http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Curmudgeons-Unite-tp7594434p7594446.html
Dave,
While I agree that there are likely to be many systemic reasons
for this electoral failure, I am unwilling to go so far as to claim
that the design of a critical application voting app belongs to the
class of impossible tasks.
Maybe a little flippantly and without dragging this entire post
into design details, the voting app needs little more than a
Facebook like-button, a Redis server, authentication and
a light-weight rest api. If the idea were to be taken seriously,
such an app could be written starting now for an election in
four years. It could be tested and verified by a trusted agency,
like the NSA. The process of building a voting app could be
taken seriously and accomplished.
A pressing issue for me remains. There appears to be forming
a public rhetoric around failure. A rhetoric which can be
summarized as: failure legitimizes institutions. Through our
grieving and eulogizing over a data breach at Target corp,
we legitimize Target as a critical institution. After two
Boeing 737 jet crashes, the collective expressions of
helplessness and loss legitimize Boeing as a critical institution.
Now, and possibly most controversially, we have the failure
of electoral and democratic process. This possibly-emergent
coping strategy additionally appears to mirror strategies
With respect to these newly minted critical institutions,
the public participates in a type of Stockholm syndrome.
We continue to support and rely on them. We continue to
form rhetoric about the impossibility of doing otherwise,
rather than calling these institutions out for what they
are, namely failing to adequately serve their functions.
Jon
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
by Dr. Strangelove