Piggy in Lord of the Flies.
The last two days, this blog has been deluged with about 5000 more hits than usual from something I'd never heard of called Fark -- which seems to be like a cross between Redditt and 4chan.
They've featured my blog on their front page of articles in the Politics section to ridicule, and so hundreds of boys are having a fun time there breaking my glasses. Here's what the headline says:
Some Conspiracy Gal: Romney's ORCA system failed not due to incompetence, but instead liberal programmer sabotage. Bonus: includes totally "not racist" accusation of a specific developer being a "likely Obama voter"
The rule there is that if you are Talking Points Memo or American Thinker or Slate, some established blog, you get a logo and a mention of that blog; if you're just a little guy like me, you get called a name.
Cruise through the comments and you'll get a feeling for the Second Life/Sluniverse/Second Citizen sort of atmosphere -- you'll recognize my RL picture, my avatar name, etc.
All of these people sound exactly like Cristiano Midnight and about 50 Woodburies on Sluniverse.
My reply -- to them, and posters at Ars Technica, who at least are 10 times more intelligent and civil.
Hello, Flies
I had never heard of Fark before about 5000 of you deluged my blog, but I guess you're sort of like a Redditt or 4chan? Excuse me, my glasses seem to be broken.
First, I see that nearly all of you have anonymous forums names, while I'm using my real name and my real name and avatar names are linked. Kinda unfair fight, eh? I notice that it enables you to find my real-life picture and post it and ridicule me, after first guessing that I might be overweight. It's been falsely said that I was the real estate queen in Second Life bombarded with the penises -- in fact that was Anshe Chung but I was involved in that story as well because the griefer spoofed my name and account using my email address and made some people think that attack was done by me (later this was cleared up completely when the real culprit came forward and was also banned).
Second Life has taught me a lot about how insecure dweebs on the Internet behave, and Fark has tended to reinforce those lessons. None of you can be linked to your RL pictures, although some of you are undoubtedly obese; no one can know you're a dog even as you gawk at me. Fun, eh?
I happen to have a male avatar in Second Life because I have the freedom to do so in a virtual world. Are you against people having freedom on the Internet? I have no doubt that out of the 5000 people deluging my blog, at least a few have made female alts in online games and may even be ashamed of this.
If in fact you chose your anonymous handles because you don't want to be judged by your RL looks or affiliations and want to be free to comment in an autonomous realm of pure thought, then why aren't you according the same courtesy to me, and just dealing with what I write and my ideas? The reason I've added a "Google Witch-Hunters" note to my page here is because I get tired of the hysterical caricatures drawn of me because my ideas dissent from the geek status quo on issues like open source software or Internet governance.
Let me address some of the issues here.
I believe that it's more than fine to ask questions about the consulting firms and developers that failed miserably for the Romney campaign; in fact, it's imperative. And that's not because I believe somehow Romney would have won if the tech worked -- he likely would not have, given the GOP's inattention to demographics and modern realities.
But these firms have an awful lot of power and money, as a Bloomberg news report illustrates, and they have an awful lot of control over our public commons and democratic process now. That's why I ask questions about them.
We know about the CIA chief's mistress and their emails; but we can't seem to find out who coded Orca, you know? Why is that? Ars Technica, which has done the best reporting on this, is reticent about naming names, and has given Zac Moffett, digital director of the Romney campaign, a very soft touch in interviewing him -- Sean Gallagher is protecting one of his own tribe there. That's why I ask questions and keep asking questions because I don't believe tech writers will write critically enough of their fellow geeks.
Zac Moffet's firm -- from which he was temporarily on leave for the campaign -- is Targeting Victory. That's why people assumed (and I wasn't the first) that they'd either have coded Orca *or know about it*. Again: this firm isn't irrelevant to the story because it's Zac's firm. It's not clear if he will return to it after this debacle, but it's his firm.
Zac Moffet -- from Targeting Victory, featured on their web page -- gave an interview to PBS bragging about his digital work for Romney and about Orca about people "off the grid," i.e. not reachable by traditional TV. One in three voters is not reachable by a TV ad. "It has to scale," says Michael Beach, who worked with Moffet on the digital side of the campaign -- which really is the entire campaign these days.
