You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

I happened to catch William Gibson on NPR this morning, being interviewed about his new book "Spook Country", which I'm enjoying reading. The interviewer asked him if he thought we were heading toward a world where technology makes it possible for Big Brother to watch our every move, and Gibson's answer stuck with me. Technology is not only giving Big Brother the power to watch us, we can also watch Big Brother, he said. And Gibson added, this is going to make it harder for politicians to hide secrets and get away with lies, an argument he first made here, on the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth four years ago. He wrote:

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

In case you doubt Gibson's prediction (made in 2003), you can read today of the entertaining results of using Virgil Griffith's WikiScanner to uncover all kinds of self-interested edits of Wikipedia by various corporate entities. And not only do people at big corporations try to diddle their company's Wikipedia entries, it appears some employees at the Times itself have thrown spitballs at various political figures, like President Bush, adding the word "jerk" to his page twelve times and referring to Condoleezza Rice's efforts to become a concert "penis." Transparency indeed!

You can also read in today's Washington Post about how Karl Rove's efforts to use every asset available to the Bush Administration to bolster the Republican political majority even included sending a top administration official to the district of a vulnerable Republican incumbent, Chris Shays, to announce the delivery of a single $23 government weather alert radio to an elementary school in Shays' district. (You can see a photo of the announcement here.) In an age where every federal grant and contract is searchable, does anyone think it will be easy to hide this stuff any more?

Rove's departure from the White House, argues Frank Rich, should be seen as a bookend marking the end of this old way of politics, and he zeroes in on George Allen's "macaca" moment as the inflection point. Rich writes in his column today:

["Macaca"] became a national phenomenon when the video landed on YouTube, the rollicking Web site whose reach now threatens mainstream news outlets. A year later, leading Republicans are still clueless and panicked about this new medium, which is why they, unlike their Democratic counterparts, pulled out of even a tightly controlled CNN-YouTube debate. It took smart young conservative bloggers like a former Republican National Committee operative, Patrick Ruffini, to shame them into reinstating the debate for November, lest the entire G.O.P. field look as pathetically out of touch as it is.

The rise of YouTube certifies the passing of Mr. Rove's era, a cultural changing of the guard in the digital age. Mr. Rove made his name in direct-mail fund-raising and with fierce top-down message management. As the Internet erodes snail mail, so it upends direct mail. As YouTube threatens a politician's ability to rigidly control a message, so it threatens the Rove ethos that led Mr. Bush to campaign at "town hall" meetings attended only by hand-picked supporters.

All this is true, but one last story in today's papers made me think that this lesson still hasn't penetrated very far into the political establishment. That was the New York Times's rundown on how the presidential candidates currently prepare for the joint television appearances we quaintly call "debates." "Debaters Plan Carefully to Keep Foot Out of Mouth"--the title says it all. The presidential campaigns still think they will live and die by the live gaffe, or the well-scripted put-down. Hillary Clinton's advisers encourage her to use "action verbs and adjectives like 'lead,' 'strong' and 'experienced.'" John Edwards's advisers wish they had scripted a perfect way to lampoon the media's interest in his hair.

All the leading candidates apparently still think they are running in an environment of media scarcity, where they can carefully dribble out a few choice words to be repeated ad nauseum by the broadcast machine, and where the hundred or so reporters on the plane with them set the agenda for discussion. None can conceive of a world where being "always on" is anything but a dangerous trap, where being themselves instead of being controlled might help them better connect with voters. They don't realize that collectively, that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of voters are watching closely, in more ways than they can imagine. They can run, but they should stop hiding.