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ProgressNowCO’s Alan Franklin is Colorado Pols, according to SquareState

by | 12:09 pm, February 11, 2011 | 16 Comments

So says “Fong” of SquareState:

I used to work at ProgressNow
and as far as I can tell, a lot of people already know that Alan Franklin is Coloradopols. He’s the web guy at ProgressNow. I also used to do the books at Soapblox and he pays the bill.

For a long time I thought there was a higher purpose ProgressNow/Coloradopols was serving and maybe for some people the mushy middle is an adequately comfy place but anymore the middle translates to the same old bullshit of Dems over-compromising and Republicans essentially always getting their way. Meanwhile enacted policies equate to the undeterred, ever accelerating destruction of life as we know it.

Anyhoo, when I worked there, all day long Huttner (Executive Director at ProgressNow) would come out of his office and tell Franklin what to put up on the blog. Their whole scheme is to control the message and hey, if they didn’t do it, someone else would, right? <-- cop-out

Back then I was also a blogger on the old, John Erhardt-run squarestate. Like the site's motif, I was green to politics and I knew that ProgressNowAction is a well-funded org that could be a stepping stone in a bright political career. I would listen to Alan's criticisms and "purity" issues about squarestate and believe him. Alan would also say that there is a "place" for squarestate and that s2 makes things better. I believed this strange contradiction so I kept my secret to myself and the others I knew who knew, and there are a lot of them. Plus, back then, I valued the anonymity of the identity of Alan as Coloradopols as much as I did the average user. I don't anymore. I think Alan as Coloradopols has set himself up to be a very public figure who somehow escapes accountability. Sorry, Alan. It's nothing personal.

Colorado Pols’ lack of posting transparency – the eponymous author is never explicitly revealed – and in the past, Jason Bane has been one of the few progressives linked by name to the blog.

And yes, there I have a screencap of the post, just in case it “disappears.”

How does this change your view of Pols?

**Update: Pols as astroturf?

Category: Blogging, Colorado Democracy Alliance, Colorado Politics, Democrats, Featured, Media Bias, Politics, Transparency, Uncategorized
Tags: > > > > > >

Comments

  1.   Muhammad Miguel Ali Hasan
      February 15th, 2011 @ 3:16 pm

    While I agree that transparency is a great thing, ColoradoPols goes far beyond the ‘editor’ setup, in aggregating independently written diaries and placing great emphasis on the comments

    The online community there is something to be beheld and complimented, as the aggregation of diverse opinion is the true champion at ColoradoPols

  2.   elpresidente
      February 15th, 2011 @ 4:14 pm

    Ali–while your affinity for that blog is demonstrated by your posts there, the idea that “the aggregation of diverse opinion is the true champion” there is, well, questionable.

  3.   steve harvey
      February 17th, 2011 @ 2:03 pm

    I have mixed feelings about Colorado Pols and the role it plays. As I’ve said before, it is almost a wonderful thing, a public forum where diverse views are exchanged on matters of public interest. But it’s also a toxic environment that brings out the worst in many and the best in few, and in which rancorous and viscious vitriol is protected while the one inexcusable sin is naming a non-anonymous poster (who posts under his own real name!).

    There is a certain overwhelming arrogance, too, to those who post under its name (I tend to associate it more with Jason Bane, because there’s something about his demeanor and Pols’ demeanor that seem very in sinc). The imperative the author(s) seem to follow is that of creating the impression of infallible disembodied authority, even if it means defending an absurdity in order to do so. And, when angered, they will vilify those who angered them, in impressively subtle and effective ways.

    But, while Pols does more to contribute to the toxicity of the blogosphere than it does to transcend it, I don’t see it as some conspiratorial undermining of public discourse. In fact, if it were what it purports to be (a community forum, run by a community will), it would be an excellent thing. Unfortunately, it is merely the plaything of those who own it, subject to their caprice, and constrained by their defects. Alas, our state’s best public political forum isn’t a public forum at all.

  4.   Chris Maj
      February 19th, 2011 @ 11:13 am

    “a community forum, run by a community will”

    LOL!

    Did they put the wifi-connections-only server on 100% solar power and then float it from a perpetual balloon, without setting any passwords?

