18 Nov 2024
Income Equality. Alive Information.
The results of the 2024 presidential election may mean untold sleepless nights for progressives. The reasons for the outcome are already clouded by agitated finger-pointing. While pundits pontificate, critical analysis is met with flabbergasted disdain. With Nuts and Bolts: The Formula for Progressive Electoral Success (https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuts-and-bolts-the-formula-for-progressive-electoral-success-robert-creamer/21250546?ean=9781947492639), political organizer and strategist, Robert Creamer (https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuts-and-bolts-the-formula-for-progressive-electoral-success-robert-creamer/21250546?ean=9781947492639) had months before the election taken a serious deep dive into an issue that was making Democrats nervous, this was even before Kamala Harris stepped into the race. Creamer’s (https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuts-and-bolts-the-formula-for-progressive-electoral-success-robert-creamer/21250546?ean=9781947492639) book can be described as a step-by-step field manual for how progressives can win electoral campaigns - and a textbook for anyone who wants to know how electoral politics really works. It's about the fundamentals of great electoral organizing, effective political communication, understanding the self-interest of the voters, political fundraising, using social media and other new technologies, creating high intensity field programs, voter mobilization, the qualities of great organizers.
For five decades Creamer (https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuts-and-bolts-the-formula-for-progressive-electoral-success-robert-creamer/21250546?ean=9781947492639) has worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national levels. His firm, Democracy Partners has managed scores of high-intensity field programs for Democratic Congressional campaigns. In our conversation Bob Creamer (https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuts-and-bolts-the-formula-for-progressive-electoral-success-robert-creamer/21250546?ean=9781947492639) talks candidly, often bluntly about the reason for electoral failure, noting that ill-chosen phrases like “A basket of deplorables” can radically alter a campaign’s success. Bob (https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuts-and-bolts-the-formula-for-progressive-electoral-success-robert-creamer/21250546?ean=9781947492639) insists on emphasizing the progressive’s failure in the 2024 election and further election will be ignoring and not focusing on “Income Equality”.
One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, In The Ascent of Information Caleb Scharf (https://amzn.to/3wWzc7v) argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text, and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate life-form. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. The Ascent of Information (https://amzn.to/3wWzc7v) offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf (https://amzn.to/3wWzc7v) explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.
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