I've explained how the big platforms of Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are going to throw the next elections by the broadcast capacity they have built up with friends of the developers, thought leaders, recommended gurus, who have amassed enormous numbers of followers and have the echo effect of re-tweeting. The left is just better at doing this, and got a huge head start by being the devs' friends and their "recommended" accounts for new users. The right had to scramble to get their presence, and while they do use social media avidly, they don't have the "mindshare" or presence or numbers that the left does.
I've become particularly critical of a new platform for people to vote on the issues and write their Congress people in particular in this regard, as I see it contains within it all the same problems of every other Silicon-Valley produced entity to "better our world". And BTW, you don't have to be physically located in California or even funded by California venture-capitalists to be part of this culture.
POPVOX at first seems like a perfectly helpful site that saves you the trouble of having to look up your congress person's name and email and write them. We all know that in fact phone calls and personal visits still do really influence and engage with Congress people far better than just zillions of emails, but naturally the people making this site tell you otherwise to get you to play.
A MIRROR CATCHING THE SUN
To understand the essential problem of this website, like any beta-stage Silicon Valley concoction, think of a mirror held in someone's hand. They can take this mirror and simply hold it up and it will reflect whatever happens to fit into the view faithfully -- but of course, will only be part of the view that fits into that mirror. Or they can tilt the mirror so that it catches the sun's rays, and a pile of twigs on the ground will catch fire. But whether they are more neutral or more directed in their actions, they are still only a partial reflection of reality because they are only a mirror. They are not the real thing.
Platforms like this never think of their powers in this way. They are infused usually with volunteer enthusiasm -- even zealotry -- and they imagine they are "making a better world". Better-worlding is a huge ideology for Silicon Valley that they use to cover a multitude of sins -- starting with scraping your data and taking away your privacy.
So the first problem that occurs with POPVOX is that it is only a partial mirror even if it merely "neutrally" reflects (it will insist that it is "neutral" as you can see from the letter to me). It reflects what I call "the tyranny of who shows up first". It is a beta-phase Silicon Valley creature, so the devs' friends, the friends of the devs, the friends of friends etc. who first hear about it in the tech press, on the tech blogs, etc. are all the people who show up first to populate it. This beta-testing effect always and everywhere skews every platform toward the "progressive" line. It's not only that the "progressives" bake their ideologies into the tools (as you will also see); they have their friends and likeminded folks show up first and populate the data. Like Wikipedia being linked because it is in the view, this then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
ANTI-SOPA FLASHMOB
Case in point: if you go to the site and examine the vote on SOPA, you will see an overwhelming majority of more than 14,000 people voting against the bill -- the pie chart is more than 95 percent. The numbers of people involved are only a few thousand. That doesn't reflect the views of the sponsors of the bill, who in fact represent millions in their states. That doesn't reflect even the views of all congress people who did articulate their views, as we know from ProPublica's SOPA Opera -- most Congress people supported the bill or had not made known their views until they were flashmobbed.
We'll likely never know how this vote would have gone because of the enormous mob assembled on the Internet to bully Congress down -- but the reality is, that only 100,000 or so 7 million signed petitions, and even adding up all the comments on all the powerful tech press blogs and all the tweets, we would still have only a few millions -- far less than the multiplied constituents of all those congress people with different views, which are tens of millions. [Note: I was quite out of date on that Google petition! It actually went from 100,000 to that huge number of 7 million in a very short time! Even so, the number of constituents represented by the bill's sponsors and supporters were greater at the time. It's difficult now for people to see this, because the information at SOPA Opera by ProPublica is now showing more congress members against the bill than for it -- because they began to weigh in at the last minute and after the bill was postponed. I still think the electronic mob does not represent the same numbers and same people as the voters and that we will see the discrepancy become more pronounced in the forthcoming president election.]
The Internet mobbers were visible and they scared the congressmen with their visibility and power to stop the Internet, on which we all rely, and that's what worked -- not democracy, not representative democracy.
INEVITABLE EDITORIALIZING IN POPULARITY CONTESTS
The most obvious way in which POXVOP editorializes is having "the most active" bills show up on top. They may not be the most important with the most effect on all our lives; but they may be those "the Internet" thinks are vital, whether SOPA or NDAA. The most votes -- and these are usually reflecting the "progressive" agenda due to the pre-existing constituencies and founders' networks -- force the bill to the top and that's what you see.
Of course, people can get organized and try to get their networks and constituencies to come and vote on a bill that may not be as important to the devs and their friends, but they will be competing against a very forceful tide as I explain in this post -- the thought-influencers on social media with their gadzillions of followers and their blocking capacity.
THE TYRANNY OF WHO SHOWS UP
So first, POPVOX reflects who shows up -- and who shows up will tend to be the "progressives" for all the reasons I explain in the development history of these tools.
