Test Case

So it finally happened: a self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona. And, of course, the car was an Uber.

(Why Uber? Well, Uber is a taxi firm. Lots of urban and suburban short journeys through neighbourhoods where fares cluster. In contrast, once you set aside the hype, Tesla's autopilot is mostly an enhanced version of the existing enhanced cruise control systems that Volvo, BMW, and Mercedes have been playing with for years: lane tracking on highways, adaptive cruise control ... in other words, features used on longer, faster journeys, which are typically driven on roads such as motorways that don't have mixed traffic types.)

There's going to be a legal case, of course, and the insurance corporations will be taking a keen interest because it'll set a precedent and case law is big in the US. Who's at fault: the pedestrian, the supervising human driver behind the steering wheel who didn't stop the car in time, or the software developers? (I will just quote from CNN Tech here: "the car was going approximately 40 mph in a 35 mph zone, according to Tempe Police Detective Lily Duran.")

This case, while tragic, isn't really that interesting. I mean, it's Uber, for Cthulhu's sake (corporate motto: "move fast and break things"). That's going to go down real good in front of a jury. Moreover ... the maximum penalty for vehicular homicide in Arizona is a mere three years in jail, which would be laughable if it wasn't so enraging. (Rob a bank and shoot a guard: get the death penalty. Run the guard over while they're off-shift: max three years.) However, because the culprit in this case is a corporation, the worst outcome they will experience is a fine. The soi-disant "engineers" responsible for the autopilot software experience no direct consequences of moral hazard.

But there are ramifications.

Firstly, it's apparent that the current legal framework privileges corporations over individuals with respect to moral hazard. So I'm going to stick my neck out and predict that there's going to be a lot of lobbying money spent to ensure that this situation continues ... and that in the radiant Randian libertarian future, all self-driving cars will be owned by limited liability shell companies. Their "owners" will merely lease their services, and thus evade liability for any crash when they're not directly operating the controls. Indeed, the cars will probably sue any puny meatsack who has the temerity to vandalize their paint job with a gout of arterial blood, or traumatize their customers by screaming and crunching under their wheels.

Secondly, sooner or later there will be a real test case on the limits of machine competence. I expect to see a question like this show up in an exam for law students in a decade or so:

A child below the age of criminal responsibility plays chicken with a self-driving taxi, is struck, and is injured or killed. Within the jurisdiction of the accident (see below) pedestrians have absolute priority (there is no offense of jaywalking), but it is an offense to obstruct traffic deliberately.

The taxi is owned by a holding company. The right to operate the vehicle, and the taxi license (or medalion, in US usage) are leased by the driver.

The driver is doing badly (predatory pricing competition by the likes of Uber is to blame for this) and is unable to pay for certain advanced features, such as a "gold package" that improves the accuracy of pedestrian/obstacle detection from 90% to 99.9%. Two months ago, because they'd never hit anyone, the driver downgraded from the "gold package" to a less-effective "silver package".

The manufacturer of the vehicle, who has a contract with the holding company for ongoing maintenance, disabled the enhanced pedestrian avoidance feature for which the driver was no longer paying.

The road the child was playing chicken on is a pedestrian route closed to private cars and goods traffic but open to public transport.

In this jurisdiction, private hire cars are classified as private vehicles, but licensed taxis are legally classified as public transport when (and only for the duration) they are collecting or delivering a passenger within the pedestrian area.

At the moment of the impact the taxi has no passenger, but has received a pickup request from a passenger inside the pedestrian zone (beyond the accident location) and is proceeding to that location on autopilot control.

The driver is not physically present in the vehicle at the time of the accident.

The driver is monitoring their vehicle remotely from their phone, using a dash cam and an app provided by the vehicle manufacturer but subject to an EULA that disclaims responsibility and commits the driver to binding arbitration administered by a private tribunal based in Pyongyang acting in accordance with the legal code of the Republic of South Sudan.

Immediately before the accident the dash cam view was obscured by a pop-up message from the taxi despatch app that the driver uses, notifying them of the passenger pickup request. The despatch app is written and supported by a Belgian company and is subject to an EULA that disclaims responsibility and doesn't impose private arbitration but requires any claims to be heard in a Belgian court.

The accident took place in Berwick-upon-Tweed, England; the Taxi despatch firm is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Discuss!

by Charlie Stross, Charlie's Diary |  Read more:

Beloved Guitar Maker Gibson Faces Crushing Debt

Like the blues giant Robert Johnson, whose mastery of a Gibson guitar was said to be the result of a deal with the Devil, the company has come to a crossroads.

After 116 years, the Devil’s knocking on Gibson’s door. Debt of as much as $560 million is due this summer, and investors are whispering that Chief Executive Officer Henry Juszkiewicz has got to go.

Juszkiewicz traded a slice of Gibson’s soul in an attempt to become more than just the maker of the world’s most beloved guitar. He bought pieces of consumer electronics companies to relaunch Gibson Guitars as Gibson Brands Inc., a “music lifestyle’’ company. It didn’t work out as planned.

“My dream was to be the Nike of music lifestyle,” Juszkiewicz said in an interview. “At this point, I have to cut back on that ambition, frankly.”

