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Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause?
theodp writes "The press has been filled with wide-eyed articles about how Obama's tech team pulled out the stops in their race against the Republicans. But as exciting as some of the new techniques dreamed up may be, Tom Steinberg points out it's important to reflect on the difference between choosing to use tech skills to win a particular fight, versus trying to improve the workings of the democratic system, or helping people to self-organize and take some control of their own lives. 'I am still filled with an excitement about the prospects for non-partisan technologies that I can't muster for even the coolest uses of randomized control trial-driven political messaging,' writes Steinberg. 'The reason why all comes down to the fact that major partisan digital campaigns change the world, but they don't do it in the way that services like eBay, TripAdvisor and Match.com do. What all these sites have in common – helping people sell stuff they own, find a hotel, or a life partner – is that they represent a positive change in the lives of millions of people that is not directly opposed by a counter-shift.'"
I'd say it was a slashvertisement but the summary is practically incomprehensible.
Offer everyone all the entitlements you can possibly give them, when they cannot be afforded. Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns. I feel like moving to Canada, except for Canada is more liberal than the US. I need a foreign country that is more conservative than the US to move to. Or I think I might buy an island. Is the Isle of Man for sale? If there's a cave, I'd call it the Man Cave. If it had bats, I'd call it the Bat Cave! And Since it was my own country, the copyright or trademark trolls could all just contact my justice department. Which would be me.
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with? Using Twitter? Writing a blog? Campaigns and PACs soliciting donations or informing people of important dates through text messages, phone calls, emails or applications on phones?
Wow - What an age we live in...if you ignore that the underpinnings of these technologies have been around for years if not decades.
All they did was leverage what was there to spam everyone and rake in money for advertisements, travel, staff expenses and otherwise. The tools may be relatively new, but the "technique" is a century old.
Hyping marketing campaigns (of which political campaigns are a subset) has become more and more common. It's like the actual product doesn't matter anymore.
supporting the Democratic party IS trying to improve the workings of the democratic system.
The only people that support the Republicans are all the dumb libertarians that believe corporations should rule the world.
Governments that represent the public interests should rule the world, not corporations that represent private interests.
But all of the sites he mentioned are not in the business to "help" anyone. They're all in it to make money. The difference is that the Democratic party used the internet in a way that didn't involve Money. Now that's a neat trick!! I wonder if by next election someone will have thought of a way to make a business out of "getting out the vote" over the net.
Its a matter of who manages to leverage it to their advantage that makes a difference. At one point, the GOP and Karl Rove were ahead of the Democrats at using databases and software to rally support and gerrymander voting districts. But it appears that they have run out of steam.
One wonders why the Republicans haven't been the ones pushing publicly funded broadband. They are missing quite a bit of their base out in the trailer parks.
Have gnu, will travel.
Here in the US, the press has been fawning all over Michael Phelps, the gymnastics "Fab Five" and other athletes who won medals at the Olympics. But at the end of the day, they were just covering themselves with glory. These folks weren't affirming the life-changing power of playing video games like CoD Zombies, which I have had the foresight of integrating into my lifestyle along with fellow visionaires.
The real story is that the Romney team didn't have the tiniest shred of competence. They proved themselves overly secretive (bordering on paranoid) and so arrogant that they didn't think standard practices in software development and delivery applied to their "special" campaign.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/11/romneys-fail-whale-orca-the-votetracker-149098.html
America really dodged a bullet not getting stuck with this kind of leadership.
What is the difference?
St. Lucie county in Floida reported a 141% turnout, refused to recount, and refused to release a voter role (as is generally done after an election) to list who showed up to voted. The local offical who would answer such questions failed to do so and went on "vacation" and can no longer be contacted.
Thats the best voter tech, when you can get over 100% turn out for your guy the other doesn't stand a chance. Lets also not mention Philly where there was consistantly 99% turnout without a single of those votes going for Mitt.
