By now we all know that the election of the first African American president was an historic achievement. But Barack Obama’s election was historic for another reason too: Obama’s victory marks the sudden, disruptive arrival of networked culture on the world political stage. In fact, Obama will be the first president of networked America, the first Digital President of the United States.

When Obama stated, in his Grant Park speech on election night, that his team had run “the best campaign ever,” he was not boasting. Obama’s campaign team took him from fringe candidate to the White House and achieved staggering milestones along the way: $600 million in campaign donations; nearly 4 million individual donors; a centrally coordinated grassroots effort that saw an estimated 6 million volunteers getting the Obama vote out on election day. The numbers are staggering.

How did he do it? How did Obama generate such unprecedented levels of public engagement, enabling him to battle so effectively in so many states? What was the rock on which Obama’s successful strategy was built? The answer is clear: the Internet.

In fact, one could even argue that Barack Obama was elected because he had a great website. Does that sound silly? It isn’t. www.mybarackobama.com, planned by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, was in many ways the heart of the Obama campaign. This state-of-the-art online community was the primary vehicle and catalyst for tens of millions of individual donations to the Obama campaign. It generated an estimated 1 billion emails to members, emails that will be studied in communications courses for years to come as models of simple, direct and informative email marketing.

The website also offered easy-to-find and easy-to-use toolkits to promote local activism, and a platform for members to create and join action groups. The Florida Veterans for Obama, for example, garnered 5157 members, hosted 521 events, made 19,598 calls and raised $27,982.59 during the campaign. There were over 35,000 of these self-organizing groups that cost the campaign nothing in terms of time or money, but that contributed energetically to its success. Scalability and hyper-efficiency are two of the key qualities of networked communications and the Obama campaign thoroughly understood their power.

Interestingly, the single largest group that formed on Obama’s community website during the campaign was created to attack him on a point of policy, including posts encouraging members to vote McCain unless Obama stopped supporting Bush’s controversial surveillance bill (FISA). So what did Obama do when he was directly challenged in the middle of his campaign on his own website? Seemingly very little. He did not “feed the trolls,” as the old Internet adage goes. Nor did he respond with a knee-jerk command-and-control reaction such as deleting the group or its members, which would have been disastrous. Instead he watched and waited, comfortable in the knowledge that some disagreement is inevitable on any community website, and that should the issue blow up, having its epicenter on his own turf would actually make it easier to deal with than otherwise. Ultimately, although unsatisfying to those who wanted him to change his position, Obama’s response was web-savvy, and clearly succeeded in minimizing the impact of the dissent.

One doubts whether the team running www.johmccain.com would have acted with the same forbearance, as McCain’s online campaign reflected his lack of understanding of networked culture. Remember, this is a candidate who admitted that he did not know how to use email, and who, for all we know, may never even have surfed the web. That www.mybarackobama.com was written using open-source code (PHP) while www.johnmccain.com was written in Microsoft’s .ASP language is not perhaps the defining distinction between the two men and their campaigns, but it is nevertheless a potent and relevant symbol of their differences both online and off.

The power to create, to connect and to share lies at the heart of networked culture as it lies at the heart of Obama’s idealism. Americans were drawn to Obama‘s inspirational character, intellectual acuity and moral leadership but the deep relationships that they felt with the man and his message were nurtured through online networking tools that put real power in real people’s hands. His slogans – “yes we can” and “the change we need” – were made manifest by an online platform that posited and enacted a revitalized American identity. In the end, history will show that it was Obama’s ability to align his inspirational brand with the Internet’s profoundly democratic character that gave him his victory, and that made an African American the first digital president.

Yet as Obama said in his Grant Park speech, his election is not an end but a beginning. The critical question then becomes: now that Obama has used the power of the web to get elected, how will he use it to govern?

