Listened to Picture-Perfect Democracy from On the Media | WNYC Studios

The history of the American primary; the first town to vote; and New Hampshire reporters do some self-reflection.

The sloppy roll-out of Iowa results prompted disinformation and confusion over the mechanics of the caucus system. This week, On the Media looks at the origins of the nomination process to explain how we got here. Plus, local reporters in New Hampshire examine the power struggle at the heart of the upcoming contest. 

1. Galen Druke [@galendruke] on the history of America's unique primary system. Listen.

2. Stranglehold reporters Jack Rodolico [@JackRodolico], Lauren Chooljian [@laurenchooljian], and Casey McDermott [@caseymcdermott] on Dixville Notch's mythical status. Listen.  

3. Lauren Chooljian [@laurenchooljian] examines how New Hampshire's local press benefits from being a first-in-the-nation primary. Listen.

Watched A bold idea to replace politicians by César Hidalgo from ted.com
César Hidalgo has a radical suggestion for fixing our broken political system: automate it! In this provocative talk, he outlines a bold idea to bypass politicians by empowering citizens to create personalized AI representatives that participate directly in democratic decisions. Explore a new way to make collective decisions and expand your understanding of democracy.

“It’s not a communication problem, it’s a cognitive bandwidth problem.”—César Hidalgo

He’s definitely right about the second part, but it’s also a communication problem because most of political speech is nuanced toward the side of untruths and covering up facts and potential outcomes to represent the outcome the speaker wants. There’s also far too much of our leaders saying “Do as I say (and attempt to legislate) and not as I do.” Examples include things like legislators working to actively take away things like abortion or condemn those who are LGBTQ when they actively do those things for themselves or their families or live out those lifestyles in secret.

“One of the reasons why we use Democracy so little may be because Democracy has a very bad user interface and if we improve the user interface of democracy we might be able to use it more.”—César Hidalgo

This is an interesting idea, but definitely has many pitfalls with respect to how we know AI systems currently work. We’d definitely need to start small with simpler problems and build our way up to the more complex. However, even then, I’m not so sure that the complexity issues could ultimately be overcome. On it’s face it sounds like he’s relying too much on the old “clockwork” viewpoint of phyiscs, though I know that obviously isn’t (or couldn’t be) his personal viewpoint. There’s a lot more pathways for this to become a weapon of math destruction currently than the utopian tool he’s envisioning.

👓 Click Facebook’s “I’m Voting” Button, Research Shows It Boosts Turnout | TechCrunch

Read Click Facebook’s “I’m Voting” Button, Research Shows It Boosts Turnout (TechCrunch)
Today, Facebook is encouraging its legions of users to declare civic enthusiasm to their friends, with a prominent "I'm A Voter" botton at the top of the newsfeed. Large-scale, experimental research shows that simply clicking the button, and sharing your voting intention, could do more to increase …

📑 ‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | John Naughton | The Guardian

Annotated 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism by John NaughtonJohn Naughton (the Guardian)

We saw the experimental development of this new “means of behavioural modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality game Pokémon Go.  

👓 Voting Laws Roundup 2018 | Brennan Center for Justice

Read Voting Laws Roundup 2018 (brennancenter.org)
Voting legislation continues to be a subject of state legislators’ attention. So far in 2018, lawmakers have introduced bills to restrict voting in eight states. But all of them, as well as 14 other states, are considering laws that would expand access to the polls.

👓 You Think Your Vote Doesn’t Count? Read This! | ColoradoBoulevard.net

Read You Think Your Vote Doesn’t Count? Read This! by Cheryl Cabot (ColoradoBoulevard.net)
Five votes. That’s the number of votes that finally put Denise Menchaca over the top to win a seat on the San Gabriel City Council in 2016. But those five votes came at the end of a long and torturous road. By Cher...

👓 How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed | ProPublica

Read How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed (ProPublica)
From a new Supreme Court ruling to a census question about citizenship, the campaign against illegal registration is thriving. But when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.
I knew the voter fraud panel Trump convened had fizzled, but I didn’t hear that there was a court case and the concept flopped so painfully. This is some fantastic reporting. Glad I ran back across it while looking at the midterm elections results relating to Georgia and the massive voter suppression efforts that have been happening there this year.