Elvis Presley changed history on a Gibson J200. Eric Clapton’s famous solo on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps’’ was played on a Gibson, and when young B.B. King fled a burning building and realized he’d left his Gibson behind, he risked his lifeby going back inside to retrieve it. The fire had been accidentally started by two men fighting over a woman, and King gave his hollow-body guitar her name -- Lucille.

But pop cares little for legend. Gibson says sales are strong, but guitars don’t have the mystique they did in King’s day.

Consumer Electronics

“We have a younger generation coming in with tastes toward a different type of music,” said Al Di Meola, a Grammy-winning jazz guitarist.

Juszkiewicz tried diversification. He bought a line of consumer electronics from Japanese company Onkyo Corp., and in 2014 he added Royal Philips NV’s audio and home entertainment business, WOOX Innovations, for $135 million.

The purchases fit into Juszkiewicz’s vision for the company’s future. Not everyone was pleased.

“Gibson has chosen to go into that market where they’re competing with the really big dogs,” said Pat Foley, who leads artist relations at Orange Amplifiers. He ran Gibson’s entertainment relations worldwide before being fired in 2014. “In the guitar market, we were the big dogs.” (...)

The company has expressed pride that its Gibson guitars are made in the U.S. Acoustic instruments come out of a factory in Bozeman, Montana, and solid-body electric guitars are made in Nashville, Tennessee. Hollow bodies, like King’s Lucille, are crafted at its Memphis plant.

The Memphis factory sits near B.B. King’s Blues Club and not far from the old Sun Records studio, where Presley cut his first album. The guitars are shaped, sanded, painted and polished by hand. Wood chips fly, sending the scent of cut rosewood into the air. It takes up to a month to make each instrument into a work of art. Only 60 are completed each day.

“We’re preserving the artistry,” Juszkiewicz said. “That’s what Gibson is, and that’s what people want from Gibson.”

To raise cash, Gibson Brands sold the Memphis factory in December to private equity firms Somera Road and Tricera Capital for $14.1 million. It continues work there, for now.

Reduce Leverage

“Their hope is that the capital structure is refinanceable if they can reduce leverage,” said Cassidy of Moody’s. “We think the likelihood of a default or some type of financial restructuring is pretty high.”

Another obstacle to the company’s resurgence is its broken relationship with some retailers. A number of them have stopped selling the brand, citing unmanageable demands that range from annual credit checks to upfront orders for a year’s merchandise.

“You have to eat so much garbage in order to be a Gibson dealer that it’s not worth it,” said George Gruhn, who owns Gruhn Guitars in Nashville.

Other vendors echoed that sentiment, including Frank Glionna, who says he’d been a Gibson dealer since the 1970s and called his decision to cut ties last year “bittersweet.”

‘Everybody Bailed’

“In the last couple of years, everybody bailed,” said Glionna, owner of The Music Gallery in Highland Park, Illinois. “The company is in the worst place I’ve ever seen it in my decades as a dealer.”

by Emma Orr and Austin Weinstein, Bloomberg | Read more:

Image: ES-339, Guitar Center
[ed. Sad. People have been saying for years that Juszkiewicz needed to go.]

Embarrassed Whale Panicking About Huge Barnacle Outbreak Before Date

ATLANTIC OCEAN—Concerned that the unappealing affliction would spoil his plans for a romantic evening, an embarrassed right whale was reportedly panicking Monday after having a huge barnacle outbreak before an upcoming date. “Oh god, I look terrible, they’re all over my face,” said the mortified cetacean, scrambling in vain to clear his skin by rubbing against a nearby rock outcropping. “I can’t believe this, I haven’t had a single barnacle in months, and tonight of all nights I get dozens of them. The worst part is, there’s basically nothing I can do about it. I guess I’ll just take her to a darker part of the ocean and hope she doesn’t notice. This is so humiliating.” At press time, the whale was reportedly feeling much more relaxed after his companion showed up for their date with her face completely covered in a fishing net.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How to Delete Facebook

If you’ve finally given up on the world’s most popular social media network and want to get rid of Facebook, it’s not too complicated to remove yourself from the service. But before you delete all of those pictures, posts, and Likes, you should download your personal information from Facebook first.

Your Facebook archives contain just about all of the pertinent information related to your account, including your photos, active sessions, chat history, IP addresses, facial recognition data, and which ads you clicked, just to name a few. That’s a ton of personal information that you should probably maintain access to. To download your archive, go to “Settings” and click “Download a copy of your Facebook data” at the bottom of General Account Settings, and then click “Start My Archive.”

After you’ve finished downloading your archive, you can now delete your account.

Beware: once you delete your account, it cannot be recovered.

If you are ready to delete your account, you can click this link, which will take you to the account deletion page. (Facebook doesn’t have the delete account option in its settings, for some reason.) Once you click “Delete My Account,” your account will be marked for termination, and inaccessible to others using Facebook. (...)

The company says it can take up to 90 days to fully delete your account and the information associated with it, but it notes that your account will be inaccessible to other people using Facebook during that time.

by Micah Singleton, The Verge |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Tonina Saputo

12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech

Technology isn’t an industry, it’s a method of transforming the culture and economics of existing systems and institutions. That can be a little bit hard to understand if we only judge tech as a set of consumer products that we purchase. But tech goes a lot deeper than the phones in our hands, and we must understand some fundamental shifts in society if we’re going to make good decisions about the way tech companies shape our lives—and especially if we want to influence the people who actually make technology.

