Elections and intelligent swarms

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18605

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.

To win Democrats need to win voters that are not net junkies. When Dean crashed in the first turn of the first lap,it showed how silly this is. The net is important but its hardly a revolution in politics.

if Kerry won in a huge landslide and Bush was yelling that the election must have been rigged? :toast:

It worked beautifully in Iowa and NH, didn't it? Fire fighters, veterans, and union workers identified, trained, and delivered a majority of voters and caucus goers in each precinct, which resulted in significant wins for JK.

Kerry is on course and I am glad. I was for Clark,but the people have spoken and they were right. I support John Kerry because he knows how to win.

The great failing of the Dean campaign is that it thought exactly what your statement outlines.

The failing of the Dean campaign (at least in my state) was a failure to adopt the military-metaphor campaign structure. There simply aren't enough technologically-saavy new voters to make an "intelligent swawm" campaign work.

The good thing about the GOP is that there model is probably most like the Soviet Army: there is a Big Plan, written at the RNC, and all of the campaigns follow it, under their direction of the commisars. And they don't allow the underlings to have maps. They might get ideas.

I see this already in the North Dakota gubernatorial race. The GOP incumbent is already attacking the negativity and lack of vision of the Democratic candidate, arguing he doesn't have a plan and a vision like he does.

This sounds very much like the outline of the Bush campaign strategy.

The lovely thing about the GOP's lack of initiative and flexibility is, once you can start to read their plays from their formations, you have the potential to kick their ass.