June 29, 2022

s12e31: The Thing About Websites, Is...

0.0 Context Setting

It's Wednesday, June 29, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and honestly, it's a super pleasant day.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

The Thing About Websites

Honestly, today is one of those days where I'm trying super hard to find something to write about for fifteen minutes. In yesterday's episode I continued my rant about no-good, horrible, terrible, cry-inducing Democratic Party websites, and it may well be that I keep going with that today.

The part that I didn't have in yesterday's episode, which only appeared out of my head when doing the live-tweet performance version, was that the whole thing, the whole four websites worth of no-good, horrible, what-is-this-even-for digital goodness, is kind of business as usual?

I am not one to say that x needs disrupting and really, it doesn't, not in the way that you need to throw new technology at something. But disrupting perhaps in terms of growth or change in practice, or just simply talking and figuring out a slightly different way of doing things, or being super clear about what the aim is.

Here's the rough situation: you have a model of politics here where I'm given to understand that, broadly speaking, politics is a local thing. That is good! You do a bunch of grassroots work and you get a bunch of people to vote for you, and hopefully you win and you are not in a gerrymandered district¹.

If you have pretensions and delusions of grandeur, if you're ambitious, then you'll probably use that as a springboard to go from local to state and then from state to Federal government, I guess you're also supposed to go from House to Senate to the White House. But totally start with your local community organizing.

The big thing that happened in 2008, with all of the hope and change was, in retrospect, perhaps something more along the lines of great messaging and design (I mean, those posters!) combined with a stunningly successful infrastructure around collecting a bunch of money with which, I don't know, media buys are made so that people who aren't actually that invested will turn out and vote for America's First Black President.

So now we have a payments infrastructure and alongside all the usual Big Donors, we have a way to grab tiny little donations from people over time and fast forward a good 14 years and I'm just going to wave around a totally unsubstantiated claim that there is now the Political Donation Processing Complex, which is all your ActBlue stuff. Modulo on the GOP side an apparently more effective infrastructure for super angry yelling Facebook ads to rile up your base.

There's a way of looking at this which is: a website is what an organization does. All of those websites - the Democrat national committee, the Congressional campaign committee, the Senate campaign committee and the 12 day old Defend Choice website, they're all about raising money, they all focus on raising money and they're so much about raising money that there's not really any oxygen left in the room for anything else. It's not so much that people wanted to be in the room when it happened, more that there's literally no room left for anything after you've stuck a giant Square reader in there so you can tap-to-donate and make sure you Elect More Democrats to... do whatever it is Democrats do.

So I get it. I get that the shitty mess with politics in America is that a junior member of Congress or whatever comes in and spends 99.99% of their time raising money and not actually being involved in the business of government or whatever the shocking documentary or investigation told us.

But, you know. Stop lying? There's two things going on here:

i) Unfortunately, the situation is that members of congress need to raise a bunch of money. Please give us that money.

ii) Also, we need, I don't know, more money? Something? So that we can actually deliver on our policy goals like codifying the right to abortion.

These are different things! They are, somewhat offensively, the equivalent of stretch goals, as if you need to pay the salary of a politician just to get them in the door so they can do the other stuff.

But there's no real plan for the other stuff, and there hasn't been, which is why I tend to think it's disingenuous.

The other thing that's going on here is that, apparently, the administration doesn't really care that much? Or that they're afraid of caring? So now you've got two things going on: a structural problem to do with raising money, and where raising money is so important, so critical, that you can't really talk about anything else, or you can't conceive of talking about anything else, and there's only one thing you want to ask people for (i.e. money), and the other one, which is that you don't have the guts to run on a platform that includes clearly stating that you're going to make sure the right to abortion actually, you know. Exists.

Heartbreakingly, you can't make an adminstration care. That's where they come across as liars when they say something is possible, or important, or that they'll do everything they can. Protip: never say you're going to do everything you can unless you're literally going to do everything you can. Being the type of person who says you're going to do everything you can and then demonstrably not doing it leaves you, over time, open to a complete disembowling by an orange, fake-tanned showman who doesn't have a problem on the one hand "telling it like it is" and actually being more honest, on some axes, while on others being a horrifically offensive shitfest of a narcissistic, abusive human being.

That's what's refreshing about telling the truth to people who're used to not hearing the truth, that's part of why consultants get the good bits of a gig by coming in and telling the truth and, often, fucking off before having to deal with the consequences long-term, and why it might be that if you're actually employed and on staff and you keep telling the truth for too long, on average, you might suddenly find yourself without a job. Which might have a parallel to, er, politics. Because politics is people.

I was talking about disruption. Everything is connected, everything is systemic now, we look around and we are the dog on fire gesturing, vaguely, everywhere saying "well, I guess we're fucked". But, and this is my stupid damn optimism leaking out, we don't have to be fucked. There is always a path forward, I have to believe that, otherwise I wouldn't be able to look my kids in the eye.

Here's where I still, naively, think there's a path to being honest, and what I might start crafting messaging (ugh) around, but it's only messaging if someone actually believes it and will act on it:

• You know, it fucking sucks that we have to raise money.
• But we can't change the rules right now. We don't have enough votes to do it. Sure, we could filibuster, but realistically, that's not happening. Or, rather: hoping we'll get rid of the filibuster is not a plan. We have to have an actual plan to not need to get rid of it.
• Which means winning seats.
• This is what you'll get if we win seats.
• There's a reason why news outlets like to go on about the first 100 days, it's because we hardly have the patience to think past thirty at this rate.
• But I said there's a path, and a path looks like this: you're going to reform campaign finance so the money thing isn't so fucked up. When? What do you need to do that? Reforming campaign finance will make it that bit easier to win races on the ground.
• You want to win races on the ground? Sure, it's systemic. So start talking at every level about how you're going to not necessarily turn every single little bit of ground and land people see and stand on blue as such, but how you're going to make them fairer and for every American, and don't get distracted about what for every American means: just fucking take it as read and act like it. Don't argue.
• Anyway. None of what I'm saying is new. It's not groundbreaking. But it does require much better knowledge of digital because digital does work and it can do things, and if you want to win, if, like I've said before, we were to get a green new deal, then we'll fuck it up if we don't do a green new deal with better tech and a better way of working with tech than we do right now. Which means changing how we work, together, and keeping at knocking down these shitty pretend walls and silos between groups with different experience and skill.

Hm. So turns out, I could write a bit.

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Best,

Dan