Date: Wed, 8 Jun 94 14:31:39 PDT
From: RISKS Forum <risks@csl.sri.com>

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Wednesday 8 June 1994  Volume 16 : Issue 12

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Date: Mon, 6 Jun 1994 18:09:55 -0700
From: Phil Agre <pagre@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Campaigns and Elections

I encourage everyone to have a look at an issue of the magazine "Campaigns
and Elections".  It's a monthly, sold at many newsstands (in the US anyway),
for the people who run political campaigns.  Every issue includes numerous
references to the growing role of computers in campaigning.  Now I'm sure that
this trend has its good sides and its neutral sides and its complicated sides.
But inside the back cover of the May 1994 issue is an advertisement from a
political software company whose headline is "The age of individual targeting
is upon us".  In other words, everyone gets their own personalized direct-mail
pitch, based on a detailed database of information relevant to your likely
political leanings.  One use of such databases is basic demographics for
choosing issues to emphasize; another is deciding who should be approached
personally and urged to vote.

But a scarier use of such databases, not mentioned in the ad, is the tailoring
of messages to individual voters.  For example, a group of land developers
in San Diego is promoting an initiative for tomorrow's primary election
that would open up the last parcel of wild land in San Diego to development.
Their campaign has been incredibly sophisticated, including numerous tactics
that aren't relevant here.  The part that *is* relevant here is a letter
I received over the weekend encouraging me to vote Yes on the initiative.
Along with the letter were two inserts containing endorsements from the leader
of the local AFL-CIO and a Hispanic city council member from another district.
Did the guy around the corner with the "Rush is Right" bumper sticker get the
same inserts?  He didn't have to, if the developers had access to a suitably
"enriched" database.  In the future you won't even have to bother putting
together a coherent coalition; just find out what everybody's hot issues are
and make them all whatever promises you need to make, one by one, the Saturday
before the election, so nobody has time to compare notes.

Campaigns and Elections, 1511 K St NW #1020, Washington DC 20005, USA.
Subscriptions $30/year in the US, write for prices elsewhere.

Phil Agre, UCSD

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 16.12
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Date: Wed, 13 Jul 94 10:24:54 PDT
From: RISKS Forum <risks@csl.sri.com>
Subject: RISKS DIGEST 16.23

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Weds 13 July 1994  Volume 16 : Issue 23

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Date: Fri, 8 Jul 1994 15:51:25 -0700
From: Phil Agre <pagre@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Promises and "Scary"

In RISKS-16.21, Peter Denning <pjd@cne.gmu.edu> asks why I find it scary
that politicians might use individually targeted communications to make
personalized promises based on information from demographic databases.
He considers that contradictory promises would be exposed through public
bulletin boards.  This is conceivable, but it's not something I'd want to bet
the future of democracy on.  Nobody would be stupid enough to make clearly
contradictory promises to different people.  Rather, extrapolating some
current practices, they would find out the "hot button" themes for particular
segments of the electorate and tailor strongly worded but vague statements for
each group, based on its particular themes.

(Right now the most common way to find out the "hot button" themes is to call
people on the phone and ask them under the guise of poll-taking.  If someone
doesn't have any buttons you can press, you simply say "thank you" and leave
them out of your get-out-the-vote plans.  The expense of this method limits
its application, but once the data collected this way is pooled, stored, and
merged with other available databases, the costs should come way down.)

When analyzing the pathologies of electoral systems, I think it's a big
mistake to focus on "politicians".  It's a system with a logic, and changing
the faces won't change the logic.  Quite the contrary, term limits (which PD
says he supports) will intensify the role of money and campaign experts, since
candidates will be even more unknown to voters on average than before.  (For
those outside the US, the US is currently experiencing a wave of plebiscites,
promoted by a far right-wing organization, limiting political candidates to
one or two terms of office.)

The computer-related Risk here pertains to the construction of the sphere
of public debate.  When public debate is conducted through a common medium,
such as the newspaper, there exists at least a *chance* that public decisions
that affect everyone equally will be made by the citizenry reasoning together
as a group.  But when every campaign has a separate channel to every voter,
the whole notion of a public goes out the window, replaced by fragmentary
micropublics who know they're being manipulated but cannot do anything about
it without investing enormous effort in organizing.  If computer networks
facilitate that organizing then that's terrific, but first we need to achieve
something much more like universal access to them.

Phil Agre, UCSD

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 16.23
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