And now, the rest of my miscellaneous impressions from Yearly Kos...
DNC Chair Governor Howard Dean's keynote on the first night was a barn-burner -- he brought the crowd to its feet several times, and announced a strong new effort by the DNC to combat voter intimidation. Here's the video.
There was a session on the agenda for discussing whether or not bloggers would benefit from having a union; it piqued my interest, so I dropped in for it. It ended up being a really good discussion. The Los Angeles Times even thought it was interesting enough to write up.
Naturally enough, conservative bloggers thought the idea was too silly for words. Big surprise there. But if you were in the room when the discussion was going on, you'd probably think differently. Bloggers have a lot of the same issues that other "creative" professions do -- little or no insurance, work that comes and goes, a need to prove to potential employers that they're professionals -- and unions have been very helpful for writers and actors in addressing those issues. So it's not really crazy that bloggers would have the same discussion, although there's clearly a lot of work that would have to be done to define what the shape of such an organization would be.
Note: Farhad Manjoo of Wired Magazine has posted a response to the L.A. Times article in which he claims that what was discussed at the session wasn't a union, but rather a collective insurance pool of the type advocated by blogger Susie Madrak. Well, as I noted above, I was in the room for the discussion (to the best of my knowledge, neither Madrak or Manjoo were) and I can attest that the discussion was broader than Manjoo suggests, and that it covered a wide range of potential organizational forms, ranging from loose group-buying arrangements all the way to a more complete union like the National Writer's Union. So I'm not sure where Manjoo is coming from, exactly.
A lot is being made of the unbearable whiteness of being at YearlyKos, and there's already people pushing back against the complaints. Based on my experience there, I think the lack-of-diversity critique has some merit -- there were an awful lot of white people running around, though I, a man whiter than winter in Wisconsin, wasn't helping on that score.
But the real diversity issue, I think, wasn't so much ethnic diversity as diversity of viewpoints. No matter what color you are, it takes a person in a certain kind of position to be able to shell out hundreds of bucks to go to Chicago for a week for a conference -- and that position is an economically privileged one. That, I think, is part of the problem I was getting at in my post on the disconnect between the netroots and the problems of everyday working people; for the most part, the netroots as represented at Yearly Kos are better off financially than the average working person, so it's no surprise that they don't automatically relate.
This isn't really a problem with Yearly Kos per se as much as it is a problem with the netroots phenomenon generally. There's an idea for a panel at next year's Yearly Kos: how can we work with the tools that empower the affluent so that they can empower underpaid workers too?
UPDATE (August 8, 2007): Susie Madrak clarifies in the comments that her project is indeed unrelated to the Yearly Kos seminar: "Manjoo asked me about MY bloggers project. He didn't ask me about the Kos workshop at all and I never pretended to be speaking for those who attended."
Comments (2)
Comments posted to CtW Connect are the sole property of the individual posting them, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of Change to Win, its affiliated unions, or its leadership.
Manjoo asked me about MY bloggers project. He didn't ask me about the Kos workshop at all and I never pretended to be speaking for those who attended.
Posted by Susie from Philly on August 7, 2007 at 6:05 PM
Posted on August 7, 2007 at 6:05 PM
Susie,
Thanks for the clarification! I suspected that was the case, but it wasn't clear to me from the way Manjoo's story was written. I've updated this post to include your note.
Posted by Jason Lefkowitz on August 8, 2007 at 9:15 AM
Posted on August 8, 2007 at 9:15 AM