Yea, they made Bill Daily's old "election techniques" outdated. Who needs dead people to vote when you can just put in whatever number you want to now?
From day one, neither campaigns are at an advantage. It's about managing a group (a campaign team) that will run like clockwork.
They gather people together to educate the population and help increase the number of voters (obviously they target their audience). BOTH PARTIES used tech, BOTH PARTIES used databases to hone in on their target audience, BOTH PARTIES used tech to coordinate their campaign efforts. Romney's team simply sucked. Obama always does an excellent job of taking advantage of the technology available to bring people together and manage a large group. Honestly, I want a president that can do this. It's a good trait. ;) Especially for, I don't know, the President of the United States.
Romney's team became known for using ORCA. It was a failure. This should have raised flags quickly and have been fixed (or replaced early on). It wasn't. Romney's team was mismanaged from the start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29
"What all these sites have in common – helping people sell stuff they own, find a hotel, or a life partner – is that they represent a positive change in the lives of millions of people that is not directly opposed by a counter-shift. " Really - eBay is all about "helping people"? Can you tell me what color the sky is on your planet? Oh, and in the system that eBay is ever-so-helpful in, "counter-shift" is called "competition." And eBay will do whatever it can to shut that counter-shift down. Count on it.
The idea that technology can be partisan is evidence that your side is relying on something besides science. Get with the program, or don't. Either way, we all win.
is complete rubbish. The corresponding negative counter-shift is the huge loss of individuals' privacy and the centralising of even more power in even fewer corporations.
Korma: Good
There is no longer any point in trying to communicate across the Republicrat - Democain divide, or the conservative - liberal divide (however you choose to view it). No communication is occurring, because the two live in completely different reality tunnels. Not even the words shouted back and forth mean the same thing to the different sides.
We are not the same country, nor the same people, though we exist amongst each other. All that is left now is to either break apart peacefully into separate nations, or (by far more likely) for one or both sides to begin exterminating the other via death camps and wood chippers.
Anything that moves the tech forward is worthwhile.
NASA developed a lot of tech specifically to get us to the moon, and along the way everyone else (who isn't going to the moon) gets to benefit from the advances.
This is like that. The goal was to get Obama elected. But the breakthroughs are something that everyone else can benefit from now that they're here.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I'm not a big fan of downmoderation, but the parent is a blatant (and successful) troll. It should not be modded +5 Insightful.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That was the problem.
The GOP has far more then one problem. They should have cleaned up this election, but even back in the primaries it was evident that there were serious problems: only Huntsman and Romney stood a chance of winning. How did the GOP get itself into a situation where all the candidates traded popularity with electability?
And then the GOP lost all of those senate races that it should have won. Was that Romney's fault as well?
The kicker for me is that the RNC, Romney team, and conservative news complex were completely clueless about what was about to happen on election day. The polls were dead on if but a very slight conservative bias, and it seams almost the entire GOP was blindsided. That wasn't Romney's fault as well? Really??
You cannot make effective decisions when you are operating in an information black hole. So I would place the blame on the GOP leadership. Those guys should they *lead*, and not simply respond to incentive structures given to them.
If the GOP doesn't do some serious navel-gazing, and make accurate changes to its operations, then the next election will be another huge expensive failure.
It comes down to using information accurately. So you gotta ask, "what REALLY went wrong". Not just point at the fall guy and resume the posture of faultlessness.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Speaking of which, XKCD pointed out a while back that no white candidate who's been mentioned on twitter has ever gone on to win a presidential election. Something to think about...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Because you are in survey research, and ostensibly Democratic you can't see the forest.
RTFA, medv4380. When you say, "That's because it's just a Libertarian or Republican anti-Obama Won because of tech argument." you show you are projecting instead of responding to TFA's argument.
How the blogger frames their argument is not partisan, unlike your response. Read the article and think about it for once.
And politicians since time immemorial have used any method they could conceive of to do it. I scanned the posts quickly to see if anyone had already stated this very, very, very basic fact about democracy.
