Empowered or Entasked? Distributed Organizing's Unfulfilled Potential
Dems are getting good at distributed campaigning, but is that enough?
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Now, back to our regular ruminations…
If you were a Biden volunteer, or want to look under the hood to understand how its distributed digital organizing team of 28 people managed to mobilize 160,000 volunteers who together made 88 million calls to voters, held 200,000 “relational conversations,” sent 150 million texts, and supported 11,000 supporter-led events, cumulatively managing one-third of the campaign’s total voter contacts, then this detailed post-mortem by Nathan Rifkin, the campaign’s director of distributed organizing, is a must-read.
I really have to take issue with his argument, however, that what the Biden campaign built by necessity because of the pandemic “is part of a long organizing tradition in America, from Huerta, to Alinsky, to Gompers, and countless more, that stretches back centuries.” To the degree that distributed organizing removes people from their local contexts and turns them into just-in-time “act now place agnostic” volunteers assigned shifts on a rolling basis, distributed organizing is more like the kind of dehumanizing industrialized factory work that organizers like Samuel Gompers fought against. Or, to be even more sharp about it, it’s like the Amazon warehouse solution to retail, with campaign volunteers as the worker bees handling incoming rush jobs, only to do good things like help remind voters where their polling place is rather than box up a toaster. It’s “Resisting Alone,” 2020-style.
To be fair, Rifkin is describing a special situation—a national presidential campaign, plus one that chose (perhaps unwisely) to stop almost all face-to-face campaigning because of COVID-19. To be able to convert thousands of stuck-at-home supporters into helpful cogs in a larger machine was miraculous. But I’m not sure it’s a model for anything beyond this special case.
Whenever I see a campaign staffer or politician, for that matter, use the word “empower” when the word “entask” is more accurate, I think back to a post my friend Zephyr Teachout wrote 13 years ago entitled “You Don’t Have the Power.” “Power is when you get to decide the rules of the game, not when you get to play it,” she wrote. “A factory worker uses a lot of force, but doesn’t—not in his daily job—have power.” She went on, with great prescience:
“It is important to distinguish between distributed work and decentralized power. Distributed work will be clearly central to future electoral politics. Candidates will experiment with more complicated Internet-enabled phone banking matching systems, door-knocking systems, and donor incentive systems. However, distributed work is not necessarily work in which the power is decentralized. The fact that I can send a suggestion into Coke.com or participate in a contest about their next marketing effort does not meaningfully transform my lack of power in the organization into a fact of power. Likewise, the fact that a citizen might sign a petition or engage in a massive distributed literature-dropping effort may show great ingenuity on the part of the designer of that system, and involve new technologies, and enable people to be part of the political process—without giving any person involved any meaningful political power, or meaningful way to have strategic input or make creative decisions.”
Now, let’s look at how Rifkin uses the word “empower,” which shows up multiple times in his essay. [emphases added]
“Distributed organizing programs, as this post will explain, represent a radical vision of volunteer organizing, an evolution of caucus organizers and neighborhood team leaders for the internet age. A decentralized organization to train and empower hundreds of thousands of volunteer organizers to achieve goals otherwise impossible with only paid staff.”
“Put another way, the goal of the distributed model is to empower large numbers of volunteers to act in decentralized unison towards a common purpose, with processes and leadership to support the creativity members of the distributed team show as they work, frequently independently, to achieve the group’s goal.”
“The primary challenge was not how to recruit the most volunteers, though that certainly played a role. The core challenge was how best to empower volunteers to engage in the most impactful work.”
“[The team] then reinvented relational metrics, which have often relied on ‘messages sent’ or ‘user contacts upload to an app’, to instead track volunteer leaders, voter contact shifts, and finally, reports filed on the number of conversations our volunteers had and what they learned through their conversation — how is your contact voting? Who are they voting for? Tracking reports on conversations vs. just ‘messages sent’ was critical to ensure conversations were actually happening — and empowered volunteers to reach out to their people however they felt comfortable. Volunteers didn’t need to use Vote Joe to have their conversations. They could do so via phone, social media, or text message, and simply use the Vote Joe app to report back to the campaign.”
“As a series of principles, distributed organizing programs organize and train teams of volunteer leadership, empower volunteers to act now from wherever they may be, and build out new technical tools and solutions to engage in big, structural organizing.”
“While the line between ‘Distributed’ and organizing is ultimately artificial, the impact of organizing programs that radically trust and empower volunteer leadership is anything but. Distributed programs should not be looked on as something distinct from the long tradition of organizing. The practice, and the vision, of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and organizers making up a distributed program, is just one part of a long organizing tradition.”
Actually, now that I think about it, Rifkin isn’t entirely wrong about where this kind of organizing fits into the labor tradition. It’s a form of hierarchical organizing that many labor activists may indeed recognize, the one where power flows upward into the hands of a few leaders and decisions are delivered downward, with little to no participation from the rank-and-file in those decisions. So, I’m not as enthusiastic as he seems to be about the prospects of campaigns getting better at this kind of organizing. It’s very Zoom webinar with the chat disabled, if you get my drift.
All that said, I’m happy to see that Rifkin has started his own newsletter, The Distro. His bio reads, “Chasing utopian futures. Director of Distributed Organizing @JoeBiden & @TheDemocrats. Was @ewarren. @IronStache, @HFA, @Bernie2016 & more. Started a union.” I’m looking forward to reading more from him.
Odds and Ends
--One emerging theme from the 2020 election is more people at the state level talking about shifting resources towards long-term local organizing. This thread
by Lara Putnam, who follows the topic closely, is indicative. Take, for example, this oped by Emmett Soldati, who is running for NH Democratic party state chair: “The Democratic Party hasn’t invited enough folks or reached out to enough communities on a regular basis. We too easily write off a lack of engagement from voters as a lack of interest in the values that we stand for. Instead, our party, perhaps from the pressure of First in the Nation or to impress donors, has calculated with surgical precision a plan for who gets a door knock, a mail piece, a call — and who does not.” Likewise, this story in the Washington Monthly by Gabby Birenbaum suggests the key to the revival of Democrats in Orange County, California—a longtime Republican stronghold—has been the growth of local clubs.
--A coalition of advocacy organizations led by Accountable Tech have sent an open letter to the Biden transition urging it to “to treat disinformation as a fundamental and intersectional threat – one that stands as a barrier to progress on every issue.” Among the letter’s good recommendations: pushing Congress to revive the Office of Technology Assessment, putting online voter suppression on an equal footing with offline; and appointing a disinformation expert to the COVID-19 taskforce.
And on a final note, as we head into the holidays: If you’re a Beatles fan, this advance peak
at Peter Jackson’s upcoming movie, drawn from hours of unseen footage, should leave you with some holiday joy. Or just plain joy! See you in the New Year!