C-SPAN, the public service cable network that covers Congress and so much more, turned 40 years old this year. Many of my Facebook friends are noting this milestone by sharing screen shots or clips of their own C-SPAN moments, and I have enough of an ego to do the same. I have two of them…
The first is from January of 1995. At the time I was working for Sen. Edward Kennedy and the Senator had just delivered a speech at the National Press Club on the topic of ‘Maintaining Democratic Party Principles’ in the face of electoral losses to Republicans in the previous election. Faced with new GOP majorities in both the House and the Senate, the Senator spoke to how Democrats must stick to their values and not become just “warmed over Republicans”. In the Q&A that followed, Sen. Kennedy was asked about the advantage that the GOP had developed in delivering their message via talk radio and cable television, and what the Democrats would do to catch up. And about 30 seconds into his reply, came my first C-SPAN moment. I wasn’t watching the speech live myself, and I remember getting a call from a co-worker who was with the Senator at the Press Club warning me that my phone would likely start ringing with calls from reporters and that I shouldn’t respond until I had spoken with the press secretary. “Why would I be getting calls from reporters?”, I asked. “Because he just said your name in response to a question.” And they were kind words indeed.
My second clip is more than a mention, but me in the flesh. It was when my book, The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age was published. I think it holds up, how about you? Terrible haircut, but at least I still had hair! There’s a great commercial for C-SPAN’s own website at the start that I just had to keep in place as it really helps provide a flavor and look at the 1996 time frame of the interview and the state of the web at the time.
Few things are as satisfying as receiving the interest of others in what it is you have done and are doing in your life, and inviting you to speak with them about it. More humbling and flattering (and a bit intimidating as well), is if they want to record you, to better reach a larger audience and remain available long after the conversation.
In mid 2017, a friend and former colleague and employer, Nathaniel Pearlman, began a podcast called The Great Battlefield. What IS the Great Battlefield? Here’s how Nathaniel describes it in the opening of each episode;
A great political battle is being fought right now between progressives and the forces of reaction on the other side. This show is about the political entrepreneurs and other progressive leaders who are finding new or improved ways to fight.
It’s an excellent podcast, and Nathaniel’s genuine interest in his guests, their personal stories, and the work they are doing benefits from his personal expertise, experience, and thoughtful questions. And so I was very pleased to join him in a relaxed conversation about my own story about the path of my work in political technology, and the help of the many colleagues and collaborators along the way, himself included, upon whose smarts my career has depended. If you’ve got an hour to spare, give us a listen.
Three years ago, I wrote a blog post that I was and remain pretty proud of. It was titled Networks, Information, Engagement & Truthand in it I described the influence that two great American thinkers have had on my own thinking of the power of computer networks to advance and improve our political process, and the threat of ‘bad information’ that could yet undermine it all.
One of the two mentioned thinkers was Thomas Jefferson. But I need to focus further on the other, J.C.R. Licklider. This is how I described my introduction to ‘Lick’ and his work in that blog post;
Sometime around 1998, I read a wonderful history of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon called Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. And through that history, I was introduced to the work and writings of the other bookend of my thinking about technology and politics: J.C.R. Licklider.
In 1962, Licklider was the Director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet) and is considered among computer science’s most important figures. His prescient writings about computers, networks and their impacts, well, sort of blew my mind. The below excerpt from Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the key Licklider (Just ‘Lick’ to many) prediction that I’ve never forgotten:
“The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.””
The book didn’t directly cite where this passage from Licklider came from, but the very next paragraph described his “seminal paper”, Man-Computer Symbiosis. Written in 1960, Man-Computer Symbiosis describes Lick’s imagined future where “the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association.” The paper is considered a key text in the field of computer science. (For a recent look back, check out this article, Another Look at Man-Computer Symbiosis by David Scott Brown, 1/3/18).
Given the placement of this mention of Man-Computer Symbiosis, immediately following the passage about “the political process”, I naturally imagined it as the source of the passage. Alas, it is not. And so for years I have shared this excerpt of Licklider’s predictions on the impact of computer networks on our political process as I originally found it in Where Wizards Stay Up Late, still uncertain of its origin.
