AOC and the Future of Politics
Tuesday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on the live-videogaming site Twitch to play “Among Us” and encourage watchers to vote. At one point, 435,000 Twitch users were watching her live, and the video of her playing against fellow Rep. Ilhan Omar along with several Twitch VIPs, had more than 4.5 million views as of late Wednesday. To put those numbers in context, ranked against regular Twitch celebrities, AOC would be in the top twenty for peak views.
Polygon, a Vox Media site that covers online gaming, called Ocasio-Cortez’s stunt “the future of politics.” “This is what is possible when a modern, tech-savvy politician attracts not just supporters, but fandom,” Polygon senior editor Patricia Hernandez wrote. Unlike old-fashioned cults of personality, online fandoms organize, she added. “Fandom, in other words, has power — and many fans know how to wield it. Combine that with an authentic politician who knows how to speak candidly with her constituents, and you’ve got a potent combination of visibility and enthusiasm.”
I’ve seen this movie before, when Barack Obama ran for president and made savvy use of Facebook and MySpace. Now taste-making sites like Wired are falling over themselves to dub AOC “the interactive politician,” the same way they gushed about Obama. Just read what Hernandez writes about Ocasio-Cortez and substitute Obama’s name:
“The future of politics isn’t just young, tech-savvy, and meme-literate. It is accessible. Ocasio-Cortez talks to everyday people on Twitter and Instagram Live, and even visits constituents in Animal Crossing. These sustained efforts allow her recent Twitch stream to seem less like a political stunt and more like another genuine attempt to reach people where they live. “Pokémon Go to the polls” this is not.”
It’s great that AOC has built a big online following. But let’s be clear. There’s nothing about this that is inherently empowering of anyone but her. Mastery of various interactive platforms can be turned to authoritarian uses just as easily as democratic ones. In their 2018 book, New Power, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms coined the term “platform strongman” to describe leaders like Donald Trump, who rally “a highly empowered, anarchic, digitally savvy movement of people [to champion] a more orderly and severe, rather than more free and open, America.” They add, “this combination of an old power, authoritarian value set and a sideways, unstructured new power model lies behind some of the potent and dangerous leadership models in the world today.”
As a member of the “people’s house,” Ocasio-Cortez’s fanbase does give her a very important advantage: she doesn’t have to spend hours every day on call-time, phoning wealthy Americans and begging them for large campaign contributions. A whopping 78% of the $17.3 million that she has raised in the 2020 cycle so far has been in small, individual contributions of less than $200. Not being reliant on big donor fundraising also gives AOC more time to focus on policy or preparing for congressional hearings (where she sometimes asks a really good question, earning another round of viral attention).
Only ten of the 435 members of the House raise the majority of their funds in small donations, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the gold standard of campaign finance data. In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, they are Duncan Hunter, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Justin Amash, Nancy Pelosi, Devin Nunes and Katie Porter. As anyone familiar with these names knows, what they have in common is national celebrity; nothing more.
To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez has tried to use her ability to draw an adoring crowd to shift power within her district. As Brittany Gibson reported recently for The American Prospect, her district office has developed a series of webinars for constituents on everything from workspace safety and organizing to how to coordinate group childcare. It’s a move in a direction that few members of Congress have explored: how to do more than treat their just constituents as clients to be helped one person at a time by giving them more tools for collective action.
That said, if we want to get serious about the potential of online, interactive platforms to improve the relationship between elected representatives and voters, we have to start by recognizing the underlying power imbalance. Even the most progressive members of Congress do very little to formally empower their constituents to have a greater say in the decisions that affect their lives. To get a sense of what is possible, you have to look overseas, to places like Barcelona, Madrid and Helsinki, where local city councils have used online engagement platforms like Consul and Decidim to involve neighborhood residents in policy discussions.
Imagine if someone like Ocasio-Cortez turned to her constituents and invited them into a transparent and well-structured platform for ongoing dialogue and community review. Call it a “local assembly.” Individual residents and community organizations could each have their own presence on the platform, and it could be used as a complement to face-to-face in-district community meetings when those become safe to do again. Such a system could give everyone in her district the ability to get their representative’s, and the community’s, attention. If Ocasio-Cortez promised to listen to, or even be bound by, the decisions of this assembly, it would become a valuable place for people to congregate. It could become a place where people get to do democracy on a daily basis.
That, rather than a new kind of online crowd-making machine, is a political future worth imagining.
Odds and Ends
Monica Bauerlein and Clara Jeffrey report for Mother Jones that back in 2018, when the magazine saw its online traffic take a sudden dip, it was because of a deliberate decision by Facebook management, which it was in the process of tweaking its News Feed algorithm to prioritize “trusted” and “informative” news sources, to favor several right wing “news-sites” like The Daily Caller and Breitbart over sites like Mother Jones.
Commenting on last week’s item about the Sturgis motorcycle rally as a super-spreader event, reader Randall Smith (co-head of Powerlabs) points out two studies that made use of mobile phone data at large scale by UCLA’s Keith Chen: one that found much longer wait time at polling places in Black neighborhoods; and one that found the movement of staff between nursing homes was a major source of Covid-19 infections.