Posted by
Prof David West on
Feb 09, 2020; 12:45pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Curmudgeons-Unite-tp7594434p7594454.html
Jon,
The "artifact" — a couple of hundred lines of code executing on a smartphone — can be engineered. No question.
The "app" however is the artifact deployed in a context; a context that includes human beings.
The app+context is a complex system and you cannot "engineer" that system. You will not be able to anticipate all, or even most, of the ways that things will go wrong once your quality engineered artifact is deployed. You will not be able to anticipate and account for how something as simple as a "Facebook-like button" will be perceived by different users of the app, many of whom have never seen Facebook or its buttons.
Moreover, since you are introducing your artifact into a complex system, it will change the system. For example: the app requires you to enter a number in a field. A paper form requires you to enter a number in a field. Same thing —right? No!
Paper provides all kinds of affordances that the app will not: erasures, modifications with initials, etc. You cannot know what many of these affordances are and you certainly cannot engineer them into your artifact.
Even more interesting and perplexing, the app embodied a system change that was never evaluated: how voters will behave when they know that their sequence of actions are being reported, not just their final act. Will the behavior change" Yes! Did Shadow have any concept of how or why, or did the DNC when it created the specs for the app? No!
And did the design of the app take into account intentional bad actors? Sure, it had two-factor authentication (which more than half the users did not understand how to make work), but would the same trolls that jammed the phone lines to headquarters have affect the ability of the app to submit results? Probably not literally, but a DNS attack probably would have; not to mention all kinds of spoofing possibilities.)
Arguing that a "critical application voting app belongs to the class of impossible tasks" the way that I am supports the heart, I think, of your concern about the rhetoric of failure, but at a different level.
Rhetoric about a data breach at Target does not legitimize Target — it legitimizes the institution of "credit" and institutions like credit reporting agencies. Beyond that, the institution of social security numbers.
Rhetoric about Boeing 737 legitimizes, not an institution but a conviction — that artificial intelligence is superior to human, that autopilots are more trustworthy than human pilots.
I completely agree with you that, as a culture and society, we are totally in thrall, Stockholm Syndrome-like, to the "newly minted" and the impossibility of doing anything different.
I suspect that my perspective with regard the rhetoric, its use, and its targets are far more expansive that the concern you have articulated in this instance.
davew
On Sun, Feb 9, 2020, at 12:52 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
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
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