Farhad Manjoo

What happened next was beyond anything that Yellin had expected. Hundreds of people began pitching in, documenting their small donations in the comments threads of Daily Kos and other blogs: “$25.01 coming from me.” “$30.01 from me too.” “Yeah, this liberal kicked in $20.01.” (Daily Kos readers add in the extra penny as a kind of signature for the site, letting a campaign know where the money’s coming from.) The tide came in for at least two full days, and when it was over, Ginny Schrader, a candidate who was recently unknown to even the most obsessive campaign watchers, found herself flush with more than $30,000. She was suddenly a political force to contend with.

Thanks to blogs and the Internet, we now live in an age when news can be translated into action — into money — in no more than the time that it takes to post a paragraph online. What happened to Schrader was not novel; it’s a phenomenon we’ve seen dozens of times in the past year, ever since Howard Dean put himself on the map with an extraordinary day of fundraising last summer: It starts with a small, hopeful appeal posted on a blog, something short and sweet and inspirational. And then, out of nowhere, the money starts pouring in. Loads of money — more money than anyone involved in the process had ever dreamed of. In his one-day push last June, Dean raised more than $800,000, a trick he repeated several times during his presidential campaign. In a two-week period in January, readers of blogs sent $80,000 to Ben Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat running for Congress. Stephanie Herseth, running for South Dakota’s House seat, saw similar unexpected money spikes during her campaign this spring.

The most newsworthy point about this latest episode of online fundraising is perhaps how normal it’s become. The blogosphere and its readers are on hair-trigger alert, ready for any new development to spur them into action; this is especially true of the left-leaning online communities, where people seem to be as fond of making political donations as they are of making fun of George W. Bush. But what makes them do it for a particular candidate? Why do people online suddenly come together in hordes, aligning themselves behind Ginny Schrader, Ben Chandler, Stephanie Herseth and Howard Dean — while dismissing some of the dozens of other candidates who regularly advertise on blogs in search of such pots of gold?

The answer, alas, is nobody really knows. In interviews, neither the bloggers on Daily Kos, the officials in Schrader’s campaign or some of the people who donated money could fully account for what exactly caused hundreds of people to decide, en masse at the same time, to open up their wallets for a woman they’d just discovered. Obviously it had something to do with newfound opportunity — Ginny Schrader’s luck only turned after it was announced that her opponent would be dropping out. But was it only that? Was there something about Schrader that appealed to bloggers? Certainly, that mattered too. Liberals appreciated her positions on certain issues. But at the same time, Schrader was untested in a major political campaign. Why didn’t this bother people?

Yellin says that maybe the secret to Schrader’s success can be found in the way he wrote his original appeal. People have told him, he says, that he phrased his praise for Schrader in a particularly artful way, inspiring many to support her despite her status as a novice. “The term I’ve heard used is ‘kingmaker,’” he says. (This would ordinarily be an odd thing to hear a 16-year-old say, but Yellin’s no ordinary teenager. When Salon called, he was in the middle of a photo shoot with the New York Times.)

Yellin is not sure that Schrader’s success was all his doing. “I wouldn’t call myself a kingmaker, though I feel very, very honored to be part of this. I think it’s that people online are so dedicated, so fired up, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get people elected. It was the combination of the way I wrote it, but also the political climate.”

Jerome Armstrong, the proprietor of MyDD, another popular political blog, agrees that the political climate had something to do with Schrader’s success. But the most important thing, he says, is the sense of “community” felt by the readers of political blogs. Until Monday, Armstrong had never heard of Ginny Schrader. Then he got an instant message from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs Daily Kos and is Armstrong’s partner in a political consulting firm, with news of Greenwood’s departure from the race. He took a look at Schrader’s Web site, and “I told Markos this has the potential of getting big quick.”

How did he know? Armstrong — who used to work in Howard Dean’s campaign, where these money floods were a normal thing — says he can’t really put his finger on it. “You learn to recognize it,” he says. He and Moulitsas sent in their own donations to Schrader, signaling to their readers that they were in full support of the candidate. “And then we just sat to the side and looked on,” Armstrong says.

When Armstrong, Moulitsas and Yellin had all played their hands, that’s when the readers started really jumping on the Schrader bandwagon. According to some estimates, the money was coming in at the rate of about $3,000 an hour on Monday night and Tuesday morning. It’s probably fair to say that at this point, a kind of madness had overcome the denizens of the lefty blog, and many of them were giving Schrader money just because they knew that others would be giving. “There’s a whole stimulus-response type of reaction to it,” Armstrong says. “It feels good. Joe Trippi” — who headed Dean’s campaign — “used to tell me that people would give because they felt that other people would give and they didn’t want to miss out. They’d want to be able to say, ‘I was part of this thing. It’s bigger than me, and I wanted to be part of it.”

Benjamin Rahn, the president of ActBlue, a political action committee that runs a popular Web site that allows people to donate to Democrats of their choosing, echoes this thought. “One of the exciting things about online fundraising is that it gives people who are giving small amounts very tangible evidence that they are part of a strong community that, together, will be giving a lot. It’s not because people are writing $2,000 checks, it’s because you can see that lots and lots of people are sending in money.”

And people also donated to Schrader just to show that the Web — and Daily Kos in particular — is a powerful political force. Jon Schiffman, an attorney in New York who is a very dedicated fan of Daily Kos and who gave $75 to Schrader, says that “there was a sense that this is something you do because you want to support Markos as a player among the big people. We wanted to show that there’s an activist base out here and we should be listened to.”

They got their wish, too. When Greenwood first dropped out, there was some speculation that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would look to replace Schrader with a candidate who’d had more political experience. Until this week, Schrader’s campaign had not really taken off. According to Brian Welsh, the campaign manager, Schrader, who handily won a primary contest to become the nominee in April, was still working at her day job, which left her few opportunities for fundraising. (Until this week, the campaign’s biggest fundraising event was a screening it arranged for the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11″; the campaign raised $1,100.) Now that the seat was open, would the Democratic establishment look for a candidate that could at least raise more money?

The question was put to rest, Welsh says, when the money started coming in from the Web. “The Daily Kos was the wind on our sails that we needed to cruise through that 24-hour period; without that, this would have been very rough for us,” he says. “And it all started with Stephen Yellin. I spoke to him earlier today and I thanked him about a hundred times.”

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”