|
TRANSCRIPT: Q&A with Al Gore By Jose Antonio Vargas This is the transcript of a wide-ranging, two-part, three-hour interview with Al Gore, touching on the impact of technology and the Internet in politics, both in the U.S. and abroad; the state of the mainstream media and the left and right blogosphere; the role of the Web in spreading the facts about global warming, among others topics. The interviews were held in early and late October, first in the San Francisco offices of Current TV, then in his geothermal system-powered home in Nashville, which is certified as Gold LEED, one of the highest ratings for green design. An excerpt of the Q&A appeared in the Dec. 10, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone. Jose Antonio Vargas: A year ago, weeks before the election, I visited Blach Middle School in Silicon Valley and spoke to a group of young reporters. In the middle of the talk, Naib Mian raised his hand and asked if I had downloaded Obama's iPhone application -- which showed, in real time, where Obama was campaigning, the number of campaign offices within a few miles of where Naib lives, how much money he had raised... AG: Wow. AG: More power to you. More information to you. You know, politics, as we understand the word, is a recreation of the Greek concept which arose in a culture where spoken word was a medium of the community within which individuals could express themselves well, could yield influence and political power with ideas. Before we talk about what's happening now, let's look back to the history of the printing press. The printing press catalyzed the emergence of an information ecosystem with very low entry barriers for individuals and created a marketplace of ideas in which individuals were literate even without wealth, family connections and force of arms -- all important prerequisites for power during the period from the fall of Rome to the emergence of the printing press. Individuals use ideas without any of those prerequisites as a source of power or influence or political authority, then the ecosystem that flowed out of the technology of the printing press was eclipsed by electronic medium -- the antecedent being the telegraph, and then the radio and then the big kahuna, you know television, which has you know the attraction for the brain because it's moving. You know the average American now watches TV five hours a day. The average American in an average American lifetime spends 17 uninterrupted years -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week --- watching TV. Seventeen years! So the reason why all the newspapers are in a nosedive is because -- first, that started with the afternoon newspapers, when television colonized that market niche. And the coup de grace was the Internet, coming in and taking in classified advertising...But now what's happening is, as evidence by that 13-year-old in Silicon Valley, that young kid with an iPhone, is that the Internet is now getting close to the stage where it will be possible for the Internet to eclipse television. JAV: That's the process we're seeing now? AG: That's the process we're seeing now. As the great writer [William] Gibson said -- he wrote this phrase: "Television will sink into the digital universe." I think we're beginning to see that happen. But we're not there yet. We're still at a stage where TV is completely dominant in our political culture. JAV: As we see with Glenn Beck... AG: Yes, and where candidates and elected officials are concerned, they have to spend more than three-quarters of all the money they raise to purchase 30-second TV ads and the only way they can get that amount of money on a consistent basis is by relying on business lobbyists. During the Enlightenment -- which again flowed out of the printing press -- ideas displaced some of the remarkable amount of the influence that had been placed on money and also power, and led to the blossoming of representative democracy and the modern version of capitalism. As you know, the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations were both published in the same year. And they were both based on the idea that individuals, empowered with information, can make intelligent choices, and then their choices can be aggregated to give the kind of a massively parallel processing of all the data that society has to digest and process to guide the economy, to guide self-government. But when television replaced print, there was kind of a "re-feudalization" of political power -- because those with a lot of money were able to exercise enormous influence in the political system. So what you have now is that the Congress finds it almost impossible to take any action that is opposed by very powerful business lobbyists. They still do sometimes -- if popular sentiment rises above this threshold that causes them to say, "Wait a minute, you know, this is popular with the people." But by and large, the underlying algorithm of governance is, an intensely held minority view can trump a weakly held majority. If a small group that has lot of passion and means to make their views heard has one point of view, and the general public interest is in opposition of their view, but most of the public is not aware of