Photo: You don’t have to be an anime demon to build political tech, but it helps.
I got my start in digital politics when cell phones were exotic. When downloading a good-sized jpeg took minutes. When email, websites and a handful of back-channel discussion forums were all we had, and not everyone had an email account. It was 1996!
The political tech landscape looks very different in 2024, and so do the people creating the tools. As I put it in Campaigns & Elections last year,
As a whole, they’re immensely diverse — far more so than my colleagues in the first political tech boom, back in the late 1990s. I can’t speak about people building new digital tools on the Republican side — they don’t invite me to their parties as much — but the Democrats vary widely in race, gender identity, background and style.
By contrast, political dot-commers were mostly white and mostly male. Plus, this was DC a quarter-century ago, before office-casual had liberated cube workers from their jackets and ties. If you were in downtown south of Dupont Circle and wearing jeans, you were probably a bike messenger.
Political tech was also a much smaller world then. In DC in the late ’90s, the few dozen people at our Net Political Happy Hours (NPHAHO) would have included a sizable percentage of the people on the planet trying to do politics on the internet!
As I point out in the C&E piece, many of us had also come from the institutional side of politics, more from Congress and trade associations than from campaigns or activism. Today’s tech founders generally seem have more experience trying to persuade people and turn out votes in the wild, to their great advantage. The products they create reflect that background. The companies supported by Higher Ground Labs, for instance, generally try to solve a concrete problem encountered by campaigns or political communicators. If they’re trying to change the world, they’re generally doing it incrementally.
During the political side of the dot-com boom, by contrast, we were shooting for the stars! Wealth and glory awaited, and our ideas were sure to catch fire as fast as eToys and Pets.com. We were also shooting in the dark, trying to guess how politicos and everyday people alike were going to do politics on the internet, before it existed as we know it now. In practice, many of us picked up valuable experience instead of lucrative stock options, but the ground we broke has since yielded an amazing crop of tools and tactics.
Today’s Democratic tech founders have another advantage over us political dot-commers: as a group, they’re remarkably diverse, and in politics, diversity matters. When you’re trying to reach today’s potential Democratic voters, products that reflect the assumptions of only the young, white, male and Ivy-educated are probably going to miss a few nuances on the way. Along with a few business opportunities.
Political tech entrepreneurs from varying backgrounds will have different understandings of how people communicate, how they use technology, what motivates them to become politically involved and much more. Assumptions matter, for everything from interface design to the language vendors use when talking with candidates, organizations, volunteers and activists. For that reason alone, diverse teams will tend to create better political products, all else being equal.
As we all know, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. We’re really at the beginning of our collective journey into digital politics, and our next opportunities will depend in large part on developments in the bigger technology world. But wherever this generation of political technologists (and the next, and the next) take us, I’m proud to have been part of the first serious exploration of the potential of the internet to change the way politics works. They can take away my flip phone, but they can’t take that.
– cpd