Over Labor Day weekend, I spent some time with a very smart group of engineers, quantitative analysts, and e-activists, all of whom were wrestling with the question of whether the internet could contribute to solving the climate crisis, and while everyone had something to say, we didn't do a very good job of thinking together. As we all sat with our laptops open, half-listening while we tapped away on our email or Twitter-feeds, I wondered, have we all caught Internet attention-deficit-disorder?

Now we're all watching Wall Street's continuing meltdown, and thousands, maybe even millions, of us are trying to answer that age-old political question, "What is to be done?" But the spike in online discussion of the economic crisis--Ari Melber noted in The Nation a huge surge in references to the bailout in the blogosphere over the last week--hasn't exactly resulted in clarity about what to do.

As Nancy Scola posted a few days ago, uber-geek Robert Scoble is throwing his hands up in the air at all the armchair punditizing going on, and declaring his intention to turn his attention back toward the very elites who supposedly had their hands on the wheel steering us into this mess! (Not David Brooks, Scoble!)

The problem with information overload, and interaction overload, may well be hardwired in our brains--the so-called "Dunbar number" of 150 being the rough limit of how many people we can actually have a real relationship with. But we can definitely do a better job building and sharing better filters for dealing with these overloads. Now, more than ever, we need to take this problem of collaborative cogitation seriously--otherwise all the web is doing is making it easier for more people to talk to each other, but not necessarily to listen to each other.

As Mark Pesce, who keynoted PdF this year with a provocative talk on the new age of hyper-mimesis and hyper-connection, says in a fresh post on his blog:

Four years ago, when I began my research into sharing and social networks, I asked a basic question: Will we find some way to transcend this biological limit, break free of the tyranny of cranial capacity, grow beyond the limits of Dunbar’s Number?

After all, we have the technology. We can hyperconnect in so many ways, through so many media, across the entire range of sensory modalities, it is as if the material world, which we have fashioned into our own image, wants nothing more than to boost our capacity for relationship.

And now we have two forces in opposition, both originating in the mind. Our old mind hews closely to the community and Dunbar’s Number. Our new mind seeks the power of the mob, and the amplification of numbers beyond imagination. This is the central paradox of the early 21st century, this is the rift which will never close. On one side we are civil, and civilized. On the other we are awesome, terrible, and terrifying. And everything we’ve done in the last fifteen years has simply pushed us closer to the abyss of the awesome.

We can not reasonably put down these new weapons of communication, even as they grind communities beneath them like so many old and brittle bones. We can not turn the dial of history backward. We are what we are, and already we have a good sense of what we are becoming. It may not be pretty – it may not even feel human – but this is things as they are.

Mark argues that we are caught between our need to belong to real functioning human-scale communities and our tendency to be sucked into larger, mob-like behavior, and offers a way out of this nightmare: make our communities smarter by harnessing the power of the mob, i.e. crowdsourcing.

...every time we gather together in our hyperconnected mobs to crowdsource some particular task, we become better informed, we become more powerful. Which means it becomes more likely that the hyperconnected mob will come together again around some other task suited to crowdsourcing, and will become even more powerful. That system of positive feedbacks – which we are already quite in the midst of – is fashioning a new polity, a rewritten social contract, which is making the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries – that is, the industrial era – seem as antiquated and quaint as the feudal systems which they replaced.

It is not that these institutions are dying, but rather, they now face worthy competitors. Democracy, as an example, works well in communities, but can fail epically when it scales to mobs. Crowdsourced knowledge requires a mob, but that knowledge, once it has been collected, can be shared within a community, to hyperempower that community. This tug-of-war between communities and crowds is setting all of our institutions, old and new, vibrating like taught strings.

I think that Mark is right that we're constantly discovering and playing with new patterns for collaboration. Everything from the rise of the netroots to the rise of Twitter #hashtag campaigns are examples of new forms of self-organization and collaboration. But here's the thing: we're in danger of rushing so fast into the future of networked communication, playing with our new tools and inventing new ones, that we'll never get really get the crowdsourcing-->community effects refined that we need. ("Dean done right," some people used to call it.)

