the end of big, how the internet makes david the new goliath, the author joins us from boston. before we get into the substance of your book, if could relate your personal experience to the book, the end of big. >> sure. i started my life as a computer programmer and ended up at the interception of technology and politics n 2003 i joined howard dean's campaign and joined early in late april of 2003. and was on the campaign for almost exactly 12 months from early days to the very bitter end. my experience as a working for an insurgent candidate led me to

think a lot about the roll of technology in impower insurgence against the establishment and it ewhere my book started? in 2007 and 2008, we watched the astonishing primary where hillary clinton, she and bill clinton built the democratic party and lost to the primaries to a man who was in public life less than a decade and that was a dramatic moment of the inurge sent winning. in the last couple of cycles we've seen a similar die 234578ic with tea party insurgents challenging successfully a number of senators in their own primaries as well as other candidates. and so the book started with my interest in the role technology

plays in against the establishment. as i looked across a range of other industries and verticals i saw similar trend at work whether that can be in news, entertainment, in higher education, in armies and militaries and manufacturing, across the board it was clear that there were a couple of significant trends at work. >> mr. mele, when you joined the dean campaign, did they have the sense of the power of the internet? >> i think when i joined the dean campaign, i mean they hired me and it was clearly some sense this could be a competitive advantage, that there was a tactical opportunity that had not been tapped.

in many ways was patterned off of move-on. by 2004, move-on had been around for half a dozen years and it raised a lot of money for cad tkapbts but never before did a candidate build an organization like the dean campaign. in 2,000, bill bradley petitioned the f.c.c. to allow credit cards over the internet. but, it was the dean campaign that really embraced it and just blew it wide open. >> you have a quote in the end of big, and you say, that nobody in washington, d.c. took the internet seriously, so it was allowed to happen by the time anybody noticed it had already

won. what does that mean? >> so, one of the reasons i had worked in washington, d.c. at a number of nonprofit in the political space including common cause, and one of the reasons i werpbt to work for howard dean, that year he was the only presidential candidate whose headquarters was not in washington, d.c.. inside washington, d.c. there was a wisdom how you went about running and winning a national presidential calmpaign and the internet didn't figure into that. raise money in $2,000 chunks and spend most of it on negative advertising on television. that was the model. joining the dean exam pain where he didn't have a national list of donors to tap and a long established mail program, he made it as a candidate to find a

tactical advantage and, you know necessity is the mother of invention. that is in part what drove the dean campaign to the internet early was -- we had do something and this was available. i joined the campaign knowing that there was an opportunity here i was not going to have on a frontrunner or very establishment established exam pain >> what is radical connectivity that you talk about at the end of big? >> we just don't have very good language to talk about it. if i started talking about the role of the internet in political campaigns that doesn't entirely capture what we're seeing. if i started talking about the mobile phones, well it's lot more than a phone. talking about mobile phone doesn't capture what's going on. one of the challenges i had in writing the book was, we just don't even have a vocabulary to

describe the kinds of changes technology is bringing to our society, to our institutions and to the globe. and so, when i was thinking about it, part of the argument i make in the book, what is really different, what is really changed is the degree to which we're connected to each other all the time at practically zero cost and totally flat, distributed network without any hierarchy or priority or credentialing. that's why i talk about the impact of radical correct teuft. it's a radical kind of connectedness in speed, in frequency and presence in immediacy -- you can go almost anywhere in the globe and be connected today. there's a new advice i just saw, $10,050 that will do text messaging via satellite even from the north pole. the total press and available alt ability of everyone with a

smart phone is astonishing and unprecedented in my man history >> radical most of us feel lost in the dust kicked up by the pace of change. is radical connectivity unravelling society as we know it? >> i don't think it's unravelling society. it's just creating a wholly different one. that's a challenge to many of our existing institutions. it's why i wrote the book is to look at the impact radical connectivities having on our institutions. in 1975, if i asked you what a computer was, you probably would have described something that that would fill a room. a super computer from the 1970's cost $5 million and was available to the world's biggest

universities and companies and governments especially the department of defense. today you can walk into pretty much walk into any stripmall and buy a smart phone that has equal or greater power than a great super compute order. in just under 40 years we've taken something that was really only theconsidered enormously powerful and matter of national security and now can you buy it anywhere in america. not just america but just about anywhere in africa. the total aou bigty of this technology has lead to an enormous tkeuf fusion of power. that creates enormous challenges for all our institutions that are built on assumptions about individual power and individual agency that involve hierarchy

and authority and review and credentialing. today if you're not happy about how something works you can use social media and opt out in a variety of ways. >> i have two little boys, 4 and 2, and there's a -- near our home is a park with a huge slide. you have to climb up three stories of stairs to get to the top of the slide. i love it because it exhausts the boys. climb up the stairs again. climb up the stairs again. and hurricane irene destroyed the slides. the local town said it would take -- i don't remember -- maybe 30 grand in 2 or 3 years to rebuild the slides. 2 or 3 years is an eternity for a 4-year-old. some parent started a paypal page and posted all around the park fliers and stuck them to the trees saying if every player who comes to the park gives 50 or $100 we'll have 30 grand

