<nettime> No evidence of digital wrong-doing...

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

On 28 Jan 2019, at 06:15, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Heiko's remarks completely bypasses the fact (sorry, it's a fact) that the British 'Brexit' referendum was a clusterfaktap of major magnitude (& probably 'deliberate by default') in terms of how a real, valid referendum should be prepared and organised, even if you don't have the Swiss experience in running one.

I don't participate in BREXIT conversations since I find the whole
concept illigitimate. The margin of results is so thin that it
doesn't matter how few or many people got manipulated into voting
themselves into havoc - the winning side only won by manipulation
and denying that is absurd. To me it is surreal that so many people
are going forward like this BREXIT thing should even be taken
seriously - especially the politicians that accept fraud as fact.

But, hey, Facebook says there is no evidence for any manipulation
having been successful... we should believe them, they must be the
ones who know!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/21/no-evidence-brexit-influenced-cambridge-analytica-scandal-facebook/

But worse than that, even the Information Commissioner’s Office
(ICO) of UK finds that there is no evidence of anything...

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/11/06/no-evidence-two-leave-campaigns-worked-cambridge-analytica-data/

Which brings me back to the reason I in 2013, after Snowden, ins-
tinctively thought the only way to stop the net from being a platform
for evil action is to make wrongdoing technically impossible because
we will always be unable to find culprits if DIGITAL EVIDENCE is
itself just digital data that anyone can manipulate and even if it
hasn't been tampered with, no-one can prove that it is pristine.

So back then I thought everybody would quickly understand this
problem and not come up with GDPR-like legislation, instead we are
accepting the outcome of absurd elections and referenda, even after
brave journalists have uncovered how the whole process works.

If GDPR is making Google pay back some peanuts that's just because
these Silicon Valley giants are so profoundly detached from the
reality of their wrongdoing that they aren't making enough effort
to hide their traces.. but they certainly will in future.
And no fines are expensive enough to bring us back democracy.

Can somebody please tell the politicians that the 'no evidence'
logic is fallacious in the digital context?


On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 09:35:35AM +0000, David Garcia wrote:
> Brilliant as O’tool’s artcle is, he and other commentators need to pay more attention to is the importance 
> to the evolution of the role of expert knowledge (ethics,medical, legal) played in the Irish forums. What is 
> vital to comprehend is that they were not brought in as regulators. Nor as the voice of power and authority. 
> They were a resource that citizens could draw on in the prcess of coming to their conclusions. We could look 
> on this as the beginings of an important broadly based move towards a more dynamic, experimental and less 
> defferntial relationship not only between experts and citizens. It could articulate a new relationship 
> between citizens, the unelected regime of regulation (expertocracy), and the political class and the judiciary. 
> This is the direction in which we must travel to take us beyond te epistemic crisis of the cybernetic era.

Even better when expert knowledge is in check by liquid
democracy rather than size-limited citizen assemblies.
We actually have a new technology that solves this
challenge but it is still being used too rarely.


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