Half an hour in front of DC politicians

Tomorrow I'm doing the lunchtime keynote for the FieldWorks Technology Politics Summit. I have half an hour. Here's an outline of what I think I'm going to say:

1. I want to address two questions in a roundabout way. A. Why is it that when Dean supporters met, we'd frequently talk about what we didn't like about Dean, even while remaining fully licensed Deaniacs? B. WRT the Dean slogan, we have the power to take our country back from whom exactly? Why did that slogan work?

2. These questions are obscured by the rapid consolidation of inappropriate lessons we've taken from the Dean campaign, including that the Net is only good for raising money and all that social networking stuff was for naive girly-men.

3. So, let's accept (for the nonce) the view that politics is naught but a specialized form of marketing in which the only successful market share is 50% + 1. So, what's happening with marketing? Marketing is war waged against customers, but we're in revolt. Marketers no longer have control over corporate information. Networked markets are smarter than the companies they're talking about. [Yes, this is overtly Cluetrain-y.]

4. At the heart of the revolt is the human voice. We get to sound like ourselves in the new public world known as the Internet, rather than having to listen to the monotonous, inhuman, too-perfect voice of marketing.

5. Taking blogging as an example. It looks individualistic, but it's really about conversation and links. To see how unusual it is, look at the Dean blog: We've never before had someone who speaks for the campaign but in his/her own voice. This isn't good marketing. It's anti-marketing: It succeeds insofar as it stays off message.

6. To see the importance of comments (i.e., the blog wasn't simply a new type of broadcasting), you have to understand the Net's architecture. It is not a broadcast or publishing architecture. It's end-to-end. It succeeded by removing the controlling center, and by keeping the center as empty as possible so that innovation would happpen at the edges. The Net is the opposite of marketing. It is profoundly democratic. And it explicitly provided the model for the Net portion of the Dean campaign. (Meanwhile, Washington and Hollywood seem hell-bent on destroying the Net by misunderstanding it.) [I'm sneaking in World of Ends stuff because there will be people in the room — including Tom Daschle — who I want to yell this at.]

7. No wonder we're so eager to go wrong about the role of the Net in the Dean campaign. Campaigns are about top-down control of message. Kerry said ten words off mike and there was a firestorm. But blogs are always off mike. (We forgive ourselves preemptively.)

8. Back to the two questions. We talked about why we disliked Dean because it affirmed that this campaign wasn't about top-down marketing. It was about us. We were encouraged to go off message — that is, to appropriate the message in our own way — because the campaign is about us, not only about Howard Dean. That is, we are taking the country back not just from the lobbyists, corporations and Republicans. We're taking it back from the campaign marketers. We're taking it back from our own alienation. And that's a good thing.