One Way Forward (3 page)

These two stories, of two very different passions, will evoke two very different responses from you. First, they should evoke a sense of hope. Second, and especially if you’re a member of either of these two movements, my putting them together as I have will likely evoke a feeling of anger, or frustration.

Let’s start with the hope: The couch potato has left the couch.

This is critically important, yet just part of a much bigger trend.

In the past I’ve written about “read-only” cultures—cultures in which people passively consume culture created professionally elsewhere. That’s the couch potato. That’s your four-year-old (but not your six-year-old) with your iPod. Think: lost to another world, while also lost to this world.

Such read-only cultures can be contrasted with “read-write” cultures. These are cultures in which amateurs create their own culture, or versions of culture, and share that creativity with others. Think remix videos on YouTube, or photos on Flickr, or Wikipedia, or the links and RTs on Twitter.

Amateur,
however, not in the sense of
amateurish.
Some of it is; much of it isn’t. But whether it is or isn’t, that’s not the point. Instead, think
amateur
in the sense of people who create for the love of creating, and not for the money.

The virtue in this kind of amateur lives deep within our culture. We want our kids to learn to play the piano, even if we don’t expect them to become concert pianists. We’d be proud of our kids becoming the resident expert on some obscure subject in some corner of Wikipedia, even if we knew their expertise wouldn’t earn them a living. And we’d be deeply saddened if the only sex that a close friend ever knew was professional, rather than amateur, sex.

The life of the professional—the wage earner, the laborer, the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher—is important and edifying and produces enormous social and individual wealth. But a life lived solely as a professional is not important and not edifying and produces only a kind of poverty—certainly individual poverty, but social poverty as well.

Until the twentieth century, all culture was “read-write.” All culture lived not only through professionals performing but also through amateurs re-creating and re-performing. Professionals composed music, but amateurs sang it and played it and adapted it. “When I was a boy,” John Philip Sousa testified to Congress, in 1906, “in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs.” But technology—the phonograph or the player piano, he feared—was going to take this amateur practice away. “Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day.” The consequence? “We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.”
¹⁷

Sousa was certainly right—about the technology of the twentieth century. It did much to make us much more passive. We had more and better music to consume. Think of record shops: an extraordinary diversity literally at our fingertips. We became much better consumers and, much less frequently, creators. Creativity was for the professional. We were to shut up and listen.

Sousa would certainly be wrong, however, to say this about the technology of the twenty-first century. Digital technology has not only improved the ability to consume; it has radically democratized the ability to create. When I was a kid, creative sorts shared mixtapes. My kids will share remixes. In five years, if all your kid can do is push play, you’ll worry that something is wrong.

The critical point is that the same read-write transformation is now happening in politics as well. Until the twentieth century—or, more precisely, the rise of broadcasting—all of politics was read-write. The energy of democratic politics inspired by Andrew Jackson and perfected by Martin Van Buren was to get people out of doors—to canvass, to debate, to argue, and (not to romanticize this past too much) to promise the necessary patronage or buy the necessary votes.

The twentieth century killed this political read-write culture as well. As campaigns were professionalized, command and control were centralized. The audience was expected to shut up and listen. The worst possible idea was for ordinary supporters to produce their own copy. Campaign material was professional material. The job of the amateur was simply to show up and vote.

Yet here again, the twenty-first century is reviving what the twentieth century killed. Technology has returned the amateur to politics. It has invited the blogger to comment, or to criticize. It has encouraged citizens to post on YouTube or Meetup or to make iReports. It has made a Tweet central. And this has happened not just here, but across the world. The possibilities have changed. There are more channels. Scratch that: there’s no such thing as a “channel” anymore. There’s only an endless stream of created work, some professional, some amateur, all trying to motivate people to act and to believe differently.

As these new technologies have invited the amateur back in, they have excited the passions that this chapter has described. These passions, in turn, fit the pattern of social movements that students of this age will recognize. It is a pattern that is common to every important social “surprise” in the last generation. No one (outside of MIT) imagined the Internet; this kind of movement created it. No one (outside of MIT) predicted GNU/Linux, the free software operating system that took on Windows; this kind of movement built it. No one anywhere conceived of Wikipedia as even possible; this kind of movement wrote it. No one predicted the energy of the Tea Party or the Occupy movement or the other parallel movements around the world, but all of them fit this same form. Indeed, as I’ve gathered the material for this short book, I’ve been most struck by the universal invocation of the ideals of “open-source culture” to explain these movements.

