Silicon Vermont and the Open Source Campaign

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Silicon Vermont and the Open Source Campaign

In a break with the rhetoric of the political field, in 2003 Joe Trippi began publicly framing (Benford and Snow 2000) the Dean campaign as an “open source” and “decentralized” effort (Cone 2003) that was leveraging the power of new communications technologies to revitalize American democracy. In a now-famous blog post from May 17, 2003, Trippi (2003) explicitly compared the Dean effort with Linux, the collaboratively-built operating platform, and criticized previous political campaigns and those of Dean's opponents for being predicated on a “top-down military structure.” Trippi’s claim, if not always the practice, was that the Dean campaign embraced the networked technologies that enabled citizens to “self-organize”; for the campaign “the important thing is to provide the tools and some of the direction…and get the hell out of the way when a big wave is building on its own” (Ibid.). In adopting the mythic language of prominent technologists found on the pages of digital lifestyle magazines such as Wired during the dot.com boom that heralded the new social and economic forms coming into being through networked technologies (Mosco 2004) along with these culturally-valued material tools, Trippi (2004, 82) created a vision of a revolutionary new form of mediated, participatory politics that was premised on the model of Internet start-up companies including “Amazon.com, eBay, and all the online travel agencies.” In turn, the decentralized communication made possible by6 the Internet empowered individuals to act as creative agents in democracy, pursuing expressive and novel forms of engagement, in contrast to the alienating broadcast model (Trippi 2004, 40)

of communication and organization in American politics.

Trippi’s framing of the campaign in the rhetoric of Silicon Valley technologists adapted to the political realm and its uptake of networked tools marks the historical moment within which the campaign occurred. In generating an effective frame for the Dean campaign Trippi served as what organizational theorists refer to as a “cultural entrepreneur” (Lounsbury and Glynn 2001; Johnson 2007), an individual who performs the cultural work necessary to create and legitimate new ventures within a distinct discursive context. Through the use of metaphors including the "open source" campaign, a term used to denote collaborative, technical labor, Trippi drew from a discourse rooted in Silicon Valley that not only had wide cultural purchase, but was associated with a host of revolutionary countercultural claims of new world-making through  ommunications technology (Turner 2006). In adapting it to politics through hundreds of press interviews and writings on the Dean For America blog and Web-site and the deployment of the technology itself, Trippi (2004, 209-210) situated his insurgent candidate as standing at the forefront of a technological revolution that would reshape the democratic process, support a new kind of political campaign, and enable individuals to become citizens again through the participation that the Internet inherently affords. These technological frames shaped understandings of the campaign for journalists and, by extension, potential volunteers and voters. Journalists widely adopted Trippi’s language of the "decentralized" and "open source" campaign organization in their articles, in turn disseminating this frame to a wider audience, including the readerships of Fast Company (Tischler 2003) and Wired (Wolf 2004), the business and technology magazines of Silicon

Valley, and technology-oriented blogs including Slashdot.com. The perceived cultural affinity between the Dean campaign and the Valley, both rhetorically and through a shared set of technologies, in turn facilitated a number of information technology professionals joining the campaign as both staff and volunteers. As Streeter and Teachout (2007, 28) note “part of what7 made the campaign what it was, what attracted a slew of young Internet enthusiasts and created an iconoclastic sense of openness, an enthusiasm for  xperimentation, and a new sense of hope, was the way it became associated with the vision of new technology and a widespread fascination with the future.” At the same time a set of conditions existed that supported crossovers between these then-distinct organizational fields (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). While

the riches of the dot.com boom afforded the movement of individuals into the political field, for example MoveOn.org was founded in 1998 by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades after they made their fortunes in the technology industry and were inspired by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) to invent a new form of Internet-enabled civic association, an advertising and investment slowdown in the post-crash era left a number of writers and technologists out of work and searching for new professional opportunities (O’Reilly 2005; Allen 2008), including those in the political domain (Franke-Ruta 2003). Trippi and these "young Internet enthusiasts" (Streeter and Teachout 2007, 28) along with the seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and IT workers who joined the campaign brought with them both a set of cultural understandings of networked technologies and strategies for implementing them in practice that were drawn from their personal and professional backgrounds. A number of scholars argue that involvement in social movements as well as

innovations in rhetoric, organizational practice, and tactics can be a function of what Jasper (1997, 54) calls “biography,” or “the processes by which certain elements of a broader culture are selected for use in an individual’s mental and emotional arsenal” and which are shaped through an individual's experience in myriad social and cultural contexts. For example, Gusfield (1981, 324) theorizes the role of “carry-overs” between movements, where individuals bring knowledge, meanings, and practices from their prior experiences into new settings, and in  formal social movement organizations a number of scholars document how professionals routinize their functions along the lines of what they encounter and create in other managerial contexts (Staggenborg 1988; Taylor 1989; for a review see Clemens and Minkoff 2004)

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