Larry Lessig and Doc Searls have both come forward and very graciously acknowledged that their worst fears about the recall didn’t materialize. Lessig says:
total(ly wrong about the) recall
I was, at least. The recall provision is still stupidly crafted. But the results last night are as a democracy should be. A clear majority voted to recall the governor. And more people than supported Davis voted to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger.
He wasn’t my first choice. But it is interesting that the two top candidates “started” their life in the US in poverty. Anyone who gets as far as either did deserves our respect. And we Californians can hope that some of the benefit of the hard work and luck that has marked Mr. Schwarzenegger’s life might now pass to California.
And Doc says:
Well shit, maybe I was (and still am) wrong about “direct democracy,” California style. I guess we’ll see. Richard’s certainly right about MoveOn, which has lost the common touch, if it ever had one.
Comments on Lessig’s post indicate a deep well of hostility remains on the Left, with a “stupidity” meme replacing the “anti-democratic” meme that preceded the election. I don’t see much in the way of the VRWC hi-jacking another election except in two curious sources on the East coast, the always arrogant George Will and doddering David Broder. (via Kaus). The East Coast establishment was annoyed to have the national spotlight shining in a place where they don’t know their way around, apparently. Neither has the basic facts right. Will says:
California’s recall — a riot of millionaires masquerading as a “revolt of the people” — began with a rich conservative Republican congressman, who could think of no other way he might become governor, financing the gathering of the necessary signatures.
And Broder agrees:
The misguided effort to convert the broadly shared public discontent with economic stagnation and political gridlock into a recall effort against Democratic Gov. Gray Davis was made possible only because Republican Rep. Darrell Issa pumped almost $2 million of his own fortune into a commercial signature-collection campaign.
In point of fact, the recall was initiated by Ted Costa, a Sacramento small government gadfly who’s anything but rich. Darrell Issa’s money – about a dime per voter – sped up the process, but it would’ve happened anyway. The only thing worse than a fool is an arrogant fool.
Doc calls me out on a question about the End-to-End stuff by Grant Henninger, to wit:
As long as the underlying protocols on the net are open and all servers accept packets of information from all other servers, the higher order protocols can be proprietary without breaking end-to-end.
My argument about this is that the important principles in Internet design are open standards and any-to-any connectivity, not the end-to-end structure of control in a certain version of the core protocols*. So as long as the datalinks and packet links are willing and able to move data from anyone to anyone, it doesn’t matter whether they do retransmissions, billing, and flow control solely at the end points or at each individual hop. For A/V applications, it’s necessary to do these things hop-to-hop instead of end-to-end, so the Internet will inevitably move to that kind of architecture as it becomes more of an A/V network and less of an e-mail network.
This is progress and we should embrace it.
It probably is true that the Internet would have had a slower ramp if it had been hop-to-hop in the old days, because that kind of architecture is more demanding of routers than the simplistic architecture, but technology has improved and we can now use the net – or soon use the net – for more interesting things.
*this sentence revised for clarity