Slouching toward cyberocracy — #2:

The previous post was about surveillance capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff’s concept. Today’s post concerns surveillance electioneering. Yet, here too, the emphasis on surveillance isn’t quite enough, for far more than surveillance is going on.

In this article, NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall shows how “Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists: Left and right agree on one point. The president’s re-election campaign is way ahead online.”

The article is largely about “geofencing” — “a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area — a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town.”

But geofencing is “just one of the new tools of digital campaigning, a largely unregulated field of political combat in which voters have little or no idea of how they are being manipulated, in which traditional disclosure requirements are inoperative and key actors are anonymous. It is a weapon of choice. Once an area is geofenced, commercial data companies can acquire the mobile phone ID numbers of those within the boundary.”

Other new techniques in this field include “mass personalization, dark patterns, identity resolution technologies, dynamic prospecting, geotargeting strategies, location analytics, geo-behavioural segment, political data cloud, automatic content recognition, dynamic creative optimization” and micro-targeting.

The 2020 Trump campaign remains multiples ahead of the Democrat’s in grasping and applying these new technologies and techniques. Indeed, “Trump rallies are providing a gold mine of data for the 2020 election” according to manager Brad Parscale.

And the Trump campaign gains a further advantage from this asymmetry: “First, when Trump says something, Fox repeats it. When a Democrat says something, The New York Times and the rest of the MSM knock it down if it’s false or debatable.” Thus, “Trump benefits enormously because of the Right’s aligned network of media properties (i.e., Sinclair), Facebook properties, YouTube influencers and bots/sock puppets. This kind of amplification network barely exists for Democrats/progressives.”

Part of what alarms me here is that the powers on the Right are moving forward in these techniques in order to move our society backwards. At this point, I’m quite sure that a 2020 vote for Trump will prove to be a vote for increased cruelty and inequity, mostly by people who would not countenance cruelty and inequity in their personal lives.

SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/trump-digital-campaign-2020.html

 [Re-posted from my Facebook page posts a few weeks aago.]