Greater Democracy: The GOP's Innovation Cycle

January 14, 2005

The GOP's Innovation Cycle

In business, if one company can get inside its competitor's innovation cycle, it will kill it off. The same is true in politics. The fact of the matter is that the GOP has gotten way inside the Democrat's social contract innovation cycle. Naturally, the GOP is thus rapidly killing off the legacy Democratic party and its legacy social contract, alpha release 1, dating from the 1930s.

The GOP, in the form of Gingrich, is about to release the 2.0 version of its 1990s social contract [with America]. The GOP's social contract innovation cycle is clearly measured in just years. The Democrat's cycle is measured in glacial decades.

The Democratic party will be non-competitive until it can get inside the GOP's innovation cycles, both political and technological.

The Democratic party is also an organization that has to come to grips with some hard problems. I see seven very hard problems for the party as long as clings to old industrial era business models that:

1] Are trapped in many year depreciation cycles when the innovation cycle is measured in months;

2] Are unable to leverage end user investments in Customer Premises Equipment [CPE] -- production at the edges.

3] Centralized hub and spoke architectures that must be globally upgraded at large capital costs. For example, the DNC. As Frankston writes, "He with the most infrastructure loses."

4] Depend upon wires and the obsolete notion that, as David Reed writes, RF Photons interfere with each other in the ether, to justify a property model of spectrum management. In the end, the market will adopt open spectrum as it is more efficient and flattens the value chain. A move to Open Spectrum would also starve the beast of the GOP's propaganda engine.

5] Try to tightly bind content with transport, as this violates Internet architecture principals that are rapidly becoming the norm. This is the foundation of the GOP command and control model.

6] Can not take advantage of the move from algorithmic devices to heuristic devices: dumb 1930s era radio architectures to cognitive 21st century radios. The power of cooperative gain from collective behaviors at the edges will give cognitive devices substantial competitive advantages. IE restore real power in the grass roots -- neutered by McGovern's "reforms" in the 1970s and discarded by the DNC's 1980 embrace of corporate money.

7] Are only able to see the citizens as one dimensional "consumers" to be manipulated like Pavlovian dogs with "broadcast media". The revolution that is rapidly emerging is that citizens are demanding to be treated respectfully as multi dimensional creators/producers of content [Apple iLife, blogs, podcasting, vidcasting, Skype, 2nd Life, etc], distributors and consumers. What is the iPod Photo?

One of the DNC's biggest new market opportunities is to provide distribution for all the creations of their grass roots.

These seven problem areas make it very clear why the Democratic party is in such deep trouble. It is why James Carville's recent letter is such a joke. It locks the party into the DNC's blind refusal to innovate. On the other hand, the party could free itself from these intractable problems by inventing a new, post broadcast social contract and joining the Open Community, much as IBM is going with Linux and its new IP policies. It is the only way to get inside the Republican's innovation cycle. It is the only way to start winning again.

Posted by Jock Gill at January 14, 2005 12:30 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Notes:

The industrial broadcast era had attributes that forcefully shaped our culture and politics for over 100 years. They were:

1] Very capital intensive means of production and distribution;

2] Production and Distribution were located in the center � hub and spokes architecture [See for example, the Kerry campaign architecture];

3] The technology did NOT enable dynamic feed back [conversations];

4] Intellectual property was to be controlled and made as exclusive, secrete, and walled off by regulations, as possible;

5] There were few owners/participants which led to elites;

6] Citizens were only seen as one dimensional consumers.

The digital revolution, starting with spreadsheets, has turned this old industrial paradigm upside down and inside out:

1] Production and Distribution of digital content is now low cost and getting ever closer to free.

2] The action is now taking place at the edges of the network � Internet architecture. See for example: blogs, podcasts, bittorent, 2nd Life, Skype, Apple�s iLife [FREE with Mac Mini ];

3] Dynamic Feedback, in the form of many to many conversations, is becoming the driver [Dean Campaign is an early example];

4] Intellectual property is becoming ever more open, distributed, and seen as creating competitive advantage through cooperative gain from collective action as the edges. IBM is making good business on this model and using it to whack Microsoft in their crown jewels.

5] There are now orders of magnitudes more owners/participants at the edges and the number is growing exponentially;

6] Citizens are reclaiming their full, multi-dimensional humanity as creators, distributors and consumers.