But then the mirror effects -- catching the twigs fire -- takes place next.
When you log on to a site like this and pick out an issue, and you see that 90 percent of your fellow Internet users have voted "no" or "yes" on an issue, you will feel intimidated.
At a town hall, reading a newspaper article or an editorial, in real life, you are in a space where your thoughts are free to develop without pressure; you are in the mini-democratic space of your own solitude, and then the somewhat larger but still private democratic space of family or friends with whom you can talk things over privately.
Not so on a big, public boardwalk like POXVIP where you must sign up with your real name in order to have the letters reach your congress person. You now are in a very public space, even with a "user's name" that can be a pseudonymous nickname, and you may very well likely feel pressured to "go along" and do what "everybody else" is doing just because they are so visible.
Of course, you could still click "support" on SOPA and no one but the site owners and developers will know (if/when they look at their data), and you can just not comment. You will then see your voice represented on the pie chart as a tiny sliver.
When you "finish" your vote, POPVOX tells you that you have "affected the pie chart". That's how they get you to "stick" -- the feeling that your voice, even if in dissent, at least affects the visible pie chart.
But how will anyone know and possibly follow you?
THE TYRANNY OF WHO'S ON TOP
Here, to try to persuade others, you can leave a comment, i.e. opt to have your letter to your congressmen automatically generated now by the system become a "comment" with your user name in the "oppose" or "support" columns under the bill.
But now another built-in tyrannical feature of these platforms kicks in -- "the tyranny of who's on top". That means anybody can flash-mob the site and just keep putting in anti-SOPA (or pro-DREAM act, or whatever) comments endlessly, all day, if they have time to play on line.
The flash-mobbers have even gone one better -- while the developers thoughtfully provided "supporter" and "opposer" columns for people's comments to go into on both sides of the issue, the mobsters have simply invaded the other side of the issue.
So under the column "support" for SOPA, you find those who oppose it, putting their comments into the view doubly under "support" and "oppose". While the devs have apparently hard-coded the system so that your comment to your congress person in support or opposition to a bill can *only* slot into the "support" or "oppose" columns of comments, some people have already "gamed the system" which inevitably happens with coded artifacts that are not real life.
So because the bill has a humongous 97 percent opposition rate, some of the campaigners feel they can "waste" their vote to show up in the "support" column with actual opposition. So you get things like "Deerfieldmom in Illinois' 10th District" who "supports" the bill but writes "It hurts open speech and free ideas" and look at all the others there.
There are so many of these, that you can't attribute it to merely stupidity and not being able to use the tools adequately. To be sure, you can find people with support comments on the "opposition" side of the aisle too -- but most "invaders" seem to be on the "support" side. How do we know? Because there are 97 percent overwhelmingly opposing the bill and very few "wasting" their vote to appear in the wrong side. Moderators could be moving these comments, but then they'd have to move votes, too, most likely.
Oh, but I can only have an anecdotal impression, because it's a huge stream of comments, and I'm only going to scroll down so far. And that's just it. That "tyranny of who is on top" can work in the favour of any side with the persistence to stay in the view. Whoever has better networks or Redditt skills -- and those are the property of the "progressives" for the most part (Redditt was key in sinking SOPA).
NO "NO" VOTE!
There's still one thing that can be done on the "comments" page -- and that is click on APPRECIATE if you like someone's comment. It's not clear if greater numbers of "likes" in this fashion will drive comments up to the top -- that's often how these systems work. It's pernicious, because again, not only can it be flashmobbed, it just naturally plays to the existing embedded networks of these platforms to perpetuate the "progressive" view.
You can't "dislike" anyone's view, because that's never how these platforms work. Can you "dislike" anything anybody says on Facebook? No, you can do nothing, or defriend them and get them out of the view. You can "vote up or down" news stories on Digg, but do you REAAALY think you will win with the existing anarcho-lefty constituency on Digg?
Most platforms only allow "likes" because, as I have come to find from extensive exposure to the culture and ideologies of Silicon Valley in the petri dish of Second Life coding, geeks hate the "no" vote. They just hate it. It undermines their power. They are terribly frightened of it. They use the excuse that if they allow "no" votes they will be "gamed" by "negative" people. They use the excuse that it promotes "uncivil discourse" or "negativity" if they let people criticize with an actual "no" vote or "dislike". They'd just rather have it all be "double-plus good" as in Orwell -- they believe that is "better". They believe it is far, far better to create systems that move people to consensus with positive reinforcement in binary systems that work like this: "advance/block/dissidents leave" rather than "yes/no/majority wins". They say they "have" to do this because otherwise people will vote down their very development and coding decisions. All these platforms are inherently undemocratic because they don't start with the "will of the people" indicating how the tools should be made; they start with the "will of some people with a certain set of views" making the tools and forcing others to adapt.