Voter turnout among young and minority voters has been a big problem for the Democratic party for a long time. The GOP tried to make it an even bigger problem. The Democrats used technology to solve a real problem in one of the most basic realities of democracy: what voters think doesn't matter unless they actually vote. Romney was astonished that he lost only because he expected the Democratic voter turnout problem (along with dirty tricks) to win it for him. What a shock. Democracy won, and technology helped. Yes. That's news.
A Democratic system can be used to allow fascism to replace it. Fascism can only be replaced via use of the gun.
Quit worshiping stuff because it is 'cool technology'. I'm sure very 'cool' technological means of torturing people can be created. It would still be used for fskin' torture.
What's partisan tech? All sides attempted to boost their base. Just because Obama's team was better doesn't mean they had better partisan tech, just better tech.
Remember Obama had more offices than Romney in the swing states and was very advanced. It was full of college students and 20 somethings who knew their base, whereas Romney's was a lot lower tech.
So for example:
These are the sort of sites Tom Steinberg is talking about -- sites that change the balance between people and government at a grass roots level, by allowing people to work together and see what each other are doing.
I've used eg the FoI tool, and it works. Think of these as force-multipliers for the individual's voice and clout in society.
Steinberg is really thinking about the low-budget, non-commercial, very effective sites that his charity MySociety has set up over the last 10 years in the UK, which aim to help non-party democracy at a grass roots level, by helping make citizens more powerful against government at all levels, by creating systems that give them more information, help them work together, and track and share the outcomes of what happens when they tangle with power.
What Steinberg is saying is that systems like that, that make the citizen more powerful, are far more impressive to him than systems which make a particular political party more effective. It's a bit surprising that so far seemingly every poster here has missed Steinberg's point.
Bullshit.
First, Tripadvisor's purpose is not to make the customers stronger or the hotel sector weaker. Its to generate a profit for its stockholders, by capturing as large a market-share in the travel agency sector as possible. If its makes the customer stronger and the "hotel sector" weaker - which is highly questionable frankly, unless increasing the accessibility of purchasing their services is somehow something they wouldn't want - then that's an secondary byproduct. The same is true for Match.com, Amazon, Ebay and a number of other sites who takes my money in exchange for goods or services. It takes a willfully ignorant viewpoint or a willfully skewed paradigm to frame this as altruism.
Second, TripAdvisor is not a monopoly. There are a dozen other companies "directly opposed by a counter-shift" to their goal of maximizing their own profits by maximizing their market share. If the hotel sector was somehow being harmed by these websites, there would be an attempt to oppose them as well. Only by obfuscating the actual goal and purpose of these commercial entities could this not be incredibly obvious.
Third, it is entirely possible to report potholes using his apps. Yay, good on him. Meanwhile the technical prowess used in this "fight" will change the world in incredibly meaningful ways. Billions of lives are effected by the policies, temperament, priorities actions and competency of the President of the United States of America.
It might not allow you to book a trip to Greece in twenty fewer clicks like TripAdvisor, but it will have a huge influence on whether there's still a Greece worth visiting.
It may not let you buy someone's family heirloom on your lunchbreak like Ebay, but it might help you have a job to take a break from, or ensure other people don't have to sell their heirlooms to make ends meet.
And it might not let you find a date in new ways like Match.com, but it might make it possible for you to marry the one you love.
The fact that other people are working against your efforts doesn't make the fight not worth fighting or the outcome any less ennobling, important or life altering for billions.
I joined match.com earlier this year and I'm currently going month to month. I sure wouldn't call it a positive use of technology as the main article states. It's not been a complete waste of my time and money but it has mostly been a waste of them both. My experiences might be interesting to other geeks so I'll describe how it really works.
