s allowed them to tamp down on this -- as you said, we sort of got an awful lot of personalities fighting amongst each other rather than some one new person rising up and getting anointed.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, very interesting. I’m going to pause here and just see if anyone who is listening wants to join the conversation with Dave Karpf about the Move On effect and more broadly about the way that technology is changing the nature and structure of political organizations in the United States, just his *6 on your phone and I’ll pull you into the queue. So, let me just pause for a second if anyone does want to ask a question, we’ll give them a chance to do that.

So if not, I’m always good for more. Okay, so don’t see anyone jumping in just at this point.

So, I’m tempted to ask you about the free agent affect and whether it trumps the Move On affect. And what I mean by that is you know, this is a little bit of quasi-channeling Clay Shirky and his notion of organizing without organizations. But it is really interesting to see how often this happens now where someone who is not necessarily a political professional enters the arena because for some very visceral reason and because the network (small “n”) is tuned -- people will share stuff that resonates, they will -- this sort of visceral cry for help.

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But for example, we see this happen on Reddit a lot where someone who is clearly not a pro says, “Darn it, I’ve just had it and you get a (inaudible),” and the next thing you know it’s got hundreds of comments and a swarm sort of coalesces around somebody. And if that person is prepared to take the next step they can very quickly form a kind of proto-political group.

Likewise with messages that -- I mean, when you look at what happened with It Gets Better where a sex columnist named Dan Savage writes a very personal response to the wave of gay teen suicides that happened about a year ago, and then puts up a video and the next thing you know strikes such a resonant chord, I mean that’s also a free agent. That’s not a Move On, I mean -- maybe it was much later that a group like Move On emailed its members and said, “Hey, check this out.”

So, where does that fit into your taxonomy and does this new -- do you think this phenomenon is significant? Do you think it represents a challenge to existing organizations whether it’s the legacy ones or the kind of new Move On style ones?

DAVE KARPF: So -- yeah, I would say it is significant. I would say it actually ends up fitting together very well with the Move On affect because like you said, we have -- you know, somebody in Reddit can write something and that attracts a lot of attention and they basically form a proto organization.

The Move On affect for me is often about what happens at large scale. It absolutely -- and I find myself -- I figured on 98 percent (inaudible) Clay Shirky that the space we disagree is that -- then again, his tag line is Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and my (inaudible) says -- well, we largely see in big cases in organizing through different organizations.

But those different organizations are what happens once things reach large scale. So, it’s -- the way that things bubble up or the way organizations form has been changed by the internet. Then at some point if the email chain is successful and they end of with a list, one of two things can happen with that list; it can either lie dormant and never get emailed again, that happens plenty. But if that happens that’s sort of an awful lot of potential energy that doesn’t turn to kinetic energy, it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s never emailed again.

If it gets emailed again, then eventually what happens is these new netroots organizations notice it and come and help out and pile up. And that’s when we often see things scaling up because again, this is barring from a David Weinberger (inaudible) on the internet, the internet is a system of edges, but also a system of hubs. So, we have end-to-end communication where -- or many-to-many communication, but also in the din that forms out of that information abundance, hubs become tremendously important in allowing people to communicate and allow people to find information.

So, it’s important I think for -- it gets better that it’s Dan Savage writing that message because he’s well known, he’s well (inaudible), he’s well read. So, when he writes a message it’s read by millions right away whereas is somebody just outraged by seeing that who has no audience (inaudible), maybe it gets picked up by Reddit and so we still have a different group formation process.

But eventually if they’re successful then they become a hub. And once they become a hub then other hubs and other organizations start interacting with that. Move On is about how once we get large scale, the organizations operate differently.

MICAH SIFRY: Speaking of large scale, I mean another thing that you touch on in the book which I found really interesting was how some of this is becoming professionalized, and also I wanted to ask you to what degree do you think these new methods are being co-opted? And that the -- if it’s originally the energy of storming the castle then you’ve sort of made it over to kind of batter this metaphor -- you make it over one of the ramparts and you feel like you have some access now, right? You’re Marco (inaudible) and they’re inviting you on to Meet the Press and top politicians are coming to your national conference. Does that change the way that these organizations can function, too?

I mean, I can argue both sides of this. I actually think that -- I mean, everybody is vulnerable to being seduced by access and seduced by status and seduced by money. Do you think that the -- to stick with the Move On frame, Move On organizations are more vulnerable to that? Less vulnerable?

You know, the problem -- then you win, right? You elect someone. How do you hold them accountable if they were the person you supported and now the only way to hold them accountable is to criticize them?

