Listen to the Rich Guy

Robert had shared this Joel Spolsky essay on "duct-tape programmers" the other day, and it was sort of bugging me. In searching for it again, I found that it's already received its share of criticism.

It did make me wonder what made Spolsky so willing to promote Jamie Zawinski's advice despite a lot of it appearing to me to be pretty badly misguided. And I guess it has to be because, whatever happened to Netscape later on, he got his zillions of dollars, making him a success by the only meaningful metric of capitalism. And therefore someone whose wisdom should be respected.

Aaaaand we're done here

Aforementioned C4SS blogger Thomas Knapp's credulity towards the "Tea Party movement" is the final straw.

"Little indication" it was an astroturf job? That's the whole point of the astroturfery, no? That it looks like the roots of real grass? Fortunately we don't have to rely on "indications," as the involvement of right-wing and business interests has been well documented.

Not likely to take on an "explicitly anarchist ideology"? I think you might be on to something there...the transformation of authoritarian right-wing populism into anarchism would be odd indeed.

So I'm done with them. It really gets me, as carrying water for proto-fascists who don't want to pay for public schools is exactly the kind of short-sighted tactical blunder for which Kevin Carson has so frequently excoriated libertarians. I had high hopes for C4SS but at this point they might as well be Reason.

Clowning the Discourse

Myglesias takes issue with Brendan Nyhan's approving link to Bob Somerby's criticism of Rachel Maddow. He has some worthwhile points, but there's a fundamental disconnect at play here in how these different media critics are coming at the show.

I think Nyhan is somewhat of an idealist who believes in and tries to work towards a more elevated public political discourse. Spinsanity really used to drive me nuts (during the 2004 election cycle, I guess it would have been) with how painfully even-handed it could be in the face of all sorts of right-wing vileness. Matt Yglesias is basically himself a pundit, and of course he's going to be pretty cynical about the political media; from that perspective, the existence of Democratic talking points on cable news beats is preferable to its non-existence, end of story.

Somerby is sort of a hybrid, eminently jaded about the state of the discourse, but committed to improving it because he's a true believer who is certain that liberalism will carry the day if things are hashed out in good faith on an even playing field.

Personally, I enjoy Somerby's vitriol but am probably closer to Yglesias on the cynicism scale. Not that the triumph of either of their brands of moderate liberalism is worth propagandizing or discoursing for in the first place.

VidProp

Via tiltfactor, an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post about war propaganda video games. I think it's interesting that the medium of video games is still young enough that this kind of propagandizing doesn't necessarily seem out of place. I think a lot of US-made World War II games, for example, present a perspective so simplistic and blindly patriotic as would seem crass (if not flatly offensive) were it in a movie.

AstroTurking

Last week DU told me about Amazon's "mechanical Turk" program, which is basically a framework that allows the hiring of human labor to accomplish very small tasks that are difficult for computers.

The implications are pretty awesome (in the sense of inspiring awe) and extremely creepy, and as DU pointed out its primary application right now is probably using Indian labor to game search engines and other similar sketchiness. Which is nothing new, of course; Amazon is just democratizing something you'd previously have had to contract out for.

In any case, it made me think that a good use for this would be political astroturfing. At one point in 2005 I tried to turn myself into a sort of volunteer Democratic operative on one web community. I created a pseudonymous account, and every day I would look at the DNC's latest press release and then go post a diary echoing the DNC's claims in my own words.

The intent was to help counter the constant drum of GOP talking points propagated by the Right-Wing Noise Machine. This proved essentially impossible, simply because the whole way the Might Wurlitzer works is through repetition: by the time you hear someone repeat some anti-Kerry slur reported by Wolf Blitzer as what "some leading Democrats are saying," you've already heard it from half a dozen Rush listeners, Leno viewers, workplace know-nothings and your great uncle's email list. As Digby reminds me, it's the constant reinforcement of these memes that makes them "stick."

In contrast, when I loaded up democrats.org each day, my first reaction would be "they're talking about what?" Not that their lines of attack were bad, but they just weren't being repeated anywhere: I'd listen to Air America and read a bunch of liberal blogs, and nobody would be focusing on, e.g., deforestation, or whatever the DNC was on about that day. I felt like my efforts were for naught because nothing I said had any resonance.

Anyway, all of this is a long preamble to the idea that something like the mechanical Turk program could be used for this kind of thing really easily. Like, each day have a specific idea or key phrase (say, that John McCain has a history of financial corruption, or just the word "McSame") show up posted by ten different people on each of the ten most popular political blogs or forums. At a dollar per comment that's only $100 a day. And no single comment needs to be persuasive or even really coherent, because the point is to just get it out there and resonating.

Sync these messages up to what campaign surrogates are saying in the media and I think this approach could be really effective. But even when instigated by a single lone actor it would accomplish much more than my solitary shilling ever could.