👓 Texas Voting Machines Have Been ‘a Known Problem’ for a Decade | Motherboard

Read Texas Voting Machines Have Been ‘a Known Problem’ for a Decade (Motherboard)
The voting machines and their software—not voters—are to blame for votes switching from Beto O'Rourke to Ted Cruz (and vice versa), an expert told Motherboard.

👓 Hackers Face New Scrutiny For Pointing Out Voting Equipment Flaws | BuzzFeed News

Read An 11-Year-Old Changed The Results Of Florida's Presidential Vote At A Hacker Convention. Discuss. (BuzzFeed News)
Veteran hackers have tried for years to get the world to notice flaws in voting machines. Now that they’ve got it, they have to wrestle with scaring people away from voting.

👓 Strategy and Solidarity | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Read Strategy and Solidarity by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
As I noted in my last post, I recently read Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community as a means of thinking a bit more deeply about the ways that Generous Thinking deploys the notion of community.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Calls to work on behalf of the community or to the community’s values wind up not only, as I noted in my last post, ignoring community’s supplementary role with respect to capital but also essentializing a highly complex and intersectional set of social relations.  

This reminds me of some studies in psychology about why people vote and for whom they vote. It’s not always who they would vote for individually, but who would a group of people like them vote? This makes the “community” portion far more complex than it would appear.

I should track down the original references, but I think I remember reading about them via either George Lakoff or possibly Malcolm Gladwell.

Under late capital, the non-profit has been asked to take over the space of providing for community needs or supporting community interests that had formerly been occupied by the state as the entity responsible for the public welfare.  

I know the book American Amnesia talks about the value built up by a strong government working in conjunction with a capitalist machine over the past century or so. I wonder if the later half of the book gets into how to shift things back in this manner?

👓 How School Shootings Spread | New Yorker

Read How School Shootings Spread by Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell (The New Yorker)
An increasingly ritualized form of violence is attracting unexpected perpetrators.
An intriguing article whose theory seems both applicable and timely. It also seems extensible to additional areas, some of which I’ve noted in my annotations.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.

Knowing a little of what is coming in advance here, I can’t help but thinking: How can this riot theory potentially be used to influence politics and/or political campaigns? It could be particularly effective to get people “riled up” just before a particular election to create a political riot of sorts and thereby influence the outcome. Facebook has done several social experiments with elections in showing that their friends and family voted and thereby affecting other potential voters. When done in a way that targets people of particular political beliefs to increase turn out, one is given a means of drastically influencing elections. In some sense, this is an example of this “Riot Theory”.


“But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

This might also be the same case with fraternity shenanigans and even more deplorable actions like gang rapes. Usually there’s one or more sociopaths that start the movement, and then others reluctantly join in.


If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.


Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party.


The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic.

Seven though? In such a short time period? These must have known about prior ones or else perhaps the theory doesn’t hold as much water. Similarly suicide could be added as a contagion that fits into this riot model as well.


That’s what Paton and Larkin mean: the effect of Harris and Klebold’s example was to make it possible for people with far higher thresholds—boys who would ordinarily never think of firing a weapon at their classmates—to join in the riot.


He disapproved of Adam Lanza, because he shot kindergartners at Sandy Hook instead of people his own age: “That’s just pathetic. Have some dignity, damn it.”

This model of a dialectic suggests that the narrative can be shaped, both by the individual reader and each actor. Can it also be shaped by the media? If these mass-murderers are portrayed as pathetic or deranged would that dissuade others from joining their ranks?
gandalf511 on Oct 13, 2015

gandalf511, I like the idea you’ve elaborated here, and it may work to at least some extent. One other hand, some of these kids are already iconoclasts who are marginalized and may not put much value or faith in a mainstream media representation. The tougher needle to thread is how to strike a middle ground that speaks to potential assailants?

👓 Chiefs Of Three Russian Intelligence Agencies Travel To Washington | Radio Free Europe

Read Chiefs Of Three Russian Intelligence Agencies Travel To Washington by Mike Eckel (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty)
WASHINGTON -- The directors of Russia's three main intelligence and espionage agencies all traveled to the U.S. capital in recent days, in what observers said was a highly unusual occurrence coming at a time of heightened U.S.-Russian tensions. Russia's ambassador to the United States had earlier confirmed that Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), was in Washington in recent days to meet with U.S. officials about terrorism and other matters.
Unmentioned in this article: there’s a pending election in Russia which is creating optics for voters there as well.