Threadecessors

I've been preparing for my next round of Internet Research courses for the Boston University PI program and it's come to mind that two esteemed teaching examples have shut their windows and folded.

The first is Kartoo. Kartoo was the literal interpretation for "connecting the dots." Kartoo was a metasearch visualization tool that ran on Google. That means you could apply Google syntax to Kartoo and get the added bonus of the Kartoo interface doing its magic.

Instead of presenting an endless scroll of countless pages, Kartoo processed the top-cut or highest ranking sites like a clustering tool. Then it displayed your terms as connection points between information sources. It also augmented the referencing of relevant words and phrases between sources. For instance an original story picked up in other places would display primary and secondary sources (and the paths between them).

The second also-ran was Newssift which closed shop after only a year. It was the first websearch that kept and expanded on the promise of sentiment analysis. If you wanted the dirt on a high profile executive Newssift would enable you to do this without soiling for a single adjective. Brilliant. If you want to lament more here's my review of them from last spring.

One of the promises I make my students at the beginning of each cycle is that they've already paid to take the course. There's no double-dipping in subscription fees. The flip-side of course is that these innovative answering machines are at the mercy of a rather dominated and unimaginative business model where Google hegemony is as absolute as the Microsoft/Intel cartel was to the desktop. This is small comfort to BU's instructional designers who are on the verge of publishing outdated curriculum every semester.

However, in the biggest picture this doesn't count as a service disruption or even a broken link. So long as there's more than one answer to a question there will be a reason to improve on existing search technology.

Threadecessors

I've been preparing for my next round of Internet Research courses for the Boston University PI program and it's come to mind that two esteemed teaching examples have shut their windows and folded.

The first is Kartoo. Kartoo was the literal interpretation for "connecting the dots." Kartoo was a metasearch visualization tool that ran on Google. That means you could apply Google syntax to Kartoo and get the added bonus of the Kartoo interface doing its magic.

Instead of presenting an endless scroll of countless pages, Kartoo processed the top-cut or highest ranking sites like a clustering tool. Then it displayed your terms as connection points between information sources. It also augmented the referencing of relevant words and phrases between sources. For instance an original story picked up in other places would display primary and secondary sources (and the paths between them).

The second also-ran was Newssift which closed shop after only a year. It was the first websearch that kept and expanded on the promise of sentiment analysis. If you wanted the dirt on a high profile executive Newssift would enable you to do this without soiling for a single adjective. Brilliant. If you want to lament more here's my review of them from last spring.

One of the promises I make my students at the beginning of each cycle is that they've already paid to take the course. There's no double-dipping in subscription fees. The flip-side of course is that these innovative answering machines are at the mercy of a rather dominated and unimaginative business model where Google hegemony is as absolute as the Microsoft/Intel cartel was to the desktop. This is small comfort to BU's instructional designers who are on the verge of publishing outdated curriculum every semester.

However, in the biggest picture this doesn't count as a service disruption or even a broken link. So long as there's more than one answer to a question there will be a reason to improve on existing search technology.

SearchBoards

The choice of text versus numbers is starting to ring false. The trade-off between relational tables and keywords is no longer a stretch or a compromise. The missing ingredient isn't the optimal content database or the more responsive search tool but the outcomes that live in the cross-hairs between traditional BI and conventional keyword matches, and what began many formatting standards ago as decision support.

The purpose of SearchBoards is to classify content on a granular level. The goal is not panning for knowledge gold but to scratch the itch that prompts the question. Searchboarding doesn't retrieve articles and files, Search Targeting informs what happens next. As Judith Jaffe, Knowledge Manager from the Risk Management Foundation put it in yesterday's Boston KM Forum it's to embed interventions into workflows. It's us knowledge workers reconfiguring the juggernaut of documentable consequences. In English that means indexing spreadsheets so that the nuggets are discoverable, process-specific, action-based, and quantifiable as assets.

