GETTING
PAST THE HYPE
It
has become a bromide to declaim that the Internet has forever
changed the way we play politics. It's true, of course, but
not for the reasons usually given. Oh, it's supposed to be
all about raising money, or sending email, or organizing seemingly
spontaneous demonstrations. But compared to the soft money
being ladled out by the special interests, the total amount
that piddled in through cyberspace amounts to no more than
a drop in a bottomless ocean. Spamming voters with unsolicited
email may be the fastest way ever devised to alienate voters
– not exactly a clever cutting-edge ploy. As for spontaneous
demonstrations – the British anti-tax blockaders claimed
that they couldn't have done it without email and the Internet,
but I'll wait for the protests to spread to this side of the
Atlantic (not counting Guatemala!) before I weigh in on the
subject. No, the story of how such a phenomenon as "cyber-politics"
is evolving is a lot more interesting than that.
HYDE
PARK IN CYBERSPACE
What
really gave rise to the growth of a political sensibility
in cyberspace was the appearance of the first independent
posting board – i.e., one not inside one of the self-enclosed
systems like AOL and Compuserve. FreeRepublic.com
is a freewheeling forum in which people post articles from
just about anywhere and discuss the piece on the resulting
"thread." I have written about FreeRepublic often in
this column, and by now it has become a veritable institution
of the political side of the Internet. Everything finds its
way to FreeRepublic, in time: the good, the bad, the ugly,
and the sublime – this last astonishingly often. What
has come into being on this site, over the years, is a true
virtual community, a cybernetic replication of the town hall
meeting, or, more accurately, a kind of Hyde
Park in cyberspace, in which often conflicting voices
compete for attention. It is also a hangout, a place where
friendships are formed, and sundered, opinions are expressed,
and refuted, and the largely unregulated and unmoderated discussion
did what the carefully monitored "chat rooms" and posting
boards of old could never do, and that is give birth to the
cybernetic wing of the conservative movement.
POLITICS
OF PARADOX
For
all its alleged hipness and edginess, the great paradox of
politics on the Internet is that it's almost an exclusively
right-wing phenomenon. The Left has nothing comparable to
the cyber-institutions that have grown up on the Right: Z
magazine has (or had) some kind of plonky, self-enclosed members-only
system almost impossible to navigate, but that is about it,
as far as I know. With the left – albeit "triangulated"
– in power, it was only natural that the insurgent forces
of the Internet, with its radical libertarian cachet, would
come out on the Right end of the political spectrum. The circumstances
that led to the founding of FreeRepublic were the result of
Draconian measures taken against conservatives by "politically
correct" hall monitors on the AOL-Compuserve posting boards.
Censorship, reprimands, and bannings directed against virtually
any expression of conservative dissent drove Jim Robinson,
the founder of FreeRepublic.com, to set up his own site. By
the time it gained some notoriety (the good kind) as the locus
of anti-Clinton sentiment in cyberspace, FreeRepublic.com
already had many thousands of registered members – and
it is still growing.
JIM
ROBINSON'S ACHIEVEMENT
FreeRepublic
has long since reached the point of self-generating renewal,
and that is the goal that every e-business startup (with far
more cash than Jim Robinson will probably ever see) seeks
to achieve. With very little capital, and a lot of determination,
Robinson has succeeded in making his site indispensable to
large numbers of people: If Drudge,
whose original audience was largely confined to the FreeRepublic
community, is the Walter Winchell of the new cyber-Right,
then Robinson is its William Randolph Hearst. As long as Robinson
maintains the machinery – and fights off the liberal
media conglomerates using every legal trick in the book to
close him down – his site will attract new people, and,
like a true community, continuously reproduce itself and evolve.
THE
RULE OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE
The
generally laissez-faire policy that has always characterized
FreeRepublic is the key to its success. The site is undoubtedly
oriented to conservatives, but all are welcome provided they
realize that everyone is a guest and the basic rules of decorum
are observed. These rules, however, are interpreted rather
loosely, if only because the site has become so popular that
any kind of extensive policing is practically impossible.
Known disrupters – the few people who come to antagonize,
with perhaps not a few dot-gov's among them – usually
disappear before attracting a sufficient amount of attention
to require disciplinary action. Oh, there have been a few
such incidents, but mostly the disputes were personal in nature,
and had to do with the behavior rather than the politics of
the offender. But the free-style nature, and tolerance for
differing opinions, that makes FreeRepublic such an interesting
place was not appreciated by everyone, and therein lies a
tale. . . . .
