Electric Josh

7% short
So the moveon.org primary is over, and HD managed a pretty strong plurality of the votes, but not the majority that would have resulted in a wholehearted endorsement.

It seems to me that this "primary" is kind of a significant development in the country's political history. We have here a big, money-bearing, political decision being made:

• using a cheap, distributed process with few authors,
• early in the campaign cycle,
• with momentum and publicity generated mostly independently of large, central media outlets.

The most notable excerpt:

In just a little over 48 hours, 317,647 members voted, making this vote larger than both the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined.

Contributing my vote cost me a total of maybe as much as ten minutes, including registration. I'm incredibly lazy, but I was easy to organize anyway. That's compared with---how much time?---to register for (then, later, to go vote in) a real primary or election, whose results will have been determined largely by expensive TV ads anyway. There's one danger, of course: people who bothered to vote online may not bother putting their beer long enough to go vote in person.

Not that this exactly heralds the arrival of some utopian computer-mediated age of highbrow communication, but wasn't this supposed to be the (!) original promise of the public internet? That people could communicate directly with large numbers of other people, and with no middlemen filtering the message? No BigCo advertising firms nor disgustingly well-funded campaigns artificially swamping the message we thought we were sending?

I don't know. But the fact that the importance-to-cost ratio (both measured in dollars) was so low here is pretty damn cool, as is the fact that it all happened as publicly as it did. When we were kids, this is the sort of thing we thought computers would someday let us do.
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Call
Some jerk selling something called us at 9:40 PM the other day, so it is with even more delight than normal that I note the arrival of the National Do Not Call Registry, which is apparently swamped, leaving us to try what appears to be the same site here instead.
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