Now, on to the post…

Barack Obama is multi-racial and multi-cultural, son of an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas (Dorothy’s daughter who ran away to Oz and stayed there, because there was no place like home, no place better than Hawaii anyway). Obama has been socialized into many cultures - American, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Harvard Law, Black Chicagoan, lefty unionist, and elected officialdom, among others. And he has learned from each of these, learned to speak the language of each of these cultures, to see the world through the eyes of the Law Partner as well as the laid-off machinist, the single mom (like his own) and the soccer mom, the Black teen in the hood and the new immigrant and the Ivy Leaguer and the minor official, to sympathize and dream with each, and in so doing to demonstrate the shared experiences and needs that connect those of us who would otherwise feel divided, in so doing to replace enmity with compassion.

This we know. And those of us whose hearts are not too hardened by rejection, or corroded by media-fuelled cynicism, or poisoned by bigotry, welcome his willingness to dream, and to lead.

There are those who claim that he does not lead, that his words are empty rhetoric. Yet his words are truly the essence of his capacity to lead. His ability to speak truth to power, to listen to a multitude of voices and to distill their sighs and cries into his own, is the most powerful form of leadership that can be. Speaking as Obama does is leading by example.

In their collective blindness mainstream media suppose that leadership consists of something other than speaking and listening effectively and decisively. That it consists of something other than taking public responsibility for oneself and for others. That it consists of everything except this. But they are wrong. Everything follows from the stories we tell ourselves. Everything follows communication.

It was the power of communication (in this case the widely promoted lies about weapons of mass destruction) that got us into the the war in Iraq in the first place. Bush’s power was not divorced from the dishonesty that ruled in the mainstream media during the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. His actual power was his ability to create that climate of dishonest communication. Just as it was the power to influence communications in America that resulted in the popular support for the pre-war policy of depriving Iraq of medicine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

This is why Obama’s willingness to return the power of public speech to the citizens of America and the citizens of the world is so important, so transformative, and so powerful. “But,” some will say, “he is the one doing the talking, he is not returning anything to anybody. It is all about him.”

But here too they would be wrong. When, in his acceptance speech in Denver, Obama said: “What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It is about you” he was not just spouting a clever turn-of-phrase. He was using some of that African knowledge that has shaped him. And what is the essence of that African knowledge? It is the knowledge that the individual who gets on stage to speak, to preach, to blow, is not there to speak to people but to be spoken through. That contrary to popular belief, call-and-response is not about the preacher calling and the congregation responding. It is about the congregation calling and the preacher responding. And what the community is calling for is healing. The true leader has an ego strong enough to carry and transmute that burden of need into a song of purpose and possibility, but humble enough to be responsive to the merest suggestion of need, and thus to be directed by the needs of the community that has called him/her into being. That is the power of the bluesman, of the jazz artist, and even some rappers, though sadly few MCs have the humility to heed the call.

So Barack Obama’s words are not ‘just words’. They are leadership incarnate. It is his ability to unite people through his words that will bring him to power. And it is that same ability that will yield tangible results once he is elected. Will they be the results he has promised? Perhaps not. He is admittedly setting the bar extremely high. And yet George Bush has set the bar so very low that we have nowhere to go but up.

Barack Obama is aiming for the stars because America desperately needs him to.

• PromArt, a grant program supporting foreign travel for artists ($4.7 million)
• Canadian Memory Fund, which gives federal agencies money to digitize collections and mount them online ($11.7 million)
• Culture.ca Web portal ($3.8 million)
• Canadian Cultural Observatory ($560,000)
• Research and Development component of Canadian Culture Online ($5.64-million)
• Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund ($1.5 million)
• Audio Visual Trust ($300,000)
• National Training Program for the Film and Video Sector ($2.5 million)
• Trade Routes, supporting international tours by Canadian performers ($7.8 million)
• Northern Distribution Program, which distributes the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network signal to 96 Northern communities. ($2.1 million)

There are many reasons that these cuts are wrong.

They are economically wrong because investing in Canadian cultural infrastructure through programs such as those that have been chopped has proven to be a VERY successful means of creating a nationally and internationally acclaimed cultural industry sector that continues to be a growth area creating jobs, skills and brand recognition for Canada around the world. Those who mistakenly characterize such programs as ‘charity’ for ‘navel-gazing lefty artists’ have no understanding whatsover of the enormous role that Canada’s cultural sector plays in our economy, nor of the fact that the majority of these funds typically support the most mainstream of arts groups.