The counting goes beyond raw first and secondary wordcounts inherent in typical SEO analytics and goes to a tender info fantasy older than any taxonomic model. That's flipping on a switch and having the proposal auto-generate or the diagnosis nestle in a warm bed of evidence. There's a problem, a set of case tables, and a battery of check boxes. No one is left holding the word bag.

This is a good thing because it takes the conversation away from hit counts and page ranks and into the more tangible matters of solving problems and completing tasks. It's not about capturing insights -- yawn. It's about the rich conversation between what we're working with (data sources) and what we're working on and against (projects and deadlines).

Another promising development is that when our data sources are bullets and talking points, we remove the ambiguities that are full-time occupants of Planet Google. And those doubtful citizens answer to a toppled leader called "intention." And the lingua franca of intentionality are particles of speech. They disappear with SearchBoards. That's because SearchBoards eliminates the source of the ambiguity -- that troublesome middle man between all causes and effects called the predicate. It's problematic because predicates are the nerve endings of human logic and they fall apart completely at the mercy of search technology.

And those search engines are as good as teaching how futile this is as they are abysmal at overcoming their own limitations. We've been trained well to keep our expectations low. Witness a Stanford University study cited by yesterday's forum speaker Mark Sprague that suggests 2.4% of all search terms include verbs. No small wonder we have no idea what to do with our global information surplus.

Another tedious argument that goes away here is the Coke vs. Pepsi piss-off that parallels taxonomies and folksonomies. The liberation here is that common meeting grounds like "results" or "teams" or "industries" lend themselves to pattern-friendly sets of finite values (classification schemes). Other more fluid fields like "results" or "objectives" remain open-ended. But the rich variety of how those stories play out become the bucketed narratives on the SearchBoard results queue.

Finally the biggest payback is that we get to keep serendipitous top-of-mind association. Was there ever any doubt? And we can still bask in our most enduring content structures. What's there not to like when the only thing we have to Google is Google itself?

SearchBoards

The choice of text versus numbers is starting to ring false. The trade-off between relational tables and keywords is no longer a stretch or a compromise. The missing ingredient isn't the optimal content database or the more responsive search tool but the outcomes that live in the cross-hairs between traditional BI and conventional keyword matches, and what began many formatting standards ago as decision support.

The purpose of SearchBoards is to classify content on a granular level. The goal is not panning for knowledge gold but to scratch the itch that prompts the question. Searchboarding doesn't retrieve articles and files, Search Targeting informs what happens next. As Judith Jaffe, Knowledge Manager from the Risk Management Foundation put it in yesterday's Boston KM Forum it's to embed interventions into workflows. It's us knowledge workers reconfiguring the juggernaut of documentable consequences. In English that means indexing spreadsheets so that the nuggets are discoverable, process-specific, action-based, and quantifiable as assets.

The counting goes beyond raw first and secondary wordcounts inherent in typical SEO analytics and goes to a tender info fantasy older than any taxonomic model. That's flipping on a switch and having the proposal auto-generate or the diagnosis nestle in a warm bed of evidence. There's a problem, a set of case tables, and a battery of check boxes. No one is left holding the word bag.

This is a good thing because it takes the conversation away from hit counts and page ranks and into the more tangible matters of solving problems and completing tasks. It's not about capturing insights -- yawn. It's about the rich conversation between what we're working with (data sources) and what we're working on and against (projects and deadlines).

Another promising development is that when our data sources are bullets and talking points, we remove the ambiguities that are full-time occupants of Planet Google. And those doubtful citizens answer to a toppled leader called "intention." And the lingua franca of intentionality are particles of speech. They disappear with SearchBoards. That's because SearchBoards eliminates the source of the ambiguity -- that troublesome middle man between all causes and effects called the predicate. It's problematic because predicates are the nerve endings of human logic and they fall apart completely at the mercy of search technology.

And those search engines are as good as teaching how futile this is as they are abysmal at overcoming their own limitations. We've been trained well to keep our expectations low. Witness a Stanford University study cited by yesterday's forum speaker Mark Sprague that suggests 2.4% of all search terms include verbs. No small wonder we have no idea what to do with our global information surplus.

