Towards The Quantum Democracy
Towards the quantum democracy?
I shouldn’t have been that surprised, when I checked the IP address of online campaign site Avaaz.org and found it terminated at a New York data centre facility. Nor, for that matter, to discover that 38signals.co.uk is using another US-based hosting company (this makes more sense when the search also turns up the company is using the same agency as Barack Obama’s campaign).
I’m not blowing anyone’s cover here, I just typed their addresses into a box and did a reverse lookup. You’d be a poor hacker indeed if you didn’t know how to do that already. (Not that anyone would want to hack campaign sites, would they? Interesting how both are using DNS Made Easy service, which was hacked ‘for unknown reasons’ (LINK: http://www.tcpipworld.com/dns-made-easy-suffers-from-break-in-ddos-attack/216) a year or so ago.)
The more pertinent point is that both sites (and others) are dependent on hosted services. Indeed, you’d be a fool to create such a site and run all the infrastructure yourself, particularly if you don’t know at the outset whether anyone’s going to buy into what you are campaigning about. You might as well use processing delivered by a third-party, to benefit from pay-as-you-use models which only cost more as they scale up.
It’s very difficult to know what’s going to need to scale in advance. The keyword is ‘viral’ – and we’re all well aware of the viral effect a well-planned online campaign can have. For a recent illustration look no closer than Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video, which has been watched 100 million times on Youtube and Vimeo since it was uploaded a month ago.
For every Kony 2012 however, there will be a thousand videos that didn’t grab the imagination. Campaigns are like pop songs. Anyone can create a ditty, record it and upload it (even if some people really shouldn’t), but that doesn’t guarantee an audience. The caring populace has too many pulls on its valuable time.
But neither do all ideas need to be as expensive to express as this particular 30-minute piece. With the free hosting facilities and blogging tools now available, anyone with the smallest amount of Web literacy can create a page, share it with their friends and see where it goes. Got a concern about the fate of your local armadillo sanctuary? Feeling miffed at the cleanliness of park benches? Want to do something about the demise of the apostrophe? If an issue is burning you up inside but you don’t know whether anyone else shares your anxiety, it takes only a few clicks to find out.
Current campaign sites want more certainty before they launch – which is one of the reasons the campaigns from the bigger campaign sites and so on fit reasonably rigid criteria. For example, Avaaz has adopted a process of peer review, followed by testing suggestions on a smaller poll group, before launching campaigns on a wider scale. Good ideas percolate through, hitting targets of relevance, currency and emotional engagement before making the big time.
The downside with this approach is the perception that supporters are not participating in anything at all – columnists such as Micah White have branded (LINK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism/print) such activity as ‘clicktivism’. “In promoting the illusion that surfing the web can change the world, clicktivism is to activism as McDonalds is to a slow-cooked meal. It may look like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone.”
While Micah White may have a point (LINK: http://interorbis.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/a-million-tiny-gestures/), he’s missing another – which is that the campaigns themselves don’t have to start in the headquarters of the organisations currently driving them. Online tools such as Spigit use game theory to let good ideas percolate themselves, and there is no reason why this model couldn’t be extended to armchair activism; meanwhile, it would cost pennies to launch multiple campaign sites, each nuanced differently to see what sticks, even with content changing dynamically according to behavioural measures. Without, Mr White, involving any of those nasty marketing types.
That’s just two examples to illustrate just how far we still have to go with public participation in world events (and I haven’t even mentioned Twitter yet). With the kinds of hosted functionality now available, we already have the tools and services not only to ask the world every single permutation of a question at once, but also to process and act on the answers in real time. When considered against the fickle nature of the human race, the result could prove to be more of a curse than a blessing but whatever the outcome, we are on the brink of finding out.