Throughout this election, self-interested vendors of neophilia have touted tech's ability to transform old-school politics. In reality, it has put a new facade on an old building: touchscreen vote analyses and Twitter quotations are just new ways of presenting exit polls and man-on-the-street interviews Barack Obama's heralded social-networking tools? Merely an update of the ward-boss operations of old. CNN's "virtual Capitol" on election night was the ludicrous culmination of this trend. When Wolf Blitzer thanked a holographic correspondent — "Jessica, you're a terrific hologram, thank you so much" — I realized that tech is not transforming the political process; it is debasing it.

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