Even those of us who have been deeply immersed in the tech world for a long time can miss the driving forces that shape its impact. So here, we’ll identify some key principles that can help us understand technology’s place in culture.

1. Tech is not neutral.

One of the most important things everybody should know about the apps and services they use is that the values of technology creators are deeply ingrained in every button, every link, and every glowing icon that we see. Choices that software developers make about design, technical architecture or business model can have profound impacts on our privacy, security and even civil rights as users. When software encourages us to take photos that are square instead of rectangular, or to put an always-on microphone in our living rooms, or to be reachable by our bosses at any moment, it changes our behaviors, and it changes our lives.

All of the changes in our lives that happen when we use new technologies do so according to the priorities and preferences of those who create those technologies.

2. Tech is not inevitable.

Popular culture presents consumer technology as a never-ending upward progression that continuously makes things better for everybody. In reality, new tech products usually involve a set of tradeoffs where improvements in areas like usability or design come along with weaknesses in areas like privacy & security. Sometimes new tech is better for one community while making things worse for others. Most importantly, just because a particular technology is “better” in some way doesn’t guarantee it will be widely adopted, or that it will cause other, more popular technologies to improve.

In reality, technological advances are a lot like evolution in the biological world: there are all kinds of dead-ends or regressions or uneven tradeoffs along the way, even if we see broad progress over time. (...)

6. Tech is often built with surprising ignorance about its users.

Over the last few decades, society has greatly increased in its respect for the tech industry, but this has often resulted in treating the people who create tech as infallible. Tech creators now regularly get treated as authorities in a wide range of fields like media, labor, transportation, infrastructure and political policy — even if they have no background in those areas. But knowing how to make an iPhone app doesn’t mean you understand an industry you’ve never worked in!

The best, most thoughtful tech creators engage deeply and sincerely with the communities that they want to help, to ensure they address actual needs rather than indiscriminately “disrupting” the way established systems work. But sometimes, new technologies run roughshod over these communities, andthe people making those technologies have enough financial and social resources that the shortcomings of their approaches don’t keep them from disrupting the balance of an ecosystem. Often times, tech creators have enough money funding them that they don’t even notice the negative effects of the flaws in their designs, especially if they’re isolated from the people affected by those flaws. Making all of this worse are the problems with inclusion in the tech industry, which mean that many of the most vulnerable communities will have little or no representation amongst the teams that create new tech, preventing those teams from being aware of concerns that might be of particular importance to those on the margins.

by Anil Dash, LinkedIn |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Bad BBQ

[ed. I tried a new barbecue sauce on my ribs tonight. I wouldn't say it was totally bad, but it did remind me of this.]

"Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guiness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nictotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings."

~ Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Image: uncredited via

Joe Jackson

[ed. See also: Be My Number Two]

Peter Charles Henderson, Blue Egyptian Water-lily, 1804
via:

What is it to be a Cow?

The room shuddered, and Mark Zuckerberg looked down. The floor was opening, leaving him perched on a narrow ledge, a thin plank ahead, a gaping pit on either side. “OK, that’s pretty scary”, he said. It was also pretty imaginary, for the Facebook founder stood in a Stanford University lab, video goggles strapped to his head, atmospheric audio pumped in, the ground rigged to quaver. Many of those who experience the Stanford “pit”, as Zuckerberg did in 2014, are too frightened to walk the plank. And that is the marvel of virtual reality: when gadgets envelop our senses, we enter a limbo state where our minds understand the falsity but our bodies do not.

Virtual reality – and much breathless exaggeration regarding it – has been part of tech daydreaming for a few decades, without yet becoming something anyone might keep in their living room. During a previous flare of VR hopes in the 1980s and 90s, microprocessors lagged behind programmers’ visions. Today, computing power has nearly caught up, and it is up to coders to conjure dreamscapes desirable enough for us to buy. Once VR goes mainstream, optimists say, new universes will open. We’ll be able to fly. Or become trout. Or walk through others’ bodies. Any kookiness or fantasia could be concocted and shared. Pessimists, however, warn that VR will produce aimless addicts, lost in non-existent worlds to the detriment of the one we have contended with for millennia.

Whether VR proves grand or ghastly, tech corporations are hurrying to profit. Months after Zuckerberg wavered at the pit’s edge, Facebook paid $2 billion for a leading headset maker, Oculus VR. Also that year, Google released a viewer made of cardboard that allowed users to transform their smartphones into rudimentary VR screens. In the years since, the Samsung Gear VR has come out, along with the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the Sony PlayStation VR. None has sold in society-changing numbers, but each product inches ahead.

In the meantime, entrepreneurs are feverishly developing apps, promising VR fitness, VR movie experiences, VR property viewing, VR psychotherapy, not to mention VR porn. A pioneering spirit flourishes, thrilling and chaotic. “Consumer VR is coming like a freight train”, writes Jeremy Bailenson, the Stanford professor behind the pit and one of the world’s leading VR researchers, in Experience on Demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do. “It may take two years, it may take ten, but mass adoption of affordable and powerful VR technology, combined with vigorous investment in content, is going to unleash a torrent of applications that will touch every aspect of our lives.”

