Democracy Hacked

by Martin Moore

maelstrom,

This is why the three types of ‘hackers’ who successfully distorted the 2016 US election – individuals, plutocrats and foreign states – ought to be seen not as anomalies, but as models for what is coming next.

etiolated

“A little learning”, the poet Alexander Pope wrote in 1709, “is a dang’rous thing: / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

catechism

So powerful was it that it gave birth to the second catechism of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land.

collaborative – it was a genuine hivemind.

4chan fitted perfectly with the model of Silicon Valley innovation – experiment, test, evolve.

intransigent.

The only coherent ideological beliefs that linked these nihilistic communities together – beyond ‘the lulz’ – were that information should be free and that – online – they should be sovereign.

necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies”.

Conceptually, people needed to understand that memetic warfare could “be viewed as a ‘digital native’ version of psychological warfare” and used to win the battle of narratives and ideas.

Yet the consequence of this is an uninhibited, aggressive, violent and hyper-partisan online space, where democratic processes of debate, respect, civility and compromise are collateral damage.

savant

digital democracy.

tenuous

chutzpah

ingénu.

animus

coterie

From an era where we guessed the mind of the public to an age where – thanks to ‘big data’ – we know the mind of the public.

plutocrat

charlatans,

insouciance.

We may come to see 2016 as the year in which Russia fired the starting gun on a global information arms race, in which our digital space is in a permanent state of conflict, states

fight proxy battles across virtual platforms, and democratic politics becomes collateral damage.

is a continuous fight where the measures of success are public support and ownership of the narrative – a global propaganda arms race to sow confusion, division and disinformation.

Chaos Monkeys,

Best of all for propagandists, it gave them the chance to reach prospective voters directly (via their mobile phone), in a trusted environment (their personalized News Feed), with a specially tailored message that had already been ratified – or

‘liked’ – by someone in their personal network.

This later research, with sociologist Elihu Katz,

consolidated the findings of the first project and reaffirmed the central role that social networks and opinion formers have in shaping our political opinions.

Donald Green and Alan Gerber, world leaders in the science of voter turnout, have conducted repeated experiments that show social pressure, especially when it is visible to your social network, makes it more likely people will vote.

But with over two billion active monthly users, Facebook was the world’s largest online social network, larger and more active than most world religions.

opprobrium

Byzantine

The poison because it cannot function without behavioural tracking, it does not work unless done at a gargantuan scale, and it is chronically and inherently opaque.

Being open and frictionless means almost anyone can use it, at any time. It is equally open, therefore, to those with good or honest intentions and to those with malign ones.

brave new world of ad tech.

As the journalist Ken Auletta writes in his book Googled, “Not only was Google not evil, it was beneficent.”

It was a system designed to be governed by eyeballs and clicks. A system built for scale, not for control.

sanguine.

inexorably

Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg contraption

Open access for Google was both economically efficient (fewer people needed, lower cost), philosophically appealing (democratization!), and consistent with their business model (of commercializing the open web).

Yet openness is not transparency.

Indeed, as a consequence of its complexity, speed and automation, the system was unfathomably opaque.

While all this personal information no doubt helped the company tailor and develop its many and varied products, it also led it deeper in the direction of what academic Shoshana Zuboff has called ‘surveillance capitalism’.

Unfortunately, most people (journalists included) were not focusing as much attention. Indeed many of them found themselves perpetually diverted and distracted, ever conscious of the latest post in their feed, or the next stream of tweets.