Anthony Citrano, one of the founders of PopTech, expresses part of what I'm thinking in this post, which he titled "Breadlines and Battlecries." Addressing A-list bloggers like Scoble, he wrote:

I’m not asking you to give up your gadgets nor to stop blogging about blogging. Social media is unquestionably transforming our global culture and our politics. But let’s devote less energy to the tools themselves and more to the fuller realization of their potential. I suggest a little less time navel-gazing and a little more time using your voices, tools and networks to catalyze broad, deep, honest conversations about public policy. And it will be contagious: in doing so, you will set an example for the millions who will see and hear you.

Citrano's point is that we need more focus and less chatter; more signal, less noise; more attention to serious civic issues, less on ephemera. I think we also need better tools and practices in how we use the social web to make sense of our times, and it's time for political technologists to make more of an effort to congeal that conversation. Do you agree? If so, will you join me in such a conversation, if, for example, we were to pick a time for a monthly conference call for everyone who might be interested in joining in?

• One Million's Moneybomb: Can a loosely-organized Facebook group best the biggest name progressive blogs when it comes to fundraising? That's the question that longtime online organizer Jon Pincus is asking. And it seems possible that a moneybomb effort launched by the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group, which has pulled in nearly $28,000 from more than 850 people, might indeed put the group on the leaderboard ranked somewhere alongside MyDD and OpenLeft -- though below the Daily Kos empire's Orange to Blue campaign that has pulled in (some $800,000 so far, reports Jon). Though, it should be noted, those campaigns are for a full slate of Dem candidates, not just Barack Obama. #

• Catholic Battle Over Votes Moves to YouTube: Ever since Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate, we're heard a lot about the role that the Catholic vote will play in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But when it comes to who Catholics might cast a ballot for, Church officials and advocates aren't letting the campaigns dictate to them -- or be the only ones using social media to persuade voters. Time Magazine recently reported that YouTube is home to "a wildly diverse collection of pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus, and pious laypeople." And with the battle over which party's ticket better captures Catholic thinking heating up in places like Biden's hometown of Scranton, churches around the country are embedding on their websites "Catholic Vote 08," a somber 3-minute YouTube video that doesn't endorse a candidate but declares that the most important issue this election is simply put, "life." #

The Candidates on the Web

• Obama Tries to Connects the Dots with Keating Doc: The Obama campaign has kept its powder dry on the so-called Keating Five scandal -- the savings and loan controversy from the early '90s which found John McCain criticized by the Senate ethics committee for his relationship with California S&L figure Charles Keating. Until now. At noon ET today, the Obama campaign is releasing a 13 minute documentary shot in a polished doc style that would do Errol Morris proud. Politico's Mike Allen has more on the strategy behind the campaign's Keating focus. With a microsite built around the film at KeatingEconomics.com, what could have been dismissed as a dredging up of ancient history actually ties the Keating scandal to a powerful theme: that the crony corporatism witnessed during the S&L mess is still at play during our current economic crisis. That's a tough case to make in 30 second TV spot or two minute web ad -- much easier to lay it out in a 13 minute mini-film. And hey, why not launch it right at lunchtime east coast time, when people are looking for a little entertainment? The innovative technique all but guarantees it will attract attention: the trailer for the film has already gotten more than 270,000 views. Worth nothing is the contrast between this and how the McCain camp is treating the situation involving former Weatherman Bill Ayers -- as much as McCain would love to highlight the connection between Ayers and Obama, neither his campaign nor the RNC has produced anything like what team Obama is doing here with Keating; a search for "Ayers" on JohnMcCain.com, for example, produces this: No documents were found."#

• New Site Boils Down McCain: Do the elves in the Obama web shop ever take a break? The campaign has launched a minimalist but visually striking JohnMcCainRecord.com that displays three simple things team Obama thinks every voter should know about their opponent on Iraq, education, energy and ten other critical issue areas. Pick a topic, and the nuggets of information display bam, bam, bam. Each is linked to a primary source -- whether video or text. And, natch, a link to the Obaman take on the topic in question. It's old content in a shiny new package, but it works. #

