I can't think of anyone more cunning and devious than the Kremlin gray cardinal Vladislav Surkov. Sergei Lavrov is somebody we used to meet with here in NY at the UN and he was more of a perestroika liberal a decade ago than he is today; now he's the grand sourpuss of the Russian Imperium, presiding over everything from threats to Georgia to re-writing of World War II history. And Putin, of course, is a thug. Not only for what he said about drowning the Chechens in their outhouses. But for many things.
Yet oddly enough, I share their criticism of Ushahidi, the software platform that is the latest magic fairy-dust sprinkled technology panacea that is supposed to Empower the People and Bring Democracy if not Peace and Prosperity.
The Kremlin calls Golos an "outside interference." And that's exactly what it is. Not because it is funded by US foundations, government or private. I'm all for having the US have a democratic foreign policy that involves supporting like-minded dissidents abroad in democratic movements, with circumvention technology and social media. Good! If the Russians find this "interference in internal affairs," they are trying to turn the clock back before 1975, when the Helsinki accords affirmed that human rights concerns are NOT interference in internal affairs.
I will, agree, however, that Ushahidi and newfangled social media crowdsourcing technology is outside agitation, is rooted in "netroots" and not organic communities and is empowering only a thin layer of wired elite -- who are in fact terribly vulnerable to being coopted as we shall see, if not marginalized or simply DDOS'd out of business.
[Yeah, I get it that Golos uses some "Russian brand" of Ushahidi that "isn't" Ushahidi. But Ushahidi is open source. Golos tekkies surely looked at the code. If they adapted it or reverse-engineered it, so what? It's still Ushahidi! So I will call it that as a generic.]
Golos claims "7,000" violations were recorded. And that this is "20 times more" than in 2007. Really? How do we know? What if measuring lots of complaints causes more complaints to be made? A known bias that occurs in any system. What if a lot of those 7,000 complaints are hearsay, duplicates, or wrong? Is anyone checking? Who's going to watch the watchers now?
Let me explain.
I should do a separate post explaining the back story of Ushahidi, the very legitimate critiques to be had about it, the very relevant criticism about it from people actually doing emergency humanitarian work in the field, and more. And I will soon. Meanwhile, here's someone who has probably said it better than I could:
There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder's vision and, under his direction, created great software
But the short form is this: when you have a giant "magic" sieve that is supposed to sift out the democratic "golos" or Voice of the People (er, People's Will, anyone?) what do you have? In fact, you have a very big thing full of holes. It doesn't take Kremlin TV to point this out, for their own nefarious reasons. Democrats and liberals should point this out, too.
The first thing to understand about any piece of magical software is that it really only empowers one set of people: the coders. The software engineers.
Many people using magical pixie-dust software don't realize this. They think as users they are empowered and they are doing magical things with this magic pike. But they aren't. They are, as Jaron Lanier explains, making themselves into gadgets, and adapting themselves to the software.
So the first thing that goes wrong with crowd-sourcing software is that the crowd disappears and loses access to it even as the crowd grabs it because the geeks running it, who have a certain culture, a certain set of beliefs, a certain ethos (or lack of ethics, even), a certain bar-camp je ne sais quoi, become horrified. They hate what they get. What they get are "trolls". Or "griefers". Or "idiots". Or "the clueless" or just "random noise" and so they hurry to filter, curate, collate, manage. Managed democracy. That's what happened to the bunch running the forest-fire "crowdsourcing". It's really more "curated crowdsourcing" or, well, I'd call it "managed democracy". It's not truly open. Only you can prevent forest fires, I noted -- but the devs know better.
I don't know the specifics of Golos and how they used this magic pike of Ushahidi. But I wish they hadn't. Because its magic isn't real, and it has lots of problems. It's not only that if you really had everybody using it, it would produce a lot of senseless crap and a firehose of information that would paralyze the system.
It's that it prevents normal human judgement from being empowered, which is really what you want to empower instead of software.
Let's take the example of Haiti: lots of people call in to the map, let's say. So people with smartphones who have lots of garbage and debris still in their street call in because people are getting diseases. Or people call in because their well is filled with dead animals or human excrement. Or they have a child with a slight fever. Meanwhile, the person under the rubble doesn't have a smart phone and can't call in. The mother with the child who is actually dying from an injury or severe illness can't leave to go to the phone or her battery died. And so on. The system creates a mirror world that isn't the real world; humanitarians go running off to take care of garbage or fevers and the worse stuff is ignored because they don't go out and talk to real people anymore life, face to face, but wait for messages on smart phones. They get dumb from the smart phones.
You know what would have been so much better, and that is what we do in this country (and which was done in Russia, too, to some extent, but was crippled by the DDOSing of the main independent websites like Ekho Moskvy): exit polls. Get some really well organized journalists with cell phones and a really well-organized relay, and do exit polls and relay the information to some dedicated website outside the realm of the FSB's ability to DDOS it. Radio Liberty, perhaps, although they can be wary of getting involved in anything that seems like inciting unrest (and rightly so). Some honest broker that they can set up to handle the calls and the data and make the map -- but not based on Ushahidi, on human intelligence. Not based on zillions of dots for Golos, but the actual human voice saying who they voted for. To be sure, people don't always tell the truth, and sometimes in Russia, they also play to the interviewer in particular. Even so, you'd get the story, with some margin of error.
