The future of laptop government

Dean's "campaign on a laptop" as interpreted in this recent Washington Post article presages some major changes in ALL organizations, according to the writer. It might have enormous consequences for regional governments, too.

In a nutshell, Everett Erhlich claims that the Dean campaign does not even resemble the other presidential candidates' campaigns. It is run in a small, flattened information engine that completely eliminates the bloated campaign bureaucracies of the past, still used by his competitors.

Erhlich refers to the work of an economist named Ronald Coase, who wrote in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determined the size of the organization. This explained the size of a company like IBM, for example. It had to develop a mountainous management structure to organize and support the vast amounts of information processed through the operational structure.

(I am not entirely sold on this truism. Ford Motor Company, for instance, had enormous plants that did not grow from the demand for information, but for the demand for hard stuff...cars and the machines that could make them. The ratio between production size and production information volume, in this case, is radically different from the ratio maintained by IBM. For the sake of arguement, however, lets assume Coase is right.)

Dean's campaign, run on the internet and in the databases and email files of a net-savvy team, supposedly represents a new creature on the political landscape, a self-defined movement that can court the Democratic nomination but will exist with or without it. But the most important thing here, is the small, mobile nature of the information hub: essentially a laptop computer with, say, 40 gigs hard drive and some off the shelf management software.

Gone are the index card files, filing cabinets, and their entailed offices and warehouse spaces rented or even owned by the local party. Gone are the legions of clerical volunteers, the boiler room phone factories churning out personal phone contacts ward to ward, precinct to precinct. Gone are the fund raisers which must finance this huge middle layer of contacts, messages, agreements, contracts, analysis, positions, etc in labyrinthine paper stores. Gone are the people, real estate, phones, cars, expense accounts, dinners and lunches and gifts.

In their place, a laptop, an inch thick and weighing 4 lbs, available at a moments notice, capable of sharing, publishing, broadcasting or pointcasting information 24 hours a day. All documents, records, reports, positions immediately at hand. Ready to trigger smart mobs or dumb mobs into instant action. Capable of stealth or open provocations, responses, counter punches.

4 lbs of political nuclear fission. Available to anyone with a credit card.

It could well be the end of huge monolithic parties. I mean, it has been a long time since a New Hampshire Democrat really had much in common with a Manhatten Democrat or a Minnesota DFL'r....except for their shared opposition to the Right.

With the rise of laptop politics, the boundaries of political hegemonies will be like the boundaries of flocks of birds, shifting, porous, changing even as they are measured, but still indicating some kind of mass in flight, in contrast to the other life forms around them.