The Great Seduction

Pirating the people's game

I first met Justin Kan and his trademark webcam in May 2007 at Los Angeles’ landmark Roosevelt hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.  Back then, Justin Kan had his own personal Internet show: an always-on video streaming act, a digital version of Peter Weir’s 1998 movie The Truman Show, which involved Kan attaching a webcam contraption to his head and broadcasting himself, 24-hours a day, on the Internet.

Kan and I were both appearing at the appropriately named Always-On conference, an event put on by Tony Perkins, the founder of Red Herring magazine and a noted Silicon Valley impresario. As we sat in the lobby of the Roosevelt hotel, once the haunt of old media icons like Gable, Lombard and Monroe and now packed with brash new media stars like Kan, the 24 year-old Yale graduate told me that he planned to transform Justin.tv from a site that just broadcasting himself into a Web 2.0 style portal that enabled everyone to stream themselves on the Internet.

A portal, I thought to myself, dismissively -- how quaint, how antiquated, how very 1998. 

How wrong I was. Kan’s Justin.tv, financed by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator early stage venture fund, has proved to be one of the most viral hits of today’s Internet. According to the authoritative TechCrunch news service, in the first year of Justin.tv’s existence, the social-network portal has created 650,000 new broadcasters on 90,000 channels who collectively have produced a mindboggling 119 years worth of archived video material.

But now Justin.tv, which continues to experience meteoric growth of both broadcasters and viewers, is in the news for two quite different reasons: one inspiring, the other tragic.  The tragedy involved a 19-year old community college student from Florida called Abraham Biggs who broadcast himself on Justin.tv under the screen name of CandyJunkie. On November 20, Biggs, who had a long history of mental illness, committed suicide live on Justin.tv after taking an overdose of antidepressants. What is particularly sad is that some members of the 185 person audience who watched the live suicide on Justin.tv not only failed to alert the authorities for hours but actually egged on Biggs to kill himself and others callously accused the dying young man of a stunt to gain attention.

While Bigg’s suicide is not a first on the Internet, it does reveal the anomie, cruelty and narcissism that characterizes much of the web. With or without the Internet, Biggs was clearly a troubled young man fixated with taking his own life. But the existence of Justin Kan’s always-on platform provided an ideally soulless environment for him to publicly act out his final moments. That Justin.tv viewers proved to be so heartless about such an awful tragedy speaks, I think, to the emptiness of much of the much vaunted conversation, community and collaboration on the supposedly “social” web.

Fortunately, the news about Justin.tv is not only tragic. One of the more inspiring consequences of Justin Kan’s democratic broadcasting portal is its attempt, implicit or otherwise, to democratize that most archaic of old media businesses -- English Premier League football. Justin.tv members are going to games with their webcams and streaming the action directly over the portal.  While the Premier League clubs – who pay their overpriced stars with the revenue from their television deals -- have yet to formally sue Justin.tv, their lawyers have claimed that these broadcasts are illegal and that the Silicon Valley company should desist from allowing its members to post this supposedly pirated content.

Justin.tv’s current CEO, Michael Siebel, has fallen back on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to claim that the site is not knowingly allowing the reproduction of copyrighted materials. But I think he should respond more aggressively to bullying, greedy Premier League executives intent on maintaining an unnatural broadcasting monopoly on their product. The truth is that streaming the games live on amateurish, grainy videos is neither a threat to the high priced live ticket sales nor to glossy mainstream broadcasts. Justin.tv is actually democratizing the “people’s game” by giving Internet users around the world an intimate taste of English football. In fact, as a former Spurs season ticket holder exiled to the wasteland of Silicon Valley, Justin.tv’s live feeds from White Hart Lane appears to me to be almost as much of a godsend as Harry Redknapp.