The Books That Led to Licklider
In 2001 a biography of J.C.R. Licklider titled The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop was published. I have a copy signed by the author at a bookstore event. And for years, my copy sat on a bookshelf, always hovering near the top of my ‘to-read’ pile, but never quite making it to the top spot until I finally finished it last year. And it led to a major breakthrough in my hunt for the source of Licklider’s ‘political process’ writing, and in doing so, to the reason that I owe J.C.R. Licklider an apology.
In The Dream Machine, Waldrop also singled out the same bit of writing that had captured my imagination for years since first reading it in Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
“The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information and knowledge through a good console connected through a good network to a good computer.”
In my blog post, I wrote;
Information itself can be good or bad, and technology cares little about which sort it disseminates and propagates. Avoiding ignorance, as Jefferson’s hopes for civilization require, presume an ability to recognize and reject bad information to avoid being ill-informed. Licklider describes a ‘good console’ and a ‘good network’ as needed for facilitating an ‘effective interaction with information,’ but not specifically ‘good information.’ An effective interaction with bad information is equally likely. Ignorance born of bad, but effectively delivered information can and does do damage to our political process.
Waldrop foretold my connection between Thomas Jefferson and Licklider, and also my notion that Licklider had innocently overlooked the possibility of ‘bad information’ in his formulation. Waldrop wrote of Licklider’s vision, “It was a vision that was downright Jeffersonian in its idealism, and perhaps in its naïveté as well.”
More importantly, Waldrop did me the favor of citing the source of this passage. It came from a chapter titled Computers and Government that Licklider contributed to an anthology published by MIT Press in 1979 titled The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View. (In their defense, the authors of Where Wizards Stay Up Late included this volume in their bibliography, they just hadn’t directly connected it to the ‘political process’ passage.)
So to the Internet I turned, where I located and purchased a copy of The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, so I could at last drink of Licklider’s predictions for ‘Computers and Government’ direct from the source.
And guess what?! When I found my treasured passage in Licklider’s 40-page chapter in its original content, I found that in the very next paragraph he addressed exactly the sort of potential bad actors and bad information that I had previously accused him of naively overlooking.
And THAT, is why I owe J.C.R. Licklider an apology. Licklider was fully aware of the potential pitfalls and dirty tricks that the network he was still helping to build, and he described several of those potential problems with the same level of prognosticative detail that characterized so much of his writing. I’m sorry I suggested that this was a blind spot in his thinking.
And to correct this mis-characterization which I have perpetuated, below is a fuller excerpt from two out of forty pages that contained my oft-repeated political process passage, and Lick’s dose of reality that followed it. I have bolded the original passage, and added a few bracketed notes throughout.
It is technically possible to bring into being, during the remainder of this century, and information environment that would give politics greater depth and dimension than it now has [Remember, the NOW he’s writing about is 1979]. That environment would be a network environment, with home information centers (which would of course include consoles as well as television sets) as widespread as television sets are now. The political process would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. Many of the communications would be television programs or “spots,” but most would involve sending message via the network or reading, appending to, or setting pointers in information bases. Some of the communications would be real-time, concurrently interactive. The voting records of candidates would be available on-line [Generally speaking, they are], and there would be programs to compare the favorable information about themselves and critical assertions about their opponents. Charges would be documented by pointed to supporting records. Under the watchful control of monitoring protocols, every insertion would be “signed,” dated, and recorded in a publicly accessible audit trail [But who makes and monitors the monitoring protocols?]. Because millions of people would be active participants in this process, almost every element of the accumulating information base would be examined and researched by several proponents, several opponents, and perhaps even a few independent defenders of honesty and truth. Nothing would be beyond question [The opposite has become the norm, EVERYTHING IS QUESTIONED], and the question would go, along with whatever answers were forthcoming, into the accessible record. Interactive politics would function well only to the extent that the citizens were informed, but it would inform them as the had never been informed before.
Such an environment and such a process would undoubtedly open up new vistas for dirty tricks. However, by bringing millions of citizens into active participation through millions of channels, it would make it more difficult for anyone to control and subvert any large fraction of the total information flow. It would give the law of large numbers a chance to operate, and within its domain tricks would be more like vigorous expressions of the feelings of individual citizens – unless, of course, a government [Russia, China] or a syndicate [Facebook] controlled and subverted the whole network. The clandestine artificial-intelligence programs, searching through the data bases, altering files, fabricating records, and erasing their own audit trails, would bring a new meaning to “machine politics.”
