Last Call for a Manhattan Project
Nothing in politics is worse than being ambushed. It's the ultimate evidence that all of your assumptions, all of your beliefs, all of your data, information, and sense-making mechanisms: everything you knew to be true is fundamentally wrong. It doesn’t matter why. Crying foul is still crying when the problem still needs to be solved.
Elections have changed forever. Gone are the days when campaigns got out their message as much as humanly possible until the final Tuesday when people lined up to put their paper in the box. After all the polls, all the hand shaking, and all the door knocking, we all lived in the same uncertainty.. And we knew the outcome was always the right one, even if we went to bed unhappy.
Today, victory is won ballot by ballot. No longer is it enough to guess with probabilities that someone will vote. In order to win, you must be absolutely certain, quantifiably certain, that your people put that ballot in the box… for you. Accomplishing that task requires a mountain of information and an army to field it.
Democrat Advantage
Democrats built an ecosystem of technology and of data and fielded that army. Outside of any late-night shenanigans, the fundamental lesson of 2020 and 2022 is that they have outclassed us at the fundamental job of any political party: getting ballots into boxes.
Without delving too much into the history, Democrats were gifted, essentially for free, Big Data technology from Big Tech and the best available talent to turn that technology into useful tools and data for their election machine. They invented a whole new financial laundering fad called “Impact Investing” that lets them funnel billions into the development of this technology. And they dusted off a decades-old network of shady nonprofits originally set up by the Soviets, to fund and field their foot soldiers.
They have the money, the tools, the data, and the army to engineer their desired outcome, no matter what (or how senile). That’s the lesson to be learned.
Republican Complacency
Our process used to be the Gold Standard. The GOP innovated Direct Mail fundraising, demographic crosstabs, predictive analytics, and professionalized the political industry decades before the Democrats. The money, the tools, the data, the army, were originally Republican strengths almost insurmountable by Democrats and it won us the White House, state houses, and the Majority.
But strengths unhoned eventually become weaknesses, and our complacency, particularly by the “professionals” -- the consultant class -- created a massive vulnerability the Democrats saw to exploit. They even used the Citizens United case, one of our supposed triumphs, as the vector to do it.
It can not be emphasized enough that Democrats used our own strengths, along with our own arrogance of those supposed strengths, as their target… successfully… and the Republican apparatus still thinks they’re getting it right.
Strength Becomes Weakness
It’s human nature, when under pressure, to revert to what you know when faced with a situation you believe impossible. This is why undermining an adversary’s self-perceived strengths is often a more fruitful strategy than targeting their weaknesses: they don’t know how to respond and have to completely re-architect their strategy, with all the risk that entails, in order to do so.
BUT… this goes both ways. Inside every revolution are the seeds of its own destruction and inside every advantage is a vulnerability ready to be exploited. These newly acquired advantages the Democrats have built for themselves are themselves profound vulnerabilities if targeted appropriately.
Big Tech’s entire business model is building fake valuations by turning agility into bloat. Since they shun us from their Venture funding club, there’s no reason to abandon lean, skunkworks-style, development processes for their favor. Elon Musk proved this when he sacked 80% of Twitter/X’s superfluous staff.
The Big Data technology they’ve gifted the Democrats is 25 years proven and by no means a secret. We only need to cultivate the talent adequate to implement modern data management, like the Data Graph and Profile Marketing, ourselves.
Big Donors are fickle, prefer to throw big money at big problems for their bottom lines rather than the real needs or smaller opportunities like local or state issues.
And the “Big Nonprofit” network that fields their army, populated almost exclusively by KGB patsy-inspired extremists, being born and raised in the shadows for decades, will neither adapt to playing above board nor ever give up on their woke, totalitarian dreams.
In other words, their strengths are also their weaknesses… and profound weaknesses, at that.
Exploiting Strength
The key to undermining your adversary’s advantage is to field a strategic platform which deprecates, or makes obsolete, their flagship toolkit. They have Big Tech talent; We must cultivate such talent. They have Big Donor money; We must cultivate innovative ways to harvest small donor dollars. They have a Big Nonprofit network; We must activate and incentivize our grassroots and give them the tools, the data, and the empowerment to turn the Heartland into a network of political “SEAL” teams in every town and precinct.
From the talent we must implement efficient processes, and build better technology for better data and better tools more cheaply and efficiently, using (and keeping) “lean” methodologies and a fanatical, “skunkworks” mindset. Small developer teams have already changed the world; we can do more with 20 than 200.
