"Is the Tech Boom about to Bust?" Jason Benlevi & David Talbot on KALW
Offering a "Radical Idea" on KALW - Open Source Social Networking
RetroFuture - Robocars - view from 2008
Slow Democracy: Fighting Digitized-Privatized Elections
Occupy: The Power of Physical
Presence in a Digital World
The Winter of Arab Discontent & The Internet Kill Switch
Slow Democracy: Fighting Digitized-Privatized ElectionsAs with many things in the recent past, the process of conducting elections has been changed by two trends that appear to be joined at the hip: digitization and privatization. Since the 1960s (and the appearance of the Votomatic machine with its IBM punch cards) we have steadily increased our reliance on computing to speed the vote-counting process and, by necessity, the use of private companies to provide that technology to public agencies.
Although political campaigns have extended into multiyear, billion-dollar media marathons, on Election Night we have come to insist that time must collapse to deliver results within hours after casting our ballots. We have been told that the only way we can accurately speed the count is to apply more technology to the process.
As we learned in Florida in 2000, however, even the simplest technology can be flawed. Complex systems, such as touch-screen direct-record electronic (DRE) voting machines, are even more problematic because their design frailties and other surrounding circumstances make them highly unreliable. The claim that digital voting is more accurate than paper balloting is preposterous because there’s no way to verify a single vote when no physical evidence exists. With no paper trail against which to check the electronic vote tabulations, accuracy can never be claimed. Certainly speed is increased — but whom does a speedy inaccurate count benefit? Not the general voting public.
The fundamental problem of digital voting is that it requires intermediators — outside private companies — to provide the machines and software for conducting the vote. Unlike the past, with its paper ballots and human counters, officials today can’t conduct elections without going to a technology provider. In effect, civic officials are outsourcing and privatizing elections; after registering voters and preparing ballots, they retain only nominal control. This follows the trend (alarmingly demonstrated by the Wall Street-brokered privatization of Chicago’s curbside parking) of U.S. governmental agencies abrogating their civic responsibilities and selling off our public assets.
So why does it matter if the voting process is private or public? Because voting is a fundamental public activity for citizens. It’s bad enough our politicians are often for sale, do we need to sell off our election process too? There is also a huge trust issue with e-voting, and it’s not just about technology.
If you are old enough, you remember a time when many people had a trust issue with ATM machines. Now, you may ask yourself, if ATMs seem to work fine, why shouldn’t voting machines work fine, as well? It is an apt comparison considering that a company called Diebold at one time made both types of machines. However, there are two reasons why ATMs and voting machines have nothing more in common than a screen.
1. Technical: ATMs are designed for rigorous and secure operations. They are dedicated computers installed on private networks with an extensive infrastructure of backed servers that cost tens of millions of dollars. They are expensive, rugged, and difficult to hack. In short, they inspire trust. Voting machines on the other hand are stripped-down, basic PCs — cheap little boxes sold or rented at an inflated price for the proprietary voting software they contain, but with not one whit of physical or electronic security. An ATM is an armored truck. A voting machine is a Yugo. The proprietary (and therefore secret) software gives the polling official no idea of what is happening inside (or outside) this cheap little device during (or after) the voting.
2. Social: There is a social contract that you enter into with a bank when you use an ATM. You deposit your money and the bank has a stake in giving it back to you. If you didn’t trust the machine, you wouldn’t use the ATM, and the bank would have to spend more money on tellers. If the ATMs of a particular bank didn’t work properly, you wouldn’t deposit money in that bank. Customers and banks keep each other honest (at least when it comes to ATMs). That’s not to say that ATMs are never hacked, but when they are the bank guarantees that any loss will not be your responsibility. In this case the banking institution works hard to protect your interests because they are identical to the bank’s. That’s the social contract.
When it comes to electronic voting what social contract is in place to keep these cheap little insecure boxes honest? None. You can’t check that your vote has been tabulated correctly. Even the person in charge of the vote can’t check it because there’s no mechanism with which to do so. It’s like pushing the button for the “walk” sign at a signaled crosswalk — you have no idea whether you are actually effecting a change. You have to trust a private company that is not only unaccountable but also purposely opaque.
