The Year Past/The Year Ahead: The Editors and Writers of techPresident on 2011/12

By Micah L. Sifry

Technology and the Internet are changing democracy. TechPresident is one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists - we provide a daily pulse of reporting and updates on all the news that we think is important to our community of hacks and hackers.

Back during the first week of January 2011, things in the world of politics, technology, government and social change seemed more or less normal. Oh, and then there was January 6. Tunisia was experiencing a wave of protests and strikes, and we reported on how an effort by the Tunisian government to steal the Facebook and Gmail passwords of human rights and democracy activists had provoked a wave of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by Anonymous, the global hacking collective.

Suddenly, the world seemed to be turning faster. And indeed, as you read through this compilation of the best of techPresident from 2011, as well as the prognostications of thirty of our smartest friends and fellow travelers as they look at the year ahead, you can't help but be affected by just how much took place in 2011, and how hyper-empowered, hyper-networked people are everywhere the engine of this increased velocity of activity and tumult.

Of course, this is just the first draft of history.

If you want to know the real behind-the-scenes who, what, how, why, and where of 2011's when, from the Arab Spring to Wikileaks, from Occupy Wall Street to Ron Paul, this is your ebook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Personal Democracy Media
• Release date: Feb 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465836083

Micah L. Sifry

Micah L. Sifry is co-founder and editorial director of Personal Democracy Media, which produces the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference on the ways technology is changing politics, and techPresident.com, an award-winning blog on how politicians are using the web and how the web is using them. In addition, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. He is a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation, which he helped found in 2006, and also serves on the board of Consumer Reports. He is the author or editor of six books, most recently Wikileaks and the Age of the Transparency (OR Books, 2011), and in the spring of 2012 he began teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School. From 1997-2006, he worked closely with Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan organization focused on comprehensive campaign finance reform, as its senior analyst. Prior to that, Micah was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for thirteen years. He is the author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002), co-author with Nancy Watzman of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), co-editor of Rebooting America (available online for free download at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com), and co-editor of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003) and The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991). His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.

Book preview

The Year Past/The Year Ahead

The Editors and Writers of techPresident on 2011/12

Edited by Micah L. Sifry and Nick Judd

Copyright 2012 Personal Democracy Media

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

Cover illustration and inside layout by Thomas Charging Hawk. Cover Photo Credits: Tahrir Square camp - Ramy Raoof, Times Square protest - Micah L. Sifry, Ron Paul at debate - IowaPolitics.com, Protestors being hosed - Olly Wainwright, Multiply social engagement platform - Engage, Ballerina on Bull - Adbusters, Code for America - Code for America

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Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE -- The Arab Spring

Revolution Watch: Tracking Digital Activism Across Northern Africa and the Middle East

Egypt, Tunisia: Generation TXT Comes of Age?

Malcolm Gladwell Does Egypt

CHAPTER TWO -- Movement Times

#OccupyWallStreet: There's Something Happening Here, Mr. Jones

#OWS, The Other 98%, US Uncut & Rebuild the Dream: A Look at the Shoes That Didn't Drop

#OWS: Tech-Savvy Occupiers Hope to Open-Source a Movement

#OccupyWallStreet: A Leaderfull Movement in a Leaderless Time

CHAPTER THREE -- Transparency, Open Government and the Civic Space

'Through the Wall:' Code for America, One Year On

In Boston, City Hall Pursues Innovation In-House

Digital Mappers Plot the Future of Maptivism

The Fall of WikiLeaks: Cablegate2, Assange and Icarus

CHAPTER FOUR -- Watching the Data-Driven Campaign Unfold

Election 2012: It's Not Facebook. It's the Data, Stupid.

NationalField: The Private Social Network That's Reinventing the Ground Game

How Campaigns Use of Facebook Data Might Change the 2012 Election

In a Year of Local Labor Battles Nationwide, A Major Union Doubles Down Online

Americans Elect: Can an Internet-Powered 3rd Party Transform 2012?

Ron Paul Rebellion Breaks Out On Reddit

CHAPTER FIVE -- The Year Ahead: First, the Optimistic Views

CHAPTER SIX -- The Year Ahead: A More Pessimistic View

CHAPTER SEVEN -- The Year Ahead: The Future, It's Complicated

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Introduction by Micah L. Sifry

Back during the first week of January 2011, things in the world of politics, technology, government and social change seemed more or less normal. Here at techPresident.com, where we provide a daily pulse of reporting and updates on all the news that we think is important to our community of hacks and hackers, the first posts of the new year offered no hint of what was to come. Nancy Scola reported on how Newark Mayor Cory Booker tweeted up a storm during the great east coast snowstorm, a fine example of we-government but hardly an earth-shaking use of social media. Nick Judd reported on how other state and local elected officials were climbing on the social media bandwagon.

