Christopher Lyden, a friend here in Cambridge, and noted journalist and radio voice, is launching a new "conversation" with the world, with tought leaders, with the Internet populace, concerning the transformation that is occuring in Amercian democracy and politics, driven by the Internet. He describes this transformation with great prose: In my own humble observation, what's happening out there is the start of a fundamental reordering of democratic energy and political influences, a drastic subversion of a discredited game, an inversion of the old pyramids of control, or perhaps a shape shift, as Stirling Newberry argues, from pyramid to sphere. The Internet represents a rewiring of the body politic, but it's not the technology that's interesting, it's the individual engagement and social model implied in it. One of many salient effects of the Internet in politics (along with the geekification of campaigns, the new language of memes, the networks in place of campaign organizations) is the seeming recapitulation of computer-industry history in the mid-1990s. The leading practitioner of the new "open source" politics, Joe Trippi of the Dean campaign, got the idea working in California with Linux-based software entrepreneurs against the monster Microsoft. "I always wondered how you could take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and open source and apply it [in politics]," Trippi told Larry Lessig. "What would happen if there were a way to do that and engage everybody in a presidential campaign?" I expect his "Blogging of the President" will be the place of choice on the Internet (and beyond) for conversation on the presidential campaign.
9:23:22 AM 
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