"Yes, Marcus?" he said. His whole body-language shifted into a posture of thoughtful listening, one of those politician magic tricks that seemed to set him apart from the rest of us. Part of my mind wondered if he even knew he was doing it, while the rest of my mind was calming down and responding to it. Minds are weird.
"I think I've got an idea for your campaign. It's a bit, um, ambitious, though."
"Ambitious is good. I like ambitious."
"What if we give our supporters a vote-finding machine, a little app they can run on their PCs. First it goes through your contacts list on Facebook, Twitter, email, and whatever, and gives you a one-click way to send a message to each person in your neighborhood who you think you could recruit to support your campaign. We could give them some checkboxes for issues that they think each contact cares about, and automatically create a pitch note with your positions on each. Every new supporter is then asked to do the same thing with
their
contacts list. Then we go after everyone in the local campaign donor records, cross-checking to see if any existing supporters have a connection to them that we can use to pitch them for money. And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote.
"But we don't just use a static pitch. We start with what we think our best talking points are, write several variations, and test them to see which ones perform best. A/B testing -- is this one or that one more effective? We can tweak the pitch several times a day, if we get enough volume, all through the campaign, like polling but
fast
. And anyone who recruits a friend gets points, and we do leaderboards, and invite the best performers every week to a big beer-and-pizza party at HQ, make it all into a game, a championship.
"Meanwhile, we use mapping software that knows where every voter is to calculate the optimal places to hold events around the state. The press database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they're much more like stand-up or
The Daily Show
-- full of great, witty sound bites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events."
Joe's eyes were wide. "You can build this?"
I shrugged. "Probably. I mean, most of it sounds like it's just a quick tweak of some of the free/open campaignware out there. But I don't think anyone's done it for elections yet. I could build something, get it running."
"So if you could build it, then my opponents could, too?"
"Can't see why not. But that sounds like a reason for you to build it first."
He laughed. I had an idea, though.
"So, but I've also been thinking of ways you can use the net that your opponents can't."
"Go on."
The same remote part of my mind wondered why he didn't say, "Can't this wait until Monday?" But then, he was Joe. He was the candidate. He didn't get weekends. He was here, with one of his campaign workers, and that meant that he was, fundamentally,
at work
.
"You know the darknet docs, right?" It took everything in me not to look around at that moment to see if anyone was watching.
"I'm familiar with them," he said. His face was unreadable, the same mask of
listening
he'd slipped into when I started talking.
"Well, they're hard to get at right now. You have to do a lot of stuff with Tor, which is this anonymizing technology that's kind of tricky. On the plus side, it's really hard to take them down or even figure out where they are. On the other hand, they're hard for normal people to go and see. That's because no one's hosting them on a regular, boring old Internet site, as a collection of documents that anyone with a web browser can see and link to."
"Yes," he said. "I think that's right. The main reason
I
didn't go and look at them myself is that it seemed altogether too complicated for someone who wasn't a dedicated techno-ninja."
I started to say,
It's not that hard --
and was about to launch into a little tutorial about how to use Tor, but I stopped myself. It didn't matter, and besides, if Joe
felt
like it was too complicated, it was important to acknowledge that he had the right to feel that way.
"Well, I
have
looked at these documents, and from what I've seen of them, they're full of corruption, crime, and sleaze. And by and large, this corruption, crime, and sleaze has been committed by the big parties and their pals. So it seems to me that if you want to convince people that they should risk voting for an independent candidate, it'd help if you could show people that they're not 'wasting their votes' when they vote for you, because any other vote is going to give power to the same dirtbags who did all this bad stuff."
"You think we should host all the darknet documents," he said. He didn't look like he thought it was the worst idea in the world, but he also didn't throw his arms up and give me a bear hug and shout,
Marcus, you've done it!
"Yeah."
"From what I understand, only a small percentage of these documents have been examined. What if we put all this stuff on our site and it turns out that its full of lies or dirty jokes or peoples' bank details?"
Damn, I liked Joe. That was a really good question. "Well, there's the darknet spreadsheet, and that lists all the docs that have been combed over by the darknet team, whoever they are --" I made a conscious effort not to look guilty "-- so we could just slurp those in. I could write a script that checks the spreadsheet several times a day and grabs anything that's been described."
He looked thoughtful. "Well, that's better than putting it all up, but, Marcus, we don't know who these darknet people are. What you're talking about is fundamentally giving them the ability to put anything they want on the Joe Noss campaign website, just by adding it to their spreadsheet. That seems like a big step to me. And a big risk."
That was frustratingly true. I hate it when people are right at me. "Um," I said. "Well, what if we set up a requirement that everything has to be looked at by a human in our office before it goes live?" I thought for a moment longer. "I could put up all the titles of the docs that we haven't approved yet, and let visitors to the site vote for which ones they want reviewed first. So if they started pouring in by the thousands, we'd prioritize the ones that Joe Noss supporters were most interested in."
He started nodding midway through this, and by the time I finished, he was smiling. "That's a very interesting idea. Not at all what I had in mind, I have to say, but it's pretty interesting. Being the best place in the world to find out about the corruption of traditional politics is a smart move for a reforming, independent political candidate. And you think you could build this?"