    Of course not. A website is property just like everything else. But exercise of privatization of property is not shameful in the slightest – it is liberating to apply creativity and labor to raw nature, to build chips from sand and float data across them.

    Are there many actors in such a process? Certainly! Even the lowly pencil takes a free market village to grow. Consider enjoying I, Pencil by Leonard Read!

  5.   steve harvey
      February 19th, 2011 @ 5:08 pm

    Well, Chris, I’m a big advocate of market dynamics. It is a robust producer of wealth and a highly creative force. It is also limited, and less useful to some contexts than others. It’s usual comparative advantage over other social institutional materials (e.g., hierarchies, markets, and norms) is in terms of efficiency, but even that isn’t always the case, as the 2009 Nobel Prize Winners in Economics each demonstrated in separate spheres (Oliver Williamson, demonstrating when hierarchies are more efficient than markets, due to lower transaction costs under certain circumstances; and Elinor Ostrom, demonstrating when diffuse normative arrangements are more efficient than either).

    Having said all that, there are some things that are best served by means of public provision of public goods. The market, by itself, does not, for instance, address many of the negative externalities that the market creates (e.g., environmental contamination). If we want to use market forces to address that, we have to create an artificial market through public agencies (e.g., cap-and-trade). My point here was that there are some attributes that best serve a public forum that are not provided by private ownership, that is, by market dynamics.

    In fact, in Constitutional Law, there is a concept of “public forums” used in first amendment analysis; without public forums on public property, first amendment rights could conceivably be meaningless, because if all property and all media were private, the private owners have every right to censor the speach of those using their media according to their own biases and preferences.

    And that is the basis of my critique. If Colorado Pols held itself out as a capricious market actor, behaving arbitrarily according to its own will in service to its own message, that would be one thing. But it doesn’t: It markets itself as a forum open to all, guided by fairly applied rules, in service to open and honest discourse. And to some extent it lives up to this aspiration. But to a far lesser extent than either its owners or users admit. It’s owners are quite capricious at times.

    There would be a use in having a public forum that truly is what Colorado Pols presents itself as being: A community governed public forum, committed to open and honest dialogue on issues of public interest. Just as we benefit, as a people, to have sidewalks and parks where free speech can not be curtailed (as it can be on any privately owned property), we would also benefit from having analogous locations in cyberspace. The fact that some private spaces are relatively open to diverse voices does not gainsay the fact that they remain able to censor at will, and often do so without even necessarily intending to. There is simply nothing to prevent it.

  6.   steve harvey
      February 19th, 2011 @ 5:13 pm

    Of course, I should add, that the internet taken as a whole does provide that public forum. But that is different from having it provided in a single site, which creates the robust interaction seen on private sites without the caprice of private ownership.

    People can create such a site, by giving over the government of the site to those who use it. That is a step I’d like to see taken, in our ongoing experimentation with new forms.

  7.   steve harvey
      February 19th, 2011 @ 5:55 pm

    One more clarification: I’m not saying there’s something horribly wrong with the way things are, only that there is an innovation that would be a positive contribution to the social institutional landscape. My original comment was that I have mixed feelings about Colorado Pols, and that it was almost something wonderful. My reservations are due to its defects, that are curable, but that would require its owners to choose to cure them. There are two main defects, at both extremes, which curtail speech in dysfunctional ways on that site: 1) Posters are allowed to harass other posters with impunity, even announcing that that is their intention (the censorship of lawlessness), and 2) Pols itself capriciously blocks accounts, without “due process,” because, of course, it is a private entity which owes no due process. The second is the censorship of tyranny (privately owned media being, by definition, under the legally protected “tyranny” of their owners). If Pols were to, for instance, announce its own “Glorious Revolution,” and give itself over to its populace to be governed by them, perhaps following a “constitutional convention,” it would create something new and wonderful. It is not something horrible now, just something less wonderful than it might otherwise be.

  8.   Chris Maj
      February 19th, 2011 @ 7:24 pm

    There is a wealth of knowledge online about the application of free market principles to the problems of pollution and environmental contamination, starting with the lack of properly defined property rights on the part of the victims of aggression by polluters, ie. the polluter should pay.