• Your Social Data Dashboard: If you find yourself drowning in the tidal wave of social media data that's constantly being produced around this election, have a look at Perspctv's dead-simple charts. They're a dashboard on what's being said and done about the presidential candidates doing online. (Thanks Shaun Dakin) #

TechCongress and Beyond

• Hoekstra Tweets His Angst: Twitter has revealed an honest congressman, says the Municipalist's Craig Colgan. Just before the House vote on the revised bailout bill last week, Michigan Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra tweeted: "Deciding what to do on bailout bill.What a disappointment that Ds put junk into the bill and that Rs leadership supported it.Pathetic. [sic]" Why' does Hoekstra's impassioned tweeting make Craig such a fan? "This humanizes him, and brings him down with the rest of us, frustrated, angry, worried, tired of partisanship for its own sake." (FWIW, Hoekstra ended up voting yes.) #

• Protection Wiki Moves to Election Mainstream: Picking up on an idea launched by Jack and Jill Politics's Baratunde Thurston, the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy has launched its own Election Protection Wiki. #

In Case You Missed It...

Luigi Montanez asks if a Republican National Committee's FEC filing against Obama is actually based on a fake email.

Michael Whitney highlights An Obama Minute, today's ambitious effort that aims to raise a million dollars for Obama from noon to 12:01, "helped along by an interactive billboard in Times Square."

"[F]rankly it's f---ing brilliant," says Micah Sifry about a huge electronic billboard that the California Democratic Party arranged to display text messages during a Sarah Palin speech in L.A. -- a gambit that was then streamed back to the web via UStream.

Nancy Scola looks at how the largely closed second presidential debate happening tomorrow night in Nashville has one teensy-weensy opening: a chance to whisper in moderator Tom Brokaw's ear.

And, finally, Allison Fine follows up a post on the five reasons you may have trouble voting this fall with an update on how the Social Security Administration is shutting down its databases right at the time it'd be most helpful for verifying ID-less voters.

Here's why: I'm tired of living in a de facto plutocracy. I also believe we are on the verge of a revolution in participation in government, powered by new technology that is making it possible for many more of us to connect together and have a meaningful voice in the process. The bailout bill, and the process by which it is being jammed through Congress, is an affront to those democratic values. We can do better. And the vote Monday showed, in nascent form, how the same forces that are eating away at the underpinnings of "broadcast politics," the capital-intensive way of electing a President whose demise we've been chronicling here at techPresident, are also starting to unsettle "business as usual" on Capitol Hill.

Several years ago, when I was at Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan group dedicated to establishing voluntary full public financing of election campaigns, I worked on a variety of projects aiming to illustrate all the ways that Big Money had commandeered democracy. One of them was a poster that we called, "State of the Union: Congress Meets Wall Street/How Big Corporate Campaign Contributors are Buying America…And What the Rest of Us Pay." The halls of Congress had become synonymous with the trading floor of Wall Street, we argued, and to drive the point home, here's the image we developed, working with a wonderful designer named Chris Foss.

To be honest, it's not an uplifting picture. The floor of the "people's House" shouldn't be equated with the trading floor of the Stock Exchange. But to many Americans, of all political stripes, that is what Congress has become: a place where votes are for sale to the highest bidder, where access is openly bought and sold, where Members are measured not by the substance of their ideas but by the size of their campaign war-chest, and where the biggest winners have been the best-connected, biggest-bankrolled interests of the financial sector.

This chart below, which I posted about last week, shows just how much money from the financial sector has come to dominate the financing of campaigns in the last ten years. (Press the play button and follow the biggest ball, which represents finance, as it balloons in size and shifts its giving to follow the party in power in Congress.)

So here's what in my view is the most important fact about Monday's vote in Congress: for one day, at least, democracy beat plutocracy. Or, as David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and author of Free Lunch: How The Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expenses (and Stick You with the Bill), put it, the vote "shows that Washington is not entirely in the service of the political donor class, by which I mean Wall Street and the corporations who rely on it for their financing. These campaign donors, a narrow slice of America, have lobbied and donated their way into a system that stacks the economic rules in their favor."

