Seeing like a SMS campaign
So It Turns Out, #17
Hi,
So here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week:
Seeing like a SMS campaign
This week, I’ve begun doing text banking several days a week as a volunteer in support of a Presidential candidate. (For a variety of professional and personal reasons, I prefer not to name the campaign in this newsletter, but feel confident your guess about which one it is will be accurate).
The whole concept of text banking is a bit of a quirk of history. America has a weird patchwork of anti-spam laws when it comes to emails, telemarketing, and, yes, text messaging. But the FCC’s interpreted those laws as only applying to fully-automated processes; so long as a human clicks “send” on the message the app writes, one message at a time, it’s apparently kosher. Even if you do it 200 times in a row with the frenetic energy of an esports pro trying to stop some Zerg from entering their base.
Admittedly, you can then write your own follow-up messages to each recipient that responds, but even there the text banking software offers you a set of pre-written scripts (“So, Bob, have you thought of a plan yet for how you’re going to vote?”).
So, in other words, you’re a human that’s notionally in the loop, and that can exercise some discretion, but really just clicking along to meet a legal requirement. That feels, bluntly, weird.
Campaigns are, unfortunately, about numbers more than persuasion in many ways. And in modern American life, where protest is easier but durable organizing is harder, and where West Wing terminally poisoned a generation of politicians into inefficacy, that’s arguably the right call within an election cycle.
But I just palmed a card! After all, there’s no reason we should think only in terms of this election cycle, as opposed to building long-term, sustainable political influence. But unless you do, citizens are just numbers to be mass-texted, in bundles of 200 at a time.
Darmok, a reconsideration:
Another thing you discover when doing text banking is that, despite the feelings of those of us who Spend All Our Time on The Twitter Hellsite, lots of people just aren’t that tuned into politics.
But those who are, ARE, and are really into personal attacks, Superfluous Capital Letters, and discount memes from Facebook. In other words, the form (and mimicking the style of a certain politician) feels more important than the substance to many of those folks.
You get the sense, in other words, that we’re in the world of “Darmok,” from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that episode, a beloved one criticized at its time for being unrealistic, Captain Picard has to befriend an alien captain, Dathon of the Tamarians. Normally this is easy, you turn on the Universal Translator, Picard gives a speech, problem solved in no more than 43 minutes, or 86 if it’s one of the ones where Whoopi Goldberg shows up. But the Tamarian language, though translatable, lacks deeper semantic meaning when used in public — it’s all allusions to stories that they know so deeply they don’t know how to explain to outsiders, like:
Eventually, Picard figures it out, exclaiming:
But honestly, I don’t think they were metaphors, per se. And you can see Patrick Stewart in the scene realizing this, fumbling around his lines because the only concepts he has are “metaphor” and “example” — he hadn’t yet experienced the brain poison that is Extremely Online, extremely contextually-thick memes of the Twitter Cinematic Universe.
But, well, as this dude on Twitter points out, we are much closer to Darmok than a British classically-trained Shakespearean actor pretending to be a space Frenchman is:
And the fact that I’ve been using this sort of thing as a storytelling device in this newsletter since the beginning, and it never weirded any of you out, should be a really, really telling sign about how our society is formalizing the role of memes in persuasion now…
Most hacking is more like this than you’d think
Seriously.
May this birb bless your timeline
May this birb enforce your quarantine
May this little moo bring you peace
Other news:
A fascinating set of speculations about how AR glasses can change our world (via Benedict Evans)
Next time on Dave Kasten:
If I were President and committing crimes, I would simply not confess them to Bob Woodward
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
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