Conversation #14: In Verrit Veritas? (September 10, 2017)

Hey guys, we even did some preparation this time! Grace has given last week’s topic further thoughts and prayers, and came armed with notes. Paul sat down and let the million poop-throwing monkeys in his head bang out an essay. He spent a full ninety minutes on the piece and boy, does it show! In this conversation, Paul starts things off with remarks about Verrit, the new web site for Clinton supporters, and why it is both much less, and much more, than it seems. Grace chimes in now and then (how can you tell when Grace is being sarcastic? Her mouth is open). Then, Grace picks up with a followup to last week’s topic, and we discuss how to “live in protest,” and the spiritual side of political protest and dissent, while Paul does his best to deflate any emerging seriousness. In Verrit Veritas? Hell, no! But you become what you meditate on, so choose wisely, and memento mori!

How to Listen

You can find the MP3 file here.

The Podcast feed is here.

The Podcast channel on YouTube is here.

More Information

This piece from Salon discusses Clinton’s “airing of grievances” book tour: http://www.salon.com/2017/09/09/a-tale-of-two-leaders-of-the-left-new-books-by-bernie-sanders-and-hillary-clinton-emphasize-their-differences/.

The complete text of Paul’s essay is appended.

In Verrit Veritas?

I first heard about Verrit when Clinton re-tweeted an announcement about the launch of their web site. Actually I don’t follow Clinton on Twitter, so what I really noticed was Keith Olbermann responding to her. Clinton tweeted:

I’m excited to sign up for @Verrit, a media platform for the 65.8 million! Will you join me and sign up too?

Olbermann responded:

Madame Secretary, I think your account may have been hacked.

The link that Clinton shared was to an article on a new web site. The headline of the article is “Introducing Verrit: Media for the 65.8 Million.”

So I’ll just quote a few of the rah-rah text from the article:

65,853,516 Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, giving her a decisive popular vote victory over Donald Trump.

So Imma stop right there and point out: I hear this a lot. But even if that number is strictly accurate, which given my level of confidence in the election process seems unlikely, it’s just a fundamental fact that winning the popular vote does not guarantee winning the election. So right off the bat we see this ongoing meme about the election result: it is somehow illegitimate, there is some fundamental unfairness, or it says something about the outcome.

But we’ve seen this before. In 2000, Gore pretty clearly won the popular vote, although the exact totals including Florida are disputed, becase the recount was not allowed to proceed. My point is that even in the election of 2000, where there were blatant and obvious dirty tricks at work, including a very suspicious ballot design, and a one-off, extremely partisan Supreme Count decision, winning the popular vote entitles you to exactly nothing, and continuing to trumpet it may make her supporters feel better, but to the rest of the country just makes them look like they are endlessly re-litigating the election.

The Verrit article continues:

The Clinton coalition remains strong and engaged. #StillWithHer is a widely-used hashtag that reflects a mindset and a mission: to fight for a future where love trumps hate, dignity overcomes division, equality and justice defeat extremism and bigotry.

Comma splice aside, I just want to point out that I think these slogans: “with her” and “still with her” are very telling. We know from stolen e-mails that the Clinton campaign debated a list of eighty-four different slogans. Among them were “Rise Up” (rejected), “Keep moving” (rejected), “It’s about you” (rejected), “Move ahead” (rejected), “Progress for people” (rejected), “Your future. Her fight” (rejected), “A fair shot and a fair deal” (rejected), “Getting ahead together” (rejected), “Progress for all” (rejected), “Building tomorrow’s America” (rejected), “It’s about you. It’s about time” (rejected).

Basically, anything that sounded progressive or populist was rejected. For a little while she was appearing at events with the printed slogan “Fighting for us,” but that seemed to disappear. We ultimately got “Stronger together,” which was a pointed repudiation of Trump’s “I alone can fix it,” and “I’m with Her” (note: not “she’s with me,” and most pointedly, the opposite of “I’m with him,” that is, Sanders). In any case, not inspiring.

The Verrit introduction goes on:

Hillary Clinton faced relentless vilification, imbalanced media coverage, and foreign propaganda, yet still attracted more votes than any presidential candidate in history except Barack Obama in 2008.