I can't prove this, but I think that the same rise in voter participation that we're seeing in the explosion of small donors to the presidential campaigns and in the explosion of networked bloggers watch-dogging the media may also be starting to hit Congress. Ordinary people want more of a say in the process, so they're starting to pool their money and their voices, and they've learned--thanks to the Internet--that they can have an impact, certainly on the presidential campaign of the last 18 months. (Zephyr Teachout credits the Howard Dean and Ron Paul decentralized campaigns as having taught many citizen activists that they had the power to influence the process, and I agree, though I would widen that circle to include supporters of many candidates, including Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and Huckabee.)

When the White House and Congress, two highly unpopular institutions at the moment, come along with a top-down, no-debate, no-transparency, save-the-fatcats bill and ask for its immediate passage, we shouldn't be surprised to see those same forces reflexively hit back. Or, as Markos Moulitsas, one of the exemplars of the new people-powered networked politics, just put it, "Back in my day, we didn't hand off 5% of our entire GDP to an unelected political appointee on the whims of the stock market."

What happens next? Well, we're in the interregnum now. An old way of doing things is dying, and the new one being born isn't quite in place yet. In all likelihood, Congress is going to solve the crisis of the moment by putting lipstick on its pig of a bill--that is, by adding an alluring set of "sweeteners" (our tax money directed to particular interests of particular Members, little of which will be related to the actual problems of the economy, but all of which is geared to these Members' actual fears of facing the voters). And the bill will pass.

But the process has been a huge shock to the networked public sphere, which is rapidly adapting to all the new realities exposed over the course of the last week. And, as Scott Heiferman of Meetup once said, "the genie of self-organization is out of the bottle." Critical masses of citizens are coming together around this bailout fight. They've swamped Congress's servers, not only with incoming email messages protesting the vote, but also in searching to get the actual text of the proposed legislation. They've swarmed all over metastasizing text of the draft bill (which now contains sections on wool modifications and wooden arrows) and are creating a new expectation, that Members actually read the full bill they are voting on, before they vote. They're networking together to draft better ideas into life (see Jon Pincus's effort on MixedInk here and David Sirota's efforts on OpenLeft here and here. And they're finding and elevatin a new array of economist-bloggers, who are filling an information vacuum left by the mainstream media's embrace of the basic assumptions of the Bush-Paulson-Pelosi approach to the crisis.

As these new social connections are made and spread, they will gain salience. Not enough to stop whatever bill is about to pass the Senate and presumably the House on Friday, but eventually, enough to alter the way business is done on Capitol Hill. We are watching and we are learning, and in the last few weeks of financial crisis many of us have discovered that the powers-that-be are just making it up as they go along and Emperor really doesn't have much to wear. I don't think we're going to return to the old status quo, where moneyed interests and well-connected lobbyists comfortably call the shots, any more than we're going back to the days when Big Donors, Big-Foot Journalists and Big Name Consultants decided who could be a serious candidate for President and what they would talk about and the rest of us just watched and waited until our moment to vote.

The stakes are too high, too many of us are watching and joining in, and we've learned that when we get connected, we can make a difference.

• The Email Heard 'Round the World: The LA Times' Erika Hayasaki has the back story on Anne Kilkenny. Anne Kil-who? Oh, you know, the Alaskan who wrote an email critiquing her fellow Wasillan Sarah Palin that landed in your inbox at least one thousand times just after the Palin pick was announced. The LA Times brands Kilkenny a "gadfly" who was a regular at local political meetings when even the town's political reporter wouldn't show. And some on the local political scene, it seems, aren't too happy with Kilkenny's standing as a "Palin expert" these days. But she's a gadfly whose opinion on a major new American political figure whose missive went, for whatever reason, entirely viral. Beats waiting for open mic night down at town hall. #

• Deconstructing Voiceover-Gate: Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert is slamming right-leaning bloggers for their quixotic campaign to tie an anti-Palin YouTube clip to the Obama campaign, despite, well, the total lack of evidence -- unless, that is, voiceovers that kinda sound like other voiceovers counts. Eric's piece is a gleeful no-holds-barred tearing apart of the right's blogosphere, sure. But somewhere in there there's also an interesting dissection of how this particular "story" started with a kernel of truth, warped into an ungrounded political mission, and ultimately fizzled out. #

