Head Tale

I've been reading a lot about the race for the Democratic nomination in the US between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This article from the New York Times caught my eye for doing a particularly good job of capturing the essence of the differences between their campaigns – Clinton, a baby boomer, is part of the establishment who sees politics as a fight between “us vs. them”.  Obama, technically also a boomer but younger, is much more open, accessible, collaborative, and inclusive in how he operates his campaign and how he comes across generally. 

And where have you heard those words before?  Oh yeah, in every  buzzword-laden article written about Web 2.0 in the last few years.

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who
emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands
of individual decisions, [Obama's political message] is a persuasive way of seeing the world.
For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source
software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling
theory of how change happens.

[Edit: Rolling Stone has a cover story on Barack Obama in their latest issue which takes an inside look at his campaign – much of which evokes the decentralized, “starfish” approach of the most successful web 2.0 companies.]