it, then the small group, which is often a special interest group, dominates. Now television has anesthetized the body politic and has made the citizenry an audience, and the dominant political act of participation today is sitting motionless watching ads, and it's one-way meme. But the Internet empowers that 13-year-old kid to connect directly to all the information he can absorb about whatever political topics, or whatever topics, he's interested in. So if he develops passion for Obama's campaign or points of view that Obama is expressing, he can participate in the political process, once again, by using the power of ideas. So I see the Internet as a great source of hope for re-energizing representative democracy, and making it possible for people to really participate. AG: Yeah, yeah. JAV: In 1969, you wrote your 103-page college thesis on the impact of television on the American presidency. Because of the social Web, however, people's expectations of politicians -- how transparent they are, how authentic they seem to be -- are changing. Expectations are different in a Web-based democracy, right? AG: What I have learned since writing that thesis paper is a greater appreciation for the economics of media, and how the interaction of media and society and the business model for different media also have a powerful influence. The most important aspect of the shift to television -- of course that thesis was focused on governing and the constitutional balance through the lens of the presidency -- is the extraordinary expensive price tags for these television ads that have reshaped the U.S. political system. You know, when I first visited the Senate as a child -- since my father served there, I spent time there watching him -- he would take me to the floor of the Senate. In those days, debates really counted for something. Now, it's rare to have a debate on the Senate floor. And the reason they're not there, usually, the principal reason is, they're in fundraisers all the time. All the time. And the reason they're on fundraisers all the time? Mainly, is to make sure they could stockpile enough cash to overwhelm any potential opponents, by having so many 30-second TV ads that the other candidate doesn't have a chance. And again the only way they can get that money is by going to all these little cocktail parties and receptions that are populated overwhelmingly by business. AG: I was happy about it. I had tired to do it, when I ran in 2000, but the technology was still at an earlier stage. There weren't enough practitioners for it to really take hold. I was very happy that they were doing it. I do think that there is a way to use this technology for governing that will similarly revolutionize the effectiveness of self-governing. One early example is something called ComStat -- do you know about ComStat? It's short for Computerized Statistic. I have a new book coming out. I only have one copy, I can't give it to you, it just got off the press, I just got this today. [Gore gets up, grabs book, sits down and flips through the pages as he looks for a large graphic that begins a chapter.] Chapter 17 is the power of information. I don't know if you're ever seen that graphic? That's a visualization of the World Wide Web. It's really a beautiful work. It's accurate in its depiction. These are all the e-connections, where the real hubs are, and different colors for different languages. And the reason I'm showing this to you briefly is that, there's an example of ComStat being used in a place called Redlands, California. This shows the incidence of crimes. The police chief down there leads the charge. They map the crimes, and then deconstruct them to find out: why did this crime happen? The data shows your everything. And as a practical matter, in terms of the clicks and bricks model. [Gore gets up again, walks over to a white board in his office, grabs two pens (one blue, the other red) and starts drawing.] They have a horse-shoe table, basically, with a podium. One precinct displays data from that precinct, computerized data, okay? So, look, you've got 18 burglaries. That's a simple diagram. The point is, when the data is visible and understandable because it's visualized and it's held in the consciousness by all the relevant decision-makers in the organization -- they're sharing the consciousness of the problem to be solved, everyone is focused on it -- and the problem is solved. [William] Bratton put it in effect in New York City, and it spread like wildfire in police departments. But the same basic model can be used for immunization, illiteracy, AIDS prevention -- any problem that the society has to cope with. The computerization of the data, the sharing of the data, and creation of the kinds of clicks and bricks hybrid model for absorbing and responding to the implications of the meaning contained in the data -- that's really where self-governance needs to go. AG: Yes, yes. The government has to be more transparent. Technology demands transparency. JAV: Is Washington prepared for something like this? AG: Um, well, no. because now, an embarrassing number of the meetings are with lobbyists and special interests. Scheduling is too often driven by that. The great victory in the