With this talent, we must build Systemize political mechanics -- across the board -- from elections and issues to internal organizing, fundraising, and intelligence operations, into quantifiable data-driven processes that can be expressed in a technology toolkit.
The toolkit to accomplish this must follow the principles of VICI: Voter Relationship, Incentivize Activism, Cadre Building, and Intelligence Operations. These are:
Build and Maintain the Relationship between Activists and Voters,
Turn Voters into Activists and Incentivize them into Action,
Encourage Building Grassroots Teams around Location, Campaigns, or Issues, and
Add Human Value to Data Collected and Generate New Insights among Voters, Targets, and Adversaries
And to integrate these principles, we must fully integrate revenue generation into every process and feature, going beyond old fashioned appeal fundraising or merch sales into innovations like microtargeting, micropayments, P2P fundraising, gateway marketplaces, and on-demand services.
“Manhattan Project”
The need here, and the opportunity, is far greater than a street walking app or social news feed. It is a strategic platform to build long-term victory by directly targeting the enemy’s most profound advantages with the cleansing power of obsolescence.
The Manhattan Project of J. Robert Oppenheimer was a concert of herculean efforts, each of which were fanatically dedicated to achieving each component necessary to construct the final goal, the Atom Bomb. Every subproject in Manhattan, in any other context, would still have been its own incredible endeavor.
In a modern context, a symphony of component projects, each of which could stand on its own, is the fundamental difference between a mere App and a Platform. Just as the Atomic platform created the new, post-war world, so too is a comprehensive technology platform required to create a new world of social and political sanity. This is because platforms, hence the name, are foundations upon which new tools and new paradigms are built.
There are definitely good political technology apps out there, and a few of them (not associated with Ronna or the RNC) do a fair job of coming close to Democrat capabilities. However, victory doesn’t come from playing catch up and playing catch up doesn’t undermine your adversary’s strengths nor turn them into weaknesses. It's just not enough.
VICI: To Conquer
A “Manhattan Project” for a comprehensive political technology platform, like Oppenheimer’s would follow a departmentalized model to build components which could stand on their own, but closely interoperate to create the data and tools our volunteers, professionals, and activists need to achieve their operational goals.
Data
The core project would be a Data Graph Warehouse to act as the foundation for the entire platform. As opposed to a typical two-dimensional database, a Data Graph uses multi-dimensional algebra to profile the relationships between data. The simplest example of this would be the Social Graph we refer to from social media companies, where relationships between people are represented. However, the true power of Graph algebra lies in the ability to represent multiple different types of data as relationships and vectors, as well as the ability to generate new insights from those relationships far beyond what’s possible using old fashioned database tables.
This is complex, but it's also profound, and is the foundation of what Big Tech has gifted the Democrats. Fortunately, this technology is 25 years proven and by no means secret, so implementing it for our platform is as critical as enriching Uranium was in 1945.
Finance
The next core project is to build deeply integrated payments and fundraising tools. Payment processing has been a vector of censorship for our side. Fortunately there are innovations in payment systems which can and do bypass most of those issues. Payment Facilitation (PayFac) is a special type of intermediate payment processing system that permits far more flexibility than traditional payment rails. It has the virtue of being relatively easy to implement and offers an easy in-line revenue stream for any platform.
In the past few years, thankfully, several PayFacs for GOP, Conservative, and Right-aligned purposes have popped up. However, these are run as simple replacements for traditional processors and aren’t geared towards the innovations made possible by the PayFac concept. To work as an integrated platform component, payment technology will need to be made available as a low-level, deep, integration choice for every other component: microtransactions, wallet systems, decentralized transactions, pooling, in addition to simple fundraising.
Presentation
Data and Fundraising requires superior presentation tools and data collection capabilities. Also, for those platform components which might have a version for mobile app, App Store rules are extremely strict on what’s called “code mutation,” which is an ominous way of saying they don’t allow you to update your app any other way than through their audit process.
The way around this is to embed permanent presentation code into your codebase and build a “low code” wizard into your application to create pages and build forms and things, so that your application logic is treated as though it were content data. This seems complex, but this is basically what site builders like Wix and Squarespace do: simplifies creation for designers, removes expensive developers from the process, and for our needs, bypasses arbitrary restrictions from censorship regimes.