Nancy also reported on a trenchant critique of the internet freedom agenda by writer Evgeny Morozov, which raised sharp questions about the emphasis some US diplomats had been placing on platforms like Facebook to enable change abroad. And she brought the news of a promise by the incoming House Republican leadership to expand a public online archive of Congressional video, and the news of George Clooney's innovative use of satellite photography to monitor signs of genocidal attacks in the Sudan.

Oh, and then there was January 6. Nancy noted that Tunisia was currently experiencing a wave of protests and strikes, and reported on how an effort by the Tunisian government to steal the Facebook and Gmail passwords of human rights and democracy activists had provoked a wave of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by Anonymous, the global hacking collective. A few days later, on January 14, Nancy reported on WikiLeaks' role in what everyone now was calling the Tunisian Revolution, and the next day yours truly added a post urging that we not get caught up in the media hype to call the uprising a Twitter or Facebook or any other Device Revolution.

Suddenly, the world seemed to be turning faster. And indeed, as you read through this compilation of the best of techPresident from 2011, as well as the prognostications of thirty of our smartest friends and fellow travelers as they look at the year ahead, you can't help but be affected by just how much took place in 2011, and how hyper-empowered, hyper-networked people are everywhere the engine of this increased velocity of activity and tumult.

In this e-book, we've focused on the four major themes and trends that, for us at least, were at the center of technology's influence on the news and developments of 2011. The first, not surprisingly, is the role of the Internet in the revolutions that began in Tunisia and then spread to Egypt and beyond. The second is how networking has helped power the new Occupy Wall Street movement here in the United States.

These two subjects are obviously connected: organizers in the US cite the Tahrir Square uprising as inspiration, and when the Occupy Wall Street movement began in downtown Manhattan, it was activists in Egypt (as well as Spain and Greece) who were earliest and most vocal in expressing their support for the fledgling movement.

Of course, it is one thing to network to oppose those in power. And as we keep discovering, the Internet seems to help a lot in such efforts (though governments have certainly not stopped trying to clamp down on popular opposition). But the harder work of organizing positive changes in how government works that actually makes people's lives better is a topic that also deserves continued attention. And in 2011, we saw plenty of encouraging signs--especially at the municipal level--that a different way of doing things is starting to take shape. Thus, the third major theme of the year and in this book is the ongoing (though less explosive) spread of transparency and open government, and all the ways civic hackers and government players alike are starting to transform the civic arena.

Finally, no retrospective on 2011 and the role of tech in politics could avoid a close look at technology's ongoing use in national presidential politics. In these pages you'll find a detailed preview of the strategies of the leading candidates, as well our in-depth coverage of how all sides are using social media, big data and microtargeting in powerful new ways.

This book then turns from the year past to the year ahead with a symposium involving thirty of the smartest people we know from the worlds of politics, online strategy, activism, journalism and academia. All of them offer their unique perspective on how they interpret the events of the last year and project forward into 2012. No one knows what is coming ahead, but in these pages you'll find a clear-eyed guide to the kinds of questions we need to be asking and the trends we need to be following.

Of course, this is just the first draft of history. Years from now, we'll have a clearer perspective on what mattered and what didn't in the rush of events. So read these articles and commentaries as notes on a time in motion. Not the final word, just a beginning.

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Chapter One -- The Arab Spring

During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one communication to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another. Now we're in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn't spread very rapidly and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It's completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement. — Myles Horton, from his book The Long Haul, talking about his work with two American social movements, the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

In the early days of the revolution Egyptians are still fighting to keep alive, Nancy Scola ran a round-the-clock live blog to track and highlight the new and newish way that citizens and governments adapted revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tactics for use in the networked world.

Among her observations is this gem, written on the occasion of Hosni Mubarak's regime severing Egypt's access to the broader Internet:

The global shock and horror that greeted the Mubarak government's order last night to shut down Internet and mobile connections isn't, one imagines, what we'd see if they had closed the country's gas stations or even ordered all of Cairo's major roads shut down for the duration of the unrest. But it becomes almost a personal affront to anyone who uses and really likes the Internet to think that a leader of a nation would have the gall to simply shut down the Internet in his country. The idea of an entire nation of nearly 80 million people suddenly being dropped from the global network has a particularly horrifying character to it. It's the very idea of heightened connectivity that carries power, not necessarily the particulars of what people do with it in times of crisis. Simply put, it's the idea that is the Internet that political leaders like Mubarak will find themselves wrestling with in the future, not simply the tweeting or wall posting itself.

Writing a few days later, Micah Sifry suggested that if any technology played a catalyzing role in the uprisings of the Middle East and North Africa, it was the mobile phone.

