Netroots Nation round-up

By Kathy G.

I've been meaning to blog a bit about Netroots Nation. I apologize for not getting to it until now, but I didn't get home until last night some other things needed taking care of first.

I'll start with what I didn't like about Netroots Nation:

1. The expense. Bad enough that fuel prices mean that airfare is going through the roof, and the hotel itself cost a pretty penny (with taxes, around $155 per night for a double). But even worse was the $450 registration fee ($375 if you registered early). I'll be damned if I know where that registration fee paid for -- the only "meals" covered were two boxed lunches and one "brunch" consisting of coffee, juice, muffins, and bagels. Registration for a comparable conference, this year's Take Back America, was only $280, and that included most meals. Plus, if you were a student, senior, or low-income person, the TBA fee was reduced to $125 (if I recall correctly). Also, this year regular registration for Blogher cost $350, but for students the fee was only $75.

I know that scholarships were available for Netroots Nation, but still -- that's an awful lot of money, and the only reason my husband and I could afford it is that we're doing reasonably well financially this year. The cost is probably one reason why the conference was so overwhelmingly white -- it was about the whitest left-of-center gathering I've ever attended. And I don't just mean that there were few African-Americans -- Latinos and Asian-Americans were scarce as well. I also noticed that the attendees seemed to skew heavily male.

I think the organizers of next year's conference should make a concerted effort to make the conference more affordable. It hurts the netroots as a movement if its doors are closed to people of modest means, because then, inevitably, our politics will tend to ignore the bread-and-butter economic concerns that are crucial toward building a mass movement.

I've been told that in the past, it was suggested that, instead of holding the conference at a hotel, we could hold it at a university. This is apparently the route other groups go, and it makes a lot of sense to me. First of all, it's cheaper, and secondly, many large universities have adequate facilities, not only for the conference itself, but for lodging (in many colleges, the dorms are otherwise virtually empty during the summer, after all). I was told that the idea of going the university route was shot down because it would be too downscale and wouldn't impress the media muckety-mucks. But I say it's much more important to be inclusive than to give a rat's ass about what the clueless media will think (and face it, they're only going to caricature us as a bunch of dirty fucking hippies anyway).

What else was lacking?

2. I'd also have to say, the panels. I enjoyed a couple of the ones I attended, but most were decidedly underwhelming, and the intellectual content tended to meager. I was especially disappointed that so few of the panels concerned economics, and none were about the labor movement. There was a panel on the mortgage crisis, and another on economic populism, but so far as I know neither one of them contained an economist, and only one labor activist was to be found. That's not to knock those particular panels (neither of which I saw), but just to say that some policy-focused panels on economics featuring economists like, say, Heather Boushey, or Echidne of the Snakes, or Dean Baker, or Heidi Hartmann, or James K. Galbraith, or the EPI folks, would have been welcome.  Political scientists like Larry Bartels or Lane Kenworthy, who study the political economy of inequality, would also have been interesting.

A panel on the netroots as a political movement that featured sociologists and/or political scientists who are studying this subject would also have been of interest -- someone like Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell would have been perfect.

Another thing about the panels: there could have been more panels with people disagreeing with each other -- and perhaps those disagreements might even have been explored in a productive way. I understand that there was at least one health care panel with Ezra Klein advocating health care mandates and other folks advocating single payer, but that was the only one I heard of where there seems to have been substantial disagreement.

Why couldn't we have seen panels about things like: deficit hawks vs. economic populists? People with differing views on what to do about the crimes of the Bush administration (e.g., impeachment vs. a truth and reconciliation commission vs. nothing)? Hillary-phobic Obama boyz vs. Obama-skeptic feminists who were disgusted at the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton throughout much of the left-wing blogosphere? Lefty Chomskyite foreign policy types vs. mainstream liberal internationalist foreign policy types? Panels like those would at least have kept things from getting boring.

As long as I'm bitching about this, though, I should say that the lack of interesting panels is partly my own fault. I complained about the lack of good econ panels last year and was told that basically anyone can organize a session. I vowed to organize an econ panel or two but never got up off my ass to do it. I promise that next year if I don't succeed in organizing a session, I'll refrain from criticism on this point.

3. The caucuses also left a lot to be desired. I mean, I enjoyed meeting like-minded people at them, and all, but at the ones I attended, nothing practical got accomplished. One entire day was devoted to caucusing, and that was too much. It should be half a day at most, and the caucuses themselves should be designed so as to be much more practical and action-oriented.