The brainy brand

And so the Obama post-election brand is now becoming clearer. As the impressed David Brooks notes, it's the brainy brand -- the senior Obama administration being made up, for the most part, of Harvard and Yale Law School graduates and Ivy League PhDs:

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

As the author of an outrageously elitist booky-wooky which assaults our democratic cult of mass ignorance, I'm unabashedly thrilled by Obama's respect for the achievement of America's meritocratic intellectual aristocracy. His will be a truly anti-Palinesque presidency and, while it's not entirely clear whether he'll rule from the right or the left, what is clear is that the Harvard Law School graduate will rule from above rather than from below. But this does create a problem. That's because his pre-election brand was as much focused on YOU as on Obama himself. As Oxford University's Paul Temporal argues about the brilliantly successful pre-election Obama brand:

Obama reached out to all his target audiences with a single powerful message embracing vision, values and competitive positioning: "Yes we can! And yes you can!" In addition, his brand communications strategy cleverly exploited the fact that no consumer can resist an approach that talks about them and helps them feel they are in control. Obama would say things like "This election is not about me – it’s about you" and ‘I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington......I’m asking you to believe in yours."

But, of course, Obama isn't a brand like a soap powder or a fizzy drink that exists simply to be bought, consumed and then forgotten until our next trip to the supermarket.  His pre-election brand have all been about making the voter as if they were in control. But now, with Geithner at Treasury, Summers at the White House, the Hillary show rolling into State and the rest of his Harvard-Yale dream team taking up their positions, Obama's post-election rule-from-above brand doesn't quite gel with the pre-election rule-from-below brand. So there needs to be a recalibration of the message. To rule effectively from above, Obama must explain that politics is a profession rather than a moral calling and that he's assembled the intellectually best and the brightest amongst us to fix America. In contrast with the plebeian populism of the Joe-the-Plumber crowd, Barack the President needs not only to rebuild America's infrastructure but also to rebuild the value of the skilled policy-maker as the heart and soul of the political process.

Weighing up plebisictory democracy

How is Barack Obama, America's King Solomon elect, going to make a decision on whether he should save or whether he should kill the American car industry?

This past week, mainstream American media has transformed itself into a debating chamber between the pro and anti Detroit lobbies. On Sunday's Meet the Press, we first heard a passionate exchange between Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Carl Levin (D-MI) on the long-term pros and cons of letting the American automobile industry die and then some valuably calibrated perspectives on this incredibly complex issue from Texan oil and wind man T Boone Pickens, Thomas Hot Flat and Crowded Friedman and Katty Kay, the BBC's Washington correspondent. The grown-up newspapers are also full of this debate. In this morning's New York Times, for example, Mitt Romney wants something he euphemistically calls a managed bankruptcy; while in this morning's Wall Street Journal, Rick Waggoner, the CEO of GM, explains Why GM Deserves Support.

It's going to a really hard decision for Obama -- almost as tricky and controversial, I fear, as figuring out whether Hillary should be the next Secretary of State. So rather than listening to elites (who, some might say, got us into this confusing mess in the first place), maybe Obama should disintermediate these mainstream media notables and go onto the Internet where he can hear the judgment of the ordinary people, that wise crowd who elected him to office in the first place. He could go, for example, to YouTube, where a group called GMBlogs ( in truth: General Motor's home for corporate blogs) put out a four minute video entitled "The US auto industry and the Ripple Effect" which argues in favor of saving Detroit. This video has been watched over 209,000 times and has generated over 1,500 mainly negative comments from viewers including such thoughtful insights into Detroit's seemingly terminal decline as:

-- SHOULDA WOKE UP A LONG TIME AGO
-- FUCK UAW!!
-- FUCK EM ALL!!

I'm not sure about the real ripple effect of bankrupting the US auto industry, but I am pretty certain of the ripple effect of plebiscitory digital democracy on the long-term health of America's economy and society. I just hope that Obama watches curated shows like Meet the Press and reads edited newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal rather than relying on unmediated YouTube commentary. The future of the American automobile industry, I'm afraid, is too important to be determined by the will of the crowd.

The cultural crisis of capitalism

David Brooks tells us that the cultural consequences of recessions are rarely uplifting and then goes on to suggest, quite rightly I think, that the next "big social movements" will come from the "formerly middle class", the victims of today's economic meltdown.  I'm not sure, however, that Brooks quite recognizes the seriousness of the situation. For him, today's "recession" is about the formerly middle class giving up the affordable luxuries of brands like Coach, Whole Foods, Tiffany and Starbucks and finding their solace in "older, heavier, more reassuring" Playboy Playmates. For Brooks, today's situation is a standard economic downturn like the recession of the Seventies and its cultural consequences have no special historic significance.

