Zack Exley/Eli Pariser MoveOn keynote SXSW 2004 3/14/04 Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- Molly Ivins: Since GW lost the 2000 election, I've been feeling very busy. The GOP is good at sending messages and such, but they can't govern for shit. About a year ago, I said, "Son of a bitch, the cavalry had arrived: MoveOn." This is what it musta been like to be a political reporter in 1962 -- seeing the impact of a new tech on politics. For those of us who are political freaks, this is exciting. If not today, soon -- and it'll all be good. MoveOn has almost singlehandedly put people back into politics. Someone needs to figure out how to keep bad info off the Internet, much as it pains me to say it. it poisons the debate. It's fascinating to watch this emerge -- these are the guys who did it, and none too soon, particularly for Texans. The Speaker of the TX house is up for indicted -- the sixth in a row. Another was shot by his wife, who was indicted but not convicted -- in TX, we recognize public service when we see it. -- Exley: MoveOn was not singlehanded. Lots of other groups -- even the DNC. AFL/CIO 1.2MM members. TrueMajority. People for the American Way. Of course it wasn't us, it was MoveOn members. Eli: Last night at 12:30 my phone rang, it was a Washington DC number. The White House exchange. It was Karl Rove. Karl and I spent a long time talking, and I'm endorsing the Bush campaign today and stepping out of politics. Exley: That's how powerful that guy is. Eli: It wouldn't matter -- MoveOn isn't driven by us: the members are ready to step forward and take action and make change. It's about you, not us. We've collected details on the group and we'll now share it. Hugh (organizer) sent out an email. 47% Dem 40% Bizpeople 40% MoveOn members 34% Lefties 34% Consultants 28% Indies 26% Artists 16% Film people 14% Annoying lefties 12% Musicians 10% Green Party 9% Libertarians 7% Don't care 5% Never heard of MoveOn 2% Whacko libertarians 0% Republicans (forgot to put it in the list) Eli: I'm 23, just a few years out of college and my head is spinning. My MoveOn involvement was accidental. In Sept 2001, I was working for a Boston nonprofit, just out of college, and 9/11 happened. I was struck by the horror. Started thinking about the consequences: what will happen now? What should I do? They had enough blood at the bloodbank and my friends and family were safe (Ivins: The President told you to shop. Eli: I tried that, but I still felt empty). So I started a Website: "When we go after terrorists, we shouldn't use WMDs, we should respect our allies, we should realize that we can't catch them all in 1 yr." I put a petition in the site and sent it to friends, and I thought I was done. Monday I checked my email, and there were 3,000 messages in my inbox. I got a call from the guy who offered to host this for free, in a panic: the server's crashing from traffic! 40,000 people have signed the petition. Then the BBC called: "We've been hearing a lot about this, who are you?" I'm 20 y-o in my living room with a $35 website! (Exley: I'm 20 y-o I don't know who I am!) -- Exley: There's a change to the structure that we, the people use to effect change in the real world. Web tools connect people who sign MoveOn petitions -- 2.1MM people on the list who all care about the issues and want to take their country back. It's made changes to our society: we can use it to rebuild the community that's been lost in the last century. Hundreds of thousands of people sat down with each other for Dean, people who'd never been involved in politics, never met. They're still working together. MoveOn is experimenting with that now. I used to be a Union organizer. We'd try to get all the leaders of the workers at one shop in one room at the same time to make a collectively decisions. We'd have to knock on all their doors and go back around and do it again and say, "Everyone else says they'll come to the meeting, so please come." It was unweildy and timeconsuming. Before the war, we did a candlelight vigil in defiance of the war. You could come and punch in your ZIP and set up a location where the vigil would take place, then told our members to go and find your local vigil. We did 6500 vigils all over the world. 500k people showed up. When you signed up, it told you that there were others signed up to attend your local vigil, so you wouldn't be the only one. Eli: This all came together in five days -- 500,000 people mobilized in five days. A vigil every 20 blocks for the whole length of Manhattan. There are more political ways of doing this. We asked people to hold house parties and show a movie against the war, and people opened up their homes to have strangers come in and see this film. We heard from people in small midwestern towns who thought they were the lone anti-war people in their town, but the site showed them that there were dozens more who felt the same way. Look at the photos -- they're kinda boring. Totally normal groups of people. -- Exley: There used to be lots of political social clubs, socialist, capitalist. The only remnants are the dying Lions and Elks. They used to drive politics. The DNC and RNC used to have active committees in every city. This isn't an Internet thing: this is