Tedium - The Internet’s First Election 🗳

Hey all, Ernie here with a refresh of a timely article about the internet and presidential elections. The internet has been a deep influence on the 2020 election in stark ways. Given that, looking back at how things started strikes me as important.

Today in Tedium: For the past 24 years, a familiar trend has exposed itself with the turn of every U.S. presidential election cycle: Each one is ever-slightly more defined (heck, even redefined) by technology, particularly online trends that have come along in the three years prior. In 1996, it was a coming-out party for the web. In 2000, the growth of online news began to have an impact on how we researched candidates. In 2004, it was all about Meetup, as well as suddenly prominent individual bloggers like Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, whose dogged work in debunking a questionable report changed the shape of Dan Rather’s career. In 2008, fairly new outlets like YouTube and Politico became immensely influential. Twitter was around back then, but it wasn’t until 2012 when it came into its own, along with the big data campaign. In 2016, questions emerged after the fact about the influence of Facebook and misinformation. And this year: God, where do we even start? But I’m curious about how online networks affected elections before the internet had such a big impact on them, before cable networks teamed with social networks to promote primary debates. Today’s Tedium goes back to the 1992 campaign, in a year when backwards pants, Temple of the Dog, and Ross Perot were still in style. — Ernie @ Tedium

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Ross Perot (Wikimedia Commons)

How Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign helped pave the way for the Internet Archive

Back in 2015, the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott uncovered a piece of archival material so obscure that even the organization’s founder, Brewster Kahle, didn’t remember creating it. The two-hour-long video, previously unmarked and with fewer than ten views at the time Scott discovered it, features an interview with Kahle that dates back to his days as head of WAIS, Inc., an early attempt to create a broad online database.

WAIS, which stands for “wide area information server,” was effectively an internet-enabled database technology that allowed for long-distance access of digitally organized content. Initially borne in 1989 from a research project, it became something of a footnote in the history of the internet as a combination of the World Wide Web and search engines like Google took its place. But the thinking in its design was, in some ways, fundamental to the way we use the internet now.

The technology, at the time, was seen as particularly valuable—especially in the days when it wasn’t clear how we would eventually access data online. Spun off from the supercomputer firm Thinking Machines in 1992, WAIS, Inc. represented one of the first attempts to make the internet user-friendly.

And, as a company, it got its start thanks to a presidential campaign—Ross Perot’s, to be specific. As Kahle states nearly an hour into the video, the campaign basically was the reason why the company was created when it was. In fact, Kahle described it as a “fortuitous event”: He knew Perot Systems head Mort Meyerson, who had a sudden need for an information-organization platform for the campaign of the company’s namesake.

Brewster Kahle, circa 1992. (via the Internet Archive)

“Basically they’ve got this organization of people that are in 50 states, that is ad-hoc, that has three months to live, that has to keep in touch with each other,” Kahle explained in the clip. “So they have lots of information coming from the field, and they have, they need to collect up in a central place, figure out what it is they’re trying to do, what the statements, positions of Ross Perot are, and to disseminate that information out again. Paper, or having people fly back and forth, just wasn’t fast enough. Electronics made a whole lot of sense within a campaign structure.”

The high-tech approach considered by the Perot campaign makes a lot of sense. As is well-known, Perot (who died last year at the age of 89) had a significant background in technology, as the founder of Electronic Data Systems, a information technology management firm that dates to the 1960s. (He also famously invested in Steve Jobs’ NeXT.)

Kahle’s system, put together in a couple of days, impressed political strategist and campaign manager Ed Rollins, who quickly put the system to work for the campaign. Soon after, Rollins quit the campaign, and Perot famously suspended his effort before eventually hopping back in. This created a problem for Perot Systems, which had this impressive tool at its disposal that it no longer could use for its intended purpose—organizing news clippings and press contacts.

(If you know where to look on the Internet Archive, you can actually find the proposed statement of work describing this effort to create “an Intelligence System for the Perot Campaign.“)

Eventually, with WAIS Inc.‘s help, Perot Systems decided to eat its own dog food.

“Basically Perot Systems’ point was, ‘What could Perot Systems use this for?’ in terms of selling it to their customers,” Kahle explained. “So we installed it within Perot Systems to help them run their own corporation. And that, now it’s November of ’92, we’ve basically installed it and got it running for six months. The pilot groups are using the system for all sorts of information.”

Soon enough, WAIS, Inc., off the back of client work like the Perot campaign and other projects, became a successful, profitable business, one that was only slightly ahead of its time—and close enough in conceit to the web that it basically predicted the internet’s future.

As the internet started to take a more formalized shape, Kahle and other stakeholders sold WAIS, Inc. to AOL, and with the money earned from the buyout, he and fellow WAIS co-founder Bruce Gilliat started two projects that are still active to this day: Alexa, an online search and analytics tool that crawls the internet’s many websites, and the Internet Archive, which keeps the internet’s memory safe for generations to come. (They eventually sold Alexa to Amazon for $250 million in stock. It’s unrelated, except perhaps in spirit, to Amazon’s Echo-driving AI project of the same name.)