Supporters of these cuts certainly have no grasp of the significance of Richard Florida’s work on the Cultural Class, in which it is clearly and comprehensively demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between the number of creative professionals in a given city (of which artists are a prominent group, along with tech workers, educators, marketing folks and others) and the overall level of prosperity within that city. In other words, with his detailed statistical study of 30 North American urban economies, Florida proved that contrary to conservative economic dogma (such as that which motivates Harper) the best way to help everybody prosper in the age of networked knowledge is to invest in cultural infrastructure. And this is what is happening in Boston, in Chicago, in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, and all over the UK, where massive investment in urban cultural redevelopment in previously decimated northern industrial towns has yielded an extraordinary cultural and economic renaissance in places like Newcastle and Birmingham. But here in Canada? Here we chop training for the film and television industry, we chop funding for research and development online, we chop our online web portal, we chop the Canadian Memory Fund, and more.

In Canada we chop $2.1 million dollars that paid for the Aboriginal Television Network to broadcast to 96 northern communities. Was this an economic decision? Very difficult to see how it could be. No more than it was an economic decision when Brian Mulroney’s government chopped the entire annual budget for the Native Friendship Centres Radio Network back in the 1980s. How much did we save back then in exchange for eliminating what was a truly cherished institution? A measly $500,000. And today, for our $2.1 million, a drop in the annual surplus budget, we get to chop an essential cultural lifeline and unifying educational tool for native people across Canada. It’s foolish and it’s destructive. And It’s wrong.

More recently, I left the CMCC as a protest against that organization’s baffling endorsement of a terrible copyright reform plan put forward by the Songwriter’s Association of Canada. There are a lot of problems with the Songwriter’s plan, chief among them:

1. According to the proposal “Virtually all sharing on the internet and wireless devices would be tracked. ” The privacy issues here are obvious and profoundly concerning. Is there anybody that wants every file they share to be tracked by law? What kinds of slippery slope does this place us on? Strike # 1.

2. The plan proposes the imposition of a $5 universal user fee to be added to every Internet user’s account that would then be divvied up by ‘the music industry’ based on whose files were shared most often. This would be an administrative, technical and public relations nightmare. It is so backwards-looking that it amazes me that anyone would take it seriously. Strike #2.

3. Clause 8 of the proposal says: “the amount of income generated annually could adequately compensate the industry for years of declining sales and lost revenues”. But is this for artists or for the majors? Moreover the plan never mentions how or on what basis the cash that would be generated would be divvied up. Who gets what share? ‘The ‘devil is in the details’, as every one who has ever negotiated a deal knows, which makes it all the more surprising that the CMCC supported this plan. Strike #3 and this proposal is out.

I made my feelings known to the CMCC but they stuck to their guns, so I left. And while it’s no great loss to the CMCC, I admit, I do want to let people know that despite their positive intentions, this organization is heading in a dangerous and largely unhelpful direction.

I mention this because I just joined another copyright reform group, one founded on Facebook by Michael Geist. The group is dedicated to defeating the apalling and alarming copyright legislation that the Conservative government of Canada is about to introduce. I am all for defeating this bill, which is based (remarkably, after all that we have learned since it was passed) on the USA’s disastrous Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.

But while I know what the group is against, given my recent experience with the CMCC, I can’t help wondering what we are all for.

One thing at a time I guess. Our immediate need is to stop this legislation in its tracks. But if we succeed, it will be interesting to see whether the same sort of common ground can be found in favour of truly progressive copyright reform.

things are getting very, very interesting
out there and in here alike

in here 76design is preparing a massive music biz strike
but more of that in a moment…

meanwhile, out there…

• out there we have the RIAA finally winning its first lawsuit against a music fan - a single mom who may now be fined over $200k for having a small collection of downloaded mp3s on her computer!
• out there we have Prince giving away millions (yes millions!) of free copies of his latest CD as newspaper inserts
• out there we now have Radiohead pushing the envelope by treating its new recordings as shareware, allowing users to download mp3s at will and to pay as much as they choose for them, from zilch to whatever
• and out there we have this awesome blog post by Bob Lefsetz, music industry veteran and renowned music biz analyst, in which Bob calls it like it is, pointing to the desperate need for a new business model in the music industry, and ripping the pathetic failure of the mainstream music biz to develop one.