the Internet counteracting the forces that killed political communities. People want to have these communities and have an impact on national politics. Eli: People in DC don't know what's going on outside of DC. This tech allows people to get involved, to raise money, and it turns it inside out. It's driven by people like you and me doing our stuff and it makes the insider culture evaporate. We're at their doors, knocking on them, we're sending contributions, calling, constantly interacting. -- I put up a site before the 2000 elections saying, if Bush wins the electoral and not the popular vote, let's have protests. It happened, and I got an avalanche of emails -- we did a list of locations where you can do your protests; and 10-20000 people showed up, it was great. There's a tendency to characterize people who get lucky this way as geniuses, but we're just lucky. We're not geniuses. Calling us genuises misses the fact that we fail a lot too: I put up a Draft Jim Hightower site several years ago: "Fight Texans with Texans." It took me a day, and went nowhere. Eli: You just got to do it. It's cheap, it's easy to experiment. -- VoterVirgin.com: a site for getting people to vote. Looks really cool. Kits for helping get out the vote and register voters. Nonpartisan. -- Q&A: Q: We just had TX primary, there was no one to vote for, the Democratic candidate was already settled. Can we make non-swing states relevant, using the Internet? A: Voter turnout in non-swing-states is on the decline. We should fix this. California isn't a swing-state, but there are tons of Dems and progressives (though why did they get Schwarzenegger as gov?) Q: The Bushin30Seconds contest got people to submit political ads, vote for the best ones and put them on the air. A: The ad with the best rating from the raters -- 100,000 of them -- was also the best ad for the celebrity judges and also the best ad we've ever made in terms of impact in swing states. It was about the deficit, and no one really thought that a group of MoveOn progressives would care about this, but it was, and it resonated across the country. It's crazy: we pay lots of money for pollsters to tell us what ads will work, but the voters told us just as surely. We should do this with print ads -- people could vote with dollars. Once an ad got enough dollars, we'd pay to have it printed. I don't care about the RNC trying to keep our ads off the air. Why the hell wasn't the DNC fighting back? They're the ones who should be doing this. The RNC is asking TV stations not to run our ads because "they're illegal" -- it's not true and they don't believe it themselves. It's an intimidation campaign: we overcome it by having 2 million members and not allowing them to be silenced. In response, we increased our ad buy by $1 million, and our members funded it. It's a judo move: they hit us, we say, "Look what they're doing to us, help us fight back" and people step forward and help us out. Q: Tell me about the ActionForm A: People can post ideas and vote for the ones that they think are good, the good ones float to the top and it helps us know what MoveOn members want us to do. Other groups could do this too. MoveOn isn't a website. We're an email list. The distinction is important. We send email and the recipients do something with the website. That's the best way to do online campaigning. Q: How do we overcome leaders who won't listen to collective protest? A: The Dean Campaign really shifted the Dems, gave them confidence to stand up and tell it like it is. We tend to think about how we can hold leaders accountable, but it's much better to push them forward and back them up. In a couple years, we won't be talking about 2MM user lists like MoveOn -- it'll be dozens of 40MM-person lists. Ivins: the RNC has a 6MM person email list. Exley: it's an exaggeration: they may have 6MM addresses, but they bought 'em from consumer companies, identifying GOP supporters. It's very ineffective. Their response rate is much lower than ours. The GOP culture is command-and-control. MoveOn-style organization is alien to them and they don't get it -- yet. Q: This is about creating platforms for change -- MeetUp, too. Where do these platforms go for the 2008 election? A: We can't predict. People are always wrong about this stuff (Ivins: like Bush's job growth predictions; Exley: Not as wrong as those), but I think people will refine this and figure out how to do it right. We're gonna blaze a lot of new trail. In 2008 we'll be doing MeetUp style stuff, mailing lists, and so on, but it'll be honed to a science then. Dean was like the briefer from Mission: Impossible; he gave the Dems their instructions and then self-destructed. People are so scared about 4 more years of Bush that Nader isn't a serious option. The contrast is so vivid that no one can talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum anymore. Progressives need to stop complaining and get someone elected. Politicians are timid, and with good reason: when Daschle tries to do something good, he is brutalized in the press by the GOP attack machine and his own people don't back him. It's learned helplessness. We need to rally behind them and get behind them and echo them and tell them that they're being heroic. eof