Another tedious argument that goes away here is the Coke vs. Pepsi piss-off that parallels taxonomies and folksonomies. The liberation here is that common meeting grounds like "results" or "teams" or "industries" lend themselves to pattern-friendly sets of finite values (classification schemes). Other more fluid fields like "results" or "objectives" remain open-ended. But the rich variety of how those stories play out become the bucketed narratives on the SearchBoard results queue.

Finally the biggest payback is that we get to keep serendipitous top-of-mind association. Was there ever any doubt? And we can still bask in our most enduring content structures. What's there not to like when the only thing we have to Google is Google itself?

Pledge Drive Allegiance

The blogosphere is not the silver liming in the demise of the traditional news media. It's NPR. Without it journalism would be relegated to teabagger guerillas posing as ACORN show-and-clientele. Some of last week's All Things Considered led with the immunization delays that are endangering the lives of Haitian earthquake survivors. Anticipating the gathering storm of post quake outbreaks is not something visual media is equipped or inclined to do.

That's a depth of commitment that outstretches the collective attention spans of every network and cable news network. Instead of following "if it bleeds it leads" NPR positions its news according to whether it resonates it deliberates.

It would seem that so long as coastal education elites are caught in traffic this caliber of reporting will endure. It would figure that the reserve of mostly white mostly liberal mostly guilt could fuel a mad dash of pledge drives in perpetuity. But if there's a blinding sun spot on NPR's horizon it's not the familiar righty complaint of lefty bias. It's the conceit baked into the lonstanding business model that local NPR operators are the judge and jury for what goes out over their audio streams. How aligned are their programming choices with the pulse of their listenership? That's the 900 pound guerilla question. That's the uninvited guest. That's the nagging doubt that we're not quite factoring in "all" things considered.

NPR affiliates fail to announce how well their drives are performing seeded from fears fear of failure (the phones are dead) to trepidations of success (they're over the top so stop yammering on about the Ken Burns gift set already...)

Given NPR's reliance on its "public" it's hard not to feel a slight condescension -- mother ship knows best, standing on pinwheels of sanctimony. My first whiff of imperious NPR came when local Boston affiliate WBUR canned -- first its founder-host Chris Lydon -- and then the show itself. That was a double ouch because the unflappable Dick Gordon was an improvement on his undisciplined and self-referential predecessor.

This kind of cannibalization is another reminder of NPR's largely unrattled cage. On the question of journalistic integrity NPR is largely peerless. It's chief rival is no more Fox News than any frequency on commercial or cable radio. It's NPR itself. Boston can't support two teams in the same sport but now we get to see if can support two public talk radio affiliates. Earlier this winter WGBH quit classical music for the influential pastures of news programming. The results were not auspicious. There was no wellspring of original content but a pick list of every syndicated show not picked up by rival WBUR -- sort of an expansion draft of past prime broadcast-offs.

I can imagine that its hard to grow local talent and original programming takes time to nurture and root. But if WGBH wants to distinguish itself it needs to grow a farm system for cultivating that talent. And I'm hardpressed to think of a more fertile hotbed than the colleges and universities which make higher education the top industry in the very same radio market.

Pledge Drive Allegiance

The blogosphere is not the silver liming in the demise of the traditional news media. It's NPR. Without it journalism would be relegated to teabagger guerillas posing as ACORN show-and-clientele. Some of last week's All Things Considered led with the immunization delays that are endangering the lives of Haitian earthquake survivors. Anticipating the gathering storm of post quake outbreaks is not something visual media is equipped or inclined to do.

That's a depth of commitment that outstretches the collective attention spans of every network and cable news network. Instead of following "if it bleeds it leads" NPR positions its news according to whether it resonates it deliberates.

It would seem that so long as coastal education elites are caught in traffic this caliber of reporting will endure. It would figure that the reserve of mostly white mostly liberal mostly guilt could fuel a mad dash of pledge drives in perpetuity. But if there's a blinding sun spot on NPR's horizon it's not the familiar righty complaint of lefty bias. It's the conceit baked into the lonstanding business model that local NPR operators are the judge and jury for what goes out over their audio streams. How aligned are their programming choices with the pulse of their listenership? That's the 900 pound guerilla question. That's the uninvited guest. That's the nagging doubt that we're not quite factoring in "all" things considered.