Unfortunately, Brooks may be underestimating the problem. As MarketWatch's Paul Farrell argues, there are 30 reasons why today's economic crisis will probably metastasize into the Great Depression 2 by 2011. I won't bore you with the first 29 reasons which are financially quite technical. But it's the 30th reason that is most worrying because it is a cultural cause rather than a consequence of the meltdown. Farrell quotes the 86 year-old former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead who, at a recent Reuters Global Finance Summit, argued that America's economic problems will take many years to be resolved and will cost the country at least ten trillion dollars. The problem is so bad that poor old Whitehead is thinking about the downgrade of US government bonds before he goes to sleep at night:

"nothing but large increases in the deficit ... I think it would be worse than the depression. ... Before I go to sleep at night, I wonder if tomorrow is the day Moody's and S&P will announce a downgrade of U.S. government bonds.... It'll get worse because the public is not prepared to increase taxes. Both parties were for reducing taxes, reducing income to government, and both parties favored a number of new programs, all very costly and all done by the government."

Whitehead is right. In spite of the deadly seriousness of the crisis, there is a common delusion in America that the situation can be repaired through a new New Deal that won't involve any increases in taxation, but will magically be solved by huge government investment. It's the bipartisan no-pain all-gain myopia that got us into this dreadful mess in the first place. Both Obama and McCain clung to this lie because anything else would have meant certain electoral defeat. And this is why today's financial situation is so toxic -- at its root, it is a cultural crisis of democracy.

So let's go back to David Brooks' formerly middle class. These, of course, are the very people who have bought most fully into the convenient lie that they not only have a god-given right to lower and lower taxes but also have a right to government protection when things go wrong. So what happens if Paul Farrell is right and by 2011 we find ourselves in another Great Depression where the American government teeters on bankruptcy and tens of millions of people have neither jobs nor homes? What sort of social movements will emerge from this miasma? I suspect that these will be mass movements of rage characterized by an anti-government hysteria rather than by a nostalgia for the affordable luxuries of Starbucks or Whole Foods.

America into the 21st century

The future on a t-shirt. Thanks Claire.

The uncategorizable-in-chief

In "The New Liberalism", The New Yorker's George Packer spends over 6,000 words searching for Barack Obama's intellectual identity. It's a tricky, slippery business journeying into the ideological heart of the next American President, yet Packer is a hardy explorer. In his travelogue, he quotes David Axelrod, who describes Obama's thinking as "very eclectic". But even though Packer makes the standard comparisons with FDR and Reagan, he struggles to come up with a coherent ideological identity:

Unlike Reagan, Obama has no clear, simple ideology. People who have observed him in meetings describe a politician who solicits advice and information from a variety of sources, puts a high value on empirical evidence, and has the self-assurance to reach his own conclusions. A word that comes up again and again, from Obama himself and from people who know him, is “pragmatic.”

I wonder if Obama's supposed pragmatism -- this refusal to be ideologically pigeon-holed, a hostility to traditional right-left distinctions, even a rejection of the two parties as the anchors of American politics -- is emblematic of a new individualism in American political thinking. That Obama doesn't fit into tradition categories suggests, then, the appearance of a key new ideological category in American politics -- the uncategorizable. So can Obama's pragmatism -- which Packer believes is sometimes post-partisan and sometime progressive -- transform America?  Packer believes that it can. But for Obama to reinvent America, Packer argues, he'll need a highly mobilized public that can help drive his agenda:

Transformative Presidents—those who changed the country’s sense of itself in some fundamental way—have usually had great social movements supporting and pushing them. Lincoln had the abolitionists, Roosevelt the labor unions, Johnson the civil-rights leaders, Reagan the conservative movement.

Here, of course, is where the Internet comes in. Packer believes that, to be a transformative figure of the stature of Lincoln or FDR, Obama needs a movement that can challenge Washington. The challenge, Packer argues, is to convert the "breadth", "organization" and "generational energy" of his grass-roots organization. Obama, therefore, could use his vast Internet following to put pressure on Washington to change its archaic ways:

The Internet could be used to insure transparency; almost every activity of the federal government could be documented online, as some state governments have begun to do. The White House could use the vast Obama e-mail list to convey information about key issues and bills, and to mobilize pressure on Congress. Just as F.D.R. used radio and Reagan television to speak to the public without going through the press, Obama could do the same with the Web.