I find that people are now very, very conditioned to the "like" vote by Facebook (did you know if you take a peek at the code underneath it actually does have the capacity for "dislike" but the devs are withholding this for ideological reasons). They actually are made uncomfortable by "dislike" even though we all wish that when someone reported a hurricane or a massacre we could press the "dislike" button or even express some of our disapproval of even our friends' bad taste in sexist pictures. But we can't. To do so would be "negative". It would be "gamed" -- even though plussing up is gamed even more. And as we see from the "emergent behaviour" of the clueless or manipulative vote-wasters commenting in the "wrong" column, when people have no "no" vote, they overthrow the tools.
"No" votes are vital as correctives to flashmobs and to "tyranny of who is on top" and all the rest. And that's why geeks making these things hate them. They never want their own tools and decisions to be put to a vote; and they want to "keep things positive" to use the "drive away dissidents" method they use in open source software. Don't like the Benevolent Dictator for Life running your project? Fork the project. "Patch or Get the Fuck Out," is the dictum there. If you can't fix the bug within the rigid framework of the overall concept, get the fuck out.
POPVOX functions, then, as an intruder on to real-life democracy which accelerates and gathers first all the likeminded "progressives". It then uses its networks as a mirror, and uses it graphics and very manipulated comments section to fire the twigs.
Sure, people may buck the system -- I did, because I'm that way. Will everybody? A guru is fretting today about Facebook ads that will play to poor students and pitch them trade schools instead of colleges, based on demographics and data-scraping of adsters. She's expressing her concerns in the "progressive" vein. But the same principle holds. If I come on a platform and see "everybody" behaving a certain way, I will inevitably be influenced. It's hard to stay alone in that private democratic space of my own thoughts or my friends' expressions in a safe circle. All that is blown away. Clay Shirky and Beth Noveck are proud of the fact that the Internet erodes the individual and collectivizes them into group creatures that acquire identity through reflection in the group. I'm horrified.
Now let's come to the most obvious bit of manipulation on the POPVOX site -- as platformistas will not be persuaded that these mirroring effects and "tyranny of who shows up first" and "tyranny of who's on top" really make a difference.
They will point -- as will the devs, as you will see -- to the fact that the Tea Party is registered as a group on this site and presumably getting their members to vote their way. They will point to the fact that the much-loathed Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) is registered and presumably getting their supporters to vote for their agenda (I guess they're not working very hard, if they are registered, with congress people and constituents they are said to "pay for," but only got 3 percent of the SOPA vote.)
And I say, so what? Because not everybody can register! The POPVOX people must CLEAR you. Registration is not on the principle of "here are the criteria, go ahead and register." They're on the discretionary principle of clearance.
And currently, POPVOX is only taking non-profits. That means NGOs, nonprofit PACS, various cause groups.
That means they are not abiding by the law of the land, which says, since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, that corporations can contribute money to political campaigns as well.
No doubt POPVOX hates Citizens United -- the entire progressive and hard left in Occupy and many libertarians complain about CU because they think "big business" will skew the vote. That NGOs, labour unions, professional groups, law associations and many other entities of the "nonprofit" variety already can contribute themselves and already primarily helped Obama win the last election doesn't matter to them -- that's ok, they're "good" and ebil bizness is "bad". There are all kinds of small and big businesses with all kinds of views left and right, but that doesn't matter -- CU is something the collectivist left instinctively loathes because it means some other principle of organizing society than the statist and collectivist one will be used -- the business principle, whereby individuals with initiative bound by fiscal responsibility for their enterprise united. That's inherently alien to the collectivists.
This is the biggest hole in the POPVOX experiment -- the inability for ANYBODY to put whatever group they want in there. If they want to put "Barbershop on 23rd and 1st Avenue" they should be able to put that. The right to association is a universal human right, not requiring licensing or law to enjoy. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street didn't start out as registered 501-c-3 organizations. They had to find NGOs in fact at first to pass through the money they raised because they didn't have that status (OWS still uses Alliance for Justice; Tea Party chapters have registered as nonprofits in many states, which is how they can get on the ballot here at POPVOX -- I see 10 local Tea Party chapters and zero Occupy groups).
This "pluralism" of the organizations is what POPVOX will point to most as proof that they are "neutral". They aren't neutral, for the reasons I've explained.
But it's not just businesses or Occupy Wall Street camps they've left out -- it's religious bodies -- only the separate nonprofit group created by religious believers like "Catholics for Choice" or "US Bishops Conference" can be included.
Who are these people who created this powerful intrusion into the democratic life providing the burning mirror to the twigs of online life already supplied in ample amounts by Google+, Twitter, and Facebook?