Earlier I asked why it matters if voting is “public” or “private.” See what you think about these following incidents:
• In Nebraska, 2002 Chuck Hagel just happened to win a landslide victory of 83% in the
state where he also happened to have had a financial stake in the voting machine company.
• In 2004, the CEO of Diebold’s election systems wrote a letter stating that he’d do
everything in his power to see President Bush reelected. We know what happened: the CEO’s
state, Ohio, delivered the election.
• In 2010, the South Carolina electoral system managed to give the Democratic
senatorial nomination to a man who probably couldn’t spell senator, rather than to a
popular and well-known Democratic leader. The results were a drubbing by the GOP in the
general election.
Can I prove any of this was dishonest? Of course not, and that’s the problem. No one can prove anything with electronic voting. The company that owns the voting mechanism is the party in control of your vote. It becomes their ball: “Candidate B wins because we say so.”
It is technically possible to do e-voting with some level of integrity, but it would be expensive since it requires security at least as good as that used by banks. And that’s the rub: cash strapped local governments don’t have that sort of money — even though billions of dollars are spent on campaigns by politicians and their backers. It makes no sense for registrars to keep buying cheap machines from private companies when every major academic computing lab says that hacking the results is a minor task.
What do we actually gain from electronic voting, apart from speed? Since elections take place several months before anyone is sworn in — and our legislative process is glacial at best — what’s the rush to have results on election night?
So here’s a really radical idea. We’ve seen a Slow Food movement. Maybe it is time for a Slow Democracy movement. It’s as simple as this: paper, pens, ballot boxes, and fellow citizens counting the votes. The citizens could be paid, volunteer, or perform a day of election duty in lieu of jury duty. If you can be compelled to serve on a jury where two billionaire companies are suing each other, you should be allowed to serve the democratic process itself.
As we approach 2012 elections, anyone who proclaims “I want to take my country back” no matter what his or her political stripe, has to quite literally start at the ballot. CEOs and 1% types might be able to buy politicians and send our means of production overseas, but we should make sure that We the People still own our own means of voting.
Preoccupied by 24/7 entertainment and inhabiting a world surrounded by LCD screens on a variety of devices, the millennial generation was on its way to becoming completely virtualized, digitized, and distracted. But then something caught their attention — reality. They realized that the power of physical presence is a more potent force than adding your name to an online petition or making a one-click donation. The power of the Occupy movement is its persistent, dramatic, and effective presence.
The news media promotes the “narrative” that the Occupy movement is the product of social media, and the self-congratulating digerati predictably take credit where no credit is due. Social media were also assigned exaggerated credit for the uprisings in the Arab world, a claim that I have previously disputed.
I hold the contrarian view that the Occupy movement actually results from the shortcomings of and dissatisfaction with digital culture. Occupy participants are proving that only by crossing over from a screen-centric digital cocoon back into the physical world can their discontent with political reality attain the critical mass necessary to achieve change.
Political activists have been using digital/social media for a decade as a method of organizing and disseminating information with growing success. The 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections were increasingly affected by Internet blogs shared among growing circles of the public. Barack Obama owes his 2008 victory almost entirely to fundraising and organizing on the Net.
Although the Obama campaign flourished in the digital ether, it is his “ethereal” nature as a leader that has shown to be his greatest weakness. Delivering a great speech is not action. Saying is not doing. Obama has been, in some ways, a virtual president, a projection in which people have seen the leader they wanted to see, rather than the man who was actually there.
Net-based activists launched Obama into the White House, but the virtual ghost in the machine of social networking and digital media quickly lost out to the more tangible and hardened forces on the ground — the perennial lobbyists, think-tankers, and cocktail-circuit pundits who run the “ground war” of public opinion in this country.
In warfare, technologies such as airpower can cause disruption, but only boots on the ground can control and hold territory. Airpower is akin to the blogs and social networks; it’s modern, clean, distant, and disengaged. Real governmental power requires the presence of political boots on the ground.