And not just on the Left. Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, of the Tea Party Patriots, open their book by defining the Tea Party as an “open-source community.”
¹⁸

Matt Patterson, from the Occupy movement, told me the very same thing:

And likewise with parallel movements from around the world: All of them call themselves “open source.”

I heard the most passionate and articulate account of this kind of movement during a trip to Israel. Stav Shaffir, a twenty-six-year-old writer and composer, was one of the leaders of the Israeli protests that, in the summer of 2011, brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets. She was commenting on a lecture that I had given. She began her comments with a simple declaration: “We have to see how everything that is happening now is just the practice of open-source principles.” Then, for fifteen minutes, more poetry than prose, she linked the history of the Israeli protest to the practice of “open-source culture.”

As she described, Israeli society is deeply conflicted, with “many different conflicts, not just a conflict with the Palestinians.” Arabs versus Israelis, religious versus secular Jews, immigrants from the east versus immigrants from the west. “The amount of conflict,” Shaffir said, “is almost like the number of people.”

That fact of conflict drove the strategy of the Israeli protest: Organizers sought a common ground first, an issue that everyone was concerned about, even if that issue wasn’t “the most important issue” in Israel:

Once that foundation was set, the protest iterated to see whether there were other issues where they could find agreement.

And in terms that echo precisely what Patterson described above:

All of these movements are built in the same way that GNU/Linux was. All of them are architected to empower the same democratic source. And as a grandfather of the Internet, David Clark, said of the community that gave us the Internet, so too could these reformers say of themselves:

This is the age of open-source—in technology, in culture, and now in politics. It is the distinctive character of social movements, enabled by networked technology, that enables the “we” to live differently. It is the “wealth of networks” that Yochai Benkler described five years ago.
²¹
And as it flourishes almost everywhere, it is time, finally, for people to recognize it for what it is: It is power, today.

Which brings me to the second reaction that I predicted would be a result of putting these stories together, at least for some: anger.

If you’re the sort of citizen I’ve described here—if you’ve “Meetup-ed” with other Tea Partiers or pitched a tent with the Occupiers—then this chapter may well have upset you. If you’re a Tea Partier, you’re outraged that I have likened your passion to the passion of the Occupiers—“America-hating anarchists,” as one missive from the Tea Party Patriots described them. If you’re an Occupier, you’re insulted that I would link what you’ve done to the “racists” (as many refer to them—unfairly, in my view)
²²
who call themselves members of the Tea Party movement. You may concede that there’s something similar to what each of these sides feels as they each stand and make their demands for America. But you will not agree that that thing is the same. They are not us. We are not them. And anyone who would suggest differently is either an idiot or Dr. Pangloss. There is nothing
right
in the Left. There’s nothing
left
to say to the Right.

In September 2011, I, along with the Tea Party Patriots, hosted a conference at the Harvard Law School about the idea of calling for an Article V constitutional convention. The Tea Party Patriots hadn’t committed to the idea of a convention; they wanted to explore it more. I, by contrast, am a believer.

The best speech—by far—during that weekend was given by Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. In an opening address, he condemned the business model of hate. “The politicians profit,” Meckler told the four hundred in that room, “when we are inflamed against each other.” We must learn, he said, to resist it.

It was an inspiring charge to launch our two-day conference, and it set the tone for an extraordinary and productive weekend.

The following month, I received an e-mail from the Tea Party Patriots. The aim of the missive was to orient my views about the then growing Occupy movement. The Occupiers, the e-mail insisted, were not the Tea Party. They were instead “America-hating anarchists who want to take their anger out on ordinary, productive citizens.” And then, immediately after that charge, the e-mail had a link in bold: “Please make an urgent online contribution of $15, $20, $25, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford to Tea Party Patriots right away!”

There’s something completely ordinary about this hilarious, if sad, story. It isn’t a tale about the hypocrisy of any single person or group. It is instead a story about all of us. While on the one hand we all aspire to the ideal of working as one, on the other hand we all thrive by rallying us against them.

I tripped on this reality personally with an organization that I helped found called Change Congress. The idea behind Change Congress was to build a cross-partisan movement to support fundamental reform in Congress. Early on, we were very lucky to interest an extraordinary organizer to help lead the group. Adam Green had been one of the early souls at MoveOn. When he moved on, he was eager to start his own organization eventually, but he was willing to give us a few cycles as we started up.

Adam and I had long talks about my desire that the organization be cross-partisan. He smiled at my blatherings and nodded his head. But he had that kind of all-knowing smirk that all professionals bring to conversations with amateurs. He was willing to try. Yet as I look back on our time together, I realize that he never actually committed to this vision of the organization. He had a view different from mine. And he was running things day to day.