I found an article on the last page of the July 17, 2006 issue of Newsweek which contains some really relevant information to the conversations we’ve been having on this site lately in regards ot technocracy, etc. The quote goes:

Politically, there are not two Americas, the Red and Blue states. There are countless constituencies to be courted with niche marketing. In a closely divided nation, with a small and shrinking number of truly unaffiliated voters, supremacy goes to the party with the best database and most nimble microtargeters.

They also reveal someting interesting here:

Bush’s campaign had a database called Voter Vault for microtargeting ostensibly nonpolitical constituencies. Did you know that bourbon drinkers are disproportionately Republican and gin drinkers disproportionately Democratic? Karl Rove knows.

They never quite tell you how Karl Rove knows though: through good old-fashioned hardcore marketing analysis. They also fail to highlight that their own article, which is ostensibly a news piece is actually nothing more than a thinly veiled ad for a book which will - you guessed it - appeal to a certain demographic audience. This shit just goes round and round in circles. Unveiling it is a full-time job. No wonder so few people do, and those who approach it most often end up wallowing in paranoia.

PS. Here is an article on “Voter Vault” - apparently the Democrats also have a program called “Demzilla” which does this same niche-marketing/data-mining routine.

Unbound by the constraints that often apply to law enforcement agencies, the parties are segmenting citizens into psychographic databases according to individual attitudes, behaviors and beliefs — all the better to target them for communications by mail, phone or direct contact to extract money and votes.

Party leaders say they just doing more efficiently what they’ve always done at the grass-roots level.

Do you think that’s a conscious attempt to link them to young people and open-source culture by way of Mozilla?