NPR affiliates fail to announce how well their drives are performing seeded from fears fear of failure (the phones are dead) to trepidations of success (they're over the top so stop yammering on about the Ken Burns gift set already...)

Given NPR's reliance on its "public" it's hard not to feel a slight condescension -- mother ship knows best, standing on pinwheels of sanctimony. My first whiff of imperious NPR came when local Boston affiliate WBUR canned -- first its founder-host Chris Lydon -- and then the show itself. That was a double ouch because the unflappable Dick Gordon was an improvement on his undisciplined and self-referential predecessor.

This kind of cannibalization is another reminder of NPR's largely unrattled cage. On the question of journalistic integrity NPR is largely peerless. It's chief rival is no more Fox News than any frequency on commercial or cable radio. It's NPR itself. Boston can't support two teams in the same sport but now we get to see if can support two public talk radio affiliates. Earlier this winter WGBH quit classical music for the influential pastures of news programming. The results were not auspicious. There was no wellspring of original content but a pick list of every syndicated show not picked up by rival WBUR -- sort of an expansion draft of past prime broadcast-offs.

I can imagine that its hard to grow local talent and original programming takes time to nurture and root. But if WGBH wants to distinguish itself it needs to grow a farm system for cultivating that talent. And I'm hardpressed to think of a more fertile hotbed than the colleges and universities which make higher education the top industry in the very same radio market.

Rush Limbo

"Your Brain Online: Does the Web Change the Way We Think?" in the January 18th issue of Newsweek is a terrific refutation of our human webscapades -- the unquestioning assertion that any thought worth thinking is worth documenting and any documentation worth preserving needs to be online. Newsweek's cognitive beat columnist Sharon Begley argues that the Internet is not a wellspring for sparking innovation but a lap dog for rehash and retreat. Perhaps we're sparking up the wrong tree of knowledge when Evgeny Morozov writes:

"The Internet is causing the disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence -- our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached from the most recent of pasts."

The political arena is a ripe example. How else to explain that the permanent Republication majority of 2004 became the second coming of the new deal by 2008 and boomerung backwards before the mid-terms were even penciled in? Ken Auletta's "Non-stop News" piece in the January 25th New Yorker offers the testimony of New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker. Baker concludes that perspective is no longer "a calling" but a luxury:

"A reporter covering his beat ten years ago had the luxury of writing for the next day's newspaper. He had at least a few hours to call people, access information, to provide context."

Former White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn describes the rush this way: "When reporters call you to discuss a story, it's not because they're interested in having a discussion. They're interested in a response."

"Our minds struggle to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu," says Howard Reingold. Focus is no longer a virtue but an indulgence -- one that we've lost the ability to command in others or respect in our own loss of concentration. levels that flicker like enfeebled WIFI signals.

"The ubiquity of information makes us less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet," according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Our own musings are tethered to electoral textings. If our ideas and our actions are not attention-grabbing they are invalidated by the surface noise that rumbles above the silence and stillness of these deeper contemplations. This deeper offline connection is what David Wallace Wells is railing against in the issue prior to Begley's piece when he questions the reverence towards hive mind or the notion that originality is an idle curiosity to a wired and wary world:

"Why are we so enamored with wikipedia, the signal achievement of the web 2.0 era when it has channelled so much intellectual energy into a reference project that is at best only as good as the book it replaces? Do we value knowledge so little that it excites us only when it is free?"

To the contrary the replacement of the fallen tree-in-the-forest metaphor with the positioning of search results as the proverbial radar argues for the kind of sense-making and correlative pattern-matching that falls outside the boundaries of software engineering or the Blackberry-screen-sized perspective-building of modern news analytics. That's the kind of reconstruction we experience when it's too late to prevent a terrorist from exploding in mid-stream. Not only is his name buried on the do-not-fly list but the context trailing explosions of the future will not fly either -- not in the unsustainable ways we have come to inform our sense-making machinery -- a process that feeds on fear to the impoverishment of perspective.