    But if you’d rather profit by selling permits to pollute (a la Al-cap-and-trade-Gore) instead of stopping pollution by way of a voluntary free market, then by all means, get the state’s henchmen to intervene forcefully and create your artificial market for you. Or do you not see any possible challenge in an approach of stopping violence with more violence?

    Also, website != sidewalk + park. You can’t swear in all caps on the sidewalk, nor can you do a whole list of things in a park. Besides, these alleged free speech zones are often caged-in compounds whenever government loyalists come to shake down your town.

    Fortunately, the rapid expansion of private property on the internet counters violent extremism, from free market voluntary social media to wonderful collective news and analysis blogs like the PPC, and this video.

  9.   Chris Maj
      February 19th, 2011 @ 7:32 pm

    And this video.

  10.   steve harvey
      February 19th, 2011 @ 7:34 pm

    Well, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m a student of transaction cost/institutional economics, and believe, as the vast majority of economists do, that there are indeed genuine public goods/transaction cost problems that can’t be addressed via a pure private-property market mechanism. In fact, the existance of the market itself as it currently exists is a function of the resolution of various public goods problems, such as the definition and enforcement of property rights, and the provision of government backed currency.

  11.   Chris Maj
      February 20th, 2011 @ 1:11 pm

    I did not refute “transaction cost problems” – it costs money to ship parts to make and sell pencils! Solving those kinds of general free market problems by analyzing specific transaction costs is a practical real-world answer that is helped along by better theories on capital formation, price signals, and other concepts that more closely explain voluntary human action.

    In that light, your opposition to the Colorado Pols website’s behaviour gives you no cause for demand of forced government intervention into the private matter of users and admins, absent a contract, eg. a paid subscription to the service, a warranty, insurance, etc. Further, with such abundance of private property available for homesteading on tah INTERNAPS, you can always walk away with your keyboard and fork the site. Perhaps TransactionCostProblems.biz is available?

  12.   steve harvey
      February 20th, 2011 @ 5:29 pm

    Uh, sure. Who said anything about “forced government intervention”? People are free to buy and use property as they see fit, and people are free to comment on how it is used. That’s all that’s happening here. A newspaper can choose to engage in yellow journalism if it wants to (it’s a privately owned medium), and members of the public can choose to critique it for doing so. Colorado Pols is what it is, and, as I’ve said several times, that’s fine. However, it isn’t quite what it holds itself out as being, and, since what it holds itself out as being is something I consider superior to what it is, I merely am pointing out the discrepencies. That’s fine too. At no point have I implied that government has any role whatsoever in any of this, of any kind.

    As for “transaction costs,” that’s the economic concept of friction in human collective action which determines what form of social coordination is the most efficient under various circumstances. For instance, corporations exist, in general, because the activities coordinated under their umbrella are accomplished more efficiently through hierarchical organization than market organization (internal to the corporation’s activities), often due to economies of scale.

  13.   steve harvey
      February 20th, 2011 @ 5:40 pm

    “Transaction costs” refers to friction in human collective action, which sometimes renders other forms of coordination more efficient than markets. Corporations, for instance, generally form because to accomplish the tasks of the corporation, hierarchical organization is more efficient than an internal free market would have been.

    As for “forced governmental intervnetion,” that’s not something I advocated. Both how private owners of private property choose to utilize their property, within the limits of the law, and what others choose to say about it, within the limits of the law, are fair game. If a newspaper, for instance, choose to engage in yellow journalism, it would have every right to do so, as would the public have every right to comment on it.

    In this case, Colorado Pols is what it is, and has every legal right to be so. It also represents itself in certain ways, and, in my opinion, there is a discrepency between the two. I’ve commented on that discrepency, particularly because I think that the ideal it “aspires to” (or claims to have achieved) is a laudable one.

  14.   steve harvey
      February 20th, 2011 @ 5:41 pm

    Okay, sorry about that. I thought my first message had gotten lost somehow (it wasn’t there when I came back to the site), so I did a quick replacement.

  15.   steve harvey
      February 20th, 2011 @ 6:35 pm

    My comments disappeared again; not sure why.

  16.   T.L. James
      February 20th, 2011 @ 7:26 pm

    I deleted the duplicate.

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