idea of America was the revolutionary declaration that we the people are the best stewards of our common destiny and that the old model throughout the Middle Ages was information and power were held in a monopoly. You had the medieval church and the feudal lords and they really controlled everything, and 99 percent of the people were illiterate. And their ignorance begat their powerlessness. And when the printing press spread information widely, first the Bible then the classics translated in the popular languages, and then modern authors -- Shakespeare -- the journals, which turned into newspapers, that's when the ancient Greek dream was reborn in its modern guise in the Declaration of Independence. It was never perfect; you can always point to examples of where wealth played a disproportionate influence as it always has. But ideas could change the world through the democratic process. The progressive movement -- you had Upton Sinclair writing about abuses in meat-packing, and so the Congress said we will reform meat-packing. And they did. [He laughs.] Today, the meat packers would have lobbyists and campaign contributions and TV ads, like the insurance industry today. AG: Absolutely. AG: I want to show you this quote, and I've had it here for seven years. [He stands up again, walks over to his desk and shows me a quote that's taped to his Mac deskstop. He reads it out loud.] "In assembling complexity, the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time. As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes into a higher order." I used to head a group called Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future -- it's one of the places where I started exploring technology. AG: Yes, yes, I was. [He laughs.] The group was in some ways like a glorified Speaker's Bureau, but that was one of the places were brought in computer experts and networking experts. They weren't hearings in Congress. But I brought in people for hearing, too. This was a bipartisan group, a self-selected group, and we brought in Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian Chemist. He died maybe four or five years ago. And I think that eventually his key discovery will be recognized as a law of the universe on par with the relativity theory. I honestly do. He studied open systems. [He gets up, walks over to his board again and draws.] An open system as opposed to a closed system. An open system as opposed to a close system has energies flowing in through and out again, okay? So he found a class of open systems where when the flow of energy was increased above the threshold, two things happen in sequence. Number one, the pattern in the open system broke down because the new flow -- the old pattern couldn't handle it. But then the key discovery was that then, amazingly, and this is a law of nature now -- it's astonishing -- the system reorganizes itself at a higher level of complexity and the flow then continues. So Prigogine wrote that as various parts reorganize to a whole, the system escapes to a higher level. JAV: It's as if there are two kinds of politics in America today -- the politics in which many people feel connected to because of the Web, and the politics as practiced by the majority of politicians. What is the current state of our political system in your view? AG: The metaphor of the tipping point is powerful because it describes a moment in non-linear systems that's unexpected in a linear-way of thinking. Because when the potential builds up to the point where instability resolves, then it can suddenly flip and it can happen very quickly, and there are multiple examples of that happening. I'm taking off my belt to use an example here. [Indeed, he takes off his belt.] One scientist described this to me once by saying if you have a complex system that's illustrated by this belt loop, it has a basic shape that changes but the basic shape stays the same. If one of the critical boundary conditions changes enough then it can flip to an entirely different order. And so when will it flip, when will it escape to a higher order? Hard to predict. It will take time. The power of the TV medium is such, but the Internet is encroaching it. AG: The key insight was the rapid growth in the number of cars, and the very slow capacity of local and state governments to build and the willingness of them to build these new roads. Only when it was done at a national level could the highway-building match the disproportionate growth in the number of vehicles. In some ways, what was happening in the physical Interstate Highway System is happening in the virtual Information Highway System. So in the '70s, when I came to the Congress, I had a background by virtue of the work that I did in information theory in order to do that college thesis. [The thesis on was TV's impact on the American presidency.] Marshall McLuhan. I read everything he wrote. I was already 10 years old before our family got our first television set, and boy did that change something! Anyway, by the time I got to Congress by January of 1977, I started being very active on this Congressional Clearinghouse, and in one of our early presentations, the key thing that clicked for me was there was an exponential