Although Obama ostensibly stood for “change,” his troops on the ground have been the usual veterans of Wall Street and K Street for whom change is not a desirable outcome. Even though directly responsible for the crashing and burning of Wall Street, these folks — many of whom also had the ear of Bush Jr. — have been charter members of Obama’s White House power circle. The “professional left” of bloggers and net activists, on the other hand, have been told to “send contributions and shut up.”
(The conventional wisdom of this decade is that media is now a two-way experience. Less noted is that the two-way experience is overwhelmingly asymmetrical.)
We know now that the so-called “Tea Party” is largely the creation of right-wing Washington lobbyists. It was devised as a means to sideline Obama’s vague legislative program of mild changes. It was designed to paint any change that might somehow emerge as part of a “radical leftist agenda.” While the blogosphere on the left was foaming with anger on blogs about Obama’s inaction, the so-called “Tea Party” discontents were out in public making noise. They demonstrated that physical presence — real bodies showing up en masse in real locations — trumped people sitting at their laptop screen, blogging away to a finite circle of like-minded souls.
The reason the media believed the Tea Party was the force to be reckoned with is simply because they bothered to show up and literally get in the faces of politicians. For decades demonstrations had been composed of young ragtag antiwar marchers. But now we had frumpy retirees with crazy racist pictures and misspelled signs, and the media ate it up. Aided and abetted by these lazy and compliant journalists, the political center of gravity seemed to shift dramatically rightward, and media pundits proclaimed the U.S. as a "center-right nation."
In the 2010 election the power of physical presence won the day when the right actually showed up at the polls, while many progressives sat home. So, the national legislative agenda became about cutting taxes, a position only benefiting the richest 1% of the population.
Yet, despite the synthetic nature of the Tea Party, they had just enough resonance on two points of common outrage in America to appear genuine. Ironically, these are the same points expressed by those in the Occupy movement:
In both cases, these outrages were only possible because of networked digital technologies. As I state in my book, Too Much Magic:
It was the digital paradox. The financial games that brought down the economy for regular folks and exported jobs were the dark side of the same digital technology that swaddled the millennial generation in a cocoon of free entertainment, gameplay, and a virtualized social life. Digitalization now had devalued them in the workforce. The jobs that might have been theirs had been outsourced to countries via the Internet. Even young law graduates learned that entry-level legal work had been electronically outsourced to India.
Sitting on top of this virtualized heap, the lucky and/or malignantly crafty 1%. The dissatisfaction of the other 99% was no longer going to be quenched with a one-click donation to Obama for America or Moveon.org. More would be required.
The Luddite tea party types, going old school won…just by showing up at the polls and in public squares. Like Woody Allen has said, “80% of success is just showing up”…and to win an election, you only need 50% plus one.
Jump to Madison, Wisconsin, January 2011. The newly installed Tea Party-blessed governor Scott Walker set upon the task of dismantling a century’s worth of home-grown progressive legislation. Outraged by this move, tens of thousands of angry protesters descended on the state capitol. Unlike the Tea Partiers, they were not a fabricated entity, nor were they chauffeured home in chartered buses at the end of the “event.” Instead, they occupied the state capital for weeks.
As proposed by Adbusters Magazine, it was time to take this mass-protest concept and place it at the scene of the crime: Wall Street. A small group rose to the challenge. At first they looked like the typical contingent of protestors. Unlike in years past, however, they did not go away at the end of the day. They set up camp, they held their ground, and, as this is written, have done so for more than two months. Each day the story grows — as well as the numbers of people joining in around the country and around the world. A populist movement needs a populace to show up in order to make the point. To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron, “the revolution will not be Tweeted.”
I don’t want to diminish the role of digital media as an organizing tool. Blogging and tweeting are okay, but for protest it is ineffectual. It can be ignored. It can be switched off. And as satisfying as it is to vent, it is only a proxy for doing something in the physical world. At a certain point in political life — as in sexual life — it’s better not to be doing it alone in your room. Protest isn’t really protest until you have landed on the territory of those who you have targeted and make them feel the heat.