• Man Down!: Bad news for ActBlue: The Democratic fundraising hub went down yesterday afternoon for at least two hours. Even badder news: The snafu happened right in the middle of the very final moments of the fundraising quarter. The panicked emails coming out of campaigns and allies yesterday were a testament to how ActBlue, which has raised more than $68 million online since 2004, has become a cornerstone of the progressive infrastructure. That's especially true for smaller campaigns, where it can function like an outsourced finance team. The site was back up and running by early evening. And in an email, ActBlue called the downtime "unacceptable" and offered to help hand-process contributions that had piled up in the meantime. No official word yet on what went wrong. #

• Picking up the Schleppin' Tab: If this were still the '90s we'd be calling it synergy. But since it's 2008, we'll go with calling it a mashup. ObamaTravel is a volunteer-run grassroots organization that partners potential volunteers with people who have cash to spare, that quite naturally, grew out of the 2004 Dancers for Democracy movement. The Great Schlep is a Sarah Silverman-fronted effort to get Jewish folks to visit their grandmas and grandpas in Florida to convince them to vote for Obama. Put 'em together, and you've got a way to new pay for that plane ticket down to South Florida. #

The Candidates on the Web

• Taking to the Blogs to Condemn McCainCare: The Obama campaign has taken heat for supposedly giving short shrift to progressive bloggers. Now, one of their own has tried to reach out. With McCain and Obama's back-and-forth during the first debate over the Republican's health care plan causing more confusion than it erased, David Blumenthal, one of the Obama campaign's top health care advisers, penned a lengthy early morning post on Daily Kos condemning McCain's health care plan for its "blind embrace of de-regulated free markets." Crickets, my friends, crickets. David's post produced only 11 comments and 9 recommendations, and questions posed to the advisor in the comments went unanswered. By way of comparison, a diary from an unknown Alaskan on "Creating Candidate Palin" has attracted 276 responses and garnered too many recommendations to bothering counting. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• Version Tracking the Big Bill: Software develop ors working collaboratively often use revision control tools that help to keep track of changes in complex projects. Inspired by the idea, GovTrack has launched a rough version tracking of the evolving Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, a.k.a H.R. 3997, a.k.a. the bailout-out bill, a.k.a. the economic rescue plan. Here, for example, is a side-by-side comparison of Thursday and Sunday's drafts, with the differences highlighted. "Why is this so ugly?," asks GovTrack's Josh Tauberer (rhetorically, as he built the thing). Because while Congress loves that sense of resolute finality that PDFs provide, converting PDFs more user-friendly format can be problematic. "If you think the public should be able to do this better, tell your representative to support The Open House Project report recommendations," suggests Josh -- in particular, we'll note, the part about setting government data free in a wonderfully structured format like XML, so that the rest of us can easily make use of it. #

• Dennis Kucinich's Video Recommendations: The liberal Democratic congressman from Ohio not surprisingly voted no Monday on the $700 billion bailout measure. Calling this "a teachable moment," yesterday he sent around an email attempting to explain the U.S.'s so-called fractional reserve system. But, with admirable self-awareness that his economics lesson might have fallen flat, Kucinich said 'just go an watch this Google video instead.' Called "Money is Debt," it's a somewhat quirky 47-minute animated take on modern banking that was created by a Canadian artist in partnership with the American Monetary Institute. (Here's the entirely interesting "Producer's Comments" on how the video came into being.) And no, it's not every congressperson who sends around links to obscure explanatory web videos he or she had nothing to do with. #

In Case You Missed It...

With an eye on the many state-wide ballot initiatives up for a vote this election, Nancy Scola has your mini guide to navigating direct democracy, as well as a look at how the House of Representatives has resorted to turning back emails in a bid to keep its IT infrastructure up and running.