0:40:43

Is it different for a Sierra Club, right, which has a professional organization in Washington and maybe has a Board who votes on who to endorse versus a netroots organization that at least in theory is polling its members every week to see if they’re in tune with their members. Who’s more accountable to their base?

DAVE KARPF: Right, and so I would say -- I think the netroots organizations are a bit more accountable because on a day-to-day basis, specifically the fundraising they’re doing is mostly for these one-shot actions. If you take for instance, the Patreus ad that Move On famously did that got them censored by Congress. That was an ad that was tremendously popular with the members, it was not popular with non-members.

But one thing some Move On people pointed out to me is that if the membership hadn’t liked that they wouldn’t have -- they wouldn’t have been able to raise the money to put the ad out there. These netroots organizations because they’re nimble and because they have such low overhead costs, they need to pay attention to the whole (inaudible) memberships because if they start working on issues that the members don’t care about, the members won’t donate to it then they can’t really work on those issues.

Now I would say that the challenge of what do you do once you become -- once you build a reputation. That’s sort of dynamic tension that I think in many ways is unchanged by the internet. That’s always sort of been there and it’s always a big challenge. Another thing that’s always been a big challenge is the difference between the politics of reaction and the politics of articulation.

So, the storming the castle (inaudible) from like an organizing level really pretty easy, where your opponents are in charge of the government, they want to accomplish something, you want to stop it, you’re trying to tip the status quo and you’re sort of giving a simple message to your members of, “Listen, this is happening, it’s bad, we need to raise a ruckus to stop it.”

The difference between that, which is a very simple message and say, ‘what happened with the health care fight?’ where -- the message gets complicated for the left because it ends up being a matter of we want this health care legislation to pass, we would like it to be really strong, there’s this very convoluted civic process that it’s moving through and therefore there’s an awful lot of bargains that are going to get paid.

And so there’s this sort of internal tension that surfaces to the netroots and everybody on the (inaudible) side of, ‘what do we do about something like the public option?’ And it was the netroots groups (inaudible) change campaign committee that first built their organization around that issue. They had already started but that’s where their membership got paid.

They were the leading organization fighting still for public option after an awful lot of healthcare, civic organizations had said, “Yes, (inaudible) we give up.”

So there are a lot more niches that can get filled by these netroots organizations because there are a lot of people in the country who like the public option and therefore want to support an organization around it.

But that (inaudible) tension is actually one that I think the organizations were aware of going in and I certainly -- when Obama got elected it was my standard thing whenever I was talking to a (inaudible) organizer is, you know, the set of tools you developed for engaging around politics when the other side is setting the agenda, they’re all going to work a little funnier now because you can no longer say to your membership, ‘we’re trying to pass this thing, help us stop it.’ Instead you’re saying that membership is sort of weirdly nuanced thing of we want to pass healthcare reform and want you (inaudible) good and we’ll let you know whether we think it’s good enough.

And this is one of the fundamental problems that Organizing for America faced is Organizing for America was organizing phone banks around healthcare, around the healthcare reform bill but they weren’t able to say anything about the public options while it was being debated because no matter what (inaudible) was going to support the bill, you know? President Obama’s organization, the DNC wasn’t going to not support it so while that fight was going on of how hard should we push Congress to make this a really good bill, their hands were tied in a manner that is a very real tension, it’s not a simple answer on how to get out of that.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. There’s someone waiting to ask a question here.

PARTICIPANT 1: Hi, it’s me again, it’s Loralei Kelley. Thank you David, for having this talk, I appreciate it so much and for PDF. Thank you for having this talk. My name’s Loralei Kelley, I’m in DC.

I have a question about a few of the things you’ve said. I just finished doing a big research project where I interviewed dozens of staff on how they’re filtering the noise of incoming communication because of social media, and something I found -- and I worked on the Hill for almost 10 years -- is that there just seems to be so few institutionally-acceptable steps forward with this kind of coordinated swarm (inaudible) that’s kind of a surround in shame or surround and punish loud method of influence for institutional purposes.

0:46:02

I think it works really well for partisan and political purposes but one of the things I heard repeatedly from staff in different words was that they don’t have an information problem, what they lack contacts and expert judgment. And I guess the technology words for this would be (sounds like: turration) and high-quality filtering.

And what’s happening is staff is just spending inordinate amounts of time just managing communication, they’re not becoming smart about the precursors or the second or third order affects of policy decisions.

And you were saying that online actions are responding offline and organizing. I don’t see this sort of high reputation validators or the high academics or the retired foreign service officers or those folks participating in these kinds of organizing for institutions that sort of have to happen if we want the policies that we want to make any difference in the long run because facts don’t have the required political constituency to be prepared for combat in the same way as a lot of these bills.