Ushahidi is designed to destroy organizations and organic structures, even as it cunningly hides its tracks and claims it is about "empowering people" and "linking communities" and all sorts of other wonderous things. (That one powerful original founder and his or her likeminded founding followerings of course would find that concept abhorrent because they think they were all wonderful and democratic.)
But it is, indeed, designed deliberately to forcibly replace organic institutions -- governments, civic movements, nonprofits -- with a meta-layer or network on the Internet run by coders. That's what's wrong with it, inherently. Coders who arrogate to themselves the power of meta-organizers, outside agitators, if you will, destroy whatever institutions there are to be destroyed in meat world (perhaps only metaphorically, but increasingly, really), and then refashion things by their lights.
It's pretty insidious. Only they can see what's happening in the system, and whatever claims they have of transparency, there are always issues. Always! There are always democratic discussions that ought to have been had about how the software functions itself, all the decisions, bugs, trees -- and these aren't had by the general public, in the belief that they "can't understand technology". But issues about velocity of information, display of information, prioritization of information, geolocation of information, verification of information, collation of information, algorithms installed on searches of information, relevancy and weight for information -- etc. etc. etc. -- these are all governance decisions that the public didn't have a say in, but must now, perforce, use, to have a "golos". Not fair. Like all software things. Not fair.
I saw the Tor freaks bragging on Liberationtech today, for example, that "no one can see their code because it's so complicated." Like...that's a good thing?! For democracy?! For freedom????
Now, from the perspective of some movements and parties and activities, if Ushahidi and crowdsourcing software and other social media have the power to destroy institutions, isn't that a good thing if the institution is the Kremlin? Or the institutionalized siloviki cabal running the Kremlin? (which I would hope at least most people would understand is worth keeping in a reformed and enlightened *government*).
Well, yes and no. If you create something entirely "meta" and networked above and beyond the Kremlin, what is the Kremlin? It's an old fortress next to a red square. If you create something above and beyond "parties," what is Just Russia or United Russia or the ill-named LDPR? Just bunches of people arguing among themselves. The "real" world is now meta-meta, and is the Wired State, run by coders and their friends. Do these include the smart descendents of the KGB's Fifth Directorate to control dissidents? Oh, I don't know. Does it? Or not?
If the Kremlin, if they were using this same software (and it may come to that), would not be any different with it. They'd let it fill up with their own networks and own circles just like the devs of the "good guys" do. We've already seen the fake veneer of "direct democracy" (which is never really direct and never really democracy) in this voting on a fishing law -- anodyne fake stuff -- which is merely cosmetic, merely a feel-good.
Is there any honest broker that could run Ushahidi sufficiently and truly democratically and fairly?
No, there is not. That's because the entire process of software production -- decision-making about how socialware is made to serve actual communities -- is not democratized and won't be for some time (and perhaps never, because of the geeks' grab for power).
Today, the secret police merely take down the sites. Tomorrow, they infiltrate the bar-camps. Look out! They're already everywhere.
Is anyone else troubled by the idea that Russia has only one independent election monitoring group? Shouldn't there be dozens? In a country the size of Russia?! Shouldn't each party and news outlet and group be starting up watchdogs? Something about that "one-ness" doesn't add up for me.
Global Voices is talking about the "net hamsters" and deciding that now it's all about the hipsters and the cool kids and not "violent nationalists". We're going to be ENDLESSLY hearing about how this election was "won" (well, successfully challenged and fraud exposed) "due to social media". Until, well, it really becomes clear how the Internet can't really win things because it's not sufficiently democratic and liberal. It is vulnerable at one very obvious point: it is in the hands of coders. Switch out some of those coders already bar-camped by the Kremlin, and your meta is now Surkov's meta.
The reality is, these people protesting are nationalists, too, just not Putin's or Nashi's nationalists. I wrote yesterday that now that smartphoners and Facebookers like Alena Popova (business woman, start-up supporter) and Ilya Ponomaryov (head of Duma technology committee) have experienced what it's like to get arrested and beaten by police (something the dissidents and human rights activists have already known for 50 years), we will see if they become radicalized -- with Putin's help -- or co-opted -- with Putin's help.
I'm expecting the latter. I'm expecting Just Russia, as the one lone commentator noted in Popova's FB stream, to join or merge or get eaten by United Russia and I'm expecting any holdouts to get marginalized and called that most horrible of Russian names, the marginal. We'll see.
And the reason I think this is because they have been weakend by software. Watch the cell phones all go off in a heart-beat like they did in Turkmenistan. Or watch certain people suddenly lose their accounts like they do in Turkmenistan. Or simply watch a few people get strategically beaten up badly like Kashin.
Nick Judd at Tech President seems shocked that invincible software and the meta-republic that is the Wired State has taken such a beating in Russia. How could this be, when the Russian-American commission pledged to help civil society with technology! How can this be when Yandex claimed they wanted software developers to help civil society!
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