If you doubt this, just ask a friend, significant other or child if they like being treated as voiceless targets of TV Advertainment � kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

If the Democratic party wants to resume its winning ways, it needs to embrace this revolution in the form of a new and dynamic social contract. Otherwise, it will languish on the dust heap of history. The choice is ours.

Posted by: Jock Gill at January 14, 2005 1:23 PM

In Jock's comments, I believe he needs to be more careful in separating out the GOP's social contract innovations from their technological innovations.

I agree that the Republicans have been killing the Democrats in the packaging of their view of the future, which I think is what Jock means by "social contract innovation." Since the small group of Republican ideological policy entrepreneurs hooked up with the big bucks in the 1970s (Scaife, Olin, etc.), the Republicans have been very successful on this front.

But if you look at Jock's list of problems, his focus is not on social contract issues, but on incorporating innovation in the technological/communications spheres. Democrats have a problem here too. Solving these tech/com problems would be helpful, but would still leave the problem of social contract innovation largely untouched.

Getting inside the tech/com sphere appears to me to be a much more easily realized goal than dealing with the changing the Democratic Party's ability to innovate in the social contract sphere.
To win, we are going to need to innovate in both of these spheres.

Posted by: Dick Bell at January 14, 2005 4:02 PM

Dick,

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I have made a small edit that incorporates your contribution [an example of cooperative gain!]. I concur with your conclussion. I have perhaps been unclear. It is my view that how we communicate powerfully shapes everything else we do. Communications is at the root of all human interactions. So while I describe a few aspects of technical change, I mean to imply that these changes set in motion changes in many other parts of the complex system we call society. So what sort of socail cotract is appropriate for a society of creators, distributors and consumers?

Jock

Posted by: Jock Gill at January 14, 2005 4:09 PM

So basically, the Democratic Party needs to catch the Cluetrain Manifesto if they're ever to get inside the GOP's OODA loop? :-)

(Do I smell a book?)

Posted by: Rayne at January 14, 2005 8:22 PM

I knew I'd seen this somewhere, finally found the source. Getting inside the OODA/innovation loop of the competition means dealing with these challenges, in addition to embracing the nature of a wired, real-time community:

>>� Opposition elements are often fractured and divided by personal rivalries, making it difficult to mount and sustain coordinated efforts.

� The ethnic, religious, or tribal makeup of an opposition limits its ability to mobilize broad-based support within the country.

� Opposition campaigns (needing to recruit and build base) often cannot maintain sufficient operations security to prevent infiltration by agents, which makes them vulnerable to preemptive action.

� The controlling parties control of the tempo of campaigns and the threat of total attack on one issue front make it difficult for the underdog campaign to accumulate the political prowess and momentum needed to prevail over well-financed and well funded political machine coordinating with government agencies.<< [From Network Centric Advocacy at http://www.network-centricadvocacy.net/organizing_guide/index.html]

It's not the nature of technology alone that must be overcome, but human nature. We definitely have our work cut out for us. In my area we are dealing with overlapping and highly splintering turf issues related to friction between multiple unions' agendas (AFL-CIO, UAW, SEIU, CWA, Teamsters...), multiple racial and ethnic groups (white, black, hispanic), socio-economic division (urban vs. rural, white collar vs. blue collar). And many of the active party members aren't wired or only nominally wired; they don't have a clue what Skype is and they wouldn't recognize an iPod if it bit them.

It's going to be a steep curve this next two years.

Posted by: Rayne at January 16, 2005 1:18 AM

I don't know a great deal about corporate-internet babble but I do know that any plan that is to be presented to the voters must above all be understandable.Jock Gill's rant is hardly that.Why complicate the message when what is really needed is to have the bulk of the electorate understand that it is this administration that is pressing policies that result in the death of thousands of young men and women for no good reason,they are also embarked on a course of destroying a social security system that has almost single handedly saved our senior citizens from a life of poverty and dependence, are attempting to implement a system of regulations that would eliminate a persons right to seek redress in the courts over harms committedby insulated corporate entities and too many other bread and butter issues to list without becoming tiresome.Make the whole damn thing personal that's how you get people off their asses.

Posted by: boldt at January 17, 2005 2:57 PM