I wrote a blog *asking questions about this* because that's what bloggers do to try to get at the truth. When it turned out Targeted Victory had *not* coded Orca, I updated my blog with additions and corrections, but I certainly pointed out that lots of questions were still in order. Um, do you do that every time you write something outdated, incorrect or false about someone on Fark?
And it's not as if the spotlight should be removed from TV now just because they didn't code Orca. After all, they were responsible for another failed ap -- the "VP pick" ap. That was much ballyhooed and failed -- for reasons that seem a combination of technical and managerial -- the regular media scooped it so that the entire gimmick flopped -- those waiting on this ap to give them the news were the last to know (it served as a data-scraping tool).
In the past, Targeted Victory also messed up on a social media campaign for Michelle Bachman. And their social media work in general was lack-lustre for Romney in competing with the Obama machine. Why? How?
Let's leave aside the issue of whether anyone likes these candidates or not, and again, leave aside the issue of whether Romney might have done better if they were less incompetent.
What's operative here is that before, people running for political office only had to count on a few big television networks professionally organized and trained to follow them, along with radio and newspapers. These media outlets were well aware that they had to do the job serving the public interest. They tried to be fair, for better or worse. There were also outlets that had a known variety of known political leanings that came as no surprise.
Today, all that is up-ended, as they have to wade out into a storm of social media, and depend on various start-ups and up-starts in these Silicon Valley operations to guide them through these digital storms. These firms are large and small, known and unknown, but they are like shadowy middlemen between the mainstream and new media outlets and the candidates -- they are like Madison Avenue advertising firms now moved into politics, with vast Internet reach.
Now a little firm like Targeted Victory is like a big TV station and can reach millions of people using the tools of social media and blogs. So it's more than fine to ask for *accountability* of such people in this process. (Targeted Victory is not in Silicon Valley, but is in Alexandria, VA, but has the culture of that kind of organization in California as we know from Moffett's numerous boisterous and bragging interviews.)
When I found out that in this organization top-heavy with managers and marketers and only two devs and a program manager, one of the devs was Al Gore's former dev, I rightly and legitimately asked the question of how this could work out in a firm that mainly took on Republican campaigns.
And when I saw that the other dev was black, I noted that he was very likely an Obama voter, and asked how that would work out for Republican campaigns. I noted that making that observation is not racist, because whenever you mention race, people are nervous and hysterical and looking for a way to discredit your ideas and invoke racism.
But it's not racism, it's a report: we're told reliably that 96% of black people voted for Obama. They did.
Commenting legitimately on this fact on a blog on political affiliations isn't urging anybody to be kicked out of a job, discriminated against or lynched. God forbid. That would be crazy. Nor -- again -- would commenting on this fact of political life mean that minorities in and around the programming for Romney are suspect of sabotage and "lost it for Romney". Obviously, the reasons for Romney's loss are both more grand and more complex.
But it is saying that maybe they aren't suited to the job of running Republican campaigns.
If Newt Gingirch's dev promised he'd really help on the Obama back end, would you really believe him? Of course not. If Michelle Bachmann's dev was in the firm that took Obama's digital work up -- would you worry? You would. If a WASP millionaire with a double last-name and an expensive suit sailed up in his yacht and said he'd like to work for the Democrats, wouldn't someone ask about the 1 percent? They would. Hatred of the rich is big.
Now, the GOP desperately needs to modernize (and so does its ecosphere of publications and websites -- so far we've only see Red State say they are ready to drain the swamp of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck or the birthers). And they need to recruit and hire for campaigns more blacks and Hispanics and women and LGBT and other minorities. How will they do that? I don't belong to this party so it's not my problem, but I care enough about diversity of political opinion, not just diversity of races to ask the question: what do we do in a democratic society when race is now a marker for a very defined political belief system? I didn't make that so by my blog or observations; Obama and his campaign managers and the media made it so.