All right, enough of the bitching -- what was there to like? Well, as it turns out -- a lot, actually! I did have a good time and I'm glad I went. What did I like? Well:

1. The city. Austin was an excellent choice -- I enjoyed it very much. I'll be writing about why in a future post.

2. The conference seemed to be reasonably well-organized. The program was more complete and easier to read than last year, and the facilities were better, too.

3. The speakers. The panels and caucuses were kind of meh, but I enjoyed the speeches and talks by Wesley Clark, Larry Lessig, Van Jones, and Al Gore (I missed some of the other ones, like Donna Edwards). Lessig, Jones, and Gore, in particular, are visionaries who do such important work in the world, and their words -- and needs -- are inspiring. And inspiration should not be sold short -- it's one of the reasons people go to these things, after all. We all need to get energized, to have our activist hopes and passions refueled.

4. The people. This was the best thing by far. I enjoyed touching base with some of my real-life friends, as well as meeting some cyberfriends in the flesh at last. The dinner my husband and I had with Sir Charles of the Cogitamus blog was lots of fun, and our outing with the Group News Blog crew was a blast as well. As were the dinners/lunches/drinks/brief chats we had with dozens of other folks.

I've learned over the years that lefty writers and bloggers tend to be my favorite people. I'm not sure why, but I think that part of it is that I am an exceptionally shy person with pretty shitty social skills. However, when I meet someone whose blog or writing I'm familiar with, that means that there is instantly a topic at hand that we can talk about. I suck at small talk, and I am much, much more comfortable talking to someone with whom I know I have something in common -- the anxiety will then come down to manageable levels.

Of course, what also helps is that so many of the lefty writers and bloggers I meet tend to be pretty cool people and I really do enjoy hanging out with them. I met more than a few remarkable people in Austin last week, but for now I just want to mention one. The newest voice to join the Group News Blog is a writer, poet and activist named Maggie Jochild (Maggie also blogs at her own site, Meta Watershed). She joined my husband, me, the rest of the Group News crew, and a couple of other folks for dinner on Saturday. Maggie held us spellbound telling the story of her participation in the gay and lesbian White Night riots in San Francisco in 1979 which followed the (outrageously light) sentence Dan White got for murdering San Francisco mayor George Moscone and the openly gay city supervisor, Harvey Milk. (You can read her account of the riots here, on her blog). She was a part of history, and hearing that history, being so close to it in that way, was thrilling.

And yet, as amazing as Maggie is, people like her are not exactly uncommon at Netroots Nation. At conferences like that one, you'll meet others like her -- people whose lives of activism and dedication to the cause of social justice have helped transform the world. Sometimes when the world gets too overwhelmingly depressing and corrupt and violent and shitty, it helps to remember that Maggie, and millions of others like her,  whose names most of us will never know, exist. Because they acted, the world is a far better place. And maybe, just maybe, the activist work and passions and obsessions of the rest of us will also, finally, in ways that may be small or large, bear fruit as well.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

Kathy,

Not to sound like a suck up, but I had a delightful time at dinner and think you and your husband are both rather good company.

I hadn't really focused on the absence of labor panels -- that's a bit surprising as there a number of union folks in attendance. Hopefully next year.

[Melinda]

I "attended" remotely, through Second Life and streaming video on UStream. Because I'm a full-time telecommuter, involved with collaborative efforts even though it's very difficult for me to travel, and whatnot I do a lot of remote meetings and have worked with a variety of interactive collaborative tools. I think that this time around it really brought out the divide between working meetings and conferences, where one is interactive and the other is structured around speakers and audiences. Netroots was definitely a conference from the remote participation perspective and I gather that's what it was like there, too, despite the caucuses.

Another tension/divide was between Netroots as an arm of the Democratic Party and Netroots as part of a progressive movement. I think we all know that the Democratic Party is not particularly progressive and in that context the lack of representation of labor (and farmers, for that matter) on the program is hardly surprising. But, I think if there were more representation on the program by people who really are pretty far to the left there'd have been livelier panels, given the substantial differences between the progressives and the fauxgressives.

This was my first time using Second Life and I thought it was pretty "Shazam!" but not that useful as a conferencing tool. Although, there was one remarkable experience and that was that I got up from my machine to go into another room and reorganize my dogs (some go in, some go out), and heard an awful lot of noise coming from my office. When I went back in, Al Gore was on the dais. There was an immediacy to that that was actually pretty thrilling and almost made up for the fact that there was no way to interact with the speakers.

