Culture Crash

Doc Searls is looking for Republican Hackers, by which he means programmers not criminals. He's having trouble finding cool uses of IT (specifically Linux) which are in use by Republican campaigns.

I'm not sure he'll find much. I think there's something in the culture of the two parties that pushes the Democrats toward the kind of lo-tech, distributed, hi-idea platforms that are tying together some of their campaigns and makes Republicans want hi-tech, centralised, easy to understand solutions (probably from Bill) for theirs.

Its probably all part of the tradition of leftist imaginative dissent. From suffragettes chaining themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace and Ten Downing Street to Flash Mobs in Seattle the left - short on resources but long on imagination - have come up with the more memorable protests.

The two right wing protests that stand out for me are the Nuremburg Rallies and the KKK marching on Washington, both of which were organised by groups so extreme I'm not sure they belong in this post.