Revolution 2.0

Little revolts already have taken place inside Barack Obama's global revolution. So much faith, so much hope, so much money was poured into his campaign by so very many people that probably this was inevitable. All over the world the public feels like it’s got a piece of him. And among the hundreds of millions of Obama lovers who saw in the softly smiling candidate whatever they wanted or needed to see, a great many must eventually feel scorned by a hard president taking on a very tough agenda.

Certainly in the Arab world, where an Egyptian friend tells me, "Obama is more popular than in Kenya," there are predictable rumblings of concern and resentment. The initial misgivings are about Obama's appointment of Rahm Emanuel, the son and grandson of Israelis, as his chief of staff. And it would seem that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the master strategist and media maven of Al Qaeda, thinks the time is ripe already for his terror news network, As-Sahab, to tap into any incipient sense of disappointment.

In a video posted Nov. 19, Zawahiri showed news footage of Obama among rabbis at the Western Wall of the old city of Jerusalem and called him a "house Negro" doing his masters' bidding. That the term is deeply offensive, even Zawahiri knows. So to make his point he showed a lengthy clip of the late Malcolm X, or Malik al-Shabazz, defining the difference in history between the slaves who lived in the owner's house, loyal and protective, and those in the field, who, if the master's home caught on fire, prayed for a strong wind to come along. "I am a field Negro," Shabazz concluded. This aspect of the terrorist video exploiting an earlier icon of African-American politics to condemn the current president-elect did not make it into many of the mainstream media reports last week, but Al Qaeda wouldn't care about that. Zawahiri knows he's reaching out directly to his intended audience, bypassing the press completely. That's what you do with a political Web site, even if your politics are terrorism.

The Internet has always been just as open to purveyors of hate as it is to those who promise hope. It is not an ideology or ethos. It's a collection of tools for communication—and for organization and mobilization—that anyone can use. Al Qaeda discovered that a long time ago. When it comes to building community, writes forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "the intensity of feelings developed online rival those developed offline." Indeed, they may be stronger. In his recent book, "Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the 21st Century" (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sageman argues that, thanks to the Internet, "the followers choose whom to follow, and the other leaders fade away." Terror networks, he says, are "a mixture of online and offline elements, and their respective in-person and virtual discussions mutually influence each other … They are networks within networks."

What concerns me here is that the Obama campaign has now shown the world, bad guys as well as good guys, the state of the art. This isn't criticism and certainly wasn't the intent, but it's unavoidable. And while the president-elect's supporters talk about using the Web to build his democratic government, what experience has shown us so far is that the model is most effective when it is used by the forces of opposition, by outsiders. Whether they are on the left or right, progressive or reactionary, pacifist or terrorist, makes little difference when you're talking about the basic techniques to organize and mobilize.

In Israel, for instance, former prime minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud Party has emulated the Obama site almost byte for byte in his bid to regain power. In Britain, it's the Tories who've made the most of the blogosphere. And one of the immediate concerns of the President 2.0 practitioners around Obama is to find ways to bring the masses they mobilized under control, or at least steer their passions in a consistently supportive direction now that they're "no longer on the sidelines bitching, no longer just sending the shrill petition," as one of Obama's Web gurus put it. "You have this fire hose of activism, whether by way of funding, getting out the vote, sending letters to Congress …," says Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which is the company at the center of Obama's Internet operations. "It's really about editorial oversight, where you want to direct this stuff."