increase in data flow because Moore's law was already in full swing and the [computer] processes were becoming more powerful -- doubling in power every 18 months or so. And the explosion of the amount of information that could usefully be transmitted from point A to point B was completely overwhelming a communications network that was built out of twisted copper -- two copper wires twisted together. That was our network. I remember meeting in the '70s with the head of Ma Bell -- before the anti-trust case. There used to be one telephone company for the entire country, and it was all one big giant. That was Ma Bell. [Also known as Bell System.] I remember talking to a guy names Charles Brown. I had a one-on-one meeting with him and I laid out this idea. I said, "Look, the information through pits are going like this, your twisted copper pairs, they can't handle it, we need to design and build a nationwide fiber-optic network with the switches and the mathematics that can handle vastly increased data flows." Not only was he not interested... AG: He was affirmatively opposed to it. Because, in the classic model of an incumbent protecting his turf, he didn't want that. For God's sake -- the government is going to help build a network that's many thousands times more capable than his? Of course he's opposed to it. The only company that I got a favorable response from was from a company that made fiber optic cable. But the key analogy was between two discrepancies -- the discrepancy between the rapid proliferation of automobiles and the inadequate roads on the one hand, and this incredibly powerful surge of data creation available with the power of computer processing growing, doubling every 18 months, my God! And the discrepancy between that and the information networks that we have. So that led me to discover what was being done in the Defense Department, and you know the original purpose of DARPANET was to provide an alternative communications grid that could survive a nuclear attack. Ironically, my father's bill on the Interstate Highway System was the defense Interstate Highway System because it was sold as a way to serve the national interest in mobilizing material for war, if we had another war. AG: Well, from the beginning of the computer age in America, the government was very heavily involved -- subsidizing the creation of the new software, the creation of the new machines. It was always a public/private partnership. AG: But the tools we use, the medium we use, do change our consciousness. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium becomes an extension of our body. There's a certain re-organization of thinking necessary to accommodate the use of a new tool. It happens with everything. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh live in a broadcast world. The Internet commentary on their broadcasts are different from the broadcast itself. There is a common view that the Internet itself is Balkanizing and spreading people into point of view communities. I have a somewhat different point of view of that. When you went to the conservative blogs, you found the link to the liberal blogs. The common protocol is to embed links whether it's a liberal blog or a conservative blog. And what's happening is, we're still in this transitional phase -- it's a different transition, but it's still a transition era -- I think that the people who become the true believers and armor themselves with orthodoxy get the most attention. But I think beneath that there is a more powerful phenomenon where lots of people will come across a site that has one point of view and it's so easy to say, "These people on the other side, just look for yourself at how stupid they are." And you click on the link and a lot of them think, "Actually, that doesn't sound stupid to me." That takes the dialogue back and forth to the point where it begins to move toward a higher order, and the arguments become more sophisticated. And some of the most respected sites on both sides of the ideological divide find themselves responding to third or fourth counter-arguments and the debates become more sophisticated -- and both sides actually listen to the other and learn from each other. AG: Correct. It's completely different. As video becomes more common on the Internet, as the capacity of the lines accommodates HD video and we don't have to wait that long for it to download, that's when TV sinks into the digital universe, and that's when the culture and architecture of the Internet redefines the information ecosystem within which our democracy lives. AG: Basically, the whole arm of the campaign that used the Internet was severed from the group that moved into the White House. They used the Internet as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of their grass-roots organizers, and they did it better than anyone else. They just haven't figured out yet how to move from campaigning to governance. That's a long and difficult transition for any politician to make...Now, there was an announcement -- maybe in December or January, I can't remember when it was, it was during that transition period -- that said that David Plouffe was going to go off and set up something that would be a