I thought about it for a moment or two, mentally sketching out the way I'd stitch together off-the-shelf parts from various software libraries that already existed for Drupal, the industrial-strength system we were using to manage our website. "Yeah," I said. "It should be pretty straightforward. I've done most of that stuff before, it's just a matter of doing it again, but gluing it together in a different way."
He nodded again. "Do it," he said. "Do both. Build me a demo and I'll show it to Flor and my advisory committee. I might get you in to help with that. If they sign off on it, we'll make it happen. Can you have something for Monday?"
It was Saturday. Theoretically, I could do this on Sunday. He'd said a demo, right? I could nail up a demo in a couple hours. "Yeah," I said. "I can do that."
"You are my delta force ninja, Marcus!"
Lemmy straightened up from his work on the quadcopters' batteries and laughed. "That sounds about right."
My phone rang then -- it was Ange, lost in the crowd nearby, and I talked her in, waving my hands in the air so she could spot me. She gave me a giant hug, and I introduced her to Joe.
"Marcus thinks you're pretty awesome," she said to him, by way of hello.
"It's entirely mutual," he said, and the way he said it, it was like he meant it, not like a mere formality. I could actually feel my head swelling. "And I'm sure you're something special, given what I know about him. You should come by our office sometime and say hello, watch Marcus do his magic."
"I'd like that," Ange said, and I could tell she felt the same immediate trust and bond with Noss that I'd felt. It was like magic -- scary and wonderful at once.
Ange crouched down to say hi to Lemmy and went to work with him getting the quadcopters ready to go again. She'd tuned in to our feed -- following my tweet -- and was itching to do some flying. I could tell that Lemmy would have a hard time getting the controller away from her.
"I imagine you go to these all the time," Joe said to me.
"Um," I said. "Not really. Liam and I went to one yesterday, but I have to admit I don't get down to protests very often."
"I see," he said. "When I was a young man, it seemed like all we did was protest -- the Reagan years were pretty turbulent in San Francisco. Haven't been out to many since. I keep wondering when something's going to
happen
, though. We used to have speeches and such."
"Well," I said. "You can do a speech if you want. I think a lot of people would like to hear what you have to say." I told him about the People's Mic, which he'd heard of but never seen.
"It sounds like a microphone that only works if you can convince the people around you that you've got something to say," he said. "I like that."
"Want to try?" Having been shoved in front of the People's Mic the day before, I was eager to do it to someone else. After all, Joe was a real, no-fooling politician, with that spooky ability to make you trust him with a look and a few words.
He looked around at the crowd, considering it seriously. "I do believe I would," he said.
"Right now?"
He grinned. "Oh yes, certainly -- before I lose my nerve and go home."
I put my hands around my mouth, and feeling a little self-conscious, hollered, "Mic check!"
A dozen or so people picked up the call. I repeated it, and again, until a few hundred people around us were saying "Mic check" and waiting for Joe to start.
Joe, meanwhile, had struck up a conversation with the driver of a nearby parked car, who had climbed out of the driver's seat and perched on the car's bumper. "This gentleman's volunteered the hood of his car for a stage," Joe said. The driver, an older Asian guy in a sportscoat and aviator shades, was looking interested and good-tempered. The whole thing was remarkably cheerful, really -- for a gathering of hordes of pissed off people, we were all in very good spirits. Must have been discovering how many of our neighbors felt the same way we did.
Joe stepped nimbly onto the car's hood, wobbled once, caught his balance.
"My name is Joe Noss and I'm running as an independent for the California senate, but that's not why I'm here today."
This was
waaay
too long for the People's Mic, and the words got jumbled in the repetition. Joe didn't look flustered, just did his thoughtful face again, and started over. "Sorry about that."
"
Sorry about that,
" the People's Mic said.
"My name is Joseph Noss.
"I'm running as an independent candidate.
"For the California senate.
"I could have had the party nomination from the Democrats.
"And probably from the Republicans.
"But I decided to go independent.
"Even though everyone says you can't win in this country.
"Unless you're part of a party.
"And they may be right.
"But I've been a Democrat all my life.
"And the spying, the wars, the banksterism.
"It's not the Democratic Party I joined.
"And the Republicans don't offer anything better.
"Because there's something
wrong
with our country.
"There's something wrong with our
world
.
"Somehow, the ideals of fairness, neighborliness, and justice have vanished.
"To be replaced by a cult of greed, shortsightedness, and whatever you can get away with."
He had the rolling tones of a preacher, and a voice like a bullhorn. He had to wait a long time between sentences, because there were rings and rings of people repeating his words, far down the street in every direction. The guy whose car he was standing on wasn't looking mildly amused anymore. He was looking enraptured. After every sentence, while he was waiting for the mic to finish, he had a look on his face of serene confidence.
"I don't have the answer.
"I don't think anyone has the answer.
"But I think we're only going to find the answer when we stop making it all worse.
"We need politicians who stand for people, not money.
"Which is what I have been.
"And what I plan on being.
"We have an office on Mission Street, right by 24th.
"It's open every weekday.
"You can drop in any time.
"Tell us what you hope for from your government.
"And we'll tell you what we plan on doing.
"And you can visit our website of course.