MS-Democracy
20 years ago with the internet fully accelerating, anti-social media just on the horizon, and Microsoft licking their wounds as convicted monopolists, it would have been hard to imagine Microsoft today would be one of the dominant forces shaping the next generation of computing. However, if you had simply stepped back from the internet-hype, particularly the idea of it distributing power and empowering the individual, focusing instead on Microsoft's installed software base, both in the home and increasingly across the business sector, which the antitrust settlement did nothing to curtail, Microsoft's resurgence would be seen as inevitable.
A recent post on Microsoft's website titled, “Microsoft announces new steps to help protect elections” should be cause for alarm, though not for what the piece seeks to draw attention. It is written by Microsoft's President and it's Vice-President for, I kid you not, “Technology for Fundamental Rights.” The piece starts,
“Over the next 14 months, more than two billion people around the world will have the opportunity to vote in nationwide elections. From India to the European Union, to the United Kingdom and United States, the world’s democracies will be shaped by citizens exercising one of their most fundamental rights. But while voters exercise this right, another force is also at work to influence and possibly interfere with the outcomes of these consequential contests.”
It goes on, “In a new threat intelligence assessment published today by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center (MTAC), the next year may bring unprecedented challenges for the protection of elections.”
Microsoft has a threat analysis center releasing threat intelligence assessments! They ring an alarm bell for the possibility that “the world in 2024 may see multiple authoritarian nation states seek to interfere in electoral processes.” In response, they release Microsoft’s Election Protection Commitments “to stay ahead and respond to threats against voters, candidates, political campaigns, and election authorities will require a combination of steps, including a range of tools and tactics.”
By this point, the stomach turns violently. The greatest election threat is Microsoft and quite obviously the National Security State sticking their proverbial noses under the election tent. Microsoft is most concerned about AI, and yes with no irony in that the good people of Redmond initiated the recent AI boom with their billions invested in Open AI. It’s unclear in the thinking of Technology for Fundamental Rights whether AI is considered a risk, a threat or what, but in response, Microsoft is innovating a “watermark” to verify real content from artificial. You'd quickly think can't I just ask AI if it's AI generated content?
The more important question is, which the Threat Analysis Center doesn't address, why with AI will we really need elections? Aren't the algorithms going to give us the best of all possible worlds? After all, old MS Chairman Bill just recently gushed AI is “proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them.” I wonder who writes this stuff.
Don't worry, it gets worse.
“Fourth, we will use our voice as a company to support legislative and legal changes that will add to the protection of campaigns and electoral processes from deepfakes and other harmful uses of new technologies. We’re starting today by endorsing in the United States the bi-partisan bill “Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act” introduced by Senators Klobuchar, Collins, Hawley, and Coons.”
Phew, the only thing you could say worse than Tech running elections is Tech in alliance with DC knuckleheadism. Looking at this all from a constitutional perspective, leaving aside the 18th century constitution becomes a strait jacket for democracy in the 21st century, we are entering hyper and extra-constitutional times. These issues deal directly with the First Amendment and Article 1 Section 4, which gives the states the right to “prescribe” elections, though it does allow the Congress to “make or alter” such regulations. Outside some notable and correct exceptions, such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Federal government has shown republican good sense and great political taste to this point refrain from interfering with the states on elections. Today, DC is bereft of all taste.
The states decide the operations, the protection of elections, more importantly it is the counties that provide the infrastructure and the mechanics of elections. In practice, American elections are an amazingly distributed system. The responsibility for free and fair elections has never rested in DC, the state capitals, or even the county seat, but at the precinct level, the polling place itself — with the citizenry.
As elections and everything else become electronic, we watch once distributed power, and democracy only exits as distributed power, become increasingly centralized. One thing for certain, the constitution makes no mention of corporations “protecting elections,” nor as arbitrators determining speech.
The US has never had a Ministry of Information, a centralized inquisitional arbitrator of truth, such entities in themselves are anti-democratic. The First Amendment has nothing to do with the truth, but a freedom of process for all to determine truth. Beyond all dispute, history shows truth defined by powerful centralized agents is regularly no truth at all.
With no understanding of the politics of technology, we develop an increasingly undemocratic electronic information/communication infrastructure. With such undemocratic systems, whatever’s on top, well, it ain't going to be democratic. AI is another step in further centralizing the power of the established system. Amusingly, our MS Guardians of democracy can't even help plugging a Microsoft product. We will be protected by Azure engineering. Azure is Microsoft's “cloud,” the nefarious marketing term for we control your data.
History is poorly understood as specific past events defining the present. Certainly, human affairs are always contingent on the results of given events, but a given event is determinative only in the context of innumerable other events happening previously or simultaneously. As Tolstoy wrote,
“The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.”
In search for understanding, history has largely ignored complexity and what Tolstoy revealed as its fundamental contradictions. For example, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon is the event associated with the fall of the Roman republic, but it was preceded by a century and half of change starting with the defeat of Hannibal and the fall of Carthage, the destruction of the small Roman farm economy by the imperial Mediterranean plantation, and the growing dysfunction and corruption of the republic's institutions. These last days of the American republic it is not, to this point anyway, the military providing personalities with the levers of destruction leading to Augustus’ eventual triumph, but a handful of corporations. The Rubicon is crossed.