I’ve been doing some work on this topic for a little while now, showing that at least historically, the rise of this sort of activity followed from the expansion of interest groups and mobilization of business. Strong partisanship also had a significant influence.

My take is that “grassroots” campaigns like this are, as you might expect, effective in gaining attention; on the other hand, legislators are obviously aware of the orchestration of such campaigns and therefore become less receptive over time. The internet seems to make this form of participation that much easier to carry out, but also that much easier to ignore.

I also don’t see what the fuss is – before email was popular, they’d have held a big press conference looking for publicity. They’d get fewer letters to congress out of that, but congress would have estimated the viewing audience and reacted accordingly, without letters. Smart people use new tools for existing purposes. Some smart people do it for their employer. Clay can find exciting details, Seth can mutter about the same old big picture, neither one wrong.

Heh. Indeed.

I don’t think that’s exactly right. It’s certainly neither an egalitarian nor heirarchical phenomenon, but it is necessarily empowering in some fundamental sense. Like any type of infrastructure, or more generally any tool, the internet allows its users to do things that were not possible before or to do other things more easily. There’s no question that the internet is an asset, a tool, and therefore empowering to someone. The question is merely how that power gets distributed.

This relates back to what Henry has in the post “partly because we are fighting a set of tired arguments between techno-evangelists … and techno pessimists”. That says something recursively about “lowered transaction costs of group formation and communication” – why those two poles? Because that’s where the power is, so those are the interests which matter, which get heard.

But still, having to get bloggers to shill for you is a much weaker position than controlling your own campaign. And there is a price to being a recognised shill, as witness the decline in stature of some of the early A-listers who became clearly identified as Repug mouthpieces over time.

Don’t think that if I don’t get the counter-move right, of the top of my head, that there’s no counter-move possible.

You don’t have to be a dewy-eyed optimist to see that possession of a big mailing list, and the capacity to spam it, is nothing like the asset it used to be.

I suspect this effect will be limited. If corporations use their databases to promote partisan political causes, they risk alienating half their customers. This silly anti-speculation letter is political, but not partisan. I’m not sure there are really that many political-but-not-partisan issues to engender this kind of effort.

I believe that thesis, while perhaps strictly true in the most narrow sense, leads to some appalling nonsense when people try to read implications from it. The obvious next step is to have groups organized around methods of manipulation and deception, of DIFFERENT transaction costs.

It’s sort of like how video changed the way war was run. It didn’t end war – but it did change the propaganda techniques used in managing it.

This is simply repeating the basic thesis that a fall in transaction costs helps large, distributed groups more than it helps groups organized around previous methods of managing transaction costs.

What is interesting about this bit of lobbying is that rather than whipping up astroturf support and pretending it’s real (as MSFT did during the monopoly trial with the Freedom To Innovate organization), they are now trying to design linkbait that will involve useful idiots in real grassroots lobbying, at no expense, on behalf of beliefs they may actually not hold (or even understand.)

So what I see here is a tacit realization that Congress can be reached with money or votes, and that wrangling voters may just be a matter of harnessing a matter of real concern (a sudden rise in gas prices) but re-directing it to corporate goals previously addressed on K Street.

It’s disgusting behavior, of course, but the big question is whether this form of ricochet lobbying will be general purpose or not, and whether there are any good defenses against it.