The Great French Philosopher Jacques Ellul once opined that modern technological civilization consumed the rights of individuals and gave in return, quite literally, speed. Physical speed, processing speed, speedy gratification & speedy oppression, speed quite literally is modern civilization's greatest commodity.
And so it was in the name of the "virtue of speed"that the app by which the caucuses results would be swiftly tabulated promptly crashed on election night leaving the entire affair in doubt for days.
Which leads my to my own personal codicil to Ellul's "Rule of Speed", that if something is important, its also unreliable. That the quest for sheer speed has made everything fragile & vulnerable utterly unable to withstand the metaphoric high speed impact. And so it was in Iowa, speed begat impact, fueled by the combustion of individual voting rights.
Be that as it may, Iowa was also a curtain raiser on electoral chaos this fall, and if last week's caucuses were an accident, believe you me, this fall it'll be deliberate nonstop hackery & interference. So I hope someone out there has an effective plan to deal with all this madness, and whatever that plan is, count on "double the estimate" come the end of October. I don't know how much can be done, given the almost certain attempted and or successful interference from foreign powers, but forewarned is forearmed at the very least.
One thing is for certain, if we want to hold on to our democracy in the USA we need to eschew the "virtue of speed" in favor of paper & ink analog ballots, with robust hand count back up systems. Or we can watch as our rights speedily vanish in a cloud of tweets.
But I wax lyrical, our rights cannot vanish, they can only be withheld by force per Thomas Jefferson, the degree of effort required to recover them is the measure of the strength of the tyranny. Which is another thing we'll have to remember come this fall.
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