And I don’t know if that’s making sense at all but last year, you know, the (inaudible) committee got held hostage to unemployment benefits and I don’t even have to remind you of what happened to climate change, it’s not a religious litmus test.

So, what do you have to say? Do you see that kind of really important substance of organizing happening?

DAVE KARPF: Yeah, so I -- that’s a great question. I see two different items there that I’ll respond to: one is sort of -- there’s this -- the danger of echo chamber affect of what do we do when life can get forwarded around just as easy as truths and within echo chambers it’s (inaudible) tell the difference.

I personally do not think that without the internet we would have had the (sounds like: burser) controversy and all of its stupidity. I think that is something which is a negative impact to the internet. But overall I’m still an optimist I think we get more positive than the negative ones.

But that was a new form of craziness and so that ends up being challenging because like you said, this leads to a filtering problem or a (sounds like: puration) problem of how do we (inaudible) signal versus noise?

And the only answer -- I think that is one of the questions that we will have to figure out, we will be forced to figure out in the next five to 10 years as the internet continues to develop. That is the big challenge in terms of civil society that we’re going to have to (inaudible) out and right now there isn’t a good answer that I’ve seen actually -- or a good simple answer at least.

The other thing that I’m noticing what you’re saying, I talk a little bit at the end of the book at what I call “Innovation Etches.” And this is actually going to form the pattern of what is going to be a later book that I sort of am kicking around in my head. I would be that sometime in the past year there has been a petition that went to Congress that included a lot of academics or a lot of notables. And when that happened it probably got a lot of attention.

Part of why it got a lot of attention and part of why it presumably worked well is that it’s innovative, it’s new, we don’t see that very often and since it’s not seen very often, it cuts through the noise, it produces signal.

That’s actually a feature of the political system that I think has always been there but we see more rapidly now in the internet era, which is a tactical -- it is a lot more valuable when it is first used than when it’s used for the 10,000th time because once it’s shown to be effective -- so for instance, if we started having petitions that regularly had academic finding on to them, then what you would see is that since they’re being used by everyone and since then people on the other side of an issue who don’t have so many (inaudible) this side would -- I don’t know, probably give fake title to (inaudible) too much people think it would have its own experts.

0:50:15

We saw this last year on climate. There was a climate petition that got sent around by people who claimed to be scientists who said they had an issue with climate science and it turned out that an awful lot of them weren’t quite scientists at all, a couple of them were like high school biology teachers, a couple of them had no degree of any sort but they didn’t like it so they wanted to sign on.

And so that’s one way that those sorts of petitions get noisier. That process of getting noisier will always be with us, it’s the future of innovation in systems. And it’s actually something that I think can’t be fixed, it will always be with us. But what it means is that there’s added value on important issue for being a little innovative, for figuring out what is the thing that hasn’t been done before because by doing that we will then actually be able to cut through the noise and produce signal. And if you do it once and it works, that actually doesn’t mean when you try it again five years from now it’ll work as well because everyone else will adapt it.

MICAH SIFRY: We’re almost out of time so I’m going to as you two last questions to tackle that are sort of out cases maybe. One is, have you been keeping an eye on the efforts of groups like No Labels.org, which Mark McKinnon, I once heard him describe it as -- that he was trying to build a Move On for the middle, right? That that’s the theory behind that is to somehow gather the moderates into a big list. So, I’m wondering what your observations are on their efforts.

And then the other which is we just saw something very unusual happen in opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills, classic cases of lots of groups rallying their supporters or fans to oppose a bill, but this was the first time that I’ve seen companies, whether they’re for profit or non-profit like Wikipedia, interrupt their user’s experience directly to call on them to be politically active.

And that’s quite an interesting development. So, I’d love your thoughts on both of those.

DAVE KARPF: Sure, I’ll answer the second one first since that’s a shorter answer there and I’ll leave the first one to -- one at a time.

On the second point, yeah, that was amazing. I occasionally blog and it’s called ShoutingLoudly.com. And I took up that issue a couple days after it happened. That is think is perfect example of an innovation niche; Wikipedia and Google did their -- and other organizations as well, but without Wikipedia and Google that tactic doesn’t work nearly as well because again, they’re the biggest of the hubs.

That was just the perfect example of something that has never been tried before and that is the big part of why it’s valuable. If they were to do that once a week, once a month, it would actually be pretty effective just because of the sheer number of people who would then be seeing the intervention that otherwise wouldn’t hear about it.

