But it was the way Harrelson campaigned that almost won him the election–and that set the pattern others since have followed. His rivals had size on their side. Vice President Bayh had the full backing of AT&T, Netscape and ABC/Disney; GOP House Speaker Kasich had MCI and NBC/Microsoft. But these mainframe candidates were mired in old-think. They produced “spots” for analog-style TV networks and insisted on a series of “debates.” Harrelson would have none of it. Powered by huge servers and the latest in artificial intelligence, Harrelson’s “Let’s Lead Ourselves” channels featured his interactive 3-D image in a variety of settings (Iowa coffee klatch, campaign plane, TV studio), with each server capable of conducting simultaneous, real-time, discrete conversations with 50,000 voters on topics ranging from animal rights to zinc pollution. It was like a “fireside chat” with FDR actually sitting in each voter’s living room. The AI ‘bot was designed to sense the voter’s opinion so that “Woody” could agree wholeheartedly–or disagree vehemently (or sadly) if that would be more impressive. Data from all sessions were fed instantly into the Harrelson campaign’s computer, so that he could update his stands on the issues (and his on-screen attire) accordingly. In all, the site got 200 million hits. Of those who visited it more than five times–20 million souls–every single one voted for Woody. And why not? After all, they had made him what he was.
Go ahead, snicker, laugh–or cry. But it’s true: each new wave in the technology of communications tosses up leaders who ride the medium, understand the issues it generates and embody the new Zeitgeist it creates. Just take a look at the historical spreadsheet: Washington and Jefferson in the epistolary age of parchment and cheap pamphlets; Lincoln, brilliant wordsmith of public speeches, in the time of telegraphy; Teddy Roosevelt, who invented the political publicity stunt to occupy the metropolitan tabloids; FDR and radio; Kennedy, Reagan and TV. Now what? The president as Webmaster-in-chief? As hologram? We are racing toward a time in which there will be unlimited channels of fully digital, interactive virtual reality transmitting data, entertainment and news.
What kind of politics will this produce? What kind of leadership–if any? What role will federal Washington play–if any? You could see the new-world chrysalis in, of all places, the Dole campaign of 1996. Dole himself was born in Kansas when commercial radio was in its infancy, yet he was the first presidential candidate to announce his Web-site address on national TV. He already knew the stuff could work. He happened to have as his top Webmaster one Andrew Weinstein, a savvy young Dukie who had put up an alluring, highly interactive site in the primary season. The result: a bumper crop of 12,000 good volunteers who worked key “early” states and helped save the Dole candidacy. By summer, the Dole campaign was regularly e-mailing messages to these fans, each message customized to specific topics the voters said they cared about. The entire effort cost less than an average TV advertising “buy” in a major market.
This was digital grass-roots activism in action. Such visionaries as newsletter guru Esther Dyson think the Web will produce an explosion of microdemocracy. She’s right. The Web already has become the walkie-talkie and bulletin board for a new generation of organizers, from the National Rifle Association to the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Access to political information is being radically democratized. Voters can research–instantly–the record of any candidate on any issue. “The voters can really drill down,” says Evans Witt, executive editor of the popular PoliticsNow Web page. Anything that restores a sense of connection is all to the good, Witt says. “Given the cynicism about politics, anything helps.” If information is power, Washington is Rome with the file drawers locked. It took a vast bureaucracy to fill them and do the city’s business. Now voter-netheads have the capability–and should, logically, have the right–to do the work themselves. Washington still dictates the trajectory of missiles and the creation of money. But it rules little else, and the action is elsewhere: in the financial trading rooms of the world, in Silicon Valley software shops, in the antiseptic corridors of Seattle. Cyberspace is the new Louisiana Purchase, an uncharted West. It’s creating its own issues, and forcing them onto the agenda of the establishment back “East.” Instead of free silver, it’s free speech and free Web access. If Thomas Jefferson were alive, he’d be spending his time at the MIT media lab and communicating with Meriwether Lewis by laptop. If America has been defined and refreshed by its ever-westering spirit, perhaps the digital age has arrived just in time.
But digital democracy will also be mean, messy and dangerous: a shrapnel-filled grenade clattering across the marble floor of consensus. What the musty academics call “mediating institutions”–from party conventions to network news–have been declining for a host of reasons. The digital future could kill them off entirely. In the digital world, every unchecked “fact” is all too available, every opinion equal. The nifty Web page of the Holocaust-denier can seem just as convincing as the rerun of “Schindler’s List.” “Now you can immediately link the obsessions of a few like-minded folks in Tampa, Wichita and Montana,” says Doug Bailey, the pioneering founder of the Political Hotline. “When you can do that, you’re talking about the fragmentation of politics.” And soon enough, the historical echoes of the Web will not be so bracing. Instead of recalling Lewis and Clark and the pristine rivers of the West, the relevant parallel may be Carnegie and Morgan and the monopolistic power they represented. The tycoons of the digital age, like their steel and railroad predecessors, are amassing incomprehensible fortunes and unaccountable power. It’s easy to see Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch as the fat-bottomed “trusts” in an old Thomas Nast cartoon. But who will play Bryan or Teddy Roosevelt? And how can they do it if federal power is dismantled by the digerati?
Neither Bill Clinton nor Al Gore is a true Son of Cyberspace. The president is resolutely carbon-based. He confides to friends that he has no keyboarding skills (can’t type) and has never surfed the Web of his own free will. This from a man who claimed in 1996 that wiring schools for the benefits of the Internet was one of his top priorities. Gore is a half-breed. He’s an obsessive e-mailer who uses his laptop wherever he goes. Gore is known to dutifully fill out electronic registration cards for new software. (Name: Albert Gore. Occupation: vice president.) “I couldn’t believe it when I saw him showing up on our list,” one executive said. But Gore is not beloved by new-world pioneers. The administration committed a mortal sin, they believe, when Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act of 1996, regarded on the Web as a blunt attack on free speech. Gore didn’t protest publicly, they note, and should have known better.
The ultimate threats to American democracy in the digital age aren’t the rise of splinter groups, or new tycoons, or government-imposed limits on speech. The dangers are more subtle and insidious. One is the lack of a common starting point for discussion. Soon enough, philosophers of cyberspace point out, you’ll not only be able to “research” another point of view; you’ll literally be able to inhabit it. If anyone can see the world from any angle–if everything is relative and the dominant reality virtual–where’s the place called America? “It’s a principle from optics,” said John Pavlik, who heads Columbia University’s New Media program. “If you don’t have a “known’ perspective, you can’t judge anything.” The other danger is that leadership as we knew it–from George Washington to Ronald Reagan–will disappear as politicians become all too connected to the voters. You don’t have to be Edmund Burke to see the danger: imagine poll taker Dick Morris as a server and Clinton as the interactive software. What if our presidents become nothing more than the sum of our whims and misinformation? The netizens of the future will have to take their jobs seriously. Are we ready for this much democracy? Let’s hope so.