support base on the Internet. As far as I can tell, that's never happened. AG: If it's working now, good, but I have not seen much evidence of it in the first 10 months. That's the first thing. Second, people who are good at campaigning have a certain set of skills, some of which are relevant to governing, but some of which are not particularly relevant to governing. And applying these new possibilities to governance is a task waiting to be completed. It will happen. It will happen. But it's certainly not in evidence yet. There are plenty of ways to do it. . . People feel shut out of the process now -- they don't feel like they have a way into it. This 13 year old you talked about -- I keep pointing like he's living inside your iPhone, and in a way he is -- he knows the way in. And his generation will certainly find a way. AG: It was inevitable that all these high hopes would collide with the still-impressive forces of resistance entrenched in the legislative branch. I would urge people to hold Obama accountable and keep the pressure on but to give him credit for the many changes he has already brought about. For example, even though he hasn't been able to get the Senate climate bill passed yet, his EPA has enacted tough new CO2 reductions. And just yesterday, he announced that new mercury regulations were going into effect in 2011...And there are so many examples. His FCC chair has just taken the initiative on net neutrality. That's very important. Understandably, there's a focus on some of the high profile issues like health care. And inevitably hopes were so high, and the Internet amplified all of that, because blogs are all writing about them, and it was inevitable that these high hopes would collide with the still impressive forces of resistance that are entrenched in the legislative branch, in other parts of the American system. It was, after all, designed to be difficult to enact legislation. Inevitably, some people were going to be disappointed and frustrated. I would urge them to hold him accountable, keep the pressure on, but to have an understanding of how much he has done, how much is in progress, and then take responsibility yourself. AG: And look at what's happening beneath the surface in both China and Russia. Both [Wen] Jiabao and [Dmitry] Medvedev -- Medvedev is technically number one in Russia, but most Russians believe he's number two. Jiabao is number two to Hu Jintao. In both countries, the broadcast media of television and radio, and the newspapers, are controlled. But in both countries, the attempt to control the Internet has largely, largely failed, because there are so many hacks that can work around the system -- first the digital elites, then others find ways to get the information. In both countries, you have Medvedev and Jiabao making the most extraordinary speeches, confessing error, saying our system doesn't work, it's gotta be changed. I don't want to overstate this -- Wen Jiabao has now gone on to blogs and responded directly to bloggers and in both countries -- dictatorships, effectively -- they're out there campaigning. If there's a disaster in China, they're there within hours, doing photo-ops with babies, because the political consciousness of the people, even in dictatorships, has been awakened by the Internet, and they have to respond to it. And they are responding to it. So in China, there is beneath the surface, a growing pressure for democratization. The Internet is inherently a de-moc-ra-ti-zing force -- [he elongates the consonants] -- even more powerful than the printing press was. It will still take some time before it wins out, but it is a democratizing force, and the reason it's democratizing is the same reason that the printing press was democratizing. The architecture of the medium, the basic design of the information infrastructure that's defined by the medium, has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. And individuals -- intelligence is evenly distributed throughout the human population, it has no respect for family pedigree, for inherent wealth, they're sort of negatively correlated, actually -- [he laughs] -- and education is the key empowerment tool. When the printing press first began to grow in prominence, there was a wave of public demand for literacy. The average adult can learn to read and write in two weeks. It's not that hard. It's hard. It's a barrier. But it's not that hard to bridge. Once an individual is literate, then the Internet is there. And there's also digital literacy. My brother-in-law, maybe 10 or 12 years older than me, he never used the computer. He wouldn't dream of it. But after a few moths, you can't get him off it now. When I got him an iPhone, he said, "Ah, I don't want that thing." Now he's all over it. All the time. You look at the number of older people -- 50, 60, 70, 80 -- using the Internet, all the time, it's amazing. But the point is -- it doesn't matter your age, it doesn't matter your nationality. It's an advantage if you speak English, because so much of the science is in English. But it doesn't matter. As long as you have basic literacy skills and a rudimentary understanding of how to get on the Internet, then you can participate in shaping the way people