Your Website Doesn't Matter

One of the more intriguing concepts making the rounds of late is Clay Shirky's notion of the "cognitive surplus." The cognitive surplus represents what we do in all the time we don't spend fully immersed in work. During the industrial revolution, as people moved from backbreaking agricultural labor to 8-hour days in factories, they turned to drink. Today's answer is television, and increasingly, the Internet.

More and more, the cognitive surplus no longer means sitting back and getting sloshed (though there's that too), and television's hold on an Internet generation is gradually waning. The cognitive surplus is now coming to be defined by the time we spend creating content and interacting online. When asked by a TV person "where do people find the time?" to edit Wikipedia, Shirky's answer was pretty direct. With a fellow academic, he did back-of-the-envelope math revealed that all the edits to Wikipedia to date represented 100 million hours of human effort -- as compared to the 200 billion hours a year Americans spend watching television. The Internet is stealing from the hide for TV -- and not soon enough.

Over the last few days, it's dawned on me that the cognitive surplus can also explain part of the divide in left-right online activity, at least at an institutional and leadership level.

Many of the efforts typically associated with the left -- blogs, video, creative content --  seem to be derived from what people do with their cognitive surplus. Much conservative online activity, meanwhile, is directly derived from work.

This can be a challenge in a medium where interestingness wins and you're trying to capture people in cognitive surplus mode, or at least "the Bored at Work Network." 

A few examples from the last few days really stick out at me.

The first is the conference each of The Next Right's editors attended earlier in the week, the Personal Democracy Forum. This is the brainchild of Andrew Rasiej, a technology entrepreneur and former Democratic candidate for public advocate in New York City. Though explicity (and thankfully) not a project of the left, something like this would have a hard time getting funded on the right. Why? It employs at least two people full time, mostly to do two things: blog and organize the annual conference on how technology is changing politics. For the hard-nosed conservative businesspeople who fund these types of things, this type of thing could appear trivial. And yet a conference that a few years ago attracted mainly marginalized lefty academics and operatives is now some big business:

(Photo credits: Chris Casey and psd on Flickr)

Analyzing technology and politics may not be a "necessary" job in the strictest sense -- any hobbyist can do it. But I can't tell you how many reporters have called me because they read my stuff on PDF's TechPresident, not on my blog or when I wrote for Townhall. It feeds the media narrative

This video is also instructive. With Brave New Films, lefty filmmaker Robert Greenwald is trying to do for liberal video what Josh Marshall did for investigative content, ThinkProgress did for research, and HuffPo wants to do for news.

This wasn't as successful as the Obama/Wright video, which was driven purely out of a radio producer's cognitive surplus (read: free time), and went more viral with less production value (though I think one of our founders may have had something to do with that). I just wish this type of activity wasn't ad hoc and people doing this in their spare time.

What's notable though is that what's being described above is someone's job. They do this day in and day out and have an email list in the hundreds of thousands. And they're not working for the Obama campaign or the DNC or a 527 which has a clear mandate to do this stuff for this election year only. This is supposed to be a permanent fixture in the progressive ecosystem.

This kind of dabbling across a specific spectrum of media is very different than how the right operates. Conservative projects usually begin in service to a specific issue or project. It's less cognitive surplus, and more work as it drives towards a specific, narrow policy outcome. The directive is not just produce videos, leaving someone to run wild with their creativity and what's in the news. It's produce videos on Issue X, regardless of whether that issue helps win the news cycle or the election.

I will repeatedly get requests from numerous conservative organizations asking for help finding an Internet person. But the more I think of it, the less it makes sense for each individual organizations to have such a person, at least as a first priority of movement strategy.

Imagine, for a second, if all the people doing Internet work for every interest group and think tank quit tomorrow and were reorganized into a handful of Internet utilities servicing the entire movement? The movement as a whole would be served a lot better. 

There would be an entity for video. An entity for developing free activist tools. An entity for pushing stuff into the blogosphere. An entity for research. An entity for investigative journalism. All servicing every group equally. Freed from institutional politics, these nimble new organizations would be free to let their creative staff turn their cognitive surplus into work, not unlike Google's "20% time."

This isn't just celebrating a culture embraced by academics and Hollywood types. This is actually good management -- service-oriented architecture for the Right.

Corporations and governments are realizing that it makes no sense to have separate IT departments for each of their operating units. It's just wasteful and duplicative. Technology, just like the plumbing, should not be the concern of the firm. Common functions, like Internet communications and video production & promotion, can be outsourced to groups that actually do this stuff 100% of the time.

This has two clear benefits for the people working these new jobs:

1. Internet people embedded in larger organizations have to spend an inordinate amount of time bringing their stodgy bureaucracies around. Why waste time on this stuff? I hate to break this news, but unless you're a Presidential campaign, the Internet could care less if your organization's leadership "gets it."
2. Talent is atomized. Internet people only see each other at happy hours or talk over large email lists. Put them all in a room together and build a critical mass of talent.

I put together the following slide that breaks down how this works on the left. The key ingredient is that the main platforms are ecumenical. There is no siloing into economic / social / national security buckets. Their interest groups are still out there, but most of the talent has migrated to the platforms and utilities.

Your organization's website may not matter so much after all. The platforms it's built on do.