THE
SPLIT
Robinson's
laid-back California attitude – he hails from Modesto
– was resented by a few of the more prominent Freepers
(as the FreeRepublic crowd proudly call themselves), particularly
the New York wing led by the voluble Lucianne
Goldberg, literary agent-turned-right-wing-Hedda
Hopper. They didn't like what they considered to be Jim
Robinson's undue hostility to George Bush (the elder), and
they didn't like it how every right-wing splinter group, from
the paleoconservatives to the libertarians, got to put their
two cents in. Goldberg, and her
ambitious son Jonah – bit
players in the Monica Lewinsky affair – were determined
to extend their fifteen minutes of fame into the indefinite
future, and so Lucianne.com
was born. . . .
BUSH.COM
This
new site was smaller, but far slicker than FreeRepublic: it
came equipped not only with a chat room, where Goldberg and
her fans could hold court, but also with plenty of hall monitors
who policed the discussions and assiduously weeded out anyone
who didn't follow the party line. And there was never any
doubt as to which party, either – any conservative
who strayed from the idea that the Republican party is the
fountainhead of political wisdom was immediately purged. Under
the iron thumb of Goldberg's webmaster and Grand Inquisitor-in-chief,
known for the purposes of this article as the "Navigator,"
a version of right-wing Stalinism ruled the roost at Lucianne.com,
with Luci as Stalin, and the Navigator as her right-hand man
and chief executioner. While liberal dissent was tolerated,
to some extent, anyone who criticized the GOP from the right
was immediately targeted, baited, and unceremoniously deleted
– particularly if they admitted to being supporters of
Pat Buchanan. After a while, the purges became so constant,
the intolerance of any dissent so all-pervasive, that postings
on Ldot (as its habitués came to call it) consisted
mostly of mindless banter, one-liners and cocktail party chat
without substance or interest to any but the posters themselves.
Ldot was sealed up tighter than a drum. Given the freewheeling
nature of the medium, this couldn't last – and it didn't.
. . .
TROUBLE
IN PARADISE
As
news of the split between Luci and the Navigator spread through
the ranks of the Ldotters with the speed of electrons hurtling
through cyberspace, it was as if Stalin had suddenly announced
that his secret police chief had been taken out before a firing
squad and summarily shot. While rumors about financial and
other personal disagreements made the origins of the dispute
seem somewhat murky, there was also clearly a political basis
for the split. The real Bush loyalists, centered around the
Navigator and his friends, were mortally offended by the defection
of the Goldbergs to the McCain camp. Son Jonah wrote a piece
for National Review Online endorsing Mad John, and
Luci soon followed suit in some brief remarks dropped in amid
the gossipy tidbits that make up her "Shortcuts" column.
GLASNOST
IN LUCIANNE-LAND
The
chat room – known as the "Alley," always the center of
interactivity at Ldot – was shut down. The spirit of
glasnost set in: purged posters were reinstated. Suddenly
the narrow parameters of the permissible were somewhat widened,
and almost immediately there was a noticeable uptick in the
variety of articles posted and the quality (and length) of
the ensuing threads. A few people even dared to post articles
that had appeared in Antiwar.com – a site banned by the
Navigator. But it wasn't long before the Navigator struck
back. . . .
NAVIGATOR'S
REVENGE
Within
days, if not hours, the virtual community of the Right was
roiled by the appearance of yet another posting site –
VastRightWing.com.
Repeating the tactic carried out by Luci against FreeRepublic,
Navigator set up shop under his own domain name up –
and created an even slicker and more "professional" –
looking site than Lucianne.com. The graphics were glitzy,
and the number of extra features – including original
articles on the front page, the announcement of a VastRightWing
Writers Guild, a VastRightWing Artists Guild, a Voice-chat-enabled
"Alley," etc. etc. – was truly awe-inspiring. It was
a virtual amusement park in cyberspace: too bad nobody showed
up to play. . . .
VAST
EMPTY HALLS
In
spite of all the extra added attractions and shiny graphics
– to say nothing of the strangely pretentious hierarchical
titles given to various levels of posters, including "furor
scribendi," "bien pesant," etc. – the vast
echoing halls of VastRightWing.com remained largely empty.
