Online Activism

Tomorrow is Personal Democracy Forum's 2007 Conference. The theme this year is "The Flattening of Politics", a hat tip to one of the most important 'manifestos' of this millenium --The Cluetrain Manifesto.

The cluetrain was put together by a group of entrepreneurs, corporate communications experts, software engineers and new media scholars who saw 'the writing on the wall' with the new marketplace that was emerging with the rapid adoption of the internet. Yes, there was a time when many CEO looked at the web with suspicion and with a "but how are we going to make money out of this".

Notwithstanding the 1999/2000 bubble and crash, the naysayers got it all wrong.

The internet is not just changing the way we buy products or ideas. It is changing the basic dynamics of human engagement from how we meet, how we learn from each other, even how we mate.

Of course, the internet has proved to be powerful as a tool for political resource building, but in my book, it has not been used powerfully enough.

Applied to politics, the Manifesto reads as a primer on how the internet squashes any pretences of republic-like politics. Gone are the days in which engagement is only mediated by an elite 'entrusted' by the masses with every single policy and political decision making that will end up affecting their lives.

People Powered Politics is just starting in this country, but we are not there yet. Still, I believe 2008 will go down in history as the last Plato-centric, republic-like elections. Yet, after 2008, I cannot imagine the US Electoral college system surviving because people will demand more and more direct engagement in every single aspect of the political process.

Democracy literally means people (demos) power (cracy). And no self appointed leader of anthing ending with -roots will be able to rationalize a republic-like electoral system as people engage more and more with "social-technology" mediated "people power politics".

The 2008 hint at what is possible, but we are not there yet. If not, we would have had a candidate by now publish their own own 95 Theses for a new politics.

So let me take this opportunity to do it, if not for the candidates then for us, the people who are powering the movement that is flattening politics --even with this here blog. And to keep it in the spirit of the original, it would be cool if you "signed it" in the comments or with a link back to your blog.

So I give you,

The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics

Online Constituencies...
Networked political constituencies are beginning to self-organize faster than the governments and political organizations that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, constituencies are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most political organizations.

...People of Earth
The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.