[Plura-list] Fraud-resistant election-tech; Big Tech's secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects; Podcasting How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

[Cory Doctorow]

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Tomorrow night, I'm giving a workshop in collaboration with Phoenix's
Changing Hands bookstore: "All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing":

https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

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Today's links

* Fraud-resistant election-tech: A "transparent" ballot-marking device.

* Big Tech's secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects: Mr
Zuckerberg, tear down that wall.

* Podcasting How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism: Part 2.

* This day in history: 2011, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🥶 Fraud-resistant election-tech

Despite the (ill-informed) assurances of people who should know better,
there is no way to run a secret, anonymous, secure ballot over the
internet. It's a science fantasy, like faster-than-light drives or time
machines. It's a thought experiment, not a plan.

Elections are actually easy: paper ballots, hand-marked and hand counted
in sight of scrutineers from opposing parties. But thanks to a highly
consolidated vote-tech sector with plenty of money to spend, Americans
have been convinced that this can't work for America.

It's a bizarre and innumerate proposition: America has more people, so
it will have more ballots, so it can't count them by hand.

Uh, folks?

Canada and the UK don't consolidate all their ballots to a single
counting-house where, like, eight people tally the nation's votes.

The votes are counted at the polling place. America has more polling
places than Canada, but there's no reason it can't have the same ratio
of polling places - and ballot counters - to voters as Canada does. To a
first approximation, that's already true.

The American concern for electoral fraud is forever in tension with the
American exceptionalist insistence on using dumpster-fire vote-tech sold
by litigious grifters who sue the critics who blow the whistle on their
awful security.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#ess

Thus it is that, year after year, security researchers - like the merry
crew at Defcon's annual Voting Village - publish reports of jaw-dropping
incompetence in vote-tech systems, each revealing how little progress
has been made since the last.

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf

To the extent that anyone serious about this stuff believes in electoral
automation, the one technology they're willing to admit might someday be
made secure is the "ballot marking device," a machine that fills in your
ballot in a way that facilitates automatic counting.

But BMDs are still hugely controversial: even if you solve the problem
of making sure that the machine-readable part and the human-readable
part say the same thing (a Very Big Problem), there's a stubbornly
intractable problem lurking right behind it: human factors.

In real-world situations and under laboratory conditions, people just
don't carefully check their ballots, and the best interventions we have
to encourage ballot-checking don't perform very well.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9152705

Now, an innovative BMD design from Professor Juan Gilbert of the
University of Florida demonstrates a very clever technique and promising
approach for increasing the likelihood that a voter will notice if their
ballot is mis-marked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_G8bdlXBAc

The Transparent Voting Machine is a clear plastic box that shows you
your ballot immediately after it's marked, and requires you to touch the
spot directly over the place where your selection appears. Intuitively,
this sounds like it should work, and experimentally, it does.

In his seminar presentation to Princeton's Center for Information
Technology Policy, Gilbert discusses his user studies, where he was able
to substantially increase the likelihood that voters would both detect
and report irregularities in their ballots.

https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/CITP+SeminarA+Juan+Gilbert+%E2%80%93+Can+Voters+Detect+Ballot+Manipulations+with+a+Transparent+Voting+MachineF/1_67s0hsf9

In his writeup of the seminar, Princeton's Andrew Appel does the math on
these studies and concludes that with Gilbert's technology, ballot
mismarking would be detected if it occurred above the 0.5% mark: a major
improvement over existing designs.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/04/12/juan-gilberts-transparent-bmd/

But Appel also follows up with some important caveats: about the
physical security of a BMD, the sociology of pollworkers, and what a
secretary of state should do if the winning margin is within 0.5%.

BMDs aren't useless. They can be a boon to accessibility, transcending
barriers of disability and language fluency. But they're incredibly hard
to get right, and the industry that produces, sells and services them is
characterized by incompetence and bullying.

America loves vote-tech, but vote-tech is pretty iffy on American
democracy. Gilbert's design is incredibly clever and vastly superior to
the existing technologies, and if it were adopted, it would be
preferable to everything in use today.

That is an admittedly low bar. And meanwhile, people all over the world
continue to mark their paper ballots with golf pencils and put them in
boxes so that the nice poll-workers can count them by hand later that day.

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🥶 Big Tech's secret weapon is switching costs, not network effects

Today in Wired UK, my op-ed: "Why it’s easier to move country than
switch social media" - an argument that the real power of social media
comes from switching costs, not network effects.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility

Debates over market concentration in social media lean heavily on
"network effects," the idea that social media services increase in value
as their user-base grows, because the more users they have, the more
likely it is that the people you want to talk to have accounts.