As we learned on G+ today, Sergei Brin would solve this problem by having no political parties in some sort of utopia of lovely independents covering independently in name and spirit. I roll my eyes 360%. The first thing that would happen under such a regime -- and a regime it would be -- is that those helpful coders in the comments would create a Google-run, Internet-based "voting" system that would just have people vote up issues with "likes" (and never vote no) -- on propositions that the nice people at Google would frame (or say, change.org). That would in fact be totalitarianism, not freedom, but I don't doubt for a minute that you Farkians would find it quite compatible with your cultural style and politics.
There's the larger issue, too, of the left-leaning and libertarian geek class. And to comment on this reality for our lives isn't to whistle for a witch-hunt or believe in loony conspiracies, it's to ask how we can have pluralism in our politics. How can we trust the managers of voting systems? How can we expect that a GOTV campaign will *work* for the people who gave up their time and treasure to get involved in the elections?
A fellow on Ars Technica said that he feared telling me the names of the Orca developers because a loon who thinks they were to blame for Romney's loss will come and assassinate them. Really, guys? That sounds like a total trumped-up excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your coding messes. He invoked Congressman Gifford's wounding and the killing of her aids and constituents. But Giffords wasn't shot by a member of the Tea Party, but by a loon. Let's get a grip here: Republican campaigns -- the only opposition party we have now to the party of power -- have to rely on people who are afraid of being assassinated if their shoddy programming is exposed? Good Lord, that's preposterous.
Orca didn't work, and it's more than fine to ask why, and to seek accountability not only from Zac Moffett, who is tap-dancing around this like Fred Astaire, but all the 80 people in his digital workshop with the bean-bag chairs, and from the Orca developers and Targeted Victory. Did they treat this with cynicism and even neglect that amounts to sabotage because their hearts weren't in a Romney victory? Well? I know I'm asking the right hearts-and-minds question, and soon it won't be just me asking it, but every single board room where big money was involved in this campaign will be asking it -- in part because your mob helped get the word out. Thanks!
Why indeed is Al Gore's dev doing Romney's ap work? How the hell does something like that happen?
But more to the point, why did Orca fail?
Now herr -- I get it that software projects have various stages, having taken part in them time and again. And derr -- that involves testing and reiteration and bug-elimination and all the rest. Many comments here talk about short time frames, the methodology of software, with that arrogant nastiness that assumes nobody knows how that works -- when most people are taking part in live beta experiments 24/7 just by being on Twitter or Facebook and following their "issues".
From what we gather from comments on forums, these digital wunderkind coding Orca used the Agile software cult for their work. No surprise at the result there! Agile creates an alternative universe of fake user questions completely untethered from real users, and creates Stakhanovite work plans with dictatorial personages running the show with "roles" assigned them by managers imbued with the cult. Maybe Obama used Agile systems and got results because he had the cult built in already around his persona. Romney couldn't because he didn't.
We haven't heard much about the mission or plan or schedule because nobody is talking. We only know what the guy himself responsible for the mess is telling us -- which is not how you get to the bottom of a news story. Moffett says they tested in Boston, but not the nation.
Yet from what I gather talking to ordinary party activists in various states, and from what I see on their blogs, a complaint was about the over-centralization of this campaign, with all paths leading to Boston, and not enough local autonomy to run the Romney franchise in local conditions. That's not a software problem, except it is; it comes out of the dictatorial software management cults that can hold sway in an organization and become too rigid to adjust to humans.
As I've noted in my past blog, the Indian firm said to be the outsource firm denies that it was involve. Accenture won't comment. These big consulting firms are hugely skilled and covering their trail and keeping their own social media footprint invisible -- especially with Google bombing.
Say, you could organize a Fark-scapade to somebody's blog ridiculing them on the Internet, and you're done, you know? Very easy to manipulate masses in places like this, I see it all the time from 4chan or somethingawful.com
You people aren't stampeded and manipulated, are you? You all think for yourselves right?
Then tell me why Al Gore's dev or Obama's 2008 director of analytics were anywhere near Romney's jobs. That's all.
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