For Bailenson, the power of virtual reality is that it is not virtual. What you do in VR generates experiences akin to real ones, he argues, making VR the most psychologically powerful medium ever invented. Once the technology is refined (major limitations remain), VR will transform education, whether one is learning brain surgery or parachuting. It will allow us to travel anywhere in perfect safety. It could even deepen our empathy. Storytelling has long offered humans a way to glimpse others’ viewpoints, witness their escapades and their torments, too. But VR, its advocates say, would be far more potent. You could inhabit the body of, say, someone from a different country or ethnicity, or discover what it is to be a cow, Bailenson suggests. Another use of VR “presence” is real-world absence, which has been used to help burn victims through a game called SnowWorld, which distracts them from excruciating medical treatment. News organizations, too, are experimenting, hoping VR will engage the public in far-flung events when words, photographs and video fail.

The revolution is approaching at a peculiar time, when fear of what is becoming of us in the digital age cohabits with excitement about each new wizardry – these conflicting emotions often occurring in the same person at the same time. Our unease is evident in an array of recent books, amounting almost to a new genre: dystopian non-fiction. Consider the subtitles of a few from 2017: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy; The rise of Silicon Valley as a political powerhouse and social wrecking ball; The existential threat of big tech. Even Wired magazine, a longtime purveyor of our glittering digital future, now regularly asks where it all went wrong.

Bailenson is a hearty VR booster, but acknowledges a few concerns. If a VR experience is almost equal to a real one, what happens when you witness VR violence there? What if you yourself murder someone in a VR game? From the outside, it would merely look like a person in headset and earphones. Inside, something hideous could be happening. Legal questions arise, too. Should crimes committed in VR be illegal? Before you say no, what about torture? Or sex crimes? What if the user has sexual relations with a VR version of a real person without their permission? This seems obscene. But is it a thought crime? An experience crime? Or no crime at all?

by Tom Rachman, TLS |  Read more:

Image: Ready Player One, Lifestyle Pictures/Alamy

Cooking with Alexandre Dumas

If the lavish feasts and epic drinking sessions of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), are any indication, seventeenth-century France was the era of the gourmand. The musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and their young friend d’Artagnan, the Gascon nobleman who is the book’s hero, are frat boys of a different era, men for whom an ordinary evening at home is thus:

Porthos was in bed, and was playing a game of lansquenet with Mousqueton [his servant], to keep his hand in; while a spit loaded with partridges was turning before the fire, and on each side of a large chimney-piece, over two chafing dishes, were boiling two stew-pans, from which exhaled a double odour of rabbit and fish stews, rejoicing to the smell. In addition to this … the top of a wardrobe and the marble of a commode were covered with empty bottles.

The musketeers know no moderation. They order multiple bottles of wine for a quick drink, and at one point, one of them consumes an entire wine cellar. When Aramis plans to eat an omelet with a side of spinach, his friends ultimately convince him to say to the waiter, “Return from whence you came; take back these horrible vegetables … Order a larded hare, a fat capon, mutton leg dressed with garlic, and four bottles of old Burgundy.”

Dumas was a bon vivant and passionate cook who wrote in many genres, and his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, a sprawling volume that traveled the alphabet from absinthe to zest, was the great project he felt he must complete before he died. (It was published posthumously.). According to the introduction to my abridged, translated version of that volume, Dumas “wrote novels and stories because he needed the revenue but produced his masterpiece, the Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, because he loved the work.” The book includes recipes, society gossip, bits of culinary history, and the writer’s meditations on hosting and entertaining. It is not, the introduction says, “a basic cookery book for an untaught bride.” I found it fun to read that a recipe for ortolans, a rare songbird, tells us that to kill them, we must “asphyxiate them by plunging their heads into very strong vinegar. It is a violent death that improves their flesh.”

I made three dishes mentioned in The Three Musketeers—the rabbit stew and fish stew cooked concomitantly in the passage quoted above (the mingled smells really did cause rejoicing) and a spinach salad to exonerate the spinach forgone in the book. For all three, I worked from Dumas’s cookbook, choosing a rabbit-stew option that seemed possible to execute for a person who had never cooked rabbit and, in the spirit of adventure, a fish stew calling for eel. Since drinking was so essential to Dumas and the musketeers, I paired the food with wines, either those mentioned in the book or approximations.

This cooking called for an eel head, rehydrated morels (they were great), and an old-fashioned soup-thickening technique called beurre manié, all well outside my comfort zone. I took as my inspiration these words of the musketeer Athos upon being sent into danger: “So let us go get killed where we are told to go. Is life worth the trouble of so many questions?” (...)

Matelote of Eel Marinière

Take a Seine carp, an eel, a tench, a perch, and cut them in pieces. Slice 2 large onions. Put the onions on the bottom of a copper pot, then all the heads, then the body pieces, so the pieces from nearest the tail are on top. Season with salt, pepper, a bouquet garni, and a few cloves of garlic. Pour over all 2 bottles of white wine. Bring to a quick boil. Add 1 glass of cognac and flame. Add 20 or 30 little onions fried in butter. Make little balls of flour and butter and sprinkle it into your matelote. Shake to mix well. Serve hot, garnished with croutons and crayfish cooked in Rhine wine.

