This is a detour diary, really a note to myself on one of the most appalling, politically opportunistic, operationally meaningless, needlessly inhumane marketing ploys dreamed up by an American executive ever. (Oh, wait; perhaps I exaggerate; there is the national health information network.) I'm reminded of several Big Ideas presented by past clients whose dreams achieved the unopposed status of business acumen before a slack-jawed reception the morning after.
I'll not digress further. Here's the "news":
LONDON (Reuters) - Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.
Schmidt says, politicians don't appreciate "the impact" of the online world on election outcomes. What is that "impact"? From Schmidt's perspective it isn't what netroots might expect. It's not "community", not "conversation" from which both skepticism and agreement ("truth") arise. It's not the cheap broadcasting capability that the net gives ordinary people the ability to mobilize political action, funding, and other resources. It's not even originality inspired in the one by the prospect of a global audience.
It is disrupting political discourse of the polity, assembly and transactions, by distributing superficially analytical software that holds "politicians to account".
What account? Schmidt didn't elaborate on his vision of how to classify or discriminate or verify Google's prodigious cache of web documents from the output of its MSM press franchise (AP, UPI, Reuters, etc.) from the franchise of any other search engine.
In a statement to the Financial Times, Schmidt stated
One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting 'is this true or false.' We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability
Probability of what? Schmidt didn't finish this thought. How could he? The terms he tosses around in this announcement are wicked buzzwords in the "culture of corruption" of the public trust that has seized the US government and electoral process. "True" and "false" are logical terms; there are no ratios of true or false. There is no future "truth" or "lie"; these judgementsare are artifacts of a single event whose facts may or may not be knowable. Never the twain shall meet in numbers.
How dare he trivialize my fear that my Diebold-aided vote Nov. 7 may be falsified or not counted, and the resulting lie presented as truth.
But let us speculate what might be the value proposition for Truth Predictor users and Truth Predictor clients.
People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.
On the one hand, for a fee, Truth Predictor clients can subscribe to testing services and "adapt" with greater confidence to public perception of unintented lies and inadvertant inconsistencies. Much as politicians seek and boast of "trusted" institutional endorsements, they can proudly campaign on their Truth Predictor ratings. What better objective measure of performance. Certainly not the Congressional Roll Call. Certainly not the countless independent analytic reports on party cohesion that are already available on line. And certainly not the results of public opinion polls produced nearly weekly by our "professional" and partisan statisticians.
On the other, the Truth Predictor promises to be free entertainment of an intellectual grade already provided by the "I feel lucky" search option or that provided by my daughter's Happy Meal lanniappe, the "Ask Raven" faux fur, key-chain shaker.
So what's the harm of a little entertainment? The harm is first the dishonesty of presenting the Truth Predictor as a tool of civic duties, which are deliberation and participation in a democratic process. It is the dishonesty of marketing a statistical formula, distribution models of historic truths (whatever that is) instead of thinking about the truthfulness, the coherence, of one's own rights and obligations. It is the assumption that the 'inputs' from the 'internets' are themselves true. It is the presumption of capitalizing a bottomless pit of undifferentiated information based on millions of pre-installed MSFT/Google browser bars.
In yesterday's Sun OpEd, one supposes, Schmidt also wrote of the internet
It has broken down the barriers that exist between people and information, effectively democratizing access to human knowledge
Ludicrous. If politicians routinely deny knowledge of the motives and substance of events to which the public may or may not be privy, what the hell exactly will the Truth Predictor be measuring? Opinions? Oh, well, we've got that already.