think about common problems, common opportunities -- and that's really what democracy is all about. Of course the founders said that the bedrock of American democracy is a well-informed citizenry. JAV: In April, at a seminar on the Web's future, the UN's Internet Telecommunication Union said that only 23 percent of the globe's population is actually on the Internet. Twenty-three percent. Let's look ahead, 10 years from now, what's going to happen in China, Russia and Iran, when a new generation of kids, with their video-enabled cell phones, are adults? AG: The amount of bandwidth will increase dramatically. The connection within nations and across national boundaries will increase exponentially and there is already a global consciousness that is now rising. And most issues are now being dealt with in a global context. Science is completely global. A great deal of the world's GDP is now in the hands of businesses that essentially define their markets in global context. You have many industries that are dealing with transnational and international regulations and guidelines. Now when there's a merger, large businesses in the U.S. often have to pass E.U. anti-trust review. Microsoft, for example, is dealing with regulators in the E.U. as much or more than with those in the U.S. on some issues. Environmental issues are now being dealt with -- haltingly at first, but with increasing competency and force -- at a global level. And human rights is dealt with in a global context. But these are still -- as they say in business world -- early days, and some regimes have been able to insulate themselves. JAV: Instead of just Nigeria or Egypt... AG: Correct, correct. And yet simultaneously, there's a reinvestment in their identity with the region in which they live, and of course the urban area in which they live. But you find a rising awareness in regions like Catalonia, in Spain, Lombardi in Italy. Scotland is now enjoying a higher degree of Independence form the United Kingdom. The Internet is, inherently, a global medium. It doesn't belong to a country. It doesn't belong to a dictator. AG: Just as in the early days, the television news was derivative of newspapers until it found its own protocols and news culture began manifesting it. In the same way, most of the news in the Internet today comes from newspapers. And the transition from newspapers to the Internet -- leaving aside the broadcast illness for a moment -- takes place not only culturally but also economically, and the great flaw in these present predictions that Internet-based news organizations will take over from newspapers is that the economic model, the business model for Internet news, does not yet support enough revenue to pay a large team of investigative journalists. So we face the prospect -- and in some ways we're already in this transition -- newspapers are shrinking. Environmental reporters, by the way, are among the first to be let go. The same is true on television. The Weather Channel disbanded its excellent climate team. So you get a shrinking of the primary source of news before the creation of a standard business model for Internet news organizations that will be able to fill that gap. To some extent, that hole is being filled by widely distributed reporting from individuals -- citizen journalists -- but there's a danger in assuming that citizen journalists can play the role that professional journalists who are able to conduct extensive, prolonged research, and apply their professional experience to really uncovering the truth of these issues. AG: I don't think so, I don't think so. AG: They're challenging them, in a way, when it comes to not giving equal weight to arguments. Let's take global warming. You know there was a famous study by a father and son. [Maxwell] Boykoff and [Jules] Boykoff. They studied 14 years of newspaper stories on global warming in the Wall Street journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times. And during a period when the scientific community had expressed a consensus, unanimous consensus, the 14 years worth of stories, they took a representative sample of I think 634 stories, and 53 percent said -- maybe a problem, may not be a problem. That's a disservice. The title of their study was "Balance as Bias." And it's a direct result of the lost of revenue and the thinning of the reportorial ranks and the overburdening of the reporters who remain to the point where they feel that they have to take a shortcut by saying, "On the one hand, on the other hand. Some say the earth is round, but here are some people who say the earth is flat. It's up to you, dear reader, to reach your own conclusion." I'm no expert. I only did it for seven years. But I have a news organization now [Current TV], and I have always paid careful attention to [journalism]. And based on my own limited experience, I think reporting is an art as well as a science, but part of the art is determining when the reporter has a responsibility to say, "Okay, I'm gonna give you both sides here, but having immersed myself in reporting this story, I can tell you that the people who seem to have the best judgment on this are pretty clear in saying the earth is definitely round -- [he laughs] -- so