And this is where Packer's 6,000 word odyssey seems to conclude -- with an "electronic social-network platform" that could usher in a new era built around the "public good" rather than "private goods". But I'm not convinced by this communitarian conclusion. Just as Obama is an uncategorizable, so I suspect that his followers represent an electronic mass movement of uncategorizables. What unites them all is the Internet. That's the new liberalism. As Packer acknowledges, the Obama revolution will "look more like Google than like the Tennessee Valley Authority."

Obama goes viral

Barack Obama's democratic Internet strategy has just gone viral. The New York Times reports that Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, the leader of Israel's conservative Likud party, has borrowed the look, feel and features of Obama's website for his own site. Thus Israeli voters will have the pleasure of watching Bibi videos on YouTube, browsing Bibi's photos on flickr, getting invites from Bibi to join his Facebook network and receiving Tweets from Bibi on all the latest developments in the Middle East (including, perhaps, a cheerful Tweet about bombing Iran, after Bibi is elected to office early next year).

So who is next, I wonder? Which politician will borrow Obama's Internet strategy to give a little interactive jolt to their democratic standing?

Vladimir Putin must be sorely tempted to borrow Obama's strategy of using YouTube to "disintermediate" the few remaining independent (ie: elitist) Russian television channels and allow the Prime Minister to directly communicate his message with the Russian people. I'm guessing that Nicholas Sarkozy would love to use flickr to post the most intimate photographs of himself and his photogenic new bride, Carla Bruni so that the French electorate is really able to get to see the all-too-human side of their President. I imagine that the much misunderstood and maligned Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, would like to bolster his network on friends on Facebook.  And I'm sure that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il must be absolutely fascinated by the way in which Obama will directly use his e-mail database of 10 million supporters to push through policy and raise more money for future campaigns.

It's not just foreigners who are in awe of what Obama has achieved. Democratic strategist Joe Trippi told AP that Obama has "built the largest network anyone has ever seen in politics, and congressional Republicans are clueless about the communications shift that has happened."

I suspect, however, that not all Republicans are not quite as "clueless" as Trippi thinks. Expect Sarah Palin to do a Bibi Netanyahu and borrow liberally from Obama's populist web strategy. The Alaskan Governor is already quite a star on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and her authentic brand is ideally suited to the democratizing culture of the Internet. Ironically, Obama's intention to make broadband connectivity ubiquitous, thus wiring the poorest Americans to Palin's seductive message, might turn out to be her not-so-secret viral weapon in the 2012 election.

Saving the savior

Question: What do Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, most American liberal journalists and international human rights advocates have in common?

Answer: They are all pinning their hopes and hearts on Barack Obama...

• Medvedev wants Obama to "patch up" relations between America and Russia.
• Geoffrey Robertson, author of Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, believes that Obama to "right the wrongs" of all previous American administrations.
• Michael Hirsh pontificating about the failure of unregulated capitalism in this week's Newsweek, thinks Obama "job" is not only to to rescue the American economy, but also to save capitalism itself by acting "as a kind of cosmic broker between the end of one historical era and the beginning of another."

And all this before breakfast. Poor Barry O.

Experienced journalists like Hirsh should know better than to create such absurdly unrealistic expectations for a young man without much political experience. To say, as Hirsh does in "Barack the Savior?", that it "may well fall to Obama not just to save the world economy, but to save capitalism, as FDR did" is not only patently ridiculous but also wrong.  Obama has no grand "third way" strategic vision that attempts to bridge capitalism and socialism. And besides, it was Hitler, rather than FDR, who saved capitalism by causing a war that jump-started a world economy still deeply depressed in the late Thirties.

To misquote Churchill, never has the world expected so much from so little.  One reason, I suspect, both FDR And Reagan turned out to be inspirational Presidents is that few people regarded them as saviors when they came to office. The Obama era will turn out to be disastrous if we invest the young, unproven politician with Hollywood scale cosmic qualities. Under promising and over delivering is a good rule that Obama should borrow from business. And we -- as both citizens and journalists -- can save help the savior by not transforming him into an illusion before he's even come to office. 

