Stand Up for Liberty! Table of Contents
Stand Up for Liberty!
Chapter Nine
Victory Includes the Internet
The song may say this is the age of Aquarius, but in truth the Third Millennium will be the age of the electron, the photon, and the digital bit. Electronic media are having more and more of an impact on elections and political lobbying. Jesse Ventura mobilized campaign support with a 10,000-volunteer electronic mailing list. The Libertarian Party created a web site to defeat the FDIC Know Your Customer proposal. A typical FDIC proposal draws 200 or 300 public comments. Know Your Customer drew 225,000 comments, more than 99.9% negative, 170,000 demonstrably coming from the Libertarian Party's web site. In 1996, only a small percent of likely voters used the net. By November 2000, over half of all likely voters will do so.
The Libertarian Party boasted it was the first major political party to have its own web site. If Libertarian Party wants to reach for political victory through the Internet, the time to act is now. Early internet adopters (EMail, Usenet newsgroups, World Wide Web) lean heavily toward a libertarian philosophy and the Libertarian Party. As the number of users increases, the libertarian inclination of internet users will decline. The total number of Libertarian users of the net will doubtless continue to increase, but targeted recruiting of online users will be less efficient when more people use the net.
Furthermore, so long as a substantial fraction of net users have libertarian inclinations, one can hope to turn large parts of the net into a libertarian community. In an electronic Libertarian community, Libertarian principles and ideals are the norm, statist policies of the duopoly Party are denigrated exceptions, and new net users find a community with accepted moral and political principles. The net cannot coerce thought or behavior. It can make people more comfortable with the Libertarian ideals of freedom and self- government.
To establish a Libertarian community, we are not going to demand unanimity of political belief. Such a demand is incompatible with the net's self- organization and with Libertarian philosophy. When the Internet is a Libertarian community, people of every political philosophy will use the net. There they will routinely encounter Libertarian ideas. Newsgroup posters of every inclination will receive responses from people who interpret posts with a libertarian perspective in their points of view.
New Internet users are younger and more exploratory people, whose political beliefs are less likely to be rigidly fixed. Such people are prime candidates for Libertarian recruitment efforts. The Internet is far more promising as a recruitment area than, e.g., talk radio's audience of 50, 60, and 70-year-olds, few of whom are interested in changing their political party.
I am not saying that we should not take advantage of talk radio, which has proved to be highly accessible to Libertarian speakers. Talk radio is an excellent way to reaching radio listeners who are ready to Stand Up for Liberty by joining the Libertarian Party. We should continue to use talk radio to our advantage. However, it is more important to use media that reach the politically uncommitted. The famous "South Park" ad from the Kubby for Governor campaign illustrates the media style I am advocating.
Applications of the internet include web pages, Libertarian newsgroups, and internal communication. Electronic data transfer permits remote data archiving and multiple analyses of the same information. Emerging technologies such as Internet radio and video conferencing will play roles in the future. Each application has important positive roles to play in building a stronger Libertarian movement. Here I consider how the Internet helps Libertarians to communicate with each other and with potential voters, building Local Organization and Libertarian Victory. More technical uses are discussed in the Chapter 14 on information management.
WEB PAGES
Web pages are the internet equivalent of an encyclopedia. We can't put a first-rate campaign manager into the headquarters of every Libertarian candidate, but web pages give us many of the same advantages at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost. Web pages are on call when you need your questions answered. Web pages hold the facts, and the index needed to find the facts, until you call. Web pages can be highly effective in transmitting campaign kits that tell people how to run for office, reducing the perceived barrier between individual volunteers and getting on the ballot. Web pages can give local candidates incredible non-financial resources of every sort: formats for trifolds, sample press releases, fundraising scripts for making telephone calls,...
Web pages are an advertisement for their authors. We should make sure that www.lp.org is the world's best political web site. If you're on the web and want to read about politics, you should want to start with our web pages, incidentally getting exposed to Libertarian ideas.
One could go overboard with web pages. A person maintaining a set of web pages is not out on the stump, going door to door to support his candidate. However, the web pages maintained by one member of a large group may well reach more people than the maintainer could reach by going door to door.
One professional estimate indicates that with a reasonable budget the Libertarian Party in one large state could use online community building skills to attract 40,000 libertarians to state party activities within a two year period. With no budget, the same process will take substantially longer. Other states have corresponding opportunities. Libertarian volunteers could usefully set up a web site telling other activists how to do the same thing. A significant challenge is to show activists that online methods can reach people who aren't on line. Funding such efforts should be a major priority for Libertarians, because a strong activist base leads directly to a strong voter base in future elections.
