Democracy Hacked

How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics

Martin Moore

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786074096
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Campañas políticas y elecciones

Technology has fractured democracy, and now there's no going back.All around the world, the fringes have stormed the palace of the elites and unleashed data miners, dark ads and bots on an unwitting public. After years of soundbites about connecting people, the social media giants are only just beginning to admit to the scale of the problem.We stand on the precipice of an era where switching your mobile platform will have more impact on your life than switching your government. Where freedom and privacy are seen as incompatible with social well-being and transparency. Where your attention is sold to the highest bidder.Our laws don't cover what is happening and our politicians don't understand it. But if we don't fight to change the system now, we may not get another chance.

Part 1

Hackers

1

Individuals: the Freextremist Model

Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong – we hunt! If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat—!

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

In the weeks before the elections to the Bundestag in September 2017, a group of German extremists were conspiring online to raise support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and to suppress votes for its mainstream opponents. More than five thousand of them were members of a private, anonymous internet chat channel called Reconquista Germania. There they discussed how to use technology to coordinate their activities, how to hijack the agenda on social media, to mob established politicians, to attack mainstream media, to synchronize social networking raids, and to nurture the normalization of hateful and prejudicial language and images in political debate.

When they were ready, at the beginning of September 2017, the group announced publicly that it was “opening the meme war against the half-breeds in parliament”.¹ “Blitzkrieg Against the Old Parties!” one of the members screamed online. Another called for the storming of the offices of the German news outlet Der Spiegel. On a separate internet channel, called #Infokrieg or Infowar, there were chatrooms devoted to developing extremist political propaganda and discussing strategies to game Twitter. In parallel, on an online imageboard on the website 4chan, German users were building up a library of inflammatory images with slogans ready to spread across social media. In one section of the German subforum called ‘meme jihad’, Buzzfeed reported, members posted links to YouTube videos explaining how to make extremist content go viral.² Some of these images used Japanese anime, and many included Pepe the Frog, while others deliberately referenced Nazi and anti-Semitic imagery. Elsewhere on the same website, researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found, members shared “psychological operations resources”, for use during the 2017 German election campaign, “such as a ‘step by step how to manipulate narratives’ that links to GCHQ online deception and disruption playbooks”.³

Despite their limited numbers, these extremists were able to have a distorting and damaging impact on the German election. They took down an aspiring politician, raised ‘patriotic videos’ to the top of YouTube’s plays, and repeatedly gamed social media. “In the two-week run-up to the election,” the ISD discovered, “not a single day passed when #AfD was not in the top two trending hashtags in Germany.” The aim was not just to mobilize the far right, but to militarize political discourse online, smother other voices and stifle turnout for the mainstream parties. In early September, before these groups became highly active, the AfD was lying fifth in the polls. At the election itself it came third, winning 13.3% of the vote, exceeding most polls and expectations, and enabling a far-right party to enter the Bundestag for the first time since 1961.

If this was unique, then we could probably ignore it and assume that it will not happen next time, or elsewhere. But the strategies and techniques had been used before September 2017 and have been used since. They have become part of a toolkit used by ideologues, mercenaries and political footsoldiers to try to hack democratic politics and elections. Though the toolkit has been enthusiastically and energetically adopted by the far right, it is not particular to one country, nor to one specific political ideology. Indeed, many of the methods are straightforward and accessible to anyone with the time and inclination. How did we get here? How do we find ourselves in a place where democratic processes and norms have degenerated into open conflict across digital platforms? A place where political campaigners trade psy-ops manuals, discuss open source intelligence techniques and talk about memetic warfare; where people produce bot armies in their bedrooms; and where online campaigners race to ‘own the political narrative’, or to flood the digital public sphere with their hyper-partisan perspective.

To understand where we have got to, we have to trace the thread back before the election cycles of 2016–17, before the development of social media, before even the invention of the World Wide Web. Follow the trail back and you discover that being able to navigate round existing societal norms and values, coordinate collective action at speed, and undermining existing power structures, was baked into the original structures of the internet. Of course, back then there was no sense that doing this was political – in the real-world sense. It was just how you did things on the net. Cyberspace was separate from the real world – the ‘meatspace’. In cyberspace, decisions were made differently; communities were self-governing and made up their own rules; nation states and corporations held little sway. Few of the early settlers in cyberspace anticipated that the virtual population would soon rival or even exceed that in the real world. Few thought that the practices and beliefs that governed their communities would harden into ideologies. And it would have been anathema for them to think that these online communities would ever start fighting one another, or that these battles could spill over into mainstream politics, or – heaven forbid – that democratic systems could be upended as a result. Indeed, those who bought into the ideals of cyberspace – the engineers, the idealists and the digital homesteaders back in the 1980s world of the DeLorean and Space Invaders – were characterized by their digital optimism. The future they conceived was a utopia.

*

In November 1984, in an old military base by the Rodeo Lagoon just north of San Francisco, 150 hackers got together for a three-day conference organized by Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. It had been over a decade since Brand published the last edition of the iconic Whole Earth Catalog in 1971, and he had just embarked on a new project to catalogue the burgeoning world of computer software. The original Whole Earth Catalog, pulled together by Brand from offices in Menlo Park between 1968 and 1971, was a hotchpotch of counter-cultural how-tos coupled with a dash of consumerism and tech utopianism, all bound together in an oversized print volume. It managed to mash together everything from fixing a Volkswagen to growing your own marijuana, from finding a deerskin jacket to using the new Hewlett-Packard calculator. It was like an early version of the hyperlinked web but in print. Or, as Apple’s founder Steve Jobs said in 2011, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form.”

