AUSTIN, Texas – Former Vice President Al Gore urged masses gathered at South By Southwest (SXSW) to use digital tools to improve government during a panel at the Interactive portion of the annual Music, Film and Interactive conference.
Gore, paired with Napster co-founder and Web entrepreneur Sean Parker Monday drew an audience of thousands at the Austin Convention Center and via a live stream.
“Our democracy has been hacked,” said Gore, framing Washington gridlock and the effects of special interest money in digital terms.
To fix what he styled a dysfunctional U.S. government, Gore urged the audience to begin a new “Occupy Democracy” movement. He pushed for the creation and implementation of digital tools and social media to “change the democratic conversation.”
This sounds good on its face, but with recent news of big government monitoring social media sites and their users, wiretapping those who engage in political free speech, and pre-emptively shutting down websites and bank accounts and networks before due process is properly implemented, taking political protest to the Internet seems like a great way to help “the man” get you cataloged and silenced rather quickly.
Gore spoke of a “Wiki-democracy” of “digital flash mobs calling out the truth” and “a government square that holds people accountable.” But the Internet, mainstream search engines and social media sites are filtered by big media and the government so much that the “truth” one gets is the version a select group wants the masses to hear from hand-picked sources.
It would be more effective to organize and rally the traditional way: in person before your elected official’s office, in the town hall or town square, door-to-door, in the local newspapers and through massive phone call initiatives, while leaving the internet to the big conservative special interest groups on the left and right that use it to fabricate consensus.