• This Debate Belongs to You and Me: With word coming that the show will go on, we turn attention to tonight's first '08 presidential debate at Ole Miss. Change Congress's Larry Lessig and scores of other open democracy advocates from across the political spectrum (including PdF and techPres) have issued a call for the debates to be free. The ask? It's two-fold. The first is that the events' raw footage be released into the public domain. The second is that at least some questions should be chosen "town hall" style, using the Internet, as we saw happen during the primary season. Speaking of the debate, Micah Sifry has a great round-up of the ways we can all participate in the action. A programming note: C-SPAN has just launched an innovative new "Debate Hub." We'll have a full look at it later today on techPresident, so keep and eye out for that. #

• What Twitter Says About Election '08: So, what on the political landscape has Twitterers tweet-tweet-tweeting away? Well, as of this morning, it's Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric and, relatedly, Miss Teen USA. Twitter has launched an Election '08 site that will, blogs the company's Biz Stone, rely upon "real-time algorithmic analysis on millions of unedited public reactions [to] reveal what is truly on our minds." It's certainly a neat concept, at least in the aggregate. And the constant flow of tweets is as soothing as one of those burbling desk fountains they sell at the mall. But, to play party pooper for a minute, are @SallyfromSanFrancisco's decontextualized musings on the state of American politics really worth my brain space when I don't know her from Eve? #

• SuperPoking the Vote: Yesterday Facebook launched a streamlined voter registration tool in partnership with two progressive-leaning organizations, Rock the Vote and Credo Mobile. Two clicks or so is all it takes to get the app embedded on a user's profile page, and the company is running ads for it across the social-networking site. Launched in the morning, Venture Beat's Kristen Nicole reported later in the day that the app had already registered more than 3,400 people. MySpace more your cup of tea? You're covered there too, through a partnership with a vendor called Election Impact. Of course, there's one thing to keep in my mind here. While anyone -- Republican, Democrat, independent, Greenie, John Bircher, socialist, whatever -- can register to vote with these tools, Barack Obama finds himself a hugely more popular fellow than John McCain on both these social-networking sites. #

TechCongress and Beyond

• A Closed Performance of How a Bill Becomes a Law: Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland highlights the pushing now underway to make Congress's wrangling over the Wall Street bailout bill a more transparent process. Sarah has the Sunlight Foudation's Ellen Miller's take: "[E]very piece of legislation should have a minimal online-public-availability time of 72 hours... There's no better place to start with than with this bill that involves hundreds of billions of dollars." But with all eye's on the bailout debate, there's other massive and hugely-expensive legislation being passed under an even more obscuring cloak of secrecy; open government sage Paul Blumenthal has the story of this week's 357-page, $600 billion (yes, billion) appropriations bill that lawmakers had less than a day to make sense of. #

In Case You Missed It...

Nancy Scola catches up with activist, street theater veteran, and Billionaires for Bush founder Andrew Boyd on how the website BuyMySh*&tpile.com inspired him to bring together hundreds of protestors just south of Wall Street yesterday. Nancy also looks at Vote Today Ohio, a small group of activists using ActBlue and Google Docs to bank Obama some votes during the so-called Golden Week, the seven-day period when Ohio's new voters can register and cast a ballot on the very same day.

Boy has Micah Sifry been busy. He highlights a compelling new approach to meme tracking, using as subjects the McCain camp's "Celeb" ad and Paris Hilton's rather brilliant response. He asks how long it will before someone mashed up the Palin-Couric interview with with Miss Teen South Carolina? (Answer: not long, not long at all.) He's enjoying the Economist's "Global Electoral College" and unveiling a "bailout datatorial" that tracks the flow of money from Wall Street to Washington DC over the last two decades. And he's demanding an Oscar for whomever is scripting Ralph Nader's web videos, including the latest that, quite naturally, co-stars both "Obama Girl" Amber Lee Ettinger and Jesse Ventura.

Zephyr Teachout is engaging in her favorite pastime: Huckwatching. Tracking Mike Huckabee's reaction to the bailout ("disappointed and disgusted"), Zephyr predicts that '08 Republican candidate has designs on the 2012 race should Obama win. Interesting post, but for the love of all that is good and holy, please, please let us not speak of the next presidential cycle again until at least November 5th. [Editor's note from Micah: "It's too late. Zephyr wins the prize!"]