It is not likely that any agency of the U.S. government will deliberately develop anything approaching computer-based politics, because congressman have such a reactionary attitude toward meddling with their traditional political process [Not so in today’s hyper partisan atmosphere in Congress]. However, the development of networking for other purposes may create the facilities required for highly participatory political interaction. This is yet another reason for emphasizing the importance of computer system and network security, since it would be absolutely essential to orderly an effective interactive politics; one might even say that the security would have to be Watertight [A Watergate related pun?
Other issues and problems
The theme of government use of computers to control or repress the people deserves much more extensive examination, but the following notions will suggest some of the topics it might pursue:
Programmed instruction subverted to brainwashing in favor of a regime in power [Russian trolls and bots]
Programmed monitoring and censorship, achieved with the aid of natural language understanding programs
An automatic system that appends the government’s refutation to every article or program that is judged by the monitoring program to be critical of the government
Automated checking of adherence to government-prescribed schedules of activity and avoidance of government-proscribed activities
Automated compilation of sociometric association nets, showing who communicates with whom, who participates in what activities, who views which programs, and so on [Facebook]
[then, after much more good and insightful stuff, too much for me to re-type, Licklider concluded his chapter thusly]
Finally, the renewed hope I referred to is more than a feeling in the air. As a few thousand people now know – the people who have been so fortunate as to have had the first reich experience in interactive computing and networking – it is a feeling one experiences at the console. The information revolution is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a new era of involvement and participation. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information and knowledge through a good console connected through a good network to a good computer.
In 2008 I pursued and accomplished a long held goal to run a Marathon. It was an exciting goal to achieve, and a surprising thing to choose to do more than once. But I did, next in Baltimore, and then in 2010 my third, in my home town of Huntington Beach, California… the Surf City Marathon. To me there are two primary motivations to signing up for such a race, and the first is obvious, to get myself up off of my lazy ass and run, especially having paid good money to do so! But the second is for the fun of the destination, running a race in a new city, and a new environment, can be an exhilarating undertaking that adds adventure and distracts from the pain, and makes the whole thing especially satisfying. And so, for most events, once is enough.
But the Surf City folks did something very smart. They created a special status for runners who completed their event three years in a row. These runners earned the distinction of being members of the Longboard Legacy Club. You ONLY earn your membership after three consecutive years running the event, AND you have to maintain having run three years in a row to keep your membership. It’s a trap to keep you running the same race. And it works. So what do Legacy Club members get in return? An additional t-shirt (long sleeves, some have been nice, others not so much), a small stick-on extra for your medal (sometimes, not always), and an exclusive separate entrance to the post-race beer line (almost always meaningless). But runners who enter races are by nature competitive, even if they have zero notion of actually WINNING the race, they want their medal and they’ll chase other ways to feel like they’ve distinguished themselves. And for me, since running Surf City provided a nice reason for an annual visit home I returned year after year. Sometimes I ran the full Marathon in Surf City four times (2010, 2011, 2012, 2016), and the Half Marathon five times (2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018).
2016 Carbo Loading Dinner
Over the years, a number of traditions have developed around this annual race, along with many special memories. Being a visit home, meant it was also an opportunity to visit with old friends, and for years a collection of my closest would always join me for a carbo-loading meal at The Olde Spaghetti Factory in Newport Beach, a favorite restaurant of mine since childhood. I’ve also enjoyed great fan support, from my folks, but also from one of my closest friends since childhood, who would come out at both the start and finish to cheer me on and run the last couple hundred yards to the finish with me. I love that.
Sadly, this year my streak has ended. I have plans to run Ragnar So Cal in April, another event that has long been on my radar. And it just wasn’t in the books to make back to back trips for two races, and so, regretfully, I did not run Surf City this year, which would have been my 10th in a row. I’ve heard that I picked the right year to miss due to cold and rainy weather. But I know I’ll be back, and I’ll again be a Legacy Club Member, and next I’ll probably pursue that Beach Cities Challenge Medal as well!
On Christmas Day 2018, I learned the terrible news that a friend and professional colleague of mine passed away four months earlier. During my eight years as a staffer in the United States Senate, Jeff was my closest colleague and friend. But I left the Hill in 2000, and Jeff did as well a few years later, moving to Florida. And so for years our interactions were reduced to their lowest common denominator of annual birthday greetings on Facebook. So my sadness at Jeff’s passing is compounded by my regret of having mostly lost contact.
