Arrr..revolution

The German Pirates, founded in 2006 and long dismissed as a niche party obsessed with copyright reform and online privacy, picked up four seats in the Saarland regional Parliament, twice as many as the once strong Green Party — and far more than the pro-business Free Democrats, who were shut out. [..] On the surface, the Pirates are indeed niche: their platform stands for stronger protection for file sharing and against censorship, along with unorthodox ideas like voting rights for teenagers. But their real goal, and the root of their success, is more meta: using the Internet to create a new structure of politics that can solve the problem of how to energize citizens — not only for the excitement of a campaign but also the often dreary realities of actual governance [..].

[T]he Pirates’ generation isn’t as radical as their parents’, and they understand the value of conventional politics. They just believe that it’s stuck in the past.

The Pirates’ insight is that the Internet is both message and medium. Young Germans, who spend large amounts of time online, care deeply about government attempts to regulate or monitor their activity; at the same time, the Internet offers a way for the party to completely upend German politics.

Using a software package they call Liquid Feedback, the Pirates are able to create a continuous, real-time political forum in which every member has equal input on party decisions, 24 hours a day. It’s more than just a gimmicky Web forum, though: complex algorithms track member input and generate instantaneous collective decisions [..].

There’s no reason the party’s lessons couldn’t be applied elsewhere, including the United States. One of the biggest problems for President Obama has been to maintain the vigorous online following that Candidate Obama generated in 2008. But while the Obama campaign at least gave the impression that he was influenced by input from his supporters, they have been shut out of the White House.

If Mr. Obama had followed the Pirate method, he would not only have sent updates via Facebook and Twitter, but he would have involved larger numbers of supporters in an extensive dialogue and given them an actual say in determining such priorities as which issues to pursue in his first months in office and how much to reach out to conservatives.

That sounds naïve, and inside the Beltway, it may be: lobbyists and money drive the discussion, not input from Indiana. But it is precisely that sense of disconnection, comparable in many ways to the disillusionment felt by young Germans, that has sapped energy among Mr. Obama’s base and led to protest movements like Occupy and the Tea Party.