—Alexandre Dumas’ Dictionary of Cuisine, edited, abridged, and translated by Louis Colman

For the bouquet garni:

a few leaves of sage
a few sprigs of thyme
1/2 sprig rosemary
1 bay leaf

Tie all the ingredients together and place them in a piece of cheesecloth.

For the croutons:

1/2 baguette

Slice the baguette and fry the slices in butter till crispy, salting liberally.

For the soup:

1 eel, filleted, head reserved
2 catfish, filleted, head reserved
1 bass, filleted, head reserved
salt
pepper
1 white onion, in segments
4 cloves of garlic
1 bottle white wine, preferably Sancerre
2 1/2 cups water
20 or 30 little cipollini onions
8 tbs butter (2 for frying the fish, 6 for the beurre manié)
1/4 cup flour
Salt and pepper, to taste

Make a fish stock. Put the fish heads and the head of the eel, the onions, the garlic, the wine, and the water in a large pot. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 20 minutes and strain.

Brown the onions in the butter on medium-low heat until they’re very soft, about 30 minutes.

Prepare the fish. I followed Dumas’s directions and cut my fish as steaks, but they were bony and difficult to eat. In this recipe, I suggest using fillets.

Dry the fillets and season them thoroughly. Fry skin side down in two tablespoons of the butter until the skin is crisp.

Prepare the beurre manié. Mash the remaining butter with the flour until it forms a smooth paste. Make the paste into teaspoon-size balls. These will be used to thicken the soup.

Reheat the fish stock to a simmer, add the onions and fillets, and simmer until the fish is cooked through.

Add the beurre manié balls and continue to simmer until the balls have dispersed and the sauce has thickened.

Salt and pepper to taste. Serve garnished with croutons.

by Valerie Stivers, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Valarie Stivers

Leandro Erlich, La Vitrina Cloud Collection (2011)
via:

All of a Sudden, Voting Rights Are Expanding Across the Country

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is set to sign a sweeping election reform package on Monday that will make his state one of the leaders in the country in expanding voting rights. The “Access to Democracy” bills passed by Washington’s Legislature include automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and a state version of the national Voting Rights Act.

Washington will become the second state after California to have all four of these policies in place. “We want to have the highest participation rate of anywhere in the country,” says Spencer Olson, communications director for the WA Voting Justice Coalition, a network of groups that lobbied for the bills.

Washington is the 11th state to pass or implement automatic voter registration since 2015. It works like this: When voters obtain or renew a driver’s license or sign up for the state’s health insurance exchange, they will automatically be registered to vote once the state confirms their US citizenship, unless they opt out. The program will also be expanded to other social service agencies.

Oregon became the first state to implement automatic voter registration in 2016, with impressive results. More than 270,000 new voters were registered that way in 2016, and Oregon had the highest turnout increase of any state in the last presidential election. Registration among voters of color increased by 26 points. Currently, 1.3 million eligible voters in Washington—23 percent of the electorate—are not registered to vote. Voting rights advocates project that 90 percent of eligible voters will be registered under the state’s new system. These new registrants will then receive ballots in the mail under Washington’s vote-by-mail system.

Voters who are not registered automatically will be able to register on Election Day. Studies have shown that the 15 states with Election Day registration have seen voter turnout increase by as much as 10 percent. High school students who are 16 and 17 years old will also be able to pre-register at their schools so they can vote when they turn 18.

Finally, Washington becomes the second state after California to adopt a state Voting Rights Act, intended to boost minority representation at the local level. The law calls for shifting from citywide to district-based local elections. Yakima, Washington, for example, is 45 percent Hispanic, but there were no Latinos on the city council as of 2014, because elections were conducted on a citywide basis and the city’s white majority declined to vote for a Hispanic candidate. But after the city switched to district-based elections following a lawsuit by the ACLU, three Latina city council members were elected for the first time. The Washington Voting Rights Act will make it easier for cities and counties to adopt similar district-based elections, which could boost Latino participation in particular: In the 10 counties with the highest Latino populations in the state, there are no Latino county commissioners.

Washington’s voting reform package highlights a broader national trend of states expanding access to the ballot, in an attempt to combat Republican voter suppression efforts at the national level and in other states. From 2010 to 2017, 23 states passed new voting restrictions. Now, the pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction: Legislators have introduced at least 206 bills to expand access to the ballot in 30 states this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

“Unlike previous years, we’re playing on offense,” says Faiz Shakir, political director of the ACLU, which this year launched a Let People Vote campaign in every state. “We’re seeing a nationwide awakening around voting rights.”

by Ari Berman, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Ted S. Warren/AP

A Tragic Wig and the Search for Happiness in ‘Oh Lucy!’

Optimism sneaks into “Oh Lucy!,” an against-the-odds charmer about a woman, a tragic wig and an improbable journey. It’s a near-minor miracle that just about everything works in this emphatically modest comedy-drama, which draws on squishy types and themes — the lonely eccentric, the cross-cultural clash, the revelatory trip — that can quickly sink less nimble features. The writer-director Atsuko Hirayanagi isn’t selling a packaged idea about what it means to be human; she does something trickier and more honest here, merely by tracing the ordinary absurdities and agonies of one woman’s life.

