Options for Debating

Yes, Trump, debate with the fucking moderator. #debatenight

— @nickf

The 2016 Debate as Infrastructure Event

The "wrong week to stop sniffing glue" line is from Airplane!, the 1980 film, in which a flight controller discovers that the stakes of a crisis exceed what he was emotionally prepared to handle. This is the appropriate reference. The 2016 presidential debates were watched by the technology community the way you watch a production incident: transfixed, unable to look away, running a continuous internal monologue of what you would do differently, knowing that there is nothing you can do from where you are sitting.

The shimmy is Hillary Clinton's response to a technical difficulty during one of the debates — a microphone issue, a technical stumble, something going briefly wrong on stage. The response was to shimmy. This is, in fact, the correct response to a technical difficulty during a high-stakes public event. Acknowledge it, recover, move on, don't let it become the story. Ops people understood this immediately. The pundits spent three days discussing whether the shimmy was calculated.

Debating as a Process Problem

The format of a presidential debate is optimized for television and not for information. Two people stand at podiums and take turns saying things, moderated by a third person whose interventions are largely decorative. The structure does not surface accurate information, does not reward preparation, and does not produce clarity on policy positions. It produces moments. The media covers the moments. The voters absorb the coverage of the moments. The debate itself is not the thing — it is a content generation event.

This is the same as most enterprise architecture reviews, incident postmortems run without a facilitator, and quarterly business reviews where the deck is 80 slides and the actual decision is made in a five-minute side conversation afterward. The format is not the problem. The format is a symptom of what the participants are optimizing for, which is rarely the thing the format was nominally designed to produce.