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 > outlined by Baudrillard in his analysis of Watergate > <https://www.themantle.com/philosophy/why-jean-baudrillards-notes-watergate-matter-today>. > > 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 > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