Says George Dyson: "Access to facts increases the need to correlate them, distinguish between primary and secondary matters, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense take over." But there is no likelier a common fact base than there is a common sense arising from an evidentiary bias towards a common purpose or unifying theme.

Perhaps our reticence is not our ability to think independently but the trepidation that we'll be drowned out or spooked by dissenting voices: "Our knowledge seems more fragile since all facts are open, and thus open to challenge," writes Dyson. Another fault line for shattering confidence in the quest for truth-seeking is the notion that rumours can be attached to talking points the way explosives are fastened to motorcades. No matter how poorly improvised the falsehood it must be diffused or the accusation it carries takes on the payload of a grounded assertion, an emotional truth if not a supportable fact.

One way to hurdle wikipedia as a barrier to creativity, Dyson suggests, is to compare our pre-web notions of comprehensiveness with the virtual recognition that human knowledge is limited by its reach into an electronic form -- not by how we experience that understanding or petition it on our own behalf:

"What once required collecting all fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge now requires ignoring or removing unnecessary information to reveal the shape of the knowledge hidden within."

Rush Limbo

"Your Brain Online: Does the Web Change the Way We Think?" in the January 18th issue of Newsweek is a terrific refutation of our human webscapades -- the unquestioning assertion that any thought worth thinking is worth documenting and any documentation worth preserving needs to be online. Newsweek's cognitive beat columnist Sharon Begley argues that the Internet is not a wellspring for sparking innovation but a lap dog for rehash and retreat. Perhaps we're sparking up the wrong tree of knowledge when Evgeny Morozov writes:

"The Internet is causing the disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence -- our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached from the most recent of pasts."

The political arena is a ripe example. How else to explain that the permanent Republication majority of 2004 became the second coming of the new deal by 2008 and boomerung backwards before the mid-terms were even penciled in? Ken Auletta's "Non-stop News" piece in the January 25th New Yorker offers the testimony of New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker. Baker concludes that perspective is no longer "a calling" but a luxury:

"A reporter covering his beat ten years ago had the luxury of writing for the next day's newspaper. He had at least a few hours to call people, access information, to provide context."

Former White House Communications Director, Anita Dunn describes the rush this way: "When reporters call you to discuss a story, it's not because they're interested in having a discussion. They're interested in a response."

"Our minds struggle to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu," says Howard Reingold. Focus is no longer a virtue but an indulgence -- one that we've lost the ability to command in others or respect in our own loss of concentration. levels that flicker like enfeebled WIFI signals.

"The ubiquity of information makes us less likely to pursue new lines of thought before turning to the Internet," according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Our own musings are tethered to electoral textings. If our ideas and our actions are not attention-grabbing they are invalidated by the surface noise that rumbles above the silence and stillness of these deeper contemplations. This deeper offline connection is what David Wallace Wells is railing against in the issue prior to Begley's piece when he questions the reverence towards hive mind or the notion that originality is an idle curiosity to a wired and wary world:

"Why are we so enamored with wikipedia, the signal achievement of the web 2.0 era when it has channelled so much intellectual energy into a reference project that is at best only as good as the book it replaces? Do we value knowledge so little that it excites us only when it is free?"

To the contrary the replacement of the fallen tree-in-the-forest metaphor with the positioning of search results as the proverbial radar argues for the kind of sense-making and correlative pattern-matching that falls outside the boundaries of software engineering or the Blackberry-screen-sized perspective-building of modern news analytics. That's the kind of reconstruction we experience when it's too late to prevent a terrorist from exploding in mid-stream. Not only is his name buried on the do-not-fly list but the context trailing explosions of the future will not fly either -- not in the unsustainable ways we have come to inform our sense-making machinery -- a process that feeds on fear to the impoverishment of perspective.

Says George Dyson: "Access to facts increases the need to correlate them, distinguish between primary and secondary matters, knowing when to prefer pure logic and when to let common sense take over." But there is no likelier a common fact base than there is a common sense arising from an evidentiary bias towards a common purpose or unifying theme.