Could it be, Micah asked, noting the high number of mobile subscribers per capita in Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan, compared with low subscription rates in Iran, Syria, and Yemen, that what we're witnessing is the political coming of age of Generation TXT?

Of course Malcolm Gladwell disagrees with us. In the New Yorker, he wrote, a few days later, Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.

Nancy's rebuttal:

One really wishes there were more meat on this bone. Surely the world is crying out for some well-done critical analysis on the subject. But, frankly, the premise doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense. Of course, people have long been oppressed, frustrated by dysfunctional governments. People have long rebelled. But hasn't the Internet managed to shape other fields of human endeavor that somehow existed before it came along in the late 20th century? People consumed the news of the day before social media. That doesn't mean that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube haven't changed how people learn about and discuss the world.

This argument would turn out to be one that would continue throughout the year.

Revolution Watch: Tracking Digital Activism Across Northern Africa and the Middle East

January 27, 2011 Nancy Scola

With things happening remarkably quickly in northern Africa and the Middle East, with protests against governments happening in Tunis, Egypt, and now Yemen, we've decided to try a different (for us) way of covering the developments, with a liveblog of sorts that's tracking all the different news bits, images, videos, observations and more that connect in some way to the central idea that people are using digital tools and media in these historic resistance moments in ways well worth trying to understand. Revolution Watch here isn't meant in the political sense, necessarily, but in the new and newish way that citizens -- and, by all means, governments -- are making use of everything from Twitter to blogs to to email to YouTube to Flickr to digital cameras to broadband to mobile phones to shape the worlds in which they exist. So let's get started. We'll be updating the post in reverse chronological order, and all items are stamped with eastern U.S. time. We'd love to hear what you're seeing, hearing, and thinking, so by all means get in touch.

Friday, January 28th

[9:18 p.m. -- Housekeeping] The liveblog is being put to bed for the night, at least. We'll reassess the situation as things develop in and around northern Africa and the Middle East, and make a decision about where we go from here. Thanks, as always, for reading.

[9:07 p.m. -- Facebook, Bloggers, and Egypt Last Spring] The New Yorker just popped out an article from behind its firewall that's a useful look at both the complexities of the political landscape in Egypt and the role that the Internet was playing in that country before Wednesday of this week, when the street protests began. The article, by Joshua Hammer, ran on April 5th of this year, and focuses on the eventual presidential prospects of Gamal Mubarak and Mohammed ElBaradei after the Hosni Mubarak era ends. Hammer writes of a visiting Mohammed Kamal, a leader in the Mubaraks' N.D.P party who help Gamal organize a webcasted dialogue with college students:

I met Kamal, a slight, affable man, in his office at the university’s Economics and Political Science faculty, where he teaches. He said that the youth vote was essential. Sixteen million Egyptians now use the Internet, and the vast majority of them are under thirty-five. We wanted something new, fresh, dedicated to engaging with Egyptian young people, he told me. Kamal was planning another Webcast, and, he said, we’ll probably have many more between now and Election Day.

I asked Kamal about the harassment and arrests of critics who propagate their views on the Internet. In July, 2008, fourteen young activists who belonged to a Facebook group expressing solidarity with striking factory workers were jailed for two weeks. Kamal shrugged. There might be some individual cases, but no government can crack down on the Internet, he said. In the case of the Facebook activists, the police said they went beyond just expressing a peaceful point of view. They participated in demonstrations, and might have provoked a riot. When I asked him whom the police were arresting, he said, I don’t know—you tell me.

Hammer writes about Egypt's sometimes harsh response to critical bloggers:

Gamal Eid, the executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, which tracks arrests, told me, Hundreds of bloggers are being summoned, kept for days, or weeks, or months, and then released. An activist from North Sinai who, under the pen name Mosaad Abu Fajr, blogged about human-rights abuses against Bedouins has been held since December, 2007, under the Emergency Law. The best-known case may be that of Kareem Amer, the pseudonym of an expelled student from al-Azhar University, who blogged about violent clashes between Christians and Muslims (often a taboo subject), mockingly referred to President Mubarak as a deity, and criticized Muslim leaders for their obsequious support of him. He was arrested in 2006 and was sentenced to four years in prison. It was meant as a message to other bloggers not to insult religion or insult the President, Eid said.

And the piece wraps with an especially striking passage. Hammer interviews ElBaradei, who had until this week been living abroad while hoping of a future where he would help to lead Egypt. ElBaradei explains to Hammer one development that has him particular encouraged about his possible presidential prospects -- the seemingly spontaneous creation of a Facebook group, supporting him, that he had nothing to do with:

While in Cairo, ElBaradei established the National Front for Change, which, he said, "includes every part of