don't waste a lot of time on people who say that it's flat." But if they're under time pressure, they have to do it quickly, if their bosses are under some kind of ideological pressure, if advertisers are putting pressure. I know of newspapers who have been bought by chains who now have the advertising people brought into the daily news meeting and make suggestions on what pictures and what stories go on the font page in order to sell more ads. And there's no written newspaper code that this says this is a violation of the newspaper code, but there is a news culture that's been built up that will tell experienced editors and reporters -- "No, no, no, no, no, that's wrong." You have to have integrity in trying to find the best evidence, evaluate it responsibly, test it against alternative views, reach some conclusions and report the damn news. And the good news is that there are still a lot of great reporters who are out there. In fact, you could assemble, you know, several dozen examples of the best reporters working today, and they will stack up against any generation of reporters ever. They're fantastic. Just to pick one example of somebody who was on one of these shows this morning. Jane Mayer. Wow. What a fabulous reporter. Not just because I often find myself agreeing with her point of view -- often I do, sometimes I don't. She just completed this lengthy story in the New Yorker about the use of drones and the larger implications of that. Well, that's not something that you're gonna get, that you're not likely to get, from an Internet news organization -- yet. But I yearn for the day when an Internet-based news organization will throw off enough revenue consistently to hire a Jane Mayer and to hire several dozen reporters who have that kind of experience and time and skill. But we're not there yet. It may be that we'll see the emergence of new models that combine newspapers and Internet outlets and have a source of revenue that maybe supplemented by foundations. There are some examples of that happening now. NPR uses that. The Jim Lehrer Show -- [now called PBS NewsHour] -- uses that. AG: Oh gosh. Well I have a custom-designed iGoogle page that has lots of different sites on it that I scan all the time. Some of them come and go, but a lot of them stick around... AG: I think it's a great site, and I think it serves a great role. But I read sites that probably I know for a fact people don't. RealClimate.org. I wish more people read it. AG: Well, they have their own thriving presence on the Internet. But I think the culture of the Internet is democratizing inherently because it really works against ideological conformity. Because the entry barriers are so low, and individuals have ease of access, you are so constantly seeing orthodoxy challenged by a million different perspectives. The architecture of the medium kind of pulls people toward more engagement with new ideas. And I think that's a good thing. AG: It's so fragmented, the Republican Party. And this congressman from Louisiana? [Joseph] Cao? What an interesting political figure! I think they ought to really you know listen to that guy. AG: The Internet is on such an impressive upward trajectory that it will certainly play a much more prominent role in the 2012 election than it did in 2008. But that's not to predict that in only three years we will see Internet-based political communication eclipsed what's taking place in television. In practical terms, the build out of much higher bandwidth connections on a common basis will have something to do with that. I think that will also drive the amount of traffic to Internet video sites as compared to the cable and satellite television. AG: Well, in this election, the number of voters 30 or under exceeded the number of voters age 65 and older. Young voters turned out to vote. And and on global warming, the breakdown, on the legislation, is 75 to 16 among 30 and under. AG: That and LGBT issues. I mean, young people, when they hear some of these gay rights opponents, they go -- what? It's ridiculous, it's ridiculous. [Laughter.] I mean, it's just, come on, it's ridiculous. AG: I think it has helped enormously, of course. AG: Yes, that's right. And that means time, that means dedication, that means having individuals who are fiduciaries for those they represent devoting the time to doing that. Parenthetically, one of the most debilitating elements of the television-based political culture is that the elected representatives don't have the time to reflect, because they have to spend all their time raising money going to cocktail parties. In any case, back to your main concern, I am excited by the trajectory of the Internet-based political culture. I am thrilled that reform movements around the world are based on the Internet, largely. And I'm extremely hopeful that the continued evolution of Internet-based politics will lead to a political culture that makes much better decision, that's much more respectful of the broad public interest, that empowers individuals with good ideas to have traction and to find support for those ideas, and that we will have a political culture that is less dominated by the power of money and the entrenched special interest group. |