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Politics : the new and the old tools

Own definitions of politics

• socialized decision-making
• mass mind-hacking
• generalized social engineering

Objective

Discover emerging trends and build a toolkit to offer easy counter-measures.

Inspired by

• my "citizen kit" project thought before France 2007 presidential election

References

• the Political Analysis research journal
• Social engineering definition from Wikipedia
• Kevin Mitnick - The Art of Deception
• Edward Bernays - Propaganda
• Kalinovski Square (documentary)
• There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America
• The Advertised Mind - Ground-breaking Insights Into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising
• Shock Crisis by Naoma Klein
• Our Brand Is Crisis (2006), documentary film by Rachel Boynton
• To Sell a War (1992), documentary, part of CBC program the fifth estate
• Football and Facism (2006), documentary from BBC4
• ...UK docu on the visual neighborhood targeting tool
• The Marketing of a President by John Quelch for HBS Working Knowledge, November the 12th 2008
• my resources on Sophisms
• my notes on Programming for Peace Computer-Aided Methods for

Remarks

• Is voting an optimization required for society, a socially scalable system?
• What is more democratic
  • voting thus influencing by your action; or
  • not voting and thus trusting the other members of your society?
• is it possible to model constitutions, political systems, judicial systems, etc as wiki, i.e. evolving dynamical knowledge bases with several editions
  • if so, could it be extended to a world-wide phylogeneticaly inspired study of such systems?
  • what functions become important by which systems? when?
  • discern patterns

Tree/repository of political strategies

After watching Desentubages Cathodiques where former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was teaching at ESCP, a top political school in France where he said "1- is getting elected, 2- is having a program". Such a historical tree of raise to power with for each time the associated strategy in a phylogeny-like form to see how it differed from earlier attempts and successes. There are good book on war strategy, tactics,etc... there might be such a book on the history of political raise to power, the involved strategies and their evolution.

• Strategy Markup Language (StratML) enabling the organization and categorization of Government information in a way that is searchable electronically and interoperably across agencies.

To do

• import "E:\Work\__ my free ideas repository\citizen kit"
  • now locally available
• synchronization tools mybarackobama.com , providing a control panel to each local campaign director
  • heard during Masse Critique (redifusion), France Culture, 8 August 2009