On the cost front, boy, those things can be expensive because of hotel costs, network costs, staff costs, and so on. That registration fee doesn't actually sound that high to me. The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meetings are roughly the same size and we've recently jacked our meeting registration fees up to $635 for early registration and $785 for late registration. Granted, most participants' expenses are covered by their employers, but still, somebody's got to pay for it.

[MikeZ]

"And I don't just mean that there were few African-Americans -- Latinos and Asian-Americans were scarce as well. I also noticed that the attendees seemed to skew heavily male."

I've noticed this as well, both within the Left and DC. Any theories as to why? I'm Asian-American, and I wonder about this myself.

[MG]

The lack of minority participants isn't directly about cost, but about culture. It never ceases to amaze me, how folks like you just don't get how alien your values are to those of black culture. You think that because you support a few social programs or a progressive tax structure or what have you, you are on the same page as minorities. In reality, you aren't even in the same book. Were it not for those social programs, and the knowledge that modern Republicanism serves in part as a cover for racism, blacks would be some of the biggest wingnuts around. They are conservative on many social issues, distrust the do-good mentality, suspicious and resentful of patronizing elites -- I could go on and on and on.

How ignorant of minority culture are you? You are apparently unable to understand the real economic barrier to minorities participating in something like NN is that, because of the cost of technology, minorities are not online in nearly the numbers white people are, and so the pool to draw from is much, much smaller. Blacks are 9% of the population, and probably about 3% of the internet users, if memory serves. Asians traditionally have the lowest percentage of voting participation in the country. And so on.

NN was a white affair because politically active online people are white and middle class; period. You aren't going to increase minority participation by holding this thing at a University, or at Disneyland, or even making it free and at Disneyland, because people aren't going to go to something they don't know or care about.

There's a lesson in all this ranting: you folks are way, way out of touch with large parts of this country, even the parts whose interests you say you care about -- which is why it's so easy for the conservatives to paint you as elitist snobs and so on. It's one of those cases where there's some fire among all that smoke.

[Low Key]

Statistically, I'm sure it's true that black folks are online less than white folks. But it's severely patronizing to say that the pool of tech-savvy African Americans is "much, much smaller." I live in a middle class black neighborhood, and my neighbors are some of the most tech-obsessed people I know.

Stupid comment.

[David Moles]

Were any of the speakers paid? That seems to be the divide between interesting cheap conferences and boring expensive ones in a lot of other fields.

[Rich C]

There was at least one panel, on Friday morning, led by the Change To Win federation and featuring veteran union organizer Tom Woodruff. Don't know how well attended it was (it was Friday morning after all) but it was there.

[I. J. Poole]

If groups such as Netroots Nation want to attract more African Americans, they will need to talk more concretely about poverty, injustice and inequality.

One of the problems with Netroots Nation was there was very little evidence of a connection between blogosphere voices and the people who live on a day-to-day basis with the consequences of the legacy of racism and economic policies that have the effect of locking in white privilege.

That points to what I believe is the Achille's heel of the blogosphere -- not enough bloggers are pounding the pavement in low-income communities, going to the schools, talking to families, experiencing first-hand the carnage of the past eight -- hell, the past 40 -- years.

This is a function that the mainstream media only sporadically performs -- you will miss it when it happens if you blink your eye. So progressive bloggers need to pick up that ball.

One service that Netroots Nation could provide is to expand its journalism fund -- it shouldn't just be a cash award to a single "star" blogger but grants that could go to several bloggers for the express purpose of getting bloggers into communities and producing stories and commentary. There need to be both resources and rewards for bloggers who go into struggling communities -- communities of color and otherwise -- and connect the realities in those communities to the progressive vision that we say we are fighting for.

The line that "blacks are poor so they are not online as much" is a cheap cop-out. The street between the white netroots community and the African-American community is two-way both physically and metaphorically. How willing are whites to take the time to walk down that street to the other side?

[MG]

Statistically, I'm sure it's true that black folks are online less than white folks. But it's severely patronizing to say that the pool of tech-savvy African Americans is "much, much smaller." I live in a middle class black neighborhood, and my neighbors are some of the most tech-obsessed people I know.

Stupid comment.

