Hacking Democracy
Our society is been altered in a subtle yet fundamental way with the advent of social media, and we aren’t taking it seriously enough. There is a dialectic tension inherent to the question of freedom vs security, a tension Cliff Stoll wrestled with when he became an “accidental” network security expert (cataloged in his book, The Cuckoo’s Egg). Despite coming from a self proclaimed “leftest hippy” culture, he discovers the unfortunate fact that humans as a whole easily and often abuse the trust of others for their own benefit. If it hasn’t happened yet, its only a matter of scale and time. Cliff’s experience with the formative years of cyber security, especially that tension, parallels our current societal adventure with social media surprisingly well.
The major obstacle Cliff faced was not actually a hacker: It was the total lack of awareness or concern from those with the power to help remedy the technological circumstances that allowed him to have a hacker problem in the first place. If all he cared about was securing his systems, he could have easily closed his own doors by patching the vulnerabilities that let the hacker in… or so he thought. Had Cliff not become increasingly determined to catch the hacker rather than just keep him out, he would not have realized he could not have kept the hacker out at all, not in the moment of his greatest ignorance and certainly not in the future. Cliff was ignorant of the hacker’s full, evolving toolbox and would have remained so had he not decided to take it upon himself to catch the hacker.
The primary woah of social media can be summarized as “societal hacking”: Clever misinformation/propaganda machines spew out ideas, attitudes, and narratives that incidentally, or intentionally, exacerbate ideological division. Its not a new problem, but the reach, scale, and ease of it is certainly novel. Overwhelmingly, we are discovering that those with the power to address it are either unaware, unconcerned, or actively making it worse, ignorantly or otherwise. Worse yet, society as a whole fits the same description. Social media has implications that span the breadth and depth of how modern society functions, reaching so deep as to threaten freedom of speech and societal security all in the same breath. It is not merely a question of the rights of private companies that own the platform, nor of the citizens that use them; it is a question of democracy vs human nature. We can and should use technology to reveal the source and extent of such “hacks”, but the actual solution lies in human behavior. Cliff didn’t stop hackers, even if he caught his personal hacker. We likely can’t stop misinformation or tribalism. But at the very least, we can take pains to not be ignorant. We must discover and reduce societal hacking, and, most importantly, present efforts, methodologies, and motivations of such hackers to individuals so they can act for themselves on (hopefully) correct information.