She has a terrific partner in cinema with Shinobu Terajima, who plays Setsuko, our irresistibly flawed heroine. You first see Setsuko on a crowded train platform, a gray speck in a quiet sea of people, many wearing white surgical masks. She’s staring ahead as if lost in thought (or maybe simply lost), when a man brushes past her and jumps in front of the coming train. There’s a pause, the expected gasps and a discreet shot of the victim. Then Setsuko goes off to another day of work, a day like any other except that now she’s deep in a story about identity, self-annihilation and stubborn existence.

These come into play in a contrived, borderline cutesy setup that — once the parts have been snapped into place — relaxes into a pleasurable, meandering portrait of someone getting another shot, maybe the last one, at happiness. Things start clicking when Setsuko’s niece (Shioli Kutsuna) persuades her reluctant aunt to take English-language lessons with an American, John, played by a sweet, sympathetic Josh Hartnett. (The great Koji Yakusho plays another student.) John seems laughably ill-equipped for the job; his dubious pedagogical method includes fake names and hairpieces. But after giving her a curly blond wig and a lingering hug, he inadvertently transforms Setsuko into Lucy, igniting a revolution of self. (...)

At first, Ms. Terajima’s subtle performance works like a roadblock to easy sympathy. With her defeated shoulders and practiced deadpan, Setsuko seems to be a passive observer, someone who has become good at watching other people live. She isn’t at all likable and it isn’t clear, at least initially, if she’s even worthy of sustained interest. When she hunkers down smoking in her tiny, uncomfortably cluttered apartment — a killing field of empty cans, miscellaneous junk and aspirational fashion goods — it looks as if she’s living in the aftermath of a disaster of her own making. A lot of actors can weep on cue, but it takes one as good as Ms. Terajima to make emptiness feel haunted.

Together with her director, Ms. Terajima fills up that emptiness with deep, then deeper waves of feeling, and escalating, freewheeling comedy. After some narrative busywork, John disappears and Setsuko — weighted down with a large suitcase and her comically, aggressively angry sister (Kaho Minami) — follows him to Southern California. There, amid the sunshine and enveloping shadows, Setsuko finds and then loses herself while cutting loose and engaging in some savage psychological blood sport. She stumbles and she falls, plays at being Lucy and slips back into a radically changed Setsuko in a movie in which the human comedy is by turns tender, plaintive, heartfelt and joyful.

by Manohla Dargis, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Film Movement

[ed. See also: Setsuko doesn’t live here anymore: Oh Lucy!]

Cinderella Story? It’s True for U.M.B.C. in Academics, Too

The stunning victory by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, over the University of Virginia on Friday night — the biggest upset ever in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament — catapulted a school whose competitive claim to fame had long been chess into sports history.

But the U.M.B.C. Cinderella story transcends athletics, and has been decades in the making.

The university, founded in 1966, is better known for producing the most African-American students who go on to complete combined M.D.-Ph.D. programs than it is for turning out professional athletes. Before its 20-point win over the nation’s top-ranked basketball team, it was the reigning National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition champion. A statue of the school’s mascot, a Chesapeake Bay retriever named True Grit, has a shiny nose from the tradition of students’ rubbing it for good luck before finals, rather than before big games.

U.M.B.C., which has about 14,000 students and is situated about a 10-minute drive from downtown Baltimore, has come to embrace its underdog status in Maryland’s public university system. It is among the newer of the system’s 12 institutions, and it has worked to overcome a reputation as a commuter school without a football team.

After last night’s victory, the U.M.B.C. athletic department took a jab at the system’s flagship school, the University of Maryland, College Park, which had a blowout victory over the Retrievers earlier in the season but failed to make the N.C.A.A. tournament. U.M.B.C. retweeted a photo of a Maryland fan holding a sign at that December game saying that U.M.B.C. stood for “University of Maryland Backup College.”

“Hopefully you enjoyed our game from your couch dude!” the tweet said.

Over the years, U.M.B.C. has quietly carved out an identity of its own, in part shaped by national rankings listing it as “up and coming” and one of the “most innovative” universities. (...)

Dr. Hrabowski, who has led the institution for 26 years, was born in Birmingham, Ala., at the start of the civil rights movement, and grew up in the same segregated neighborhood as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He spent five days in jail at age 12 for participating in a civil rights protest. He obtained his undergraduate degree, from Hampton University, at 19, and his doctorate, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at 24.

His efforts have helped drive U.M.B.C.’s acclaimed Meyerhoff Scholars Program to the forefront of the push to increase diversity in science, technology, engineering and related fields, and the program has been replicated across the country. Dr. Hrabowski said he was most proud that it had been able to flourish over the years at a predominantly white institution.

“The reason we do well with minorities is because we do so well with everybody else,” he said.

Dr. Hrabowski has helped build the university, which was founded on farmland and initially educated 750 students, to include three huge research centers funded by NASA, a $170 million humanities building and a $140 million interdisciplinary building that is under construction.

He calls it “a middle-class campus,” but one that looks like the “plaza of nations at the U.N.,” representing the school’s motto of “inclusive excellence.” More than the win last night, Dr. Hrabowski said he was proud of what else was on display: a diverse group in the stands, in the band, on the dance team.

“You saw in the U.M.B.C. community what America wants to be,” he said.

