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Writing in @techreview, @samuelwoolley and Jacob Gursky take a deep dive into the data-gathering in the apps from the Trump and Biden campaigns. It's quite a study in contrasts!
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/21/1004228/trumps-data-hungry-invasive-app-is-a-voter-surveillance-tool-of-extraordinary-scope/
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https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/21/1004228/trumps-data-hungry-invasive-app-is-a-voter-surveillance-tool-of-extraordinary-scope/
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The Trump campaign is like Cambridge Analytica Mark II: invasive even by the standards of 2020, with Bluetooth access so your movements can be tracked by sleazy data-brokers, as well as endless-scroll propaganda channels to feed white nationalists' grievance complexes.
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It's a feature-for-feature clone of the app used by Indian PM Modi, another authoritarian strongman with serious genocidal ambitions, and Modi has used the app to create regional propaganda clubs and feed them everything they need to push his narrative, to the brink of war.
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By contrast, Biden's app is built around exploring your social graph and connecting you to people you have a genuine personal connection with in order to have a meaningful political conversations.
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It's an evolution of the grassroots organizing tactics that the Obama campaign used to great effect in 2008 and especially in 2012.
But when I read about the tactics in use, I have another touchpoint.
Back in 2010, I was working on Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother.
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But when I read about the tactics in use, I have another touchpoint.
Back in 2010, I was working on Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother.
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I knew I wanted the plot to turn on a next-generation, networked election campaign, but I was stumped for how that would work.
For weeks, I interviewed top electoral strategists, people who'd been praised as high-tech svengalis for the campaigns they'd run.
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For weeks, I interviewed top electoral strategists, people who'd been praised as high-tech svengalis for the campaigns they'd run.
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I'd call them and say, "OK, pretend you've got a candidate who'd do anything you asked, and the smartest technologists in the world working for you. What would you build?"
The responses were so dull, the thrice-brewed teabags left over from the Dean campaign.
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The responses were so dull, the thrice-brewed teabags left over from the Dean campaign.
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Then, on a lark, I asked @aaronsw what to do. I sent him a brief email outlining the challenge. A few hours later, he sent me a shovel-ready, complete plan - a plan that encompasses everything Obama did in 2012, and everything Biden is doing in 2020, and then some.
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I basically just pasted that passage into the book. I also included it in my obit for Aaron when he killed himself in 2013, two weeks before the book came out. I toured that book across the USA, and everywhere I went, I talked about Aaron.
https://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
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https://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
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We're reissuing Homeland this summer, in a new omnibus edition with Little Brother, with an intro by @snowden, who also cites Aaron as an inspiration, and who risked his life to reveal the connection between commercial and state surveillance.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583
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https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583
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We're including the afterword Aaron wrote for the book, too.
Meanwhile, I see his fingerprints all over the things that give me hope in 2020. The Trump and Biden apps represent a stark contrast in approaches - one that sees supporters as marks, and the other as supporters.
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Meanwhile, I see his fingerprints all over the things that give me hope in 2020. The Trump and Biden apps represent a stark contrast in approaches - one that sees supporters as marks, and the other as supporters.
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Aaron's plan would create a tireless, committed army of supporters that would help their candidate govern: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."
When Obama took office in 2012 he shut down his network, not willing to govern ahead of an activist rabble.
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When Obama took office in 2012 he shut down his network, not willing to govern ahead of an activist rabble.
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Meanwhile, the Tea Party held the TGOP's feet to the fire for four years, not letting them give a nanometer. They made Obama's life hell, and blocked virtually all of his agenda.
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The GOP in Congress and the Senate make the TGOP look reasonable by comparison. They're fucking orcs. If Biden wins in November, his only hope of governing is that activist rabble.
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So for me, as interesting as the contrast in surveillance approaches is, the real action is going to be in what happens afterward: will Biden shut down his app and tell his activists to stand down? Or will he govern with the activist rabble holding his feet to the fire?
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