Such a builder component will be used for content presentation and data collection, like for surveys, or data management tools.
Direct Contact
Services like Twilio, Sendgrid, and Mailgun are largely closed off to us and to our use cases, reducing our friends to using spam operations and abusive contact techniques. This is a large portion of why GOP, and other Right-leaning direct contact appeals end up in the spam filter. While this is a problem for mass appeals, it is often catastrophic for transactional contact like site and event sign ups or account management.
A comprehensive political technology platform must solve this problem, by offering a direct contact toolkit for both transactional and broadcast cases, but also solve the critical problem of data abuse, where people are receiving huge numbers of obtuse messages (cough RNC cough) which damage good will.
Democrats do not spam their lists like we spam our lists, and they do not abuse the people behind those lists like we abuse the people behind our lists. With profiling derived from the Data Graph, they don’t even use list-based direct contact. The best practices standard for direct contact, both transactional and broadcast, is a technique CRM companies like Salesforce have used for 20 plus years called Pipelining.
A Pipeline, usually called a Sales Pipeline, is a scripted interaction plan where contacts are (semi) automatically made, responses anticipated, and planned for, in a loop, with both automatic segments and human interaction, until the desired conclusion is made, hopefully a sale.
Combined with the advanced insights of the Data Graph, this an extremely effective and non-abusive direct contact tool, with decades of proven use. List-based blast marketing is woefully obsolete, inadequate, and needs to go.
Social Incentivization
The glue to hold a comprehensive platform together is the component that draws and coordinates the users, the people, on the platform. Social Media incentivizes users largely by the dopamine response from engagement. A few offer a top few direct financial benefits as incentive.
For the platform to work, for it to achieve the undermining of Democrat strengths, it must include robust Group management tools and Incentivization. Users need to help collect, manage, and curate data, need to score and validate each others’ contributions, need to interact, meet and encourage each other to action on and off the platform, and need to support each other and reward each other, both in reputation and financially.
This is beyond a simple Twitter clone. This is beyond an “Uber”-style gig marketplace. Combined with the scripted interaction Pipeline mentioned above, it becomes the organizational component which permanently renders every prior form of political organizing permanently obsolete: the Action Task Pipeline.
Architecture
A componentized structure, working together in concert, is what makes a technology platform work effectively at being the foundation for new products and features. However, doing so without attention to architectural technology choices behind those components, all you get is slow and expensive bloat.
Mobile, Desktop, Browser, Server, and maybe even bare-hardware Appliance use cases need to be supported by the platform for assorted applications and functions and managing this is complex and requires superior talent to do so effectively and efficiently.
It also requires a concerted attention towards future-proofing the underlying technology choices made in the construction of platform components and the platform itself. Failure to plan at this level is one of the most common reasons for failure of a development effort. By focusing on the VICI principles, this needle can and will be threaded by making cross-platform architecture choices and efficiency choices whenever possible at the very beginning of each component’s development kickoff.
Embrace Open Source
Also, a VICI platform, despite being an endeavor for the Right side of the aisle, must heavily embrace the Open Source software community. Even though most Open Source (OSS) developers, like most of Tech in general, lean heavily towards the Left, OSS projects suffer quietly starved of resources. There are a multitude of projects which are critical to global internet infrastructure and used almost literally everywhere, but don’t receive enough funding to support even one developer.
Big Tech abuse of the Open Source community is widespread and endemic, with Democrat-aligned Amazon being one of the most egregious actors, having co-opted multiple large scale projects for their own use with absolutely no resources whatsoever going back to founding teams. While this is part of what makes Open Source “open”, it's just plain rude, cruel, and creates a great deal of animosity towards Big Tech from this community.
Supporting the Open Source community, via stipends and bounties, will garner tremendous goodwill from thousands of top grade developers globally. Also, small stipends to a project often earns top grade development talent for pennies on the dollar, generating a resource pool that Big Tech barely taps and is slowly, intentionally, strangling. Another one of those Strengths that are really Weaknesses that become a force multiplier for our needs.
Veni, Vidi, etc.
A comprehensive political technology platform, built around VICI principles are the missing tools to guarantee success and victory.
Organizing our volunteer army and incentivizing them into local action will overwhelm Democrat’s paid goonery. It will also pack Town and School Board meetings, Legislative Committee Hearings, and Court rooms, providing needed pressure and support for genuine reform and Republican policy initiatives nationwide.
