Matt Bai obviously doesn’t own a webcam…

For the uninitiated: ‘Wtfpwn’ is the village in Poland where the first regexes were mined, hence the hacker interest. The term drifted into gamer slang. In current usage, it rhymes with ‘meringue’.

he does hit on an important point: which he sums up as:

Online politics can’t flourish in the virtual realm alone, any more than an online romance can be consummated through instant messaging.

We’re going to the tale of the tape to the Kentucky-06 fight last year – a knock-down drag-out battle, a classic Shaman vs Paladin matchup between Alice Kerr and Ben Chandler.

Now, between professionals, this matchup is a classic endurance fight, not so much about one killing blow, but mana management over the long term. For you noobs, this fight is about mana per second, not short term burst.

And when we say mana, folks, in this fight we mean bucks for advertising.

To recap, Chandler had the early bucks advantage, and then Kerr pulled ahead and looked to have the sustainability to win the fight.

The classic Wtfpwned Moment then happened, when a massive zerg of Kossacks the waved into range, flagged up and hoed into the fight.

Individually, these Kossaks are noobs who really shouldnt step out of Goldshire, capable of a maybe 20, maybe 50 point Lesser Heals or Renews, critting for the occasional 250 or 500, which is total noob stuff in an all-purple epic-ed out endgame standup fight like this one.

But when they all added up, numbers counted and Chandler got 80 000 total in the three days, exactly when he needed it from the mass of Kossak zerglings.

This hundreds-strong assist train of zerglings let Chandler dominate the last segment of the fight, and he pulled away to win – Kerr was getting help, but a few sporadic Greater Heals from De Lay and friends just wasnt a match for the zerg of tiny contributions marshalled by Kos.

A classic Wtfpwned moment, with Kos and the Kossaks effectively delivering the win for Ben Chandler in KY-06.

And thats Da Winnerz from Wtfpwned Scene Investigations, live from sunny Booty Bay.

So you would think. However, Brooks, Frum, Sullivan, Rose, and the scrawny kid are on Warcraft. Find the cave due east of the Grove of the Ancients in the Twilight Vale. It’s a fairly easy level ~15 quest; but you need to kill them all, quickly, or they bore you to death.

And ‘political journalism’ in the US resembles an game in which anyone with a keyboard can reinvent himself as a chronicler and opinion-former. Sad thing is, Matt Bai really does think it’s just a game.

Still, there’s an intuition behind the idea which makes sense. Unfiltered but meaningful emotion can draw crowds, and the greater the crowd, the more densely the emotion is distributed across the set of persons. Sense of the real involves mental discipline. Mental discipline is waived when emotion is unfiltered. Sense of the real is waived in certain crowds, especially when they’re large. This is in some part because it becomes harder and harder to communicate, so you have to resort to emotive signals more readily.

This doesn’t explain Daily Kos, though, because the viewers are from the getgo more isolated from one another than people are in genuine crowds, and they’re fully able to communicate in sophisticated ways. And in one sense, her use of the pseudonym would only inhibit emotion by blocking the sense of trust that you get from knowing someone’s real identity. So this would call the intuition into doubt.

Though in another sense, it would provide a loss of inhibitions for the reader to be critical; and in conversations which ensue with direct contact with the person, a sense of trust may be saved. Also, politics tends to provide its own emotions (especially when dealing with groups feeling underpopular, like Democrats). This would seem to support the intuition.

(Also, daen, your comment is spot-on. I wish I’d caught the irony of the statement.)

“Online politics can’t flourish in the virtual realm alone, any more than an online romance can be consummated through instant messaging.”
and the inflated self-importance of bloggers (left, right, or center) aside, he is right: politics, like any other endeavor in a “real-world” society, needs to be (and is going to be) governed by the rules and regulations of the social system it reflects – and “offline” life is most assuredly one of those factors. I read enough blogs of various political orientations to recognize the “alternate-reality” mindset which permeates so many of the most ideological/partisan sites – both bloggers/posters and their commentariat. It is events like YearlyKos which, I think, are going to be of increasing importance in shifting the nature of the “political blog” from a sort of current-affairs-oriented RPG into a real (as in “reality-based” without that term’s now-ironic connotations) political force.

Of course, it probably won’t work for any blog much smaller than DailyKos; but at least it is a start.

Why stop there? How is it different from the countless other forms of offline communication among parties of etc. who’ve never met … ?

And then the horse standing next to them rolls his eyes and walks out of the bar.

And then Tom Friedman says, “Once again, I’ll have what they’re having.”

Exactly how is this phenomenon different from the countless other forms of online communication among parties of compatible suasions who’ve never met? And for that matter, who has the time and energy to “reinvent” their political convictions on the net into something other than what education and experience has cultivated over the years?