Smart Mobs vs. Amway

A chill went through a lot of Democratic voters last week when they read Matt Bai's article in the New York Times Magazine on "The Multilevel Marketing of the President."

Bai details the ground-level Republican strategy for winning in Ohio, and other swing states, through a command structure that naturally compares to the pyramid marketing schemes of companies like Amway and Tupperware. Each layer of the pyramid is responsible for recruiting new entrepreneurs underneath them (their "downline"), and takes orders from and reports to the layer that recruited them (their "upline").

Karl Rove sits at the top of the pyramid, of course. Rove, who started out in direct marketing before becoming Bush's Brain, has adapted the approach into a sort of pyramid politics, as a way to get lots of door-knockers on the ground who can be vacuums for demographic data in the early stages, and in the later stages can be told what to say and do from back at HQ on really short notice.

Many Democratic readers wondered how the Democrats -- who are nowhere near as organized -- could compete with such a machine.

The answer, probably, is that the Dems won't. Instead, it will be the massive ad-hoc network of networks working feverishly to re-defeat Bush outside of the traditional Democratic machine, networks (self-)organized in a completely different way.

If Kerry wins, it won't be primarily because the Democrats made it happen; he will simply be the lucky beneficiary of numerous and diverse groups (MoveOn, True Majority, Americans Coming Together, Votewatch, NOW, the unions, most of Hollywood, numerous voter registration efforts, environmental groups, etc.) whose organizational model is as different from the Republicans as the Minutemen were from the Redcoats.

Or, in the open-source metaphor, as the Cathedral is from the Bazaar. The Republican worldview is the old paradigm: centralized, hierarchical, top-down, military command-and-control, the organizational model that has held sway since the Industrial Revolution. And they're masters at it, as far as that goes.

But this is the Information Age. The old paradigm can be expected to fight kicking and screaming (and who knows how far that will go, but that's another subject), but that won't change the fact that the organizational model for an information age is completely different: de-centralized, overlapping, emergent, self-organizing, adaptive, diverse, bottom-out social networks. Biology is a better metaphor than warfare; these are organisms, not organizations, and chaos is as important as order in making them function.

And they're using new tools. It wasn't command-and-control that got millions out in the streets before the war. It was e-mail. It wasn't a "machine" that launched Howard Dean to front-runner status. It was Meetups and the self-organizing website Deanspace. It wasn't traditional journalism that brought down Trent Lott. It was the bloggers.

As Howard Rheingold, who literally wrote the book, Smart Mobs, says: "Civilizations jump in complexity whenever a threshold for collective action is lowered. It's not just street protestors. It's science, democracy, markets, the way people meet and mate, the way people use cities and the way motor vehicles use roadways that are affected ... when mobile communication and pervasive computing enable new forms of collective action."

Flash Mobs Become Smart Mobs

Flash Mobs got a lot of press a while back as a wacky but pointless exercise in "swarming" enabled by text messaging. But the recent election in Madrid (and Korea and the Phillipines) changed literally overnight largely because of massive demonstrations that just "emerged" through text-messaging among participants, essentially political flash mobs. WhyWar has an in-depth analysis on "Swarming and the Future of Protest."