That’s actually damning with faint praise. Every year the voting population is larger, so even if each winning candidate got the exact same percentage of the vote election after election, this would be trivially true. And in fact it’s actually false, because Barack Obama got 65, 915,795 votes in the 2012 election, beating Clinton’s 2016 number by 80,279 votes.

So why am I doing this nitpicking fact-checking? Well, it’s because it gets at the whole notion of what Verrit claims to be. Reading on a little bit:

With the essence of American democracy at stake, 65.8 million people saw through the lies and smears and made a wise, patriotic choice. But they continue to be marginalized and harassed. Verrit’s purpoe is to become their trusted source of political information and analysis; to provide them (and anyone like-minded) sanctuary in a chaotic media environment; to center their shared principles; and to do so with an unwavering commitment to truth and facts.

So, to me this represents something interesting. It’s a news and opinion source not even specifically tied to a party, or to an ideological movement, or to courting a particular demographic, but explicitly part of the cult of personality around Clinton herself.

It interests me also because they’re doing a sort of Potemkin cryptography. Verrit posts appear in the form of images with quotes on them, and each image has at the bottom a little box that says something like “Verrit.com authentication code: 0443117.”

When I first saw this I thought “oh, interesting — they’re using cryptographic algorithms to try to fight fake news.” I thought maybe each meme image from Verrit was digitally signed, or maybe there was a chain of authentication. What that means is that I thought maybe if you see a Verrit image “in the wild” on social media, you could validate it cryptographically. There are different possibilities there and I haven’t really put my computer scientist hat on for very long, but what I initially imagined is that you could save the image, and go to the Verrit web site, and upload it. Verrit could then tell you, using a message digest algorithhm or a digital signature algorithm, “yes, this is a Verrit image and it has not been altered.” There are algorithms for doing that, for embedding a watermark or adding a digital signature that could be validated against Verrit’s key.

Another thing I thought is “oh, that’s neat, maybe they are using a blockchain algorithm to prove a chain of custody.” I’m not an expert on blockchain algorithms, and I think this would require some technical support from other social media sites that hosted Verrit images, but I imagined that maybe this would let you click on a Verrit image and see that it was validated to come from Verrit, then to Facebook, then maybe to Twitter, and at each step it has been authenticated.

It turns out that Verrit does none of those things, and the idea is that if you see a Verrit meme in the wild, and you are suspicious of it, the idea is that you can go to Verrit and type in the verification code. Not copy and paste, because it’s in an image, but transcribe it. And then Verrit will take you to the post with that verification code. But there’s not actually any technology at all behind guaranteeing that the image itself hasn’t been faked or altered, besides you looking up the number and verifying by hand that the headline on the post matches the text on the image. I’ll come back to that.

So the next thing I thought was “well, hey, at least they are trying to play the role of a fact-checker. So they must be using footnotes and documentation for their statistics, like for example Clinton’s popular vote total.”

But that is also too much to ask, apparently, because if you look at the site, you see an awful lot of posts that look like this. Verrit authentication code #0443120: “Hillary Democrats are the Heart and Conscience of America.”

That article cites some tweets, and then claims:

Hillary Democrats are the heart and conscience of America. They cast a vote for compassion, inclusion, justice, and equality — the values that made America great. It is a travesty that they continue to be treated with disdain and disrespect.

The article notes Clinton’s endorsement, then goes on:

The response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic among Clinton’s voters, with hundreds of thousands of site visits, comments, social media follows, signups, emails, etc. It validates the purpose of the platform, a place where the shared interests, values, and aspirations of 65.8 million Americans can be centered, free of harassment and hate.

Verrit was met with an entirely predictable response from Clinton’s detractors: rage, abuse, bullying, mockery.

I’ll skip ahead a bit, but it goes on:

The effort to silence and invisibilize Hillary Clinton and her voters continues unabated since the 2016 election. In fact, if the frenzy over Verrit’s launch is any indication, the hostility has intensified. But that won’t deter us from serving the needs and aspirations of our community, no matter how desperate the attacks.