overnight. of course raised the money like that and three months later new slides. that's a good example of the institution of the local government wasn't working for people and so people used the technology to opt out of it and just raise the money separately. in many ways that's very exciting, but that's also very troubling in other ways. >> well, has radical connectivity led to more civic engagement engagement? >> that is a -- ate been a mixed bag. in many ways more americans are engaged in the political process than ever before. at the same time you're looking at in many municipal elections single digit turnout to elect our leaders. los angeles, one of the biggest cities in the world, had a ridiculously low turnout in their recent mayoral election. i think that we're living in a

very fragile civic age where many of the old ways of doing things the institutions that the nation was built on, did not -- they're not necessarily doing a great job. they're very fragile in their own ways. that makes them susceptible to significant disruption when technology provides alternative ways of doing business. the story -- the whole story of obama's kapbdz dasy and the way the tea party is using the internet to challenge candidates that an a good example political parties being a shadow of themselves and not having the infrastructure they used to be and being primarily fundraising vehicles. that makes them easy to disrupt. you can disrupt the party. >> i write with regard to politics that it does -- radical

connectivity does make it easy to raise money and paeufz the way for a dangerous pop hreufpl. what do you mean? >> i think the founding fathers, in designing our system of government and our -- the process of our politics, they understood there was this tension between the monarch and the mob. the purpose in many ways of our government was to navigate that tension, to bring some sense of deliberation so that elites con act with immunity and also that the mob con ignore smart but hard decision. that's something that i think is in danger of getting lost. not just because of the technology. you can make a compelling argument ignoring the real challenges facing many americans our leaders are not tuned into

it, but the technology also plays its part. radical connectivity by flattening the hierarchies makes it very challenging to have any significant expertise. i think that a core challenge of our digital age is credentially experts. and people -- it's been well documented that any institution whether that can be politics journal hreufpl, higher education, doctors, you name it trusted institutions is at an all time low and technology gives people an alternatives. it's in the absence of expertise that i worry a little bit about what pop hreufpl -- where pop hreufpl might lead us.

>> mr. mele howard dean pat buchanan both made splashes but failed in the end. do you have a reason for that? >> that's a good question. i mean, i think part of that comes down to the dynamics of the american electorate about running caucuses in iowa and primaries in new hampshire to choose leaders. any person questions the wisdom of that. i also think there's a significant -- i'll probably get plenty of e-mails and tweets from angry people, but i think the dynamics of our political process of the presidential primary selection process, both is part of the reason this

populous didn't do well, but i think also americans have some sense what they want out of their leaders. and the pop hreufpl is a vehicle for an anger at what a bad job the institutions are doing. that doesn't mean that americans necessarily want the populous leader but they have a great deal of frustration at where the country's at. if you're under 40 in this country, you probably make less money than your parents did at your age. you probably won't be able to afford a home or at least not nice a home that your parents bought at your age. the quality of your education is same or maybe a little worse but a lot more expensive. the healthcare quality is probably the same or worse or a lot more extensive and the prospects for children are dim and more time commuting than any sane human being wants to and climate change will screw

everything up and the institutions aren't doing anything about it. if you're born after 1980 you have little reason to believe in and trust the institutions and the leaders of this country. i think this is the root of a lot of the frustration and anger we see in both parties. >> does technology and radical connectivity have a solution for some of those? >> i think it doesn't necessarily have an med solution. building real compelling alternatives to the current systems using this technology. the truth is it's all very early stage. there is not a lot of mature insurances staougsz that understand radical connectivity. wikipedia is probably one of the most mature institutions out there that understands the power that every individual carries

around, the computing power and what that means for knowledge and expertise. even wikipedia isn't that old and is struggling to wigger out what it means to be an institution. i think that that is a very -- it's very telling about our time. at the close of the book i talk about -- i open the last capture with barbara tuckman's the guns of august, talking about the funeral of king edward vii in 1910. over between 1910 and 1990, monarchy and colonies disappeared globally. that feels to us today like of course they disappeared. but if you were a part of a royal family in 1910 it was not evident or clear that monarchies are disappearing nor should

they. yet in retrospect it feels clear. i feel like we're in the same moment right now. all the institutions look like they can and should persist but i'm unconvinced that they will. >> you quote barbara tuckman and you say, on history's clock it was sunset and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying haze of splendor never to be seen today. when it comes to economic organization, what's been the effect what effect do you see on economic organization? >> well, more americans are self-employed more than any time since the civil war era. in 1920 the vast imagine were farmers or ran their own small shops or worked in very small farms and 100 years later by 1920 the trend is completely

reversed. most employees are employed by a major corporation. the pendulum is swinging the other direction. there's been an explosion of small businesses over the last decade and a half or so and in the consultant, sole proprietors and small and medium-sized businesses, the nature of organization of work is changing dramatically in this country. and yet, we're not sure how we navigate that. when i talked a moment ago about new institutions that might be emerging one interesting one is the free-lancers union that tries to -- to provide shared