Only a few dozen Ldotters, at most, followed their Great Leader,
the Navigator, into the turgid waters of the new site. It
seemed as if every day the Navigator came up with some new
feature, some smooth new graphic, to attract visitors to the
site, but the registration of VastRightWing.com probably never
exceeded a hundred. Certainly only a very few threads
of more than two or three posts were ever started: since the
old methods of purging anyone who disagreed with the Great
Navigator's politics were continued, and even more strictly
enforced, the site rather quickly degenerated into near total
inactivity.
TAKE
A LESSON
After
months of this, the VastRightWingers seemed to realize that
simply adding new features every week did nothing to improve
their failing fortunes: reconciling themselves to their near
complete isolation, the site was cleaned up, unused features
were eliminated or downgraded, and matters were considerably
simplified. Today, VastRightWing.com stands in lonely isolation,
a monument to the rule that heavy-handedness can kill a posting
site as quickly and effectively as being down half the time.
THE
BIG SMEAR
Lucianne.com
continued to chug along, without the variety and sheer size
of FreeRepublic, yet obviously prospering under the new regime.
Threads were longer, and far more interesting, if a bit on
the combative side. The Buchananites who posted were emboldened
by the new openness, and this provoked a reaction from the
more militant Bushies, most of whom returned after McCain
crashed and burned in the primaries. But the "let a hundred
flowers bloom" period came to an abrupt end, one day, when
news of fresh purges hit the rumor mill, and several threads
were summarily pulled, one after the other. Glasnost
was over. I had been largely unaware of all this until someone
brought a curious development to my attention: The "Rules"
posted for the edification of those who wanted to register
at Goldberg's site were rewritten to include the following
clause:
"Articles
from hate group sites such as KKK, Aryan Nation, American
Nazi Party, etc. are not allowed. Articles from AntiWar.com
and Spotlight are not welcome on Lucianne.com. Anyone posting
articles from any of these sites will be banned without notice."
HARDENED
ARTERIES?
A
more senseless and artlessly malicious assertion would be
hard to make: Antiwar.com in bed with the Ku Klux Klan and
the American Nazi Party? Antiwar.com a "hate group"? Since
we deal with international affairs to the virtual exclusion
of all else, and post no articles dealing with race,
such radical cognitive dissonance suggests that Lucianne Goldberg's
problem may be medical rather than ideological: this kind
of oddly inappropriate behavior seems more like an early warning
sign of Alzheimer's than any kind of political analysis. Aside
from a diagnosis of hardened arteries in the brain, however,
is it possible to explain this kind of mindless vindictiveness?
SEND
THIS LADY FAN MAIL
This
columnist had a minor
dustup with son Jonah over his
proposal that the US invade and annex the African continent
– or, at least, a great chunk of it – which I found
amusing
enough to write about, but this hardly merits such an
unfair and even vicious trashing. Those who wish to send Luci
a get well card via email can do so by sending it to Lucianne@lucianne.com.
You might also let her know what you think of people who don't
even know who and what they are slandering. . . . .
THE
AMOEBAE SPLITS AGAIN
The
new crackdown on Goldberg's site led to some real dissatisfaction
in the ranks of longtime posters and their friends, and this
resulted, once again, in yet another split-off and the birth
of a new site: Pipebombnews.com.
Set up by two longtime Ldotters, the pipebombers may not have
the glitzy graphics, and their site may be a bit confusing
at first, but they make up for it in spirit. Here is a return
to the freewheeling spirit of FreeRepublic, with anyone and
everyone welcome (so far as I can see), and they seem to be
growing. This place is well worth a visit.
THE
SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
While
the numbers of people engaged in cyber-political activity
are still not large enough to be a decisive or even important
factor, by any measure, the phenomenon may have some predictive
value as a harbinger of how politics will come to be played
in the future. The growing centrality of the Internet impacts
how political activists are recruited, and organized, how
votes of key constituencies are mobilized, how campaigns are
conducted – and, most importantly, how political ideas
are disseminated. It will be interesting to see how the virtual
communities I have described grow, and mutate, in the future:
I'll be chronicling what I find to be a fascinating process,
from time to time, in this column, so stay tuned.
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