Match requires both you and the person you contact to be paying members to be able to read and send email. Yes, you cannot even read email unless you are a paying member. The reality of this is that as most women do not pay (I cannot speak for male members as I am a guy looking for women), most of your attempts to contact women will never be read. Match won't even tell you who sent email unless you pay. Everything is about money. I've been on other dating websites that allowed some limited exchange of email if one party was a paying member, but Match doesn't do that. This is the number one impediment in trying to meet people on the site.
I cannot prove this, but based on my experience and what I've read online, I suspect that Match by default turns off IM for women members. Non paying members can communicate by IM if a paying member initiates it, but the interface is poor and many people don't notice IM notifications if they get them. And some women aren't tech savvy enough to ever turn on IM, so there's no hope of communicating with them either if they don't pay and don't ever turn on IM.
About half the profiles I see could be classified as "Barbie doll seeks Ken doll." Then you have a rather large number of women with insanely restrictive requirements and they won't even talk to anyone who is outside of them. I've seen short women who only want to date guys over a foot taller than them. I've seen women who only want to meet guys within 1 year either way of their age. I recently saw a profile from a woman who only wanted to meet guys who were 20-37 years younger. No kidding. I also have seen a ton of seriously pissed off women who write very negatively about their Match experience in their profiles. These woman may not have very restrictive requirements, but they don't get any contacts except from perverts it seems. One thing that people should keep in mind is that Match has a cutoff where if you don't login within 3 weeks, they put that your last login was "over 3 weeks ago". Once a woman drops into the "over 3 weeks ago" category, the odds are rather high that she got angry about her experience and she's not going to pay to re-join. Many women are gym rats and between their jobs and the 2 hours a day, 7 days a week, they spend in the gym, it's no wonder they can't meet anyone. But they always have such restrictive requirements anyway that if any guy does contact them, they'll probably never respond.
I am convinced that Match is being run deliberately to prevent most people from making meaningful connections because your failure keeps you renewing your membership, thinking "this month will be the one". In America in the past 15+ years there's been this crazy shift thanks to TV and movies where many people are convinced that there is one and only one perfect person for them. Many of these people are on Match. They never find anyone because they never meet their preconceived perfect person. A lot of women members are on there only rolling the dice that maybe Taylor Lautner will contact them and if he doesn't, they're simply not interested.
Match hasn't been a complete waste of my time and money, but it has been really frustrating. A lot of my female and male friends who joined in the past have nothing good to say about it. It's like having a part time sales job only you find out that you don't get paid until you hit a mystery quota of sales. That sales target might be $1000 or it could be $1 million. You don't know. And if you quit before you reach the target, you don't get paid. But as you have no way of knowing how close or far you are from the target, you might have to work a long time to g
Neither of your boys watch TV, yet they get their news from TV comedy shows? Ignoring all of the significant issues in that state of affairs, when is it TV?
Is it only TV if I use rabbit ears?
If it is live (ie. no pvr)?
"helping people sell stuff they own, find a hotel, or a life partner – is that they represent a positive change in the lives of millions of people "
Lots of people use these systems for negative change. How many married people are on dating sites, buying things they shouldn't, taking trips with money they don't have. They do a lot of good, but there is always bad in there somewhere.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Wow, that's some serious gobbledegook!
As both a classical liberal (i.e., someone who believes in the high value personal liberty) and a progressive (someone who believes government serves an important role in providing a safety net, protecting the weakest, and keeping markets healthy), I've been disappointed in the poor job our political classes have done in packaging rational humanist values into a political platform that appeals to the broad middle of people who would be best served by a government that protects their interests (provides inexpensive basic health care and efficient basic education) and lets them do business in peace and live and let live.
The Republican party transformed itself in the 50s and 60s into a movement that punched well above its weight by seeming to do the impossible: convincing the weakest that government was their enemy, etc. It was a triumph of political imagination and movement-making... and it's come close at times to ruining this country.
I'd love to see how technology can help improve our political system, but what we really need to fix is the failure of political imagination on the part of and on behalf of this broad middle. If there is an app for that (genetic algorithms for creating political movements?), I'm game to see it.