'WHO WE ARE"
Not surprisingly, Tim O'Reilly is a founding advisor. Tim O'Reilly is one of the most powerful and influential thinkers and publishers on the Internet although most people, especially on the East Coast, will not be sure whether he's that comedian talk show host or that FOX TV host. He's neither -- he's a very serious Silicon Vally lobbyist who is an ardent believer in the open source software movement and its related "open government" movement. (I've been quite critical of him in the past, for many aspects of his empire, including his bloggers' code of conduct which is an unacceptable restriction on First Amendment speech rights, and his invasion of municipal IT budgets.)
In fact, with his "civic stack" concept, he is busy trying to get into every single municipal IT budget and planning in America (and then something like POPVOX and other related tools like GovTrack can be wired right into your town). I've debated him strenuously on his software invasion plans, and I've constantly debated his Washington lobbyist Alex Howard, who finally blocked me on Google+, stating that "the community" (whatever that was) found me "negative". This is what happens to dissent against these people: they use the handy features of the tools they created to mute you. They have First Amendment power without First Amendment responsibility.
The CEO of POPVOX is Marci Harris who sounds like a perfectly nice, public-minded person who did past work in tornado recovery and health issues. She used to work for Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), representing the 13th district in California (pro-Silicon Valley), famous for opposing the war in Iraq but then supporting the draft to make rich kids go to the war, too -- and infamous for being the only congressman to state that he is an atheist. (Oh, and he's anti-SOPA, too, surprise, surprise.)
I don't know whether Pete Stark believes in the Singularity or whether he's a Transhumanist, but since he was courageous enough to put down that he was an atheist in a setting where religious affiliation seems to be a requirement to gain many of your voters, I have to ask. There's nothing wrong with him declaring this affiliation, but it lets us know the likely tabula rasa of the belief system at work among this platform's founders.
The rest of the staff seem like the public-spirited sort of young people who populate "progressive" projects with their nonprofits and networks -- I don't think I'd be crazy to bet that every single one of them is an Obama voter (as I was, and will no longer be) and that every single one of them think that Congress is "in the way" of progress (if they didn't think that, they'd still be working for Congress people, instead of for this interloper that will first mediate the "public" views to Congress, then take over and replace Congress in the Wired State. That's why I bother to criticize it and waste time on it, though it may fail for lack of use or funding.)
MORE PETE STARK
Annalee K. Flower's bio on the site describes her as working for "a congressman" -- for some reason, the devs were reluctant to say which one.
Thanks to the wonders of Gov2.0, however, not only can we find this out with a quick Google, we can find out her salary. Oh, she worked for Pete Stark, too! Well, again, that by itself wouldn't mean bias; she may or may not be an atheist or a booster of Silicon Valley -- but chances are in this bunch she will row with the crew.
Advisors include Maria Thomas, former CEO of the Union Square Ventures-funded Etsy (that's Fred Wilson, who I endlessly spar with because of his copyleftist technocommunist views). All of them are social-media developers or supporters and that means they come from a certain perspective.
NO CORPORATIONS CAN REGISTER
POPVOX says they have a company principle of "not editorializing" -- that's why they won't summarize the bill's issues for you, pro and con and ostensibly only offer you in a neutral fashion the comments of others and their organizations.
But since corporations can't be included -- although they are now eligible under the law to contribute to campaigns thanks to Citizens United!!! -- this is already "editorialized". Since the first votes to arrive on all the bills are already massively driven by a perspective that already reflects the O'Reilly and Stark agenda through their networks, it already is de-facto "editorialized". Since we have no way of "voting no" on the comments we don't like, we face another editorial block.
And then there's this: it's a private organization. It can do what it wants. It's not the state (at least, not yet, it's only the Wired State). So if you are a critic, if your comments are "out of line," you can be deleted and/or banned and blocked from the site.
Congressional offices may increasingly pay attention to what's happening on POPVOX. They will see how it is organized even better than their massive amounts of email that has to be sifted in person without the wonders of lovely coded templates (as Analee can tell you). They will look at it like they look at Facebook comments, tweets and everything else out there that may or many not actually represent their actual constituents (who made themselves known at townhall meetings, and got denounced as "angry" and even "violent" by the left who had suppressed them), and who showed up in droves at real-life ballot boxes and put the Republicans back in the House (despite the ownership of the mindshare the left thought it had on social media).
If I or anyone else is blocked from POPVOX -- which this corporation/start-up can do because it can "do what it wants," we can't reach our congressmen in the most efficient way -- if they begin to pay attention to POPVOX (and I hope they discount it). Sure, we can write emails the regular way without these interlopers. But does anyone doubt that if a congressional staffer has the option of looking at what 14,000 people did on POPVOX, or looking at thousands of individual enmails even with a keyword system on his own email, what he'll chose to be influenced by?
"Your Voice," as the developers' slogan has it. "Verified. Quantified. Amplified." Indeed.
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