Dissent is nothing without presence. Occupy is presence coupled with amazing persistence. The digital world has no substitute for people marching in the street making authority figures sweat. The parents of many young protestors could have told them that. Out into the streets and parks is how civil rights were won and the Vietnam War was ended. From recently revealed tapes, even iceman Richard Nixon was touched by the thousands marching in the street against the war.
As the young get away from their screens and enter real city environments to share stories, sing songs, hear the pulse of the drums, and feel the camaraderie at Zucotti Park and other Occupy zones, they give hope that the Cult of Tech has not yet turned this generation into digital drones.
There is a growing frustration about screenlife from young people. They want to be more than a username and a profile picture. Maybe that is why Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture is growing in the hipper regions of the world. People crave doing real things like baking bread, making pickles, growing gardens, and putting hands on tools and materials beyond touchscreens and keyboards.
Since the Occupy movement is low-tech by necessity, and no microphones were permitted in the OWS site by law, the group devised what is called the “Human Microphone.” In this method a single speaker speaks one phrase at time, which is then immediately repeated by others in full-voice unison. The cue is simple: the speaker yells “Mic Check.”
This stunning technique has moved from OWS at Zucotti Park to other locations. It is even finding its way into corporate-friendly forums, business roundtables, press ops that showcase the talking heads too often heard on Sunday talk shows. The bewildered looks on the faces of the politicians and rent-a-cops is just priceless as the process begins. Whom to arrest? Whom to squelch when widely dispersed human microphones are doing their thing in a room full of people? Impolite? Compare this to the raving threats of Tea Partiers heard at the town hall meetings in 2010.
It’s good that people are coming up with work-arounds to technology because those controlling the Net are not just the 1% — they are the .01%.
Just as financial institutions have devolved into a handful of megabanks, communications and Internet service providers, too, are consolidating. What’s more, they have an admitted history of directly and illegally colluding with the government, as well as an agenda to end the Net as an open and free forum.
We learned from Iran, China, and Egypt that when push comes to shove, the authorities will track people, filter information, and blackout access. What we haven’t seen yet, but probably will, is massive disinformation campaigns conducted on social-media channels. Even if it never comes to that, young occupiers and citizen journalists are uploading lots of images of fellow demonstrators — and they are being captured. Who knows how they will be used, perhaps even decades from now, and by whom?
The Cult of Tech tells us that electrons (media) are more powerful than atoms (stuff). However, you can’t live on audio and video. Atoms constitute reality: a place to live and food to eat. Atoms form human beings showing up to reach the critical mass needed for real change. We don’t know how Occupy will play out, but the lessons are clear, boots on the ground are more powerful that fingers on touch screens.
OCCUPY = PRESENCE + PERSISTENCE
The Winter of Arab Discontent
& The “Internet Kill
Switch”
Although the northern hemisphere was suffering through one of coldest winters on record, in the warmer climes of the Arabic-speaking nations, the political situation was simmering to a boil in the Winter of 2011. The governments’ of Tunisia and Egypt were festering with the sort of excessive authoritarian corruption so often found in the region. The wealth was headed to those at the top and the game was stacked against those who were not connected to the ruling oligarchies. Those who were young, ambitious, and well-educated felt deprived of the opportunities and freedoms that they knew existed in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Unlike their parents, they had a global cultural awareness garnered through media that came to them via the Net and over satellite TV.
The “Arab-street” led collapse of the Tunisian government became a signal to many in Egypt that change was possible from the ground up. The seeds sown by Tunisian people-power spread instantly in Arabic social media circles. A young, globalized and urban population did not hesitate to seize on the social network application Facebook, as well as Twitter, to voice their discontent for being underemployed and culturally thwarted. Soon their unrest and frustration spilled into the streets, and then on to the screens of the global media beast.
One face, one Facebook page, set the spark. Wael Ghonim put up a Facebook group to protest against the government of Hosni Mubarak. For his efforts he was spirited away by the not-so-secret police and disappeared for more than a week. His worried family and Facebook friends sounded the alarm to the global media.