Perhaps our reticence is not our ability to think independently but the trepidation that we'll be drowned out or spooked by dissenting voices: "Our knowledge seems more fragile since all facts are open, and thus open to challenge," writes Dyson. Another fault line for shattering confidence in the quest for truth-seeking is the notion that rumours can be attached to talking points the way explosives are fastened to motorcades. No matter how poorly improvised the falsehood it must be diffused or the accusation it carries takes on the payload of a grounded assertion, an emotional truth if not a supportable fact.

One way to hurdle wikipedia as a barrier to creativity, Dyson suggests, is to compare our pre-web notions of comprehensiveness with the virtual recognition that human knowledge is limited by its reach into an electronic form -- not by how we experience that understanding or petition it on our own behalf:

"What once required collecting all fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge now requires ignoring or removing unnecessary information to reveal the shape of the knowledge hidden within."

Sparing No Free Speech Expense

A week after the recent Supreme Court ruling that advanced individual rights to corporations and unions I heard an interview with a CEO / lawyer / author / ACLU guy who wrote a book called "Can they really do that?" He said that the inverse of the rights of groups to be individuals is not true. He said that employees have no rights inside corporations. The first amendment does not apply at all. That means free speech exists when you pay for it. But if you take it for free you're basically stealing from your employer.

If corporations are people shouldn't they be allowed to own guns? If unions are voters shouldn't they be allowed to purchase the holidays that will hold our future elections? If our political system is dysfunctional shouldn't self-interested groups be allowed to throw their own money at our collective miseries?

If the logic is a stretch so is the cognitive leap that the plural of constitutional freedoms is unlimited spending on public speech. First the lines between church and state began to blur. Could spirituality survive without organized religion? Try making that case to Focus on the Family. Now comes the collision of privileged and public communications. Parties are now treated as persons. And if those parties can operate in an unfettered political climate they are not only parties but first parties: I am. Therefore I spend my mind freely.

The goal is not about becoming the firstest of first parties but to influence the electorate/consumer. These are third parties. In the 20th century third parties were considered the influence-peddlers who pretended to have no stake in the games they were handicapping through their research and commentary. Anyone remember the run up to the dotcom implosion? It was paved with the investment reports of financial analysts whose employers sanctioned the IPOs of the same profit-challenged start-ups they were praising all the way to the ugly meltdown.

The purpose of unions and corporations is the same for all successful organizations in a capitalist system. It's to deliver to its members more wealth and power than they could ever attain as individuals. This is the practical consequence of the first amendment in our gilded contemporary age. To the individual any form of free speech is quite expensive if the goal is to slice through the din of today's media web. "Free" according to the new framings is not a limited time offer. Freedom is the right to be heard regardless of how noisy the chambering echoes of the marketplace.

If we follow money and the rationale its underwrites we see a day where super-agencies will absorb and incubate, and trial balloon policy directions like thinktanks. They will train, fund, and ultimately deploy squadrons of candidates to mouth these appeals. This is too big a temptation for merchandisers to pass up. Instead of competing against ruthless (and countless) competitors, these political factories need only face off against a single opponent (assuming the two parties continue to reach the post season year after tedious year).

For self-modeled political outsiders they will no longer be encumbered by dancing to the fundraising shakedowns that we suffered through or the horse-trading sausage barrel of cable news monkeys and their partisan medleys. They can stand up for their convictions because their political goals are in lock-sync with the commercial objectives of their affiliate factories. What could be more sincere?

Carpet-bagging will go the way of the pay phone. That's not because political talents are likelier to go homegrown. That's because we're looking to bond with people who promise to leave us alone. If we don't know our neighbors what does it matter if our officials suit up with the hometown teams? We want to be surrounded by winners -- even when these victories come at the expense of the greater community good. What could be less appealing to profit-making than catering to active communities when I can sell directly to unquestioning location-neutral market segments?