Citing a plain statistical fact -- a fact you actually agree with -- is a "stupid comment" and "patronizing". OK. I'll accept your word for it, on the grounds of your manifest expertise in the field of stupid comments.

[Batocchio]

I didn't attend, but you're right about price, and a college or university would be much better for the reasons you outline. Many rent out in the summer for that sort of thing. The diversity of opinions you mention would also be good, since right now opposition to the Bush administration overwhelms other differences. I'd like to see the liberal hawks taken on. ;-)

Also, meeting bloggers in real life really is the coolest thing about these events - plus the inspiration you mention.

[Karl Steel]

MG, I wonder how much of your description of minority culture is equally applicable--minus, of course, the 'voting Democratic because Repugs are racist' bit--to poor white people. The people I grew up around, mostly poor whites, were also "conservative on many social issues, distrust[ed] the do-good mentality, [and] suspicious and resentful of patronizing elites." Of course, any "elite" was automatically assumed to be patronizing, and "elite" was a pretty elastic category: it could extend to people like me, poor kids who did too much reading for their own good.

[the littlest gator]

Thanks for this post. I agree with a lot of your recap. One thing I do know is that the price, and access issues was addressed both in a small orgnaizer meeting and in the big end of conference input panel. I know they are seriously working on different pricing structures specifically for students and seniors for next year.

It was great meeting you at the concert. Thanks!

I think you and your sig-other are brilliant! let's stay in touch.

[the littlest gator]

hey, how 'bout a blogroll link?
hugs

[Kathy G.]

Littlest Gator, it was great meeting you and the other Group News folks, and yes I will definitely put you on the blogroll! I've been lax about updating it but there are several blogs I want to add, and a couple of links that need to be updated. Thanks for the reminder!

[MG]

Of course, any "elite" was automatically assumed to be patronizing, and "elite" was a pretty elastic category: it could extend to people like me, poor kids who did too much reading for their own good.

Posted by:Karl Steel | July 24, 2008 at 04:59 PM

_________________

Skin color is, and always has been, the only dividing line between poor white Americans and poor black Americans. But it's a pretty sharp divider. If you're black, the knowledge that not even half a century has passed since you've been "granted" the status of a Real 'Merikan seldom leaves your mind, or at least not mine. Jim Crow and strange fruit, poll taxes and Bull Connor -- poor white people have nothing like these things in their recent history. Poor white people also have the "privilege" of having blacks and other minorities to look down on, an opportunity perfectly captured in the phrase "I'm free, white, and 21." And finally, my skin color and hair are things I'll take to the grave, no matter how far I advance in life. If you're white and successful, you can (it isn't easy, but you can still do it) blend in with all the rest of the successful white people, no matter your background. Economically similar, even culturally similar, but in reality, worlds apart, because of a little pigmentation....

[Karl Steel]

MG, agreed, and thanks. Although it might have looked like it, I'm not saying that class trumps race. I know that class and race operate in analogous, but not identical, ways; but because white privilege is nowhere so invisible as for the people who enjoy it, I know I'm not sufficiently aware of this!

I'm just wondering--and I'm no social scientist, so this is just wondering--whether several of the points you described for the social conservatism of minorities, their low internet use, and reluctance to politically engage with developing effective political groups like NN are--roughly--identical for poor whites. Anecdotally, I would expect they are; but I know anecdotes get us only so far.

I would imagine, however, that we might have something analogous to the low rate of political participation by low power groups. For example, in areas that are 80% Democrat, the Repugs tend not only to avoid putting up lawn signs for their candidates, they tend to vote less. And vice versa.

With your points in mind, my sense is that Right-wing racism--as even Rove argued (I think) concerning Repugs contra hispanics--is probably the one thing keeping the Right from completely ruling this country (although I wonder how many whites they would lose if they dropped racism??).

[sex shop]

With your points in mind, my sense is that Right-wing racism--as even Rove argued (I think) concerning Repugs contra hispanics--is probably the one thing keeping the Right from completely ruling this country (although I wonder how many whites they would lose if they dropped racism

[sex shop]

MG, ve teşekkür etti. Rağmen benziyordu olabilir, bu sınıf Koz Irk demiyorum. Ben sınıf ve Irk benzer faaliyet, ama aynı değil, yollarını biliyorum ama çünkü beyaz hiçbir ayrıcalık böylece onu zevk için insan olarak görünmez, ben bunun yeterince farkında değilim biliyorum!