Sorry, Republicans Rule the Internet
Article by Kara Swisher in "The New York Times":
Is there an app for that?
Apparently
not for the Iowa Democratic caucuses, which is now red-faced over what
appears to be an inept rollout of new technology to help precincts
report the results of the voting on Monday.
Who
won? Who knows? Which is not exactly how the Democrats want to start
off these critical primaries. This looks more like my octogenarian mom
when her New York Post app does not load correctly than a political
party leaning into the future.
This
reminds me of another Democratic tech snafu: the debut of the
glitch-laden and over-budget Obamacare website, technically called
HealthCare.gov, in 2013. A nonpartisan report from the Government
Accountability Office later concluded that there was a lack of
“effective planning and oversight practices” in the development of the
site.
The
primary season is a much larger beast, made more complex by the
hyperpartisan political landscape, the breathless media environment in
which cable TV hosts vamp for hours and, most of all, by social media,
which on Monday immediately stirred itself into a frenzy.
There
was the hashtag #MayorCheat, alleging links between Pete Buttigieg and
the company that built the app for the caucuses, Shadow — Could it have a
worse name? No, it could not! — and also its funder, a Democratic
digital strategy operation called Acronym.
There
were the twins of conspiracy mongering — also known as the Trump sons,
Eric and Don Jr. — along with the Trump campaign head Brad Parscale
shoving out a series of unsubstantiated rumors about rigged results. And
bots, so many bots, making it all worse by turning the social media
engagement into enragement. And, certainly, there was also the
possibility of hacking and possible foreign influence that hangs over
our elections like a Putin stink bomb.
Above
all, though, it appears that rank tech incompetence is at the bottom of
the Iowa debacle; I have seen enough Silicon Valley apps do similar
belly flops to feel confident that’s what happened on Monday. As the
Democrats sort out the problems — from bad mobile connectivity to an app
that gives beta testing a bad name, to obvious human error caused by
the confusion of using a new system — such ineptitude is not a good look
for the party.
As the writer Maura
Quint noted on Twitter: “Feels like you can ask people to trust the
process or you can name your election companies Acronym and Shadow like
they’re rival gangs of supervillains in a movie where Spiderman teams up
with G.I. Joe to save Manhattan, but you can’t do both.”
This
gets to the heart of a persistent myth: that the Democrats are the
party of the internet generation, intuitively embracing the whole
app-tastic, A.I.-centered, who’s-got-the-V.R.-headset future better than
the Republicans. That fallacy was fueled, in part, by the use of
digital tools by Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 and the image of him as
tech-forward, a guy who hung out with Silicon Valley leaders like the
former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
The
truth is that Mr. Obama was only sort of techie. More important, his
administration did not challenge the industry in any significant way. In
the Obama years, Silicon Valley consolidated its influence and
centralized its power without oversight. In addition, the idea took hold
that the tech industry was full of liberals, when in fact it is more
libertarian-lite with a strong proclivity for an unusual combination of
live-and-let-live social mores and “don’t regulate my innovation or tax
me” business attitude.
In fact, from
the start of the internet age in the 1990s, the right has been more
clever than its rivals in exploiting ever-morphing tech to influence
vast numbers of people with targeted messages.
While
it’s hard to forget in the age of Fox News ubiquity, a couple of
decades ago most of the truly powerful media outlets were centrist (or
slightly left of center), and mass-media broadcast technology was not
readily available to the emerging conservative movement.
Thus,
these outsiders latched on to the web, which in many cases meant they
were among the first to effectively use highly targeted email and search
ads. Back in the early 2000s, people like the evangelical political
strategist Ralph Reed showed us what was coming: campaigns that are
fought and won online, and power shifting to those who know how to move
the tech levers.
Right now that’s
people like Mr. Parscale, whose tactic is to use the entire arsenal of
weapons that companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have provided
in the most creative and sometimes nefarious of ways. And, as loath as I
am to say this, why shouldn’t he create a raging digital fire of
confusion and propaganda and microtargeted lies and truths if no one is
making rules to stop him? It is not meant as a compliment, but right now
being the best tech arsonist is what rates.
Meanwhile,
as it all burns, the Democrats in Iowa are fiddling away on an app that
can’t tally what is a relatively simple set of data. Long ago, during a
debate about the Obamacare site mess and what it meant for eventual
online voting, I suggested to a panel of Washington power players that
maybe we get a start-up like Tinder to run the voting system, since it
did complex matching calculations in real time.
My
comment was greeted by looks of horror, with one panel member asking me
why our democracy should rely on dating app technology.
The answer was simple: because it works.
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