U.M.B.C. sends 40 percent of its students to graduate programs, including Harvard and Stanford. Its graduates include high-profile researchers at Johns Hopkins and college presidents. It is a leading feeder to the National Security Agency and Northrop Grumman.

“It’s a campus where you come because you want to be a serious student, no matter your background, across disciplines,” he said. (Two of the school’s basketball players have 4.0 G.P.A.s.) (...)

It was not lost on him that Virginia is one of the oldest public universities in the country; has a legacy that stretches back to one of the nation’s founders; and has $9 billion more in endowment money than U.M.B.C., which is trying to raise its first $100 million.

“Public universities can be strong academically, even if they don’t have hundreds of years and a major budget,” he said. “We’ve got to help the public understand that institutions of all types have to have quality.”

by Erica L. Green, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Audioslave

The Cambridge Analytica Files

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

It was Wylie who came up with that idea and oversaw its realisation. And it was Wylie who, last spring, became my source. In May 2017, I wrote an article headlined “The great British Brexit robbery”, which set out a skein of threads that linked Brexit to Trump to Russia. Wylie was one of a handful of individuals who provided the evidence behind it. I found him, via another Cambridge Analytica ex-employee, lying low in Canada: guilty, brooding, indignant, confused. “I haven’t talked about this to anyone,” he said at the time. And then he couldn’t stop talking.

By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”

He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May, it was revealed that the company had “reached out” to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election.

The Observer also received the first of three letters from Cambridge Analytica threatening to sue Guardian News and Media for defamation. We are still only just starting to understand the maelstrom of forces that came together to create the conditions for what Mueller confirmed last month was “information warfare”. But Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.

He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”

Last month, Facebook’s UK director of policy, Simon Milner, told British MPs on a select committee inquiry into fake news, chaired by Conservative MP Damian Collins, that Cambridge Analytica did not have Facebook data. The official Hansard extract reads:

Christian Matheson (MP for Chester): “Have you ever passed any user information over to Cambridge Analytica or any of its associated companies?”

Simon Milner: “No.”

Matheson: “But they do hold a large chunk of Facebook’s user data, don’t they?”

Milner: “No. They may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data. It may be data about people who are on Facebook that they have gathered themselves, but it is not data that we have provided.”

Two weeks later, on 27 February, as part of the same parliamentary inquiry, Rebecca Pow, MP for Taunton Deane, asked Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix: “Does any of the data come from Facebook?” Nix replied: “We do not work with Facebook data and we do not have Facebook data.”

And through it all, Wylie and I, plus a handful of editors and a small, international group of academics and researchers, have known that – at least in 2014 – that certainly wasn’t the case, because Wylie has the paper trail. In our first phone call, he told me he had the receipts, invoices, emails, legal letters – records that showed how, between June and August 2014, the profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users had been harvested. Most damning of all, he had a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers admitting that Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data illegitimately.

Going public involves an enormous amount of risk. Wylie is breaking a non-disclosure agreement and risks being sued. He is breaking the confidence of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer.

It’s taken a rollercoaster of a year to help get Wylie to a place where it’s possible for him to finally come forward. A year in which Cambridge Analytica has been the subject of investigations on both sides of the Atlantic – Robert Mueller’s in the US, and separate inquiries by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, both triggered in February 2017, after the Observer’s first article in this investigation.

It has been a year, too, in which Wylie has been trying his best to rewind – to undo events that he set in motion. Earlier this month, he submitted a dossier of evidence to the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Crime Agency’s cybercrime unit. He is now in a position to go on the record: the data nerd who came in from the cold. (...)

It was Bannon’s interest in culture as war that ignited Wylie’s intellectual concept. But it was Robert Mercer’s millions that created a firestorm. Kogan was able to throw money at the hard problem of acquiring personal data: he advertised for people who were willing to be paid to take a personality quiz on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics. At the end of which Kogan’s app, called thisismydigitallife, gave him permission to access their Facebook profiles. And not just theirs, but their friends’ too. On average, each “seeder” – the people who had taken the personality test, around 320,000 in total – unwittingly gave access to at least 160 other people’s profiles, none of whom would have known or had reason to suspect.

What the email correspondence between Cambridge Analytica employees and Kogan shows is that Kogan had collected millions of profiles in a matter of weeks. But neither Wylie nor anyone else at Cambridge Analytica had checked that it was legal. It certainly wasn’t authorised. Kogan did have permission to pull Facebook data, but for academic purposes only. What’s more, under British data protection laws, it’s illegal for personal data to be sold to a third party without consent.

“Facebook could see it was happening,” says Wylie. “Their security protocols were triggered because Kogan’s apps were pulling this enormous amount of data, but apparently Kogan told them it was for academic use. So they were like, ‘Fine’.” (...)

Russia, Facebook, Trump, Mercer, Bannon, Brexit. Every one of these threads runs through Cambridge Analytica. Even in the past few weeks, it seems as if the understanding of Facebook’s role has broadened and deepened. The Mueller indictments were part of that, but Paul-Olivier Dehaye – a data expert and academic based in Switzerland, who published some of the first research into Cambridge Analytica’s processes – says it’s become increasingly apparent that Facebook is “abusive by design”. If there is evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it will be in the platform’s data flows, he says. And Wylie’s revelations only move it on again.