Web campaigns can be highly effective at propagandizing against attacks on Liberty. The Party's Defend Your Privacy web site generated more than 170,000 messages opposing an FDIC proposal to turn your bank into a Federal spy on every detail of your life. We should repeat this success by running more Web and Internet propaganda campaigns. Look how successfully the (non-Libertarian) Postal Service EMail Tax hoax propagated itself. Real ideas, well presented, can be transmitted as effectivelyas hoaxes, not only for Federal issues but for local issues like corporate welfare to sports stadiums.
There are open invitations from commercial internet operations for people to create a set of Libertarian pages for their users. Associate web managers find and attach links to other web pages, constructing an intelligent bibliography for the use of readers. The Libertarian activist who supports a first-rate set of links may be doing more for the movement than many other activists around the country.
USENET NEWS GROUPS
Take Back The Internet. The wags say 'the Libertarian Party rules the net.' This is a bit of a a stretch. There are *.libertarian news groups on the internet. Those news groups are useless, swamped with cross-posts and riddled with trolls. (This is a non-partisan issue. The *.Democratic and *.Republican groups are just as bad.)
The Libertarian Party should protect a small part of the net. There is a technical fix for ineffective Libertarian newsgroups. Create a *moderated* newsgroup to supplant the unmoderated group. An appropriate activity for a national organization is to perform the technical fix by group-creating and by finding good moderators. The moderator(s) (you'll need several, but the support software is in existence) are there to block off-topic threads and pointless trolling, not to prevent debate. To be credible, moderation cannot be done by the National Party itself. Perhaps one can enhance the credibility of the moderated group by creating a second newsgroup that would post most messages rejected by the moderators. (I shall be the first to encourage the occasional appearance on the moderated group of the coherent but not the trolling Anti-Libertarian FAQs and their refutations. These FAQs inform many Libertarians about critiques that can be made of their ideas.)
INTERNAL COMMUNICATION
Electronic mail is an effective way to mobilize volunteers rapidly. EMail lists of volunteers can rapidly be told what could usefully be done soon. During the 1996 campaign, a volunteer ran an EMail list which alerted Libertarians to electronic political polls, so that the Libertarian point of view was properly represented. Similar Email lists can turn out volunteer efforts on other topics.
EMail is an effective way to help run a local group of citizen politicians who cannot take days from family and job to attend meetings. The Email lets much of the same work get done by people who stay at home with their families, thus letting people who show up for work every day build Local Organization in their home towns. To negotiate a document, make a complex analysis of an issue, or do fine-detail wordsmithing, electronic mail combines the precision of paper and the speed of speech.
The core issue is that the screen and the printout are overwhelmingly superior to voice transmission for transmitting complex information, because you can go back and reread things you did not understand the first time. And when you have finished re-reading, you can pick up where you left off without losing the thread of the message. In contrast, a speaker says things and moves on, leaving no possibility for re-listening. If you spend a few moments thinking about what you just heard rather than listening, whatever the speaker said while you were thinking is gone forever. Indeed, modern pedagogical research shows that lecturing has an efficiency of under 10% for transmitting information. 90% of what is said when you speak to someone is not remembered.
Electronic mail is also the fastest communication method, especially for a larger audience. Most people read at least as fast as they can talk. Voice recognition technology is bringing us to the day when people will generate text ("type") as fast as they can talk, namely by speaking words aloud and having the computer transcribe them.
Sometimes you need to settle emotionally heated questions. Sometimes you need to resolve issues in which words are understood differently by different players. Sometimes the unwritten vocal emphasis on different parts of a sentence becomes important. Under these conditions, face to face meetings are a more effective way to produce agreement. In the future, internet television may become nearly as effective as personal contact.
REMOTE ARCHIVES AND PARALLEL ANALYSIS
In recent years, acting on a variety of pretexts, government agents have seized and allegedly by accident destroyed computers, hard drives, and files of publishers and writers. The Secret Service raided the corporate headquarters of Steve Jackson Games to suppress publication of the roleplaying game GURPS Cyberpunk by seizing all copies of the manuscript. California Libertarians Steve Kubby and Peter McWilliams lost computers, files, and book manuscripts to local and state authorities. Even if your work is unlikely to suffer government harassment, it remains a sound principle of computer management that you always maintain a backup of your files at a remote site.
