this is the coke-pepsi nomination. clinton is coke. obama is pepsi. both candidates have internalized the lessons of the 1990's in opposite ways. clinton capitulates on foreign policy, while obama on domestic policy. clinton fights on domestic policy, while obama on foreign policy. between the two, you have on progressive, or one conservative democrat. clinton's vector is more liberal, while obama has nakedly appealed to republicans.

let's get beyond that, because it leads nowhere as a fight. the interesting thing to me is that this election isn't about the high information voters on the internet, it is about the high passion voters on the internet. and while high passion was part of dean, and clark, and even edwards, in 2004, in 2008 hpv, or high passion voters, and yes i've been briefed on what that abbreviation can mean, are the key people. this is because the internet has made more strides in connecting people, than in informing people, in the last four years.

here i am in the same kind of blog dialog box that i was in four years ago. drupal and scoop are better, but basically the same. blogger is better, but it is still blogger.

but in the world of creating passion, we are worlds apart. facebook, you tube and other social networking tools mean that while blogs filled a double role of social and information, now they are information far more than social.

this is why the candidates look different. in 2004 we were faced with old politics of media position and activist loyalty, which was enough to carry kerry to the nomination, and then prevent him from winning the presidency, against new politics information and flexibility of organization.

this campaign is about two old politics candidates, one of whom, obama, is the choice of the nude generation.

the nude generation

the nude generation is the generation of people who do much of their best work low on clothes. i'm still not to the point where i do this, i've been known to blog in a power tie. but that's an anachronism. the nude generation is the rising world of doing ones networking by first internetworking, and then hooking up.

and this is the world that is rapid transforming, because it is now easy to carry around a list of one's 1000 closest supporters on facebook.

the nude generation, and i'm far from the first to point this out, have drunk the obama fizzy water. some where this or that. but hillary rodham clinton, is almost nowhere to be found in the facebook fiesta. she's on email, but blogs and farther, are not her place. hillary clinton is the candidate of the medium information voter, of the medium passion voter, of the 1950's sense of wouldn't it be great if. obama wraps himself in 1960's youth.

in reality, both candidates are refighting the 1990's.

it was in the 1990's when a wing of the reactionary movement thought it could end the liberal state. the gingrich revolution was the first and last attempt by the republicans to roll back liberalism. it died with the "freedom to fail" act. republican people got exposed to what the market looks like in a rent obsessed society, and they realized they weren't landlords, but share croppers. that was that.

however, the virulence of their position remained. radicalized they fell on a new idea: coöpt imperialism and conquer the oil. this lead into iraq later, but in the 1990's it created a culture of bombastic ultra-certainty on the right, fueled by the failure of reagan's economic policies to lead to an immediate catastrophe. this culture of bombastic certainty married with the rage of riffing - where the military was downsized - to create the dixiecratic version of the republican party. in a sense the coalition that nixon forged, between dixiecrats and old republicans, flipped to being dixiecrats dragging the last of the old repbulicans along.

the 1990's were about how to deal with this. bill clinton used a three fold strategy, differentiate, capitulate, triangulate. first draw lines, then see the reaction and give in on those things that are hard to fight, and then move to a third position, more humane, and sometimes more liberal. however, clinton's political survival instinct was to fight on anything that punctured him personally, even if it was an affair.

both hillary and obama internalized this lesson in different ways, but largely their argument is over whether the best way to capitulate is to make a deal with republicans who hate iraq, or republicans who realize that a broke liberal state is a broken one. neither is correct, the best thing to do is to slice off the entire technocratic wing of the republican party, which can be made to see both and and both and as connected, but no matter.

the fight between them is not over 1960's or not, but over how best to differentiate, capitulate, triangulate. obama's brand is that by capitulating more closely, he will be able to triangulate better. this is absurd, it is mccain who is the unitycrat, and lieberman joins him. the few pro-war democrats left are willing to go over to the republicans, and willing to sell out the democratic majority on votes of critical importance. instead, the democrats need to flip new voters in region once safely in the hands of old republicans, because the children of old republicans, are not old or republican.

the age of nixon

in 1968 america fought, an ended, the 1960's politically. there are no fights about the 1960's really. instead, america decided it wanted a liberal state, run by conservatives. almost every election has turned on the question of whether democrats could prove themselves willing to be conservative, or the republicans could promise to continue to have generous uncle sam continue in his dotage. the party that did this the best one.

the age of nixon can really be defined by two features, the first is the liberal government run by conservatives, and the second is the presidency as conspiracy.