Fundraising Integration will support our resource-starved grassroots and down-ballot races and force Democrats to hemorrhage money astroturfing these “purple” races they regularly manage to “win.”
Empowering the Grassroots into data maintenance and intelligence operation tasks will provide the best quality data to activists not just for cash-flush high profile campaigns, but also the races we need most, like School Boards, County Clerks, and State House Seats, in ways no shadow network can ever compete.
For the Activist and Voter, it will bring national, regional, and local issues and state, local, and national campaigns a personal relevance that’s missing from political discourse today. Democrat’s say “Think Global, Act Local” and they live it, while we hatewatch Beltway drama ignoring the cries of our children being indoctrinated to Woke.
Social Media Edgelords will no longer have to shout into the void. Moms fighting for their children will find helpful allies to restore sanity. Campaigns will have cost efficient resources and won’t have to empty bank accounts into consultant’s pockets. Donors will see their donation dollars used over and over again instead of being burned up on a TV no one watches anymore.
Most importantly, Success and Failure are quantifiable, and therefore reproducible. With over 155 thousand election precincts, 3200 counties, and thousands of County Commissions, School Boards, and State Legislative races, not to mention Congress and the White House, copying and adapting what works for your needs starts with understanding what works elsewhere, all enlightened by the Data.
Last Call
We have about a year (as of Labor Day Weekend 2023) before the final push for 2024 really gets hot. In that year to come, there is a lot to build, but it can be done. Firstly, it’s far easier to build something when you know what you’re building, and the components of a Project VICI are all known and understood; there’s very little to be invented or subject to experimentation.
Secondly, componentized architectures are easier to build than monolithic architectures that tend to make up most Apps. Thirdly, maintaining lean, “skunkworks” methodologies is already known to build amazing outcomes, including the Manhattan Project itself, which went from Chicago Pile-1 to Trinity in a little over two years… and they were still figuring out the physics along the way!
But we are running out of time. If we don’t get started now… RIGHT NOW, not in a month, or two or three,… quantifiably affecting the 2024 election in our favor will be almost impossible against the Democrat data machine, even with marginal improvements in our data ecosystem brought by new, less sucky, products trying to copy the Democrat tools.
The recipe for any technology development project, especially software, is Time, Talent, and Funding. The time factor we know. The talent is there, even for us, despite 9 out of 10 coders being Democrat or cowed by cancel culture. Small development teams, fanatically purposed, punch harder than thousands of process monkeys slurping down lattes with avocado toast.
Funding is the component that’s needed. Fortunately, small development teams, fanatically purposed, also cost a lot less than those same thousands of process monkeys. For anyone who’s experience with software development consists of hiring an expensive development shop consultancy, local or off-shore, and paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour for junior developer time, that still seems too arduous.
In the GOP and Right wing “technology” spaces, this is the rule rather than the exception. This is almost entirely due to “skill inversion” where the conceptual (supposed) innovations come from politicos instead of from technologists, requiring coders to be sourced too late in the process, resulting in mercenaryism and mediocre outcomes.
The VICI concept is a technology-first strategy. Its whole purpose is to bring the highest quality talent, tools, data, and productivity from the best of the technology world into the political world, instead of double purposing political actors into mediocre technologists.
To Victory, or Else.
The Republican Party’s resurgence, and its liberation from the grifting consultant class, hinges on a resolute commitment to innovation and action. The path forward is clear, but its realization requires the crucial component of funding. Donors gleefully throw untold millions of dollars at legacy media nobody pays attention to anymore, and this piece should be considered a call to action to put at least some degree of financial resources into technology development along the VICI initiative.
The VICI strategy offers a blueprint for success, built on a foundation of technology, data quality, and strategic adaptability. But this transformation requires resources to unleash its full potential and overcome the challenges that lie ahead.
This ask is not just for financial support, but for the realization of a vision that can shape the course of American politics. With the VICI initiative, we're not simply attempting to catch up – we're poised to lead. By harnessing the power of top-tier technologists, cutting-edge tools, and data-driven precision, we can level the playing field and forge a path to victory that is truly our own.
Supporting the VICI initiative will empower compact, purpose-driven teams to make a profound impact, allowing us to punch above our weight in the face of an entrenched data machine. It will shape the narrative, rewrite the playbook, turn the tide, propel our candidates and issues to victory and secure the enduring legacy of the values we hold dear.