As a lot of people have pointed out, this is a rather confused article. I think what the author Dominic Basulto is trying to get at is that the Internet and new applications/platforms are being used to exert political influence in new ways.

For me this is the logical consequence of the increasing "digitization" of the structure of our society, i.e. social networks etc. Basulto has jumped from this to Rushkoff's "program or be programmed" idea. But in the large scale the "programs" that define new social spaces is actually written by a very, very small number of people mostly in California, and have nothing to do with campaigning for anything.

moocow01 is correct to say that people going to Codecademy to learn how to launch online campaigns will be disappointed. This is partly because we don't have an API layer for programs that organise social interactions, and this is one reason why I'm working on a project that does just that.