For someone who has had such a profound influence on the modern world, Stewart Brand is remarkably little known outside Silicon Valley. Three times, in three decades, Brand managed to draw together seemingly disparate cultural threads and cohere the voice of a new generation: in the late 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, in the 1980s through the hackers’ conference and the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, and in the 1990s with Wired magazine (again organized with Kevin Kelly). Brand encapsulated, both in who he was and in what he did, the seemingly contradictory “Californian Ideology” – as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron back in 1995 – of the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism.⁴

When Brand organized the first-ever hackers’ conference in 1984, he was seeing how the ideals he had managed to connect in the Whole Earth Catalog transferred to the world of computers. He was exploring whether the spirit of the 1960s Merry Pranksters that he had captured in print was reflected in the ethics and sensibilities of the growing community of entrepreneurial computer geeks. In particular, he was seeing if these hackers embraced the “Hacker Ethic” that was described in a new book by Steven Levy.⁵ Levy, who was at the conference himself – nervously watching participants leaf through his freshly printed book – had identified six ethics, from “Access to computers . . . should be unlimited and total” through to “Computers can change your life for the better.” All of them struck a chord. But the one that best captured the ideology of the hackers, that melded the individual geeks into a wider collective, and that would prove the most revolutionary, was the second, that “All information should be free.” As Fred Turner writes in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, “Like the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement, binding its members to one another, information was to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds.”⁶ ‘Information’, as Levy described it, refers to code, and ‘free’ to its flow through the computing system, rather than to its cost. Indeed, some of the hackers at the conference emphasized that ‘free’ did not mean they could not charge for their work. Brand tried to make this distinction when he said to the participants that “on the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable . . . On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Yet, as happens with powerful ideas, this distinction soon got lost, leaving the belief that ‘all information should be free’ as the first catechism of internet citizens, or netizens.

While the hacker community was emerging in the 1970s and early 1980s, John Perry Barlow was writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and running the Bar Cross Land and Livestock Company in Wyoming. You would not have thought that, in between writing songs and cattle ranching, Barlow would become an early migrant to cyberspace. And had it not been for Steward Brand, he probably would not have done. But, following the hackers’ conference Brand and Larry Brilliant set up the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link or WELL. The WELL was essentially an early text-based bulletin board, where subscribers could post topics and others could respond. While Brilliant sorted out the technology, Brand gathered together the community. Given his munificent social network this turned out to be an eclectic mix of hackers, journalists, writers, musicians and lyricists. Much like the communes of the 1960s, Brand wanted this community to be open, uninhibited and self-governing. Barlow, who joined the Grateful Dead’s David Gans on the WELL in 1987, was immediately captivated by it. Cyberspace, Barlow thought, was a new, unexplored territory, an ‘electronic frontier’. Here he had the chance to experience “the noble, essentially human, act of plunging off into unassayed wilderness”, of going west to find gold and glory: something his parents and grandparents had done in the physical world, but which had so far been denied to his generation. Now, “another frontier yawns before us,” he wrote excitedly. “This frontier, the Virtual World, offers opportunities and perils like none before. Entering it, we are engaging what will likely prove the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.”

So taken was Barlow by this idea of cyberspace as an unexplored land where he and fellow adventurers could go forth and settle, that he took strong exception when the old world intruded into the new. In 1990, when a small games book publisher was almost put out of business after the US Secret Service raided its offices and accessed its emails in search of a document (which was not there), Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation – to protect civil liberties in cyberspace. When, six years later, the US government tried to introduce a law that would punish the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those under eighteen, Barlow penned his infamous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” Barlow wrote in Jeffersonian tones. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”⁷ Despite its gravitas, Barlow dashed it off over the course of a night in Davos, in the midst of the World Economic Forum, in between dances with graduate students.⁸ He published it online from Switzerland and, even in that pre-social-media era, it went viral. Even at this early stage in its evolution, the idea that the net was a new world that would be run by its inhabitants according to different rules than the old was magnetic and irresistible. So powerful was it that it gave birth to the second catechism of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land.

Not long after Barlow presented his declaration there was, just as he had predicted, an internet gold rush. Digital entrepreneurs, bloggers and prospectors rushed to settle this new-found land. Amongst the shopkeepers, self-promoters and innovators were pioneers wanting to set up new communities. Some of these took their lead from the early bulletin boards of the 1980s and 1990s, though each individual community was defined by the personal proclivities of its founder, and by whoever chose to settle there. Some sites evolved from the text-based format of bulletin boards into early weblogs like Memepool (1998); others distinguished themselves by letting people post images and text, like Fark (1999) and Something Awful (1999). One, set up a few years later in the summer of 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole and called 4chan, looked similarly basic and homespun, though it had some distinctive characteristics. Characteristics which would, later, come to make all the difference.

*

It is impossible to explain the subsequent political impact of the 4chan community and the methods they devised without understanding how the site works. The architecture of the site and the way it functions are integral both to the way it was politicized and to its subsequent political impact.

4chan is an imageboard. This means that, to add something to the site, you have to post an image (or a video), beside which you can add comments. Others can then respond to your post with a comment, or another image and comment. There are no other ways to respond. You cannot, for example, like a post as on Facebook, or upvote it as on Reddit, or retweet it as on Twitter. If no-one responds, then your post quickly – very quickly – sinks down the page (and subsequent pages). A 2011 academic study found that most threads stayed on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes.⁹ When posts disappear, they are gone. Occasionally, memorable threads are captured on another site – Encyclopedia Dramatica – but there is no official archive (something originally done to save server space). Your post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top of the board. Posts are anonymous – not pseudonymous but properly anonymous. There is a space where posters can add a name but few do, preferring to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default...