Seeking to do something meaningful in his memory, and true to his very unique character, a fellow former colleague and I considered a few options, but then he nailed it with a four-letter type reply… SETI. If you knew Jeff, then you’ll likely be quick to understand and agree. But if you didn’t, then let me share this about Jeff;
If you work on Capitol Hill, your access to information is greater because of Jeff.
If you work in digital advocacy, your tools, emails, petitions, websites, streaming media, and sharing were innovated by Jeff.
If you sometimes see only clowns to your left, and jokers to your right, but bemusedly press on in the search for intelligence on earth, Jeff was stuck there in the middle with you and could laugh about it.
And if you believe in the power of technology to help boost that intelligence, to better ourselves as individuals and for all humanity, and if you hold out hope that there IS intelligence to be found in the universe, then you share a core conviction with Jeff that drove his work day to day.
So I invite you to join me in making a small contribution to a worthy cause in Jeff’s memory. Were he here Jeff would demur the effort. But he’s not, and it’s for us that we do this in his memory. And I know that Jeff would appreciate that whatever modest amount we might raise, is still more than nothing, and that is something. Thank you.
Another reviewer already captured my initial reaction to this book perfectly by stating, “If one has fallen asleep in 2015 and woke up in 2019 and did not know what has happened in the past three years, this would be the perfect book to read.”
I have been a voracious consumer of Trump-era books this last year. Some are more substantive than others, some are more memoirs with a dash of Trump, some try to dissect how we got where we are. It’s probably not a healthy habit, to constantly delve into the depths of our country’s current crisis and our democracy at risk. I need to mix in some more escapist reading, some more fiction to provide a needed escape.
But like the other reviewer said, if I were to recommend just ONE book to someone who wanted to gain a big picture understanding about the Trump campaign and presidency so far, and exactly how Russia successfully attacked our Democracy, then this is the one book I would recommend. Written by a Washington Post reporter who wrote many of these stories when they first broke in the news, this book allows him to now weave them altogether, layering on still more information revealed since they were originally reported. It’s a fast and unnerving read.
And of course, this story’s far from over. I’m writing this review two days before the 2018 mid-term elections, one in which ALL agree is a real referendum on Trump, regardless of the fact that he’s not himself on the ballot. Will voters endorse his lies and hate mongering? Or will they instead vote for a Congress that will serve as a check on Trump? Will there be any indication that Russia has again attacked our elections, and cast doubt on any of the results? And with the election over, what will come next from the Mueller probe? So yes, read The Apprentice to refresh your memory and strengthen your grasp on recent events, then pay close attention every day to the news, because the first draft of the sequel is being written every day.
Along with lawyers, and used car salesmen, among the most maligned professions has to include a hugely ranging swath of work done by those who can generically be described as a ‘government worker’. They are an easy target, often taking shots not just from the public they serve, who too often have little understanding what they do. But also from a newly elected new boss, a politician replacing the old boss.
Ronald Reagan joked in 1986, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Now President Trump almost daily attacks against his imagined ‘Deep State’ and his own Justice Department and the FBI.
And it’s in that context that I found The Fifth Risk to be at the same time uplifting and distressing.
The book is tremendously uplifting through the stories it shares from a wide variety of ‘government workers’ who work to “save the citizens from the things that might kill them”, such as eating unsafe food, or stepping out into the path of a tornado. People who use science, and data, and expertise for the benefit of all.
And the book is terribly distressing as it recounts the initial unpreparedness, disinterest, and then selfish interest with which these vital government roles have been handled, or mis-handled by the Trump administration.
Those government workers, they work for us, paid for by us. The results of their work, be it weather forecasts, public health and safety data, a piece of chicken that’s safe to eat, or a dose of medicine safe to use, that’s our too.
Until the new bosses take it away to serve a political goal or for financial benefit. Honestly, do we all REALLY need access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions? Former Congressman and Trump’s pick to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Mike Mulvaney doesn’t think you do, and wants to take it down. One example of many of public data that has been removed from public access or is similarly threatened.
“There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.”
This was a very fast, engaging, and informative read for me, and I recommend it to all. And once you have, thank a government worker for what they do. They deserve it.