Mr Obama goes to Tehran

So Obama is already a lock-in for Time magazine's 2008 Person of the Year. And that's before he actually accomplishes anything. So what, exactly, will the guy do and how will he be remembered in fifty years time? The rule in American politics is that Presidents get elected because of the economy and then spend most of their time focused on international affairs. With the good ship Hillary hopefully on the team as Secretary of State, Obama will soon recognize the intractability of the problems in Detroit and on Wall Street and will instead turn his statesmanlike gaze outward, toward American relations with the rest of the world. 

We haven't had a genuinely bold moment in American foreign policy since Nixon went to China in February 1972 to bring the Beijing communists in from the cold. The obvious opportunity is for Mr Obama to go to Tehran and sit down with the bearded powers-that-be there to establish a firm American-Iranian raprochement. An Iranian trip early in his Presidency would be the most effective way for him to really turn Middle Eastern politics upside down. And it would be the key to solving most of America's most explosive foreign policy problems. Such a historic trip could accomplish the following:

1. The symbolism of Barack Hussein Obama breaking bread with with the Mullahs in Tehran would be much more effective way of ending the cold war between American and the Islamic world than either turning Afghanistan into Iraq, bombing northern Pakistan or endlessly hunting down the merely symbolic Bin Laden (who is probably dead anyway).
2. Allow Obama to gracefully withdraw most American troops from Iraq while ensuring there be no immediate Iraqi civil war.
3. Doing a deal on the Iranian nuclear capability which save Tehran's face but also ensure that an Iranian bomb remains potentiality rather than actuality.
4. Laying the foundations of a genuine Arab-Israeli peace by bringing the Syrians, Hezbollah and Hamas to the table and then forcing the Israelis to honestly negotiate a viable two state deal.
5. Showing the Arabs, particularly the Saudis and the Egyptians, that the Americans have alternative Moslem allies in the region.

So what are the chances of this really happening?  Low, I'm afraid, very low. As John Pilger reminds us, Obama's decision to pick the uncompromising Zionist Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff suggests that he's learnt nothing from the last fifty years of disastrously pro Israeli American diplomacy in the Middle East. The great Seymour Hersch said the same thing in Denmark on Sunday, when he spoke before me at Fagfestival.

So, Mr Obama, is you happen to be reading this: please go to the Tehran and bring the Mullahs in from the cold. Such a trip will guarantee you posterity. It might even win you another Person of the Year award from Time magazine.

(de)Regulating capitalism and democracy

In his provocative 2003 book, The Future of Freedom, Newsweek editor and CNN host Fareed Zakaria argues that the 20th century was defined by what he calls two "broad trends":

1) The regulation of capitalism
2) The deregulation of democracy

Both these trends, Zakaria, argues, "overreached". by the 1970's, he argues, capitalism was regulated to such an extent that the free market was taxed, licensed, controlled and nationalized to death. Thus governments spend the last quarter of the 20th century "deregulating industries, privatizing companies, and lowering tariffs." In contrast, Zakaria says, democracy has moved in the "opposite direction" to capitalism. Quoting John Dewey's ironic remark that the "cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy", he suggests that the "deregulation of democracy has gone too far." And that's why, Zakaria says, most Americans hate their politicians and why "public respect for politics and political systems in every advanced democracy is at an all-time low."

At first glance, Zakaria's observations now appear rather dated. After eight years of George W. Bush, the common wisdom is that capitalism has been excessively deregulated while it's democracy that has been muzzled and now needs to be freed from the shackles of the neo-conservative state. Writing, for example, in this week's New Statesman, Will Hutton suggests that there the consequence of the regulate capitalism will be an the increase in democracy. Thus, he says, Obama's support of public service broadcasting, trade union rights, higher taxes on the rich and multilateralist foreign policy will all create a more harmonious society and, thus, he assumes, a more vibrant democracy.

But I wonder if the causal relationship between regulating capitalism and enriching democracy really is as simple as Hutton suggests. I suspect that Barack Obama's most significant legacy will his impact on American democracy and not on capitalism. It will be his experiments in direct democracy and his ability to manipulate the American people through the democratization of media rather than his relatively unimaginative economic policies which will make him profoundly different from previous American Presidents. On the eve of an Obama Presidency which promises an authentic style of leadership rarely seen in American history, the questions about deregulated democracy raised in Zakaria's The Future of Freedom are now perhaps more relevant than they've ever been.