retirement benefits options because we're increasingly a free answer economy. that has dramatic implications for all our system built on assumptions on how work would happen. another trend i talk about in the book that is related is the rise of 3-d printing and on demand fabrication. i talk about how i printed sandals for my boys. the future of manufacturing over the next two decades is exciting and almost impossible to imagine where technology is taking us on this front. and yet, it's -- it is arriving. gibson says, the future has arrived and just not evenly distributed. i think that that is -- that's the challenge for our institutions and government and politics and the other kind of crucial institutions of our time is how to navigate the emerging

future when it is so woerldrldly in terms of the way the people thought they worked. >> you talk about national security and military. how does the edward snowden situation fit in your book? >> i think it's perfect example. here's low level employee who use a thumb drive to divert the entire national security apparatus in the united states. that is astonishing. that's a significant disruption. i think it raises two questions for me. one question i talk about in the book in the context of another league, the wiki leaks is whether or not it is possible to keep secrets in a digital age. you can copy a file without anyone's permission and without

any loss any cost files are copyable and that's part of the advantage. in that context it looks to me like it's really hard to keep digital secrets. you can't keep people from copying things and that wasn't true in a paper age. there was a lot of easier to control documents and keep secrets. in a digital age i don't believe we can keep secrets. that raise as bunch of questions about are there secrets that we should keep in a democracy? maybe secrets like diplomacy requires sometimes some see contract kret /* secrecy. the apparatus of the u.s. government was set up to balance the need for secretsy in some

situations. part of the -- what we're seeing in the edward snowden case is that our institutions that balanced the powers lost and the accountability is gone. we had the head of the n.s. a. effectively lying to congress about the n.s.a.'s activity. the checks and pwalz and accountability seems to have evaporated here. and it makes edward snowden feel like the only way he can hold the institution accountable is by disrupting it. and that's -- i think the two major issues raised by the case are one the nature of secrets in the digital edge and what the implications for leadership and the citizenship and the secret balance and the second is the extent to which our institutions are completely unaccountable and that is what -- that frustration

with holding these big institutions accountable is to use technology to see how to disrupt them. >> when you look at the affordable care act, for example, and radial connectivity. is the a. c. a. set up for a new world in your view? >> it's a mixed bag. it has these healthcare exchanges which would not have been possible in a pre digital era or -- i at least struggle to imagine how the healthcare exchanges would work pre internet. in many ways it's looking at digital solutions. but in other ways i think that it creates kind of more challenges and may inseven advise people to seek

alternative vehicles for their healthcare of the -- just the sheer complexity of. >> mr. mele what is echo ditto >> that's my consulting firm. we have officers here and washington, d.c. we found the company following the dean campaign with a group of folks who were on the campaign. our work involves helping organizations navigate the digital world both technical advice and helping them think through the implications on their work. >> in the subtitle of your book you have the word goliath. if were you to speak to a comcast or a "washington post" organization to goliath in our current world what would you tell them? >> i would tell them they have to reimagine their customers, their audience, as having more power than they do.

this is what is so hard for leaders in big institutions to imagine is that you're -- the people you're leading are more powerful than you are. in the case of the "washington post" it's not the audience but the former audience and you need to figure out how to engage and tap into their power and help use them to accomplish your goals and ends. i mean, certainly comcast got a taste of this around the pippa fight last year where there was this piece of legislation about the internet that looked like it was going to pass and suddenly people broadly went around the united states and got up in arms and overnight changed the piece of that legislation. customers have a lot of power here to disrupt and shape your direction. if you're not -- if you don't come to it thinking about their

power and what they can do to disrupt and to create opportunity for your business and your organization then you're going to be -- you're going to face a lot of surprises in the next decade. >> what would be your message to congress? >> my message to congress is not that dissimilar. i think my primary message to congress is that the -- we need some fundamental overhaul of how this government works. i mean, we vote on tuesday because sunday is church day and monday is market day and you ride your horse and buggy into town to vote on tuesday. that is just ludicrous. we have 435 seats in the house of representatives. basically because that's how how many seats fit in the building despite the average size of the house has quadrupled over the last 40 years. the mechanisms of our government are due for a dramatic overhaul

and congress will not be able to navigate out of the current cul-de-sac they've got themselves into unless they understand and embrace the changing nature of our society of our world and reimagine what government might look like in the digital age. i firmly believe that we're at a moment of opportunity here with this -- with radical connectivity. you can see hints of it. the speaker's office has interesting digital tools and the white house has some but it's small and not topping the incredible power and engine aou ity of the american people. >> the ends of big is the title. how the internet makes david the new goliath. this is the communicators on c-span.

>> when he was alive, harper did not his youth that. they wanted a documentary archives they're related to the kennedy presidency. they didn't want the museum, particularly in harvard square. it attracts schoolchildren each year. they did not want the traffic. when the universities got involved in deciding whether to this -- except a presidential library, the question is what do we do with the museum? >> the presidential library sunday at 7:30 eastern.

>> next, our original series, first ladies, focuses on the life of florence harding. after that, news briefings. >> florence harding once said she had only one real hobby. war and harding. she was a significant force in her husband's presidency. florence harding set many precedents that would help define the role of the