At one point Bob rants:

“The public is no longer unsophisticated. One reason fans are paying Radiohead is because the money is going directly to the band. If they buy the major label product, they believe the money goes to the man, who is SUING THEM!

The fan has no interest in the label’s business model. The fan is just that, SOMEONE DEDICATED TO A BAND’S MUSIC!

How do you get someone dedicated?”

And this - dear readers - is where the rubber hits the road. Very soon now, by the end of this year at the very latest, 76design will unveil a revolutionary music industry platform that specifically addresses these fundamental questions and issues. Bob Lefsetz gets it. He understands exactly where we’re at and why. Bob is asking the right questions at the right time. We at 76design are about to answer them.

Sounds like a lot of hype, right? Well it’s not. Our platform offers fans and bands a simple, efficient and revolutionary new way to manage a mutually satisfying musical economy. It’s so simple and obvious that when we launch people will be kicking themselves and asking why nobody else did this before. Because it is a win-win situation for everyone. Everyone except the labels.

Our secret project is in full production but it is still under wraps. I can’t wait til we get to show you what we’re cooking up. It’s really going to shake things up. In a couple months Bob Lefsetz will have something very new and very exciting to write about.
js

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red.
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.

when i took his undergrad class at concordia u in 1983
he told us
on our first day
that half our grade would be based on our final exam
which we were required not to take
but to write
to create quality multiple choice questions and essay questions
and we could hand our exam in to him as many times as we wanted over the semester
and each time he would critique and mark it
and hand it back to us
and we could keep the highest mark we got

wonderful
fabulous pedagogy

he taught me and my classmates another great lesson one day in class
when he was telling a ghost story
from his own life
having lived for years in Maine with the last remaining elderly Shaker virgins
and studied their strong spiritualist lore
and there with Sister Delia or some other mistress of jesus
had encountered an embodied mystery
possibly a ghost
and he was telling us about it
in this funny but serious and intense way
until as we listened
enthrallled
he suddenly stopped in mid-sentence
and said pointedly “I want each of you to very slowly turn and look around at each other”
and we did
and we saw a roomful of bodies perched urgently forward
each of us on the asslip our seat
eyes wide
hair up on every neck
and we each realized that we had all been lost in his words
and he asked us:
“Why?
“What is going on here?”
“Look at you, consumed in my tale. How? What is happening to you?”
And that’s a question that has nourished me for twenty years now.
“What is it that happens when a story is told?”
“What kind of magic is that?”

So thanks Leonard
you were a fine teacher
and, i hope, still are

The play is a fun, energetic and hyper-kinetic tribute to the legendary Canadian performance poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen. This was a group of 4 poets (bpnichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera) who studiously and ecstatically explored the limits of human vocal communication in a poetic context throughout the 70s and early 80s.

As someone who has also spent many years exploring the same fertile terrain as a poetic performer, the Four Horsemen were always an inspiration to me. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to perform and record with the amazing soundsinger Paul Dutton on several occasions, and count him as a fine friend. (Hi Paul!) For what it’s worth, I also once won a poetry battle with bpnichol, but that’s a story nobody knows and I won’t recount here. Regardless, the point is that these guys were true poets - vocal angels and vocal demons, seekers, soothsayers and shit-disturbers - and as a result, despite a sudden and belated interest in their work due to this new play, they were by and large avoided and ignored, like all real poets, in their day. Basically, they scared the shit out of most people, even tho they inspired, enthralled and enraptured many others. That’s inevitably how it is with poets, the real ones anyway, til they are dead (R.I.P. bp) or disbanded.