But I argue that this misunderstands the technical underpinnings of
networked computers - specifically, the role that interoperability plays.

The problem with a focus on network effects is its fatalism: once a
system is large enough, it attracts users, and the more users it has,
the more users it attracts.

A critique that focuses on network effects concludes the race is for
permanent, winner-take-all dominance.

But once you throw interoperability into the mix, the race changes. An
interoperable social media ecosystem doesn't just neutralize network
effects, it reverses them.

If someone offers a Facebook competitor that lets you talk to Facebook
users, that also doesn't spy on you, then Facebook isn't a walled garden
anymore, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet for competitors who can offer
better-than-FB to every FB user.

We can get that interop in lots of ways. A social media platform might
offer it on its own (as Twitter has promised to, with Project Blue Sky);
or a government might mandate interop (as is under discussion in the UK,
US, and EU).

But there's a third way: Competitive Compatibility, AKA Adversarial
Interoperability: that's when new services plug into the existing ones
without their permission or even against their wishes, using bots,
scraping, reverse-engineering, etc.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

There's a comcom story in the history of every tech giant - it's how
Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc attained scale in markets dominated by
incumbent large firms - and the only reason comcom has fallen by the
wayside is that the big tech firms have kicked the ladder away.

When you add comcom to the interoperability mix, the whole equilibrium
shifts. History shows us that when governments order companies to open
their systems, they can subvert these order, redesigning them so the
mandated interfaces cease to connect to the parts that matter.

Companies do this because government mandates are slow and complex and
can be undermined with bad-faith arguments and stalling tactics. But
with comcom in the mix, there is an immediate and (from the cheater's
perspective) undesirable response to shenanigans.

With comcom in the mix, any new service whose service is nerfed by a
tech giant that screws with its mandatory interfaces can immediately
switch to bots, scraping and reverse-engineering - replacing the managed
interface with a chaotic guerrilla war.

This is the kind of fight that users hate, and will blame the big
companies for, as they are challenged to prove they aren't bots, have
their usage mistaken for scraping, and lose contact with their
off-service friends.

With comcom, shenanigans drives users off the service, rather than
locking them in.

If your analysis of Big Tech starts and ends with network effects, the
game is already lost. All we can do is hope that decades of antitrust
litigation will result in breakups...eventually.

My grandmother fled the USSR after WWII, and lost contact with her
entire family. She didn't even know if her parents and brother in
Leningrad had survived for years. She abandoned everything she owned and
nearly everyone she loved, forever.

Her family stayed behind because of switching costs - not just the
logistical difficulties of obtaining permission to leave and sponsorship
abroad, but the cost of leaving behind everything and everyone.

The architects of the Berlin Wall claimed that it wasn't keeping East
Germans *in*, they claimed it was keeping bad guys *out* of the DDR.

Today, Zuck claims we can't interoperate with Facebook is to keep
privacy-violators and other rule-breakers *out* - not to keep his users
*in*.

Meanwhile, I've emigrated from Toronto to San Francisco to London to Los
Angeles. I kept my stuff. I kept my family. I can move back if I change
my mind. Low switching-costs enabled those moves.

Thinking about Big Tech in terms of network effects leads to despair.
Thinking about interop and switching costs shows the way out.

Mr Zuckerberg, tear down that wall.


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🥶 Podcasting How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

This week on my podcast, the second part of a five (?) part serialized
reading of my 2020 One Zero book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM,
a book arguing that monopoly – not AI-based brainwashing – is the real
way that tech controls our behavior.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

The book is available in paperback:

https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907

and DRM-free ebook :

https://sowl.co/bm2F7c

and my local bookseller, Dark Delicacies, has signed stock that I'll
drop by and personalize for you!

https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/12/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-02/

And here's part one:

https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/04/05/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-01/

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet
Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_384/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_384_-_How_To_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism_02.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🥶 This day in history

#10yrsago New Zealand to sneak in Internet disconnection copyright law
with Christchurch quake emergency legislation
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/4882838/Law-to-fight-internet-piracy-passed

#5yrsago Walmart heiress donated $378,400 to Hillary Clinton campaign
and PACs
https://web.archive.org/web/20160414155119/https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/alice-walton-donated-353400-clintons-victory-fund/

#5yrsago Goldman Sachs really only has to pay half of its settlement for
world-destroying financial fraud
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/business/dealbook/goldman-sachs-to-pay-5-1-billion-in-mortgage-settlement.html

#1yrago AMC is going bankrupt
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/12/mammon-worshippers/#silver-lake-partners

#1yrago Foxconn's potemkin "Innovation Centers"
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/12/mammon-worshippers/#scott-at-at-walker

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🥶 Colophon

Currently writing:

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1312 words (58411 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion
Guy" DeVilla

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