In the US Presidential election, what you see in the media is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The real action is on the ground, where decades of experiments and false starts have finally cohered into a new model of social organisation.
Read Zack Exley’s account to find out more:
We saw glimpses of the potential for this kind of organizing campaign in MoveOn’s 2004 and 2006 volunteer operations, the Dean Campaign and even the Bush and Kerry campaigns. And there are great examples of this kind of organizing if you go back to the social movements of several decades ago. But the Obama campaign is the first in the Internet era to realize the dream of a disciplined, volunteer-driven, bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scaleable organizing campaign. For anyone who knows how many times this has failed to happen, this is practically an apocryphal event
