Anger, technology shake up political landscape

If you're angry or frustrated at the government, you're not alone.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press just reported that 21% of respondents to a March poll said they were mad at their own government. And 56% said they were frustrated.

The technological revolution that is making the daily newspaper irrelvant and the weekly newsmagazines partisan opinion publications.

The volatility is due to tectonic, technology-driven power migration away from big organizing institutions, like corporations and political parties, to a dispersed universe of what conservative blogger and author Glenn Reynolds calls "an army of Davids."

As in David vs. Goliath.

These online armies can literally spring up overnight, as witnessed by the Tea Party's rise over the past year. The Internet gives nascent forces an immediate organizing platform, the power to push back and even the ability to create their own realities.

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"The institutions do not have the power any more," Trippi said. "Power is drifting towards these armies of Davids."

Trippi argues that successful politicians "are the people that hand out the slingshots" to the Davids.

Adaptation of new technology is moving so fast, he said, that "there will be a campaign in 2012 and 2016 that will make the Obama campaign look like just as much of a joke as the Obama campaign made the Dean campaign look like a joke."

Trippi said that the features that make the Web so powerful a political force — immediacy, decentralization, and an ability to virtually organize — are anathema to closed party primaries and top-down message control.

In the past five months, the Republican Party has had two harbingers of what Trippi said is coming for both political parties.

In a New York special congressional election last fall, Tea Party activists and others rejected a candidate who had been hand-picked by the GOP establishment. Conservatives put up their own candidate, and eventually the chosen GOP candidate quit and endorsed the Democrat, who won.

Tea Party activists in Ohio are now complaining that Republican officials are not allowing open competition for elections for the party's governing committee next month. Republican Party officials say they are doing what they always do — defending incumbents.

"The Tea Party is not an accident," Trippi said. "We are very likely to see an independent (presidential) candidacy in 2012 or 2016. ... We are entering a very disruptive period."

Once the people who edited opinions, who determined for the masses which opinions were acceptable and which were not, Pandora's box was opened and will not be closed again.