I don’t want to be the one who always trumpets my “I Told You So” moments. In fact, if someone can find a ear-clangingly awful prediction of mine somewhere on the intarwebz, please point it out to me. I’d love to be chastened.
Enough modesty.
Back on December 8th of last year, I wrote a post called “The Obama Techno-Cool Bubble”. I wrote it in response to all the old establishment geezers wheezing rhapsodically about the large “base” of supporters Obama had managed to accrue on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. These Eastern Seaboard/Beltway lefties saw a future of Total Progressive Techno-Domination, where every social networking and Web 2.0 site was used in the most ingenious way by the web savvy Obama and his coterie of techno-hipster Apple Store employees. At the time, my spidey-sense was tingling, and I said so:
Now, I know this spits in the face of all the hope we've been brewin' over these past few months, but can I ask: Can anyone prove to me that the entire Obama-netroots organism is different from other Web 2.0 phenomenons?
Show me one sustained web-event. Nearly all of them have a brief tizzy of wild popularity followed by a dramatic dowsing……There's a cruelly funny quality to this situation, where all these D.C./political types are giddy over the prospects of politics being permanently cool. I don't buy it. There's just gotta be a decline in political awareness…
…We millenials are a proud people, lazy and slack. We practically invented the digital poseur. Why should that change now?
And then, what do I see in this The Nation blog post from earlier today?
For a change of scenery [they had managed 26 whole signatures at the Brooklyn Ikea –ed.] we headed over to the nearby grocery store Fairway, where the three encountered considerably less enthusiasm. The customers were mostly Obama supporters, but few wanted to sign the budget pledge. Among the responses:
"Obama personally knows I support him. Trust me. I could call him right now."
"I voted for him, I gave him money, I'm a supporter. But I don't want to give out my email address."
"A this stage, I'm really disappointed with him. He loaded up the budget with earmarks and blamed it all on the Republicans!"
After thirty minutes, Erica had collected ten forms and Shanice only six. They were ready to head back. "I thought people would be more enthusiastic about Obama," Erica said. "They're suffering from Obama fatigue," Tremis responded. "The side effect is they don't want to hear about it anymore."
What?! You mean that a bunch of high-school kids, college students, and mindless Jon Stewart followers aren’t interested in becoming full-on political stooge—I mean, activists?
Here’s my theory on the whiplash: Obama (who is, relatively speaking*, a technologically proficient pol) ran a first-of-its-kind campaign. He used the internet as no one had done before: his people organized MeetUps, posted YouTube videos, ran a Twitter profile – it was pioneering in the most literal sense of the word. No one knew if all this digitizing would turn into success at the polls. Some people predicted it would be a success, but there was hardly a guarantee. It’s safe to say that every campaign from here on out will have a large tech contingent to it (whether these politicians/campaigns learn enough to avoid becoming a tone-deaf parody of an Old Person Attempting To Be Web Savvy Even Though They Were Born Before There Were Three Network Stations, well that remains to be seen), and Obama’s campaign was the first to do it.
But then they went and screwed it all up.
One of the Rules of the Internet is that “Anonymous can be a horrible, senseless, uncaring monster.” A few rules that are more pertinent to my post, however, are:
17. Every win fails eventually.
20. Nothing is to be taken seriously.
21. Original content is original only for a few seconds before getting old.
Notice the theme? The world of the internet is incredibly ephemeral. This is the land where Tay Zonday was huge for a day, where random collections of letters become fully-accepted OED quality words (ROTFLMAO, WTF, FTW, etc.).
There are pieces of quality on the internet (insert chance to pimp Michael Yon heeyah), there are stunningly stupid/beautiful/tragic/uproarious/angering pieces of writing out here. But do you know what sites are guaranteed to have absolutely nothing permanent, nothing redeeming, nothing I’d like to show my grandkids one day?
Facebook. MySpace. YouTube. Twitter.
Any and every form of communication the Obama team used, that’s the gossipy side of the web. It’s the place where people place drunk photos, send lewd messages, express outrage over their favorite team being upset. It’s not where you go to form beliefs or think through life’s problems – it’s where you go to find out how fat your ex has gotten. It’s where you write something on your own wall while drunk, and then quickly take down the next day, hoping no one saw it (they did).
So into this nihilistic social void did Obama stride, asking for FacebookFriends and TwitterFollowers. He found them. There were plenty of people who were sick and tired of everything Bush, and this man came along and talked to them on the internet. They were smitten. They forwarded emails to friends, a few went door-to-door and recruited other followers. Most just looked at their Obama app every time they loaded up their Facebook homepage and felt like they were all warm-and-aware inside.
The election came, the results poured in: Our New Lord of Time, Space, and Internet had won. R0x0rz my s0x0rz. Then came the “I’m So Proud of my country.” Obama had millions of people on his rosters, millions of email addresses and websites at his hand. What couldn’t he do?
But then came the auto bailouts. The Israeli-Gaza War. The further collapse of the banks. Josef Fritzl, the Austrian Creepster Dad. Slumdog Millionaire and subsequent Oscars craze. Octomom. In comparison, Obama seems so October 2008, so immediately attached to a different time than what we are living.
There are, and there will be, cries of “foul” from the intelligentsia. They’ll cry that the man who is Leader of The Free World deserves more attention and higher respect than Slumdog Millionaire. I’m sure he does. But when you build a consensus on the back of the Land Of No Commitments, the Internet, you need to appropriately discount those numbers of support. Sure, millions of people followed you on MySpace and Facebook. But there’s a million people who kvetched about the de-planetization of Pluto.
Ignoring this, the President came out with an agenda that was worthy of a man who enjoyed Reagan-esque numbers in victory. Contra the press’s efforts, however, President Obama did not have nearly the amount of support he supposed he did. Part of his hubris, I have to believe, came from his internet numbers. He envisioned a budget-support movement where teens and grandparents alike would stand on street corners with signs that said “A Trillion Dollars of Growth We Can Believe In”. He thought that there would be millions of phone calls made by patriotic supporters to their loved ones, encouraging the passage of the stimulus. The problem? The people he relied on to carry the heavy load of political work had in reality only worked as hard as clicking a “Join” button on a website and taken an hour off from work or school to do the “cool” thing and vote for Obama. ACORN activists these people ain’t.
Your numbers mean something, President Obama, but not nearly what you think.
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* That “relatively speaking” is a HUGE qualifier. I doubt Obama himself actually knows very much about the Web 2.0-and-later stuff. I’m pretty sure he’s like most men his age: knows how to check his email on his Blackberry, has got his fav sites bookmarked (Espn.com, NBA.com, Fantasy Sports, Etc.), and perhaps is familiar with the idea of Facebook but sees no reason to actually post a profile pic. Good for him – he’s in his forties, after all. But to think that he’s some Digg moderator or has an RSS feed in the hundreds is the height of asininity.
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