After the Kubby and McWilliams incidents, a web site was announced for encrypted storage of book manuscripts, especially for writers likely to be subject to censorship or state terrorism. The objective is to guarantee that writers who lose their computers cannot lose their manuscripts. Only the author can decrypt the files.
Similar principles apply to the electronic files of the local, state, and Federal Libertarian parties. The historical record in the United States is clear. In the early 1960s the offices of the democratic socialist parties of the United States were subject to illegal black-bag burglaries by federal agencies. The burglaries by plan destroyed the mailing and donor records of the parties, crippling their operations.
One might hope that the Federal government has changed since the early 1960s. However, fire, accident, and other catastrophes are just as effective at destroying records as a wrecking crew of Federal bureaucrats. To protect the Libertarian Party and all of its branches from catastrophic loss, dispersed backup of membership and other records is mandatory insurance.
Parallel analysis focuses on what you do with the facts the you have collected. Information sealed in vaults is often not very helpful. By making the same systematic information available to large numbers of Libertarians, one can generate multiple perspectives on what has happened, why it happened, and how we should respond. By making the same information available to local organizations across states and regions, we enable local and regional groups to work better and make themselves stronger.
NEW TECHNICAL MEANS
You can always listen to Libertarian Radio on the net. It's not broadcast radio, not yet, but it is a Libertarian voice reaching out across the world.
A variety of techniques, still severely limited by bandwidth issues, now in principle permit face to face contact over the Internet. Instead of flying Libertarian campaign advisers to state conventions, we can bring the campaign advisers to the homes of real campaigners. Via the Internet and video tape, we can give Libertarian activists a chance to hear and replay messages on Libertarian strategy and tactics. Video tape can be substantially more efficient as a teaching tool than a lecture, because listeners can replay it. There's a price. The technical proficiency needed to teach via video tape is considerably higher than the proficiency needed to teach through a lecture.
Many Libertarian campaigns could benefit from a candidate support package, with information on ballot access, sample press release and lawn signs, and so forth. New file formats, such as .pdf, permit transmission of graphical formats with a quality limited only by the printer at the receiving end. Acoustic formats allow activists to hear as well as read scripts for get-out- the-vote and other phone banking drives. By using new technical means, state and national party groups can provide support to local candidates at almost no cost.
These new technical means are not yet universally available. Just as the Libertarians were the first major political party in the United States to have their own web site, so also we can gain an advantage over our opponents by being first with other technologies.
FOR THE FURTHER FUTURE -- INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH
It is the fixed habit of enemies of Liberty within the United States to invoke an argument that "every other industrialized nation" does one thing or another. Often the claim is not even true. In many cases "every industrialized nation" is actually a selected list of countries in northwest Europe, places like Switzerland or Norway being omitted. Most of these places lie under the heavy heel of European tax collectors. The IRS may take a third of our income, but European tax collectors take half or two-thirds or more of their national incomes.
When it comes to freedom, European countries are even less fortunate than America. Britain has peacetime press censorship, the D Notice -- including until a few years ago a D notice forbidding the English Press from reporting that Britain had peacetime press censorship. It had detention without anything that an American would recognize as a trial, notably in Northern Ireland. To deal with street demonstrators, it is widely reported that the English government put snipers on the walls of one Northern Irish city, then shot in the back women attempting to flee from a dispersed civil rights demonstration. Large parts of English cities are subject to continuous television surveillance, exactly as foreseen by Orwell's 1984. At this writing the English government is working hard to abolish trial by jury for almost all crimes, in essence because juries could not be relied upon to give the results demanded by the establishment. Be glad that we live in America!
If we talk about foreign governments that threaten American freedoms, it is easy to begin with the Beijing genocide regime and its campaign against the independent nation of Tibet. That's an obvious threat, though in the short term it is exceedingly difficult even for a science fiction novel to imagine a Chinese Army marching south across Canada. The less obvious but equally real foreign threat to American freedom comes from across the Atlantic, from the infiltration into America of European statist ideas of high taxes, all-powerful government, and contempt for freedoms that every American takes for granted.
Fortunately, American Libertarians can ride to the aid of Europe's overtaxed, underfree masses. The World Wide Web is indeed world wide. No matter what the inclinations of the European socialists, the message of Liberty will percolate across the Atlantic, so Europeans as well as Americans will hear the Libertarian message of small government, low taxes, and a written Bill of Rights. In the short run, the need to reform the American Libertarian Party must take precedence, but in the long term we should recognize that a world cannot permanently endure part free and most in statist chains. The World Wide Web and its descendants will finally allow us to take the American Libertarian message to the four corners of the Earth.