Dark Bubbles

If there's anything we've learned from the nonstop carnival ride our nation has been on for the past couple of years, it's that many of us spend far too much time isolated from others who have different opinions and outlooks.  It can be said that this was one of the factors in the surprising election results in November.  If we are to survive and make any sort of progress, this growing habit must be quelled.  Since hackers always seem to be in the middle of these things, we ought to use our creativity and innovative skills to figure out solutions that usually escape the mainstream.

We all tend to hang out and communicate with people who we see eye to eye with.  This makes for a more peaceful existence, with arguments and debates kept to a minimum.  And that same attitude often extends to our online presence.  We spend our days and nights constantly reinforcing our beliefs by trading emails and social media posts with the people who generally agree with us.  We develop our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. friends and followers with this in mind.  And pretty soon, we find ourselves in a virtual bubble where we feel accepted and appreciated.  We're aware that there's more to the world, but we try to shield ourselves from it whenever possible.

Of course, that's not always how it turns out.  Most of us have probably experienced that annoying friend or relative who somehow finds their way into our social circle and makes our life a living hell by questioning our views or countering our facts with theirs.  For these situations, a variety of solutions exist with names like de-friend, block, ban, ignore, or report.  Once these weapons are deployed, our bubbles become safe again.

Clearly, this approach is designed to help our sanity and preserve the peace.  But it doesn't actually solve the problem; it merely puts it off.  And that's kind of what happened on Election Day: all of those people who weren't communicating with each other were surprised and shocked by the outcome.  Polls simply weren't able to penetrate these protective shields.  And many of us realized that the country we woke up in the next day wasn't the one we had thought we were living in.

Could this surprise have been prevented?  Absolutely.  Communication is key and it just wasn't pursued nearly enough over the course of the campaign.  And there's more than enough guilt for everyone to share here.  Whether it was refusal to cooperate with the other side or simply not acknowledging their existence, we created false environments that, like any fantasy, can only go on for so long before there's a rude awakening.

As hackers, we're particularly good at seeing when something isn't quite right, despite what we may be told.  When pursuing a goal or working on a project, we often discover that the path it leads us on isn't the path we originally wanted to go down.  In the end, we learn things we never expected to learn and wind up with a surplus of knowledge and, often, a sense of accomplishment.  Usually, the rest of the world doesn't care.  To most, we waste our time in these endeavors and it becomes tiresome trying to explain them.  Yet we continue to try.

This quest for information, this insatiable desire for the truth, however inconvenient, is the very definition of what a hacker is.  It's a trait that is sorely needed in fields like journalism or technology of all types.  So we can't be surprised when we hear that oddities in electronic voting machine results were first noticed by a group of computer scientists.  In true hacker style, rather than just accept the status quo, they started asking questions.  And, as with any kid who gets into trouble for asking too many questions, they were met with hostility and suspicion.  But they kept at it and, within a couple of days, over seven million dollars was raised for a recount in three states where the voting had been particularly close.  It would have been easy to not put their reputation on the line or to, as so many Trump supporters delight in saying, "just deal with it."  But when someone tells you to deal with something you find unacceptable, they are in effect telling you to just shut up and go away.  They've been telling hackers that for a very long time and we just can't seem to get the message.

Regardless of the result (at press time, the recounts weren't finished, but we all know it's highly likely that "President Trump" will actually become a reality in 2017), we can never be bullied into submission.  There is no system that can't be defeated, no set of rules that can't be thwarted with a little cleverness.  A great example of this lies in our country's Electoral College system, a bizarre and antiquated relic of centuries past that allows a candidate with millions more votes to somehow lose the election.  While most (((people))) favor its abolition, the means of doing that seem next to impossible, with large majorities of both houses of Congress and at least 38 states having to agree to do this within a set amount of time.  Just hearing that is enough to make most people give up.  But then, we heard the story of a computer scientist who stepped up to help design a possible workaround called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, where individual states simply agree to pledge their electors to the candidate who won the popular vote.  It completely bypasses the need for a Constitutional amendment and only requires a total of 270 electoral votes from however many states sign on.  They're already at 165, more than 60 percent of the way there, so this unconventional way of routing around a problem could actually work and get us past a barrier that most people believed was impenetrable.  This workaround is currently being considered in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, if they agree, that number goes up to 201.  As we learn over and over again, nothing is impossible with a little hacker ingenuity and alternative thinking.

But again, we can only come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things if we're open to alternative views and the possibility that we've had it all wrong.  That means stepping outside of our bubbles and also moving away from the mainstream.  This, also, carries a degree of risk.  You've probably heard a lot of talk about something called "fake news," which allegedly played a big part in the election.  In the past, it was easy to define what was "news" because it came in such limited supplies.  It was also easy to control how people thought for the very same reason.  Now, we have an abundance of information coming from all angles.  And some of it is pretty insane, without question.

If you only get your news from people in the barbershop, you're only going to hear a particular perspective.  If you turn on the TV, you'll hear something else.  Add the radio, some magazines, and a bunch of alternative websites, and you've got a sizable collection of information to process and figure out.  For many of us, that's too much work and so we take the easy route.  That could mean never leaving the barbershop or just getting your news from your friends on Facebook, where it's easy for anything to look like legitimate news.  It's believed that so many "fake news" stories were being passed around in these circles that they became the truth to many and actually helped put Trump in power under false pretenses.  If true, this would be a very dangerous means of manipulation.  But could the very story about "fake news" itself be an attempt at manipulation?  It's certainly possible and shows why we need to always question anything we read.  It didn't take long before we saw calls for the labeling and banning of "fake news" and, bizarrely, a list of suspicious news websites that supposedly were getting their marching orders from Moscow!  While the potential damage caused by "fake news" is clear, we must also recognize the danger of entrusting anyone to tell us what is true and what is not, as truth is always subjective and prone to manipulation.  This is a battle to engage in using facts, not a list.

If we're going to benefit from any of this, let's use this experience to encourage the questioning of everything and to start listening to the people with a whole different perspective.  This doesn't mean we'll come to an agreement and start living in harmony.  But at least we'll be armed with the facts and won't be living in a world that's not real.  Only then are we truly equipped to fight for justice.  And win.

We know the times ahead are scary for a lot of people.  We feel it too.  Not only will we not back down on those ideals we believe in, but we intend to become even more vocal and determined in fighting for what we see as right.  Perhaps this is the environment we needed to really get things moving.