As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog, I believe that oral communication technologies are extremely relevant to our understanding of digital communication technologies. In other words if social media is all about ‘conversations’, then it makes sense to seek to understand the familiar dynamics of oral conversations as a means of gaining insight into new digital conversational models. More than this, I feel that the two technologies share fundamental commonalities that distinguish them from literate communication technologies, and that as a result oralists and digitalists need each other. They actively need to be allies if either hopes to fend off the predatory tactics of literate capitalists seeking to enslave the digital realm (via WIPO and copyright, via Geolocking content, via DRM, via penalties for sharing, etc.) as they have colonized oral cultures (a quick review of the legal clampdown on sampling in HipHop would be very relevant here, as would an examination of the negligible legal value of hearsay - i.e. hear-say as trumped by texts, writs, deeds, contracts, etc.).
All of this is to say that those people who push the limits of oral communication are important, they are juggernauts exploding hegemonic literate norms and positing radically new models of engagement, expression and communion. The Four Horsemen were ahead of their time, as were peers like John Giorno (another brilliant poet-friend and a wise and beautiful man) and his lower-east side poet’s posse, which included the likes of Patti Smith, David Johansen, Jayne Cortez, and his roommate, William S. Burroughs.
But it may be that their day has come, that a playful polyvocal poetics of improvisation, of dynamic digital engagement vs. static mechanical textuality, is on the horizon. It may be that the blogosphere, chat, messenger and the rest do not represent a pathologically pointless logorrhea, as some fear, but rather a liberatory linguistic lasciviousness, a collective rush to babble, to squawk, to sing - together. No longer fearing The Four Horsemen in their bardic beards, but becoming ourselves The 4 billion babblers of the networked talkalypse, making meaning, making media, making money.

We shall see.

I think community media is in dire straits in Canada at present and that the CRTC has a responsibility to be proactive in addressing the profound lack of leadership in this area, particularly with regard to online content. One of the great incongruities of online macro-economics is the disincentive Canadian access players (i.e. cablecos and telcos who own Canada’s broadband infrastructure) have in investing in Canadian content. See, in radio and TV, there is a symbiotic relationship between content producers and content distributors. Without the artists and labels, radio cannot survive. And similarly, without TV producers, broadcasters can’t operate. But this basic interdependence breaks down in the online sphere, where the broadband ISPs can sell access to the entire www without feeling any impulse to invest in the creation of content. And by and large, they don’t. When it comes to creating Canadian content champions online, as we have done in music and TV and film, Rogers’ track record, dating back to the days of Wave, @Home and Excite all the way up to the present, is pitiful, dwarfed only by Bell’s brainless lethargy for pure backwardness and stultifying disinterest in Canadian content, community-driven media and p2p creativity.

8 years ago I created a non-profit called the Community Media Lab that produced a number of online projects with street kids and other young folks. Since then the void in this area has only become more and more obvious, and yet almost nothing is being done to address it. When Alan Rock’ $3.5 billion Telecommunications Highway initiative was disemboweled by Paul Martin we lost a huge opportunity. It wasn’t a good plan, containing a measly $50 million for community media, but it was a start. Today Canada is wasting its global competitive advantage as a multilingual, educated and supremely wired environment because of the failure to invest in those strengths. Community media is one important area in which Canada could easily become a global leader, but our complacency and greed is blinding us to the necessity and the opportunity to look ahead, look around and look within. But there’s still a chance to turn things around. Let’s see if we can’t use our networked power to inspire some movement at the political level.

Viral Marketing and Community Building have long promised to be the new “secret weapon” for online communities. And there have been some outstanding successes. But there have also been some failures that reveal that viral marketing can greatly amplify the power of Negative Word of Mouth. Is Word of Mouth the best thing since the invention of the ice cube tray? Or is it a slippery strategy that can lead to a tipping point – or a tripping point?

Can social media lead to a PR backlash? That’s certainly one of the big fears of clients considering taking the p2p plunge. We’ll hash it out at ICE. Hope to see you there…