Sunday June 9, 2024; 9:37 AM EDT
- Background: Part of the positive energy of the first Obama presidential campaign had to do with a new use of online knowledge-sharing, community-building, and event-promoting that gave people a new feeling that they could be a meaningful part of a national campaign on their local level. It felt like a new method of politics that made people hopeful about democracy in a fresh, concrete way.#
- The minute the Obama team got to Washington, they shut down the website. “Thanks for your help during the election,” they seemed to say to us, “but we’ll take things from here. We’ve got this. Go back to your personal lives. No longer think of yourselves as active citizens on any sort of regular basis. We can run the democracy without you.”#
- It felt bad to see this happen, and it seemed like a grievous misjudgment and a profound misunderstanding of people, of politics, of hope, of — well, you name it. Damn, damn, damn, some of us thought at the time. #
- The point: Fast forward to today, with the democracy far more imperiled than in 2008. The old tool in moth balls somewhere, hard to remember it in any detail. A new tool is on the table, AI. So, we know for sure that the old tool made people feel good, made people feel like active citizenship was for them. Now, with a powerful new tool available, what could it add to the positive things the old tool could already do? Just wondering. Wondering very seriously.#
- For starters, maybe it could do something like this tilted in the direction of much-needed active citizenship. And more . . .#