A strange convergence of events led to last night’s dinner, and I’ve just gotta share about it.
Months ago, the Washington Post decided against endorsing a candidate in our Presidential Election, a move that many saw as a cowardly move by the Post’s gazillionaire owner Jeff Bezos being more interested in preemptorily sucking up to a potential President Trump, than in showing a bit of journalistic integrity in picking sides between a well qualified candidate and an existential threat to our very Democracy. More than 250,000 Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in less than a week, and more followed (myself, a 35+ year Post subscriber, included).
Well, Trump did win the election, and he quickly made government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs a target of his hate, laying evidence-less blame on DEI programs for just about everything, including tragic airplane crashes.
In a shameful display, many federal agencies and corporations were quick to obey, and quickly fell into goose-step behind the President’s hate. And against that background, those with the courage to resist are noteworthy. One such organization was the giant shopping club Costco, whose board of directors and shareholders overwhelmingly beat back any notion of undoing their DEI efforts.
It’s been awhile since we were Costco members. When we have a full house of kids and a chest freezer in the basement, family trips to Costco to buy bulk sized portions of family favorites was a no brainer. But those days are long passed, and as an empty nested household of two, we let our Costco membership lapse without much notice. But recently my wife had again become Costco-curious, mostly on the endorsement of friends and family who use their memberships well, and also the benefits of larger non-grocery offerings such as appliances or furniture.
My turn away from the Washington Post has started new habits in news gathering, turning to AP, Apple News, Google News, and other starting points. And it has also helped balance my desire to both stay informed, while also protecting my mental health by trying not to wallow too deeply in our current national nightmare.
Days ago Apple News served me up an article that caused no stress about the fate of our nation, and caught my attention. From a publication called Chowhound, the article was about 15 Frozen Pepperoni Pizzas, Ranked Worst To Best. I read with mild interest. Pepperoni IS the best pizza. Why do you think the pizza emoji is a slice of pepperoni? Think about it! 🍕
Of the 15 rated pizzas, I was only familiar with three of them; #9 Screamin’ Sicilian, #8 Tombstone, and the #2 ranked frozen pizza DiGiorno. But the #1 ranked frozen pepperoni pizza was one I was not familiar with from Motor City Pizza Co. I had no notion at this point, that I’d be meeting this top ranked frozen pepperoni pizza sooner than I could have imagined. Because just two days after the pizza article was published, my wife and I returned to Costco and reupped our long dormant membership.
We didn’t go there for the pizza. We went there for some savings, and maybe there will be other sorts of purchases in our future, we’ll see. And we went there for the DEI, because businesses that do the right thing in the face of hate are too rare and deserve our support. But when I spotted a Motor City Pizza box in another shopper’s cart, the recently read article returned with a rush, and a clarity that told me that it had earned some serious praise. So we bought a two pack.
I made one that night, and guess what? It was LEGIT! 🍕
The title of this blog post that you’ve only just begun to read is very misleading. Because I didn’t really ‘meet’ President Jimmy Carter, like to have even a brief conversation with any level of meaningfulness. I stood in a receiving line to shake his hand, twice, and the resulting photo tells the story.
It was 1989, and I was an ‘Account Coordinator’ for the DC public affairs firm that represented the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And despite my low level status, I was even a ‘registered foreign agent’ in this role (which never really lived up to being as cool as it sounded). Anyway, the Saudis had a cultural exhibition traveling around the US, drumming up some positive vibes (which proved to be well timed given Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait the following year), and this exhibition visited Washington, DC, Atlanta, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. And despite being a junior nobody whose role was to find venues for the troupe of Saudi folkloric dancers to visit, it was my first real experience with business travel and related gala events.
When our tour reached its second stop, Atlanta, the gala opening demonstrated the Saudi’s ability to bring out political VIP’s, and so President Jimmy Carter was their trophy guest at opening night. I walked through the receiving line and shook his hand, and that was that.
Among our team was a former White House photographer, Karl, an amazing guy who had great stories, and he asked me, “Have you been through the receiving line? I’ll get your picture.” I let him know that I had already had my handshake, and so, photo op missed. And he said, “It’s not a long line, go again, and look at the camera!”.
So I got back in the line, just moments after already having been through it. And I shook President Carter’s hand, again. And I remembered to look at the camera. He didn’t. He looked at me like he was thinking, ‘weren’t YOU just here?’
I’m glad to have ‘met’ him, twice kinda. I learned that ‘grip and grins’ are better when you’re looking at the person whose hand you’re shaking. But from Jimmy, I have also learned from his example of the service he provided to America, and to the world, long after his presidency. Thank you President Carter, and may you rest in peace.
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.