And now I want to take a moment to talk about epistemic closure and the paranoid style in American politics.

For a while now it’s been commonplace, among contemporary so-called Conservatives, to demand the pedigree of any opinion or information source and reject it, if it doesn’t have a conservative imprimatur. In fact many times I’ve tried to counter some ridiculous meme on Facebook with an article, and been told, essentially, “I can’t accept anything in that article; it comes from a liberal source.” On particular friend actually used some kind of a site where he plugged in the articles I was linking, and the site would give him a rating on some kind of conservative-ometer. So he wasn’t willing to look at the facts, or the argument, at all, if it didn’t come from a source vetted as sufficiently conservative.

Liberals have often mocked them for that sort of behavior, just as they’ve mocked liberals for being excessively “politically correct” and demanding “safe spaces.” And of course I’m uncomfortable with this idea that you would pre-screen the arguments you’re exposed to, which is one of the reasons I find things like Facbook’s screening of people into “red feeds” and “blue feeds” very pernicious and disturbing — especially given that it isn’t clearly “opt in,” with big obvious knobs to let you know that this is happening, and adjust it as you prefer.

But I’m telling you now — although I think Verrit is pretty laughable and will ultimately fail, I’m very disturbed that it exists, and I’m even more disturbed that Dear Leader Clinton would endorse it. I think this is a pretty clear example of conservative/libertarians being dead right about the liberal tendency towards fascism.

Epistemic closure has a technical definition in informal logic, but it has come to mean, in political thought, the idea that one can, and some do, knowingly inhabit an echo chamber of like-minded people, holding opinions similar to yours, and deliberately exclude or distrust any information or opinion originating outside that bubble.

What Verrit does is to create a bubble not around an ideology or party, but around a personality. And to me this is far more disturbing than the idea that someone is just a relentless Fox News listener or Dittohead.

There is no technological fix to fake news and epistemic closure, because fake news is shared and believed by people who want to share and believe it. Epistemic closure happens when people want a safe, closed space that reinforces their beliefs. There are technological tools that could be used to help validate sources and open bubbles for people who seek to climb out of them, but Verrit does nothing whatsoever along those lines.

Already there are sites up that will let you create a fake Verrit meme. The first one I created read:

Liberals are responding to the way the right has locked itself into a closed epistemological bubble by… locking themselves in their own closed epistemological bubble.

This meme had “Verrit.com authentication code: 0192889.” If I put that number into the search window on the real Verrit web site, it comes back with nothing and says “we can’t find the verrit you’re looking for. Try searching again!” But that wasn’t really the point, because I can share the fake one just as widely as someone else can share a real one.

So what does Verrit really do? I was joking to Grace about it, saying “do you want to have a Ministry of Truth? Because this is how you get a ministry of truth.” It’s extremely Orwellian, complete with two-minute ritualized hatred projected daily towards Bernie Bros.

I think that evaluating your sources, relentlessly, and seeking sources outside your bubble, is a very important and relevant thing to do. I have nothing but contempt for people on the conservative side who seek out only writing and opinion that strengthens their confirmation biases. And of course I have to admit that I often am guilty of this, and we all are, despite my best efforts to read, or at least skim, across the political spectrum. Doing that regularly is one of the biggest reasons that I can’t place myself sqarely on a single one dimensional liberal/conservative axis.

A reasonable person might think that this is frightening, but not really important, because it represents a small minority of dead-enders. And that is true in a sense. Clinton has only a 30 percent approval rating in the most recent polls, lower than Trump at 36 percent.

But I think it is important, because a lot of those who are #StillWithHer are quite powerful and influential people. If they get on board with Verrit and Dear Leader Madame Secretary’s grievance tour, they are essentially engaging in an act of political escapism, reading only fan fiction about the world. Looking at the claims in Clinton’s new book, it’s clear that she is essentially continuing her campaign of grievances. It seems to be a Festivus for Democrats, an airing of grievances. But unlike Festivus, which is supposed to be for the rest of us, this is a campaign for the few, convincing themselves that they are for the many.

There’s a saying that goes “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what kind of mind he or she possesses, and wants to cultivate.