But part of what made that so valuable is when Wikipedia and Google decide to go dark and (inaudible) and Google change their cover page, when they do that that then has the entire mainstream media writing articles about Wikipedia and Google going dark because it’s a story. (Inaudible) do it it’s no longer a story.

And so that prompts further identification and also you’ve got actual members of Congress visiting Wikipedia and Google during the course of the day and realizing, “Wow, what is this thing?” Which means that amongst all the different bills out there and up until then, even though there have been some noise and there have been some protests, you know, my guess is that there are a lot of people in the House and Senate still haven’t identified SOPA people as something that needs to be personally aware of and personally see in their position because there are thousands of Congressional bills and they pay attention to the ones that -- it’s been identified to them, it’s just really important right now, you need to. And so that going dark again, force them to pay attention. And we saw just a dramatic, dramatic effect that’s (inaudible).

I would say that that -- again, I would say that that’s a positive thing. I would be cautious in calling it a revolutionary change because at the end of the day what we’re really seeing is the companies that provide new media realizing that they need to be politically engaged in the same way that the companies that provide old media are.

Now if they follow up and continue to get actually engaged, that means that we eventually actually see some motion on important but under-represented issues like copyright. Copyright regimes are a joke right now because we’ve got a big set of media players that care a lot and everybody is kind of frustrated but has no voice. And if Google and Wikipedia and everyone decide, “You know what, that was actually very important and we need to start having a lobbying presence and start engaging with people,” then we may start seeing motion on those important issues that we never see motion on.

But it’s still going to be -- instead of just one industry dominating the consumption policies, we’re going to have two industries fighting it out.

MICAH SIFRY: Well, we could actually go off on a longer tangent here, I just want to make one comment. I think you’re right about Google, I don’t think you’re right about Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s not a company, it has no business, it’s not making money off of violating copyright or something.

0:56:00

So, we’ve got to make a little more room in this picture for the possibility that there’s something about the nature of internet entities, whether they’re for profit or non-profit, being more susceptible to the needs of their users, they obviously are run by people who don’t want to destroy the thing they’ve created.

And so I’m not sure that this does really all boil down to one new interest group deciding to use tools that it happens to be very good at against another interest group that was using say the old tools of influence.

But let’s go to the No Labels thing just to get your final thoughts on that since we’re really just about out of time.

DAVE KARPF: Yeah, and --

MICAH SIFRY: A Move On of the middle, is such a thing possible?

DAVE KARPF: So, Jim Hightower has a great quote from over at (inaudible) that “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.” That is largely the case that we find online.

That (inaudible) blogosphere authority and (inaudible) the left and the right, I wanted to track the centric blogosphere as well. It turns out that there are no hub centric (inaudible). There are no big political blogs with a centric perspective. That’s not because no one’s ever tried to create one, that’s because the underlying demand curve for centrist political action just isn’t all that great.

And what I thought when I first so No Label that’s (inaudible), is that it would work out great if there was actually a big brewing center of this country that wanted to be totally engaged but didn’t feel represented by the left or the right.

What is actually the case is that -- and we don’t need to get into has the left moved to the center, has the right moved to the center, has one or the other moved away? In general and this is again political science researchers have found this to be true that people who get most engaged in politics tend to be people who are either on the left or the right because they care enough to get involved and therefore they end up involved in parties in moving this party toward their position.

And so while there are lots of centrics in the country, part of why there’s centrus is because they don’t actually want to follow the politics that much and therefore they don’t get very engaged and so they just feel unrepresented.

Trying to get that big center, and No Labels isn’t the first group to try this, we’ve had lots of groups that have said, “Let’s try to get recent centrus discourse now that internet has released all this pent up energy.” And the reason I’d be shocked is that (inaudible) another attempt at that really worked out is it just -- well we’ve got a big center, we don’t have a big motivated center.

The internet at the end of the day is fantastic for allowing communities of interest to come together and engage with one another. (Inaudible) the free agent affect and then later the Move On affect.

And so if it’s good for community interests coming together and there isn’t much of a community around that interest, they’re not a really big passionate community around that interest, then you can throw a lot of money at the organization but it’s not going to (sounds like: move).

MICAH SIFRY: Very shrewd analysis there. I’m going to make sure Mark McKinnon hears. Thank you Dave, this has been great.

Again, we’ve been talking with Dave Karpf. When is the new book coming out, Dave?

DAVE KARPF: The book comes out sometime in May. We now have an Amazon page.

MICAH SIFRY: Excellent. So you can pre-order copies on Amazon. It’s The Move On Affect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. You heard it here first on Personal Democracy Plus.

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