Using tech for politics

While the debate as to whether it is technology that affects societal progress or society that affects the progress of technology is a bit of a chicken-or-egg quandry. The outright denial of the importance of technology's role in our everyday lives is something only the ignorant or senseless would contemplate. The fact of the matter is simple: if you're reading this, every aspect of your existence has been touched, if not outright dominated, by the world of electrons, bytes and bits.

Be glad. While this era of accelerating technological growth has greatly increased the complexity of our lives, it hasn't done so without giving us more than enough tools to survive, even thrive, despite the maelstrom of hacks, privacy violations and outright piracies that drift afloat the sea of electrons we surf upon.

Hunter S. Thompson, the infamous gonzo journalist, is best known for his psychotropic nightmare journey into the heart of Las Vegas and the spirit of the American Dream. What is often overlooked, however, is his intense and lifelong involvement in politics. Not just the dark and degenerate world of Washington DC, though his involvement with the doomed McGovern campaign of 1972 is well documented in his "other" Fear and Loathing book, but at all levels, local and national.

What Thompson espoused was the idea that politics was an art: the art of controlling your environment. And what the father of gonzo journalism has to do with technology is that the gonzo art of environmental control is made all the more powerful when hooked up to the gigawatt reactor of digital media.

What does it mean to practice the art of politics? It means having a cheap, three-year old cameraphone in hand when the bullies that infest the police decide that you and your fellow protestors don't have the right of assembly after all. It means comparing and contrasting the claims made by a political figure against his or her voting record and prior publications, even before they made it to the national spotlight, exposing them for the frauds and charlatans they are, preferably before they can do much damage to the public at large.

It means holding onto a paradoxical mix of cynicism and optimism that only the digital era has allowed us: to believe fully that we're being lied to, and yet to believe fully that no information is ever lost, and that the truth is a Google away. And to believe stronger yet that even the commonest of voices can gain purchase and influence with but a few wisely chosen stroke and clatter of keys.

This post-Warholian future present we live in, where getting your fifteen minutes of fame is just a matter of having the right information in the right place, where the high-speed intercourse of memes and countermemes dashes apart and reconstitutes ideologies on a daily and hourly basis across forums, chat spaces and comment threads, is a neon-lit playground for the technophilic and politically aware.

Before the tragic, self-inflicted end to his life, Thompson railed against what he perceived as the death of the American Century, where the lies and corruption of those that profess to be our leaders had sapped the strength, will and hope of a once ascendant nation, now playing defense against the rise of others in our diminishing shadow.

I would like to think that, with the tools that are now available to our generation, and arguably our generation alone, we can prove his despair wrong.