“Facebook has denied and denied and denied this,” Dehaye says when told of the Observer’s new evidence. “It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law. It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”

Facebook denies that the data transfer was a breach. In addition, a spokesperson said: “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do, and we require the same from people who operate apps on Facebook. If these reports are true, it’s a serious abuse of our rules. Both Aleksandr Kogan as well as the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”

Millions of people’s personal information was stolen and used to target them in ways they wouldn’t have seen, and couldn’t have known about, by a mercenary outfit, Cambridge Analytica, who, Wylie says, “would work for anyone”. Who would pitch to Russian oil companies. Would they subvert elections abroad on behalf of foreign governments?

It occurs to me to ask Wylie this one night.

“Yes.”

Nato or non-Nato?

“Either. I mean they’re mercenaries. They’ll work for pretty much anyone who pays.”

It’s an incredible revelation. It also encapsulates all of the problems of outsourcing – at a global scale, with added cyberweapons. And in the middle of it all are the public – our intimate family connections, our “likes”, our crumbs of personal data, all sucked into a swirling black hole that’s expanding and growing and is now owned by a politically motivated billionaire.

by Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: How Facebook’s destructive ethos imperils democracy.]

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
via:

Outside Voices

The West Village is a ridiculous place to call home. People with unseemly bank accounts spend thousands of dollars freshening the flowerpots on their stoops. Rosebushes, hydrangeas, pansies, and zinnias—all casually exposed to marauding vagrants. Except there are no vagrants, not even marauding ones. It’s a generationally diverse area, but otherwise it’s as removed from reality as a movie set. Celebrities’ kids skip along the pavement, backpacks twice their size bobbing up and down. One of the houses visible from my apartment is owned by an elderly couple. The woman likes to tell guests how Hilary Swank used to climb a fence and exit through their house in order to avoid the paparazzi.

Down the block and around the clock, people take photos of the façade of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment in “Sex and the City.” Submitting to their fate, the real owners have installed a donation box on behalf of a local animal shelter, to collect a contribution for every photo taken. These tourists’ heads would explode like a bomb full of nicotine patches if they knew that Sarah Jessica Parker herself lives around the corner. I can’t help but wonder what she feels when she walks past Carrie’s building. It must be like driving past your high school—at once everything and nothing.

I only cared about the celebrities the way all New Yorkers care about celebrities: I ignored them or, if they were especially famous, congratulated myself for ignoring them. The real draw of the neighborhood was the quiet. And not just any kind of quiet. Here, in the heart of Manhattan, was a pod of that suburban silence that had eluded me as a child. You could hear a pin drop in my bedroom—on the bed. Early mornings, I listened to the heckling of seagulls that had strayed inland from the Hudson River. On warm evenings, a cellist sat on the street corner with his case open. When it rained, water pelted the leaves outside my enchanted tree house.

And then one day the leaves dropped and Jared came out. Jared lived in the town house directly behind my apartment. He must have been on summer vacation or touring Europe by colonial rickshaw when I moved in. Jared was between fifteen and eighteen years old. It was impossible to tell. I could never get a good read on his height, as his resting state was slouched in a lawn chair, watching viral videos on his phone at full volume. And I never heard him say stuff like “Looks like I can be legally tried as an adult now” despite being someone for whom the distinction was clearly relevant.

How do I begin to explain my relationship with this creature? Is it a relationship if you’ve never met? Certainly this is an acceptable dynamic online, but played out in real life it’s called stalking. All five of the windows in my apartment faced Jared’s house. And, for as many years, I heard every word this kid said. I would like to tell you that his woes were typical of his age bracket: unrequited crushes, parental oppression, social strife. But Jared had no woes. Plato advised us to be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle, but I am here to tell you that I have witnessed Plato’s exception. Jared’s battles centered around selecting the right surfboard (for show or for use at a beach house, both equally abhorrent) and the occasional obligation to come inside and set the table. And that he didn’t have to do, so long as he ignored the sound of his own name. Jewish guilt is no match for teen-age entitlement.

I rarely saw the father, who was probably off somewhere devaluing my 401(k). The little sister was shy and kept to herself. The mother was an upscale fashion photographer. She had a Susan Sontag streak in her hair and doled out advice like “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Occasionally, she would pace in the back yard, phone in hand, all puffed up about some dead-eyed model. But for the most part the yard was Jared’s domain—a place to smoke cigarettes, molest a guitar, and throw raging parties.

Lest you think I don’t know what I signed up for by living on the most densely populated slip of land in America, rest assured that I do. There are sounds one learns to accept, even to be lulled by on occasion. Jackhammers that emerge seasonally and peck at the concrete like oversized woodpeckers. Screaming matches that make you grateful you’re not one of the two people in that relationship. I have lived over d.j.s, newborn babies, sheet-metal sculptors, and Ping-Pong patios. In Chelsea, I lived above a piano player who practiced scales. When I could stand it no longer, I sheepishly knocked on his door. He apologized and vowed never to practice scales in the house again. Which is how I wound up listening to “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” every day for a year.

But Jared’s noise was different. It did not disrupt me, because disruption implies separation of activity, the intervening of outside elements. Rather, Jared’s world became my world. I was paying rent like a single person but living with an entire family in what amounted to an inaccessible wing of my apartment. Every afternoon, Jared and his friends returned home from whatever educational womb they attended and clunked