the nixonian presidency was foreshadowed by others, by mckinley, by wilson, by hoover, by fdr, by lbj and every other president since the invention of mass media dawned with the telegraph. however it was with nixon that a pervasive manipulation of every fact about every subject became the "war room," as we would later call it, at the heart of the political operation.

the economic reality that helped drive this was oil. the president was first minister of oil, and he had to do what he had to do to get it. however, even absent the physical fact, americans wanted an economy based on getting into a position of scarcity and dictating to others. microsoft is not about oil, but they might as well be, google is not about oil, but about something i called "data oil" back in 1992, the flow of processed information.

this desire for the ability to make monopoly scarcity profits as the road to riches, meant we all became either conspirators with our hands on a goose that might lay golden eggs, or dupes. often both, there are more geese than golden eggs.

this campaign has four candidates who are in a position to win, and all of them are campaigning on two points: that they will be conservatives running a liberal government, and that they will be able to control the flow of media.

however, obama is the choice of the nude generation for a simple reason. he's the genuine cult. he offers his followers the belief that they are in on the conspiracy, because they are in on the conspiracy. not his conspiracy mind you, but on the conspiracy to shatter the old social arrangements that dominate society in the present. old social arrangements based on the mechanization of the family, the pretense of monogamy, the attachment to organization. they are emphasizing brand loyalty and other consumerist features in their politics, but only for a moment. obama only became their choice, when the glower of hillary clinton created him. obama is the unhillary.

the conspiracy

there is a conspiracy, of which i am a professed member, to dismantle the petroleum society. the petroleum society introduced a host of concepts, including the nuclear family, in its drive to make labor mobile to the convenient places of production.

the conspiracy is to move production into forms that people can do where and when they want, even stark naked in their own bedroom.

the social forms and norms which came with the mechanized world have not been successes by and large. the divorce rate is high, it has torn apart the african american community entirely - moynihan had it exactly wrong, it wasn't that african-americans were failing at marriage, it is that nuclear marriage was failing them. one major reason that immigrant communities do better than indigenous african-american ones, is that the immigrants keep the nuclear norm. the parents come over when needed, or the children are shipped back.

the nuclear norm is also one that is lividly more bigotted than the extended one. this is because each partner is the sole source of emotional support for the other. it has lead, directly, to a rise in the consumption of video pornography and use of sex aids, including bondage-discipline and sado-masochism, as ways of keeping the sexual passion alive in the the nuclear couple. it is also why "defense of marriage" becomes more an obsession of the right wing. the nuclear marriage, as more fragile and stressed, needs it.

at the same time, the economic realities which allowed and encouraged the nuclear family are being crushed from both sides - young people are failing to launch, and old people are collapsing back into the home to be cared for. often both at once.

the nude generation enters this reality without an attachment to the nuclear family, without a job picture that encourages the nuclear family, that is moving to someplace and having a long residence there in the employ of one company. the nude generation therefore, neither respects the norms of that system, nor do they have any force impelling them too.

instead, as people who find people by craigslist, facebook, linkedin, friendster, myspace, and even more exotic tools, they are impelled to build networks that are polymorphous, polyamorous in many cases, and polyvalent. multi is the word of the past, poly the word that the nude generation falls upon. the polytropic has become polyagenous, a society made out of things which are indefinite in their form and structure. we don't buy things as much as we buy things that make things. computers, smartphones, internet service, sites that link us to new content we didn't know about, websites and so on.

this conspiracy to overturn the past is driven my many things, it make sense because the past really has robbed the nude generation blind. in the last 30 years the end of the GI generation, and the beginning of the baby boom, has spent the money that the second half of the baby boom, the baby bust and the echo boom assumed would be there. they have eaten the air, fouled the economy, spent the credit, burned the oil, used up the land to build, largely, parking lots.

the networked society

the networked society has three important parts:

1. the networking of information
2. the networking of social connection
3. the networking of economic power.

the first is the nominal reason for it, but even in its earlies days, the second two were as important. finding like people, and staying employed.

the nude generation is the generation that is being stripped of all of the rest of its defining characteristics. they aren't going to inherit a net surplus of credit with the rest of the world, a rising standard of living, or even the house they grew up in. they are going to pay off the loans for their college. they are going to spend more years in school genuflecting at intellectual rent. in debt at age 30, and still not married.

this is why the nude generation is a high passion generation, it is passion that attracts people to them, and which is rewarded, by young and old, as the shining light that they bring.

obama is merely the the two girls and a cup of the moment that is holding their attention. but they are passionate now, because they are passionate about not wanting to grow up to be soccer moms, and not wanting to be, as importantly, soccer dads.