Politics 2.0

Earlier this year in the Netherlands we had our former incompetent minister of Immigration and Integration starting a new political party Trots op Nederland (translation; Proud of the Netherlands, which I find a rather hilarious and at the same time disgusting party-name) and she also initiated ‘Politics 2.0′ (reference to the term Web 2.0) with her own new website and wiki page where people could submit their own ideas of what should happen. Which is of course totally ridiculous, I mean, anyone with some common sense can see that forming your party’s agenda on what random people submit on the internet is just not going to work. So when the wiki page came online, many random people on the internet (including me) had some fun by submitting the silliest ideas and offensive jokes. After this fiasco reached the headlines in the national newspapers the wiki page quickly went offline for “technical reasons”.

So after seeing “Politics 2.0″ fail so miserably in this little country it’s rather interesting to see how it works out in a country where the people that operate it actually have a clue. If JFK was the first “television-president”, then Obama is going to be the first “internet-president”. I would actually argue it would’ve been very unlikely for Obama to win if the internet and sites like youtube didn’t exist.

But the campaign is over, Obama is President-Elect and it seems they aren’t going to give up on the internet and the massive campaign structures for volunteer that are in place. They set up a new website where people can apply for a job in the new Administration, where people can submit ideas and where Obama just posted his first weekly video-blog. An American president with a weekly vlog (video-blog) on youtube, what the fuck! Hahah, that’s just amazing. I don’t think anyone expected that to ever happen. I guess Google (who owns youtube) must be thankful for worldleaders using their platform like that. Funnily enough Google CEO Eric Schmidt was also quite involved in the Obama campaign (Oooh, conspiracy theories; Big Brother Google is going to support Obama constructing a New World Order with their massive personal-information-filled databases and power over the internet!).

I’m really curious to see how this will develop. Looking at how the campaign was done I don’t expect them to pull off disastrous silly things. But this really seems to be something that has never been done before. It’s been argued that by keeping their grassroots campaign structures intact, they have a lot of enthausiastic volunteers available that can help putting pressure onto things and force the powerful lobbyists to release their firm grip. I don’t know. Internet hypes and excitement usually doesn’t last long, I wonder how long you can keep all those volunteers excited anyway. Well, we’ll see.