Meeting

“This breach in our societies”, said the tall, grey-haired accountant, “is insurmountable.”

“Completely. It takes the shape of a perpetual war between people so dissimilar that no bridge can be forged to close the ranks.”

Such were the words of a somewhat younger woman, who worked in advertising in the same company.

“I want to see both Democrats and Republicans as decent human beings, but the political war permeates everything so profoundly that it has become impossible to even pretend. In their different ways they have all become raw and paranoid”, said the third person at the table.

The three coworkers were meeting a couple of times a week in their after-work club a few hundred yards from the company. Why? Perhaps they felt a certain relief talking and elaborating on the totality of the media narratives filling their heads, and worse, every conversation at work.

So here they were. No TV pundit yelling, no smart phones or second screens lighting up constantly to call into focus some danger, some injustice, some attack on the community of lesser citizens, whose only weapon is expressions of unitary condemnation.

The three shared one thing: The feeling of exhausting owing to eternal vigilance known to be the price of liberty.

They met by chance and soon realised the club was to consist of only those three members. No other coworker felt the need.

They met and as usual reversed their stance on every conceivable subject that had come up during office hours in the common workspace. They were consenting adults, so to speak. All they knew was humiliating consent through discrete smiles whenever some hothead had erupted with snappy minuscule insights on Putin, Trump, Netanyahu and other headlines. Sometimes political correct, other times not. Every workplace was a new culture.

But consenting they were, to their bitterness.

The cast?

• Our tall, grey-haired accountant? Well, that’s Gerald. Allow him a hobby of his own choosing and he could be happy. If he could practice the art of decency on the side, even better. Making the world a better place through applied statistics? There’s a happy chap.
• The woman? Miranda. Spill-over from college surplus production. She has completed an unknown part of a masters degree in an unknown social science. For strange reasons she prefers not to divulge anything.
• The third person at the table is Christine. Savvy, bright young computer scientist with a career behind her. She wasn’t up for the constant struggle.

Long Ago in 2o20

“Can any of you remember the presidential election in 2016? We remember the election in 2020 so vividly that it overshadows that of 2016.”

“It was absolutely nerve-racking. Why so? Isn’t whomever is elected for president supposed to work for the well-being of all citizens? Even from a distant country the election was scary. If we felt scared, imagine the poor people in America.”

“The war, I mean, IT IS A WAR! The constant warlike mood makes people believe that if one party wins they will really strive to destroy everything connected with the other party. I mean, it’s political war, dammit! The aim is to make political kills. Look at the degree of mutual distrust. Irreconcilable”

“And can anybody explain to me, given the degree to which USA interferes with everything on the entire plant, why the rest of the world is not eligible to vote in the US elections? Globalisation, right? Their elections have dramatic consequences for our lives across the Atlantic. So give us a say!”

“Facts.. you recall the endless quest for facts, wrapped in elevated indisputability, facts were the end-all reply to lies and fake news and provocations. Bloggers threw all kinds of facts on the table. Not all relevant for the discussion at hand. But nice solid facts.”

“Do I remember! God yes. It never inspired the confidence it was meant to.”

“I remember one specific problem I never could resolve. The stolen election debate, you remember the video of someone pouring in a bunch of cards for scanning, and the video purportedly was meant to show that the woman simply counted her favourite votes twice on the machine.”

“Dimly remember it yes.”

“Did we ever find out if that happened? I suspected that the machine would be able to recognise these ballots on the second round, but I never was able to navigate the jungle. If indeed the grainy video showed anything of the sort.”

A bit of silence as people were wondering.

“I actually wanted to know the same thing. I even tried to find manuals online for the counting machines in question.”

“And those lame assurances from the fact-o-sphere offered no relief at all!”

The accountant jumped when he heard someone with similar qualms. “The papers would reply with such lame explanations as “Fact: Tampering is guarded against by real professionals”. What a relief! We can rest assured!, someone has got it under control.”

Silence befell the company as they forgot about their feelings of frustration and mentally meandered into a tangible world of lived historical.

“I still would like to know”, said Miranda.

They looked at each other.

“It’s useless. I have looked everywhere. Welcome to the dungheap of the Internet.”

“Yeah, we would have quite a bit of work cut out for us.”

“I don’t envy us”, the youngest woman laughed.

“But we would enter a world of storytelling, a world where narratology is everything. This is the grave irony; we trust in facts and reason to guide us in a subspace of pure fictional narration. The underlying story is still that reason and truth prevails over lie.”

Gerald offered an example.

“LA Times exemplifies this in the case of Colorado election clerk Tina Peters who got inspired by one of two major strands of batshit folly - the election fraud craze. (The other strand of course being the no-election-fraud-here sectarianism). She allowed one Conan Hayes to take snapshots of the hard drive of the Dominion machine before and after an update. Quote prosecutor:”

“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage,” said Drake, a lawyer from the Colorado attorney general’s office.

“Let’s see… Tina Peters: “Convicted of felony”, “election denier [?!] convicted in election computer breach”, “worker pleads guilty…”, “clerk indicted in ‘deceptive-scheme’” and so on. It’s one of life’s small ironies when we maintain that journalists tell a story. Emphatically not true! A story has believable characters and real motives. Not just bad guys. Heck, even Hollywood can produce a story.

Journalists thrive on prejudices, repeating them they can make a smash hit out of it.”

“But why would she even need to sneak around? It’s election. Anybody wanting transparency should be given it. If I show up and ask for an hourly data dump of the entire hard drive, then just hand it over! I’d like to inspect the process.”

“Just use standard cryptography tools to ascertain it remains tamper-free.”

“These issues that are mostly rooted in technical matters of security are impossible to relay in a useful fashion to the audience. Journalists instead resort to fuzzy chains of trust. Quoting some person X of standing saying he has full confidence in Y. Thus the actions of Y must now be classified as being within the circle of trustworthy facts. Rubber band trust at best.”

“Folks… I don’t want to waste energy on this project, okay. My chances of assessing anything are slim. And that’s if I can even dig out the information required.”

“We can still have a constructive time. Perhaps not an investigation, but we can educate ourselves. Example: Tina Peters wanted to know what a software upgrade did. The process is described as trustworthy by US Election Assistance Commission. Probably what is described is that 1) some official compiles the source themselves, and 2) the source files are MD5-summed.”

“Haha! We have this strange concept about trust. When we hear ‘security-speak’, i.e. a good amount of lingo from the fields of security and cryptography applied to a single phase of a long process, we strangely enough extend the abstract notion of trust to the whole pipeline. That’s incorrect. Know the whole chain, then we can reason about the matter.

Knowing software companies though, I believe Dominion is honest. Their company just got caught in the crossfire.”

“Should we do it?”

“Do what?”

“Well, dig out the dungheap, be our own journalists? Make our own attempt at being honest witnesses to the truth.”

“No! We don’t have the time nor the expertise!”

“We’re not stupid either. And what are we doing here anyway? Wasting time. I’m not saying we should unearth anything new. But rectify the lies a bit, sure.”

Christine wanted to have a go. So did Miranda. Gerald looked like the indecisive man he was and sighed.

“Okay, let’s’ see what America has in store for us.”

/ПРИЗРАК