Experience tells us, that there is a tendency for news media to create a “narrative” or “package” a story to make it more appealing. When it involves a nexus of technology and politics, the media will often double-down on creating linkages. No matter how tenuous the connection, the media will stamp the movement with the “brand” of the “next big thing” in technology. The failed uprising in Iran was called “The Twitter Revolution.” The Winter 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia were quickly branded “The Facebook Revolution” by the media. In this case, the branding may have gotten out ahead of the reality.
During that first week of February 2011, Tahir Square became the focal point for the overwhelming discontent of a generation. Facebook became the brand name instantly associated with this movement. It was an easy connection for the media to make since graffiti and protest signs clearly heralded “Facebook.” They had the pictures…and it played well on TV. Facebook had become a global media darling with a big movie about its youthful billionaire founders and bubble-valuation. However, it is still not exactly clear what the impact of social media might have been in the larger scheme of what transpired February 2011.
The naïve optimists of the digerati profess that the Net is an unstoppable force for freedom, yet the case is not nearly so clear-cut because control of the Net was still within the grasp of the autocrats. As previously stated, we know with certainty that Twitter and texting eventually worked against those who rose up in Iran.
So here are some factors worth considering as to whether the Winter of Arabic Discontent was indeed a social media-based uprising:
Although the Net has an open architecture and multiple pathways for information to transit, the Egyptian authorities had a choke point that connected the national parts of the Net to the rest of the world. (They also made the Net inaccessible by using a scheme to interrupt the DNS system which actually directs Internet traffic.) This may be the first time that the term “Internet Kill Switch” was discussed in public media. A term that is self-explanatory.
The mobile phone network was deployed and managed by European and U.S. companies. Although the Egyptian government ordered a shutdown of the mobile network, and succeeded for a while to shut down it down, Western governments were interested in the success of the uprising and encouraged wireless phone companies, based in Europe, to not comply with the government order. The U.S. State Department worked with Twitter directly during the Iranian uprising.
Only a small percentage of people in Egypt were Net-savvy. Less than 20% of the people used computers. More pervasive in spreading the word, was satellite TV, the medium that 99% of the Arab world had within view.
Although the spark may have been set on the Net, it was TV – uncensored and uncontrolled by government – that fuelled the flames. There is no discounting the notion that Wael Ghonim using Facebook to dissent, and his unjust arrest, was a compelling story. However, it was his face on TV, in an impassioned appearance after being freed from custody that re-stirred the action in Tahir Square. He was the face of the revolution. While only a few saw his Facebook posting, the whole Arab world saw him on TV.
Here’s where the story starts to take a twist. After his release, and grateful that he didn’t get fired by Google for his absence, Wael wanted to meet with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook to thank him. However, the leadership of Facebook took great pains to distance itself from this democratic yearning. Why? Perhaps Facebook didn’t want to jeopardize business relationships with other countries that were under authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, “Do No Evil” Google expressed pride in their employee Ghonim for fighting the good fight. The question becomes, what is more important to the world’s leading social networking company, fundamental human rights or business relationships? We’ll get to that answer later in this book.
Mubarak was forced out of office by protestors in the streets and other forces that were not readily apparent. The Egyptian Army was largely supplied and funded by the U.S. Government. The Obama administration was increasingly uncomfortable in the position of backing the faltering and corrupt regime. We can pretty much bet that high-level U.S. diplomatic and military officers were in communication with the Egyptian military and short-circuited any attempts to attack peaceful protestors in the square – a case easily made since the Egyptian Army regularly received over a billion dollars a year in U.S. aid.
The fall of the government may have been sparked by social networking, but it took Egyptians willing to put their bodies on the line in concert with diplomatic actions occurring out of public view to bring down Mubarak.
The social network-rooster crowing made a lot of noise, but did not actually make the democracy-sun rise. Many digerati will attempt to sell that impression. Had Mubarak been given the green light by the U.S. to clamp down on the demonstrators, shut down the Net, use the phone network to track down dissidents the results would have looked more like the long suffering Iranians. No amount of “friending” or “liking” on Facebook could have prevented it.