To explore

• Access Denied from MIT press
  • counter propaganda and information filtering, especially for a candidate already in place or who control part of the media in another way (ex: Berlusconi owning some, Sarkozy having an established network, ...)
  • visual of the cisor of Anastasie
• Publications from the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, a part of The George Washington University
• 'astroturfing': the faking of grassroots support for a politician or a product whose popularity is on the slide. from How Labour used its election troops to fake popular support
• Intrade Prediction Markets used for political predictions
• U.S. to Fund Pro-American Publicity in Iraqi Media by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus for Washington Post Staff, October 3, 2008
• GOVCOM.ORG Amsterdam-based foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political tools on the Web.
• WebAtlas et Sciences Po participer à des projets de recherche expérimentaux au croisement des SHS et des technologies web.
• UMR 6039 : Bases, Corpus, Langage - Logométrie et corpus politiques, médiatiques et littéraires, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
• Wikileaks multi-jurisdictional organization to protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing.
• Sunlight Foundation using the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about [US] Congress and the [US] federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens.
• "web2.0" communication tools
  • US Whitehouse Open Government Initiative
    • http://twitter.com/whitehouse
    • http://www.slideshare.net/whitehouse
• Surveillance techniques as described in Privacy Is Dead – Get Over It, Steve Rambam, Hope2604 aka The Last HOPE 2008
• twitter
  • [@laquadrature:18] #hadopi motion de renvoi en commission, JP Brard à la tribune.
• 2009 Summer School in Methods and Techniques by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)
• Revisiting the Age of Enlightenment from a collective decision making systems perspective by Marko A. Rodriguez and Jennifer H. Watkins, First Monday, Volume 14, Number 8, August 2009
  • requiring "independent decision makers" which... despite the separation of the state from the church this is clearly not the case
    • from private institutions, cf the structure of the CAC40 social network (Sc Po studies) and the growing amount of individual with an "avocats d'affaire" background (government) recently in France, ENA, ...
  • is "Decision markets" by Robin Hanson, 1999 the paper with its associated website Ive visited already? (same US lab than a research working on "interconnected mind" or networked decision making)
    • linked to the commercial website (url? linked in Seedea as I study a bit their API earlier) to "bet" on any situation in order to facilitate group predictions
  • does the recent popular book "Wisdom of the Crowd" use similar references?
  • no reference or even mention of
    • Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration, Mark Alan Elliott's thesis was or even stigmergy in general
    • wikis phenomena, neither Wikipedia nor the recent Australian and New-Zealand initiatives
      • also now in larger nations including Data.gov.uk wiki
    • P2P phenomena or similar self-organization systems on the Internet
    • but maybe done earlier in A survey of Web-based collective decision making systems by the same authors and published in 2008
  • see also my notes on Inculture(s) 2 referring to Condorcet's philosophical viewpoint
  • note also that "certain bacterial species self-organize into hierarchically complex structured colonies containing 10⁹-10¹² organisms" from on Seeking the foundations of cognition in bacteria: From Schroedinger’s negative entropy to latent information
• ShiftSpace Yeas and Nays tranforms any webpage into a means for contacting Congressional representatives
• RTGI now linkfluence
  • Wahlradar (2009)
  • US Politicosphere
  • Observatoire Présidentielle 2007
• Politique 2.zéro et Innov@tionThéorie par Fondation pour l'innovation politique
• Gov 2.0 Summit Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences
  • Gov 2.0 Expo 2010 edition, Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, May 25 - 27, 2010, Washington, DC
• Inventing our Selves - Psychology, Power, and Personhood by Nikolas Rose, Cambridge University Press 1996
  • "These mutations [progresses in psychology, physiology and related fields] are intrinsically linked to recent changes in ways of understanding and exercising political power, which have stressed the values of autonomy, personal responsibility, and choice."
  • see also Michel Foucault's concept of Biopower
  • Review by Alice Kim, Science & Consciousness 2009
    • According to Rose, we seek to govern the psychological being under the regulative ideal of freedom, which is "an ideal that imposes as many burdens, anxieties, and divisions as it inspires projects of emancipation, and in the name of which we have come to authorize so many authorities to assist us in the project of being free from any authority but our own" (p. 197).
• http://www.gapminder.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Political_spectrum
• Transparency Hub from OpenCongress Wiki
  • open, collective knowledge base for the transparency community.
• PolicyMaker Computer-Assisted Political Analysis, the political analysis and policy advocacy tool for Windows.
• Metagovernment - Government of, by, and for all the people support the development and use of Internet tools which enable the members of any community to fully participate in the governance of that community.
• VoteWatch.eu European Parliament providing easy access to, and analysis of, the political decisions and activities of the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers.
• Z Space "our users participate and innovate for the whole community."
• Wikipedia:Rational ignorance
  • costs of sophisms and political discourses in a democratic society
• LiberTIC egouvernance, ouverture des données publiques et edemocratie.
• Government As a Platform, O’Reilly Media 2010
• Wikipedia:Logrolling = trading of favors or quid pro quo, such as vote trading by legislative members to obtain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member.
• Wiki Government : How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful by Beth Simone Noveck, Brookings Institution Press 2009
• Proposal to work on with Felipe
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stet_(software)
  • http://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/Comment_system
  • http://code.softwarefreedom.org/projects/stet
  • imagine having an equivalent for your politicians http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=Utopiah
• Wikipedia:Proxy voting and delegated voting
• Liquid Democracy on CommunityWiki
• The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy Buchanan, James M. and Gordon Tullock
• http://personaldemocracy.com
• April discussion 19:32 26/11/2010
• NosDonnées.fr une plateforme collaborative de chasse aux trésors
• https://www.votizen.com
• links to IAS videos I watched
  • http://video.ias.edu/alon
  • http://video.ias.edu/elections-and-strategic-voting
  • etc
• Influence Networks by OWNI, an open-source, collaborative directory of relationships between people, institutions and companies.