Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     Metablogger Doc Searls votes Liberal, bets Conservative, and in both dimensions picks Howard Dean to win the presidential campaign in 2004.  “The hyperlinked underdogs are going to subvert the isolated overdogs every time,” Doc forecast in our conversation this afternoon.   The only real question is whether the citizenry will be effectively networked by the end of next year.  But even now, Doc said, the Web is the place to find the action and passion of the 2004 race, and the best information on it.  Doc Searls’ bet on Dean sounds like an extension of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the famous Searls marketing mantras therein, starting with “markets are conversations.”  Furthermore, “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy,” the book argued.  And “networked markets get smarter faster than most companies,” or, in this case, than the richest campaign organizations.  “I don’t see Kerry in the networked world,” he said.  Or much of George W. Bush either, for that matter, though a “wartime president” with some smart and militant blog lances is harder to dismiss.

     I was looking to the genial Doc Searls for clues to network building.  And I was eager to admire him for the intuitive leaps–the diagnostic imagination–of his own celebrated pages.  He is a news and radio guy who has graduated, by acclamation, to guru standing; but I see Doc in a white coat, with a medicine bag.  Blogs are his scope on the soul and spirit of the country.  He said his own blog feels more like prophecy than commentary.  He is trying to see where the country is going.  He thinks, as I do, that the blog boom and the war in Iraq are somehow entwined.  Blogs were far the best forum for argument in the run-up to war–far better than Congress, say, or the newspapers, not to mention network television.  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reminded Doc at moments of the Catch-22 character, the former mail clerk PFC Wintergreen, who seemed mysteriously to be running World War 2.  The “blog-guard,” notably Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, “defined the war,” Doc Searls observed.  But the left-out opposition is finding its feet and growing everyday in the sorry aftermath.  The Internet, in any event, “is becoming the Commons on which democracy depends.  We’ve always needed this Commons, and now we have it.”  Listen in.