Here are some practical implications:

* Instead of the instant distrust that greets any elected official that stands by the people and sides with their backers, the new system will bring those backers and their back rooms to the clarifying front of the political stage.

* Corporations ran the world long before the United v. FCC case was ever heard. But if they are now sanctioned to run our elections the sham of representative democracy is over. Our disbelief is in permanent suspension.

* We (nation) get what I (corporate) pay for. If our concerns are not being addressed that's because there's not enough of me to go around. Another round of tax cuts won't change this.

It's not that we won't get fooled again. It's that we can't.

Sparing No Free Speech Expense

A week after the recent Supreme Court ruling that advanced individual rights to corporations and unions I heard an interview with a CEO / lawyer / author / ACLU guy who wrote a book called "Can they really do that?" He said that the inverse of the rights of groups to be individuals is not true. He said that employees have no rights inside corporations. The first amendment does not apply at all. That means free speech exists when you pay for it. But if you take it for free you're basically stealing from your employer.

If corporations are people shouldn't they be allowed to own guns? If unions are voters shouldn't they be allowed to purchase the holidays that will hold our future elections? If our political system is dysfunctional shouldn't self-interested groups be allowed to throw their own money at our collective miseries?

If the logic is a stretch so is the cognitive leap that the plural of constitutional freedoms is unlimited spending on public speech. First the lines between church and state began to blur. Could spirituality survive without organized religion? Try making that case to Focus on the Family. Now comes the collision of privileged and public communications. Parties are now treated as persons. And if those parties can operate in an unfettered political climate they are not only parties but first parties: I am. Therefore I spend my mind freely.

The goal is not about becoming the firstest of first parties but to influence the electorate/consumer. These are third parties. In the 20th century third parties were considered the influence-peddlers who pretended to have no stake in the games they were handicapping through their research and commentary. Anyone remember the run up to the dotcom implosion? It was paved with the investment reports of financial analysts whose employers sanctioned the IPOs of the same profit-challenged start-ups they were praising all the way to the ugly meltdown.

The purpose of unions and corporations is the same for all successful organizations in a capitalist system. It's to deliver to its members more wealth and power than they could ever attain as individuals. This is the practical consequence of the first amendment in our gilded contemporary age. To the individual any form of free speech is quite expensive if the goal is to slice through the din of today's media web. "Free" according to the new framings is not a limited time offer. Freedom is the right to be heard regardless of how noisy the chambering echoes of the marketplace.

If we follow money and the rationale its underwrites we see a day where super-agencies will absorb and incubate, and trial balloon policy directions like thinktanks. They will train, fund, and ultimately deploy squadrons of candidates to mouth these appeals. This is too big a temptation for merchandisers to pass up. Instead of competing against ruthless (and countless) competitors, these political factories need only face off against a single opponent (assuming the two parties continue to reach the post season year after tedious year).

For self-modeled political outsiders they will no longer be encumbered by dancing to the fundraising shakedowns that we suffered through or the horse-trading sausage barrel of cable news monkeys and their partisan medleys. They can stand up for their convictions because their political goals are in lock-sync with the commercial objectives of their affiliate factories. What could be more sincere?

Carpet-bagging will go the way of the pay phone. That's not because political talents are likelier to go homegrown. That's because we're looking to bond with people who promise to leave us alone. If we don't know our neighbors what does it matter if our officials suit up with the hometown teams? We want to be surrounded by winners -- even when these victories come at the expense of the greater community good. What could be less appealing to profit-making than catering to active communities when I can sell directly to unquestioning location-neutral market segments?

Here are some practical implications:

* Instead of the instant distrust that greets any elected official that stands by the people and sides with their backers, the new system will bring those backers and their back rooms to the clarifying front of the political stage.

* Corporations ran the world long before the United v. FCC case was ever heard. But if they are now sanctioned to run our elections the sham of representative democracy is over. Our disbelief is in permanent suspension.

* We (nation) get what I (corporate) pay for. If our concerns are not being addressed that's because there's not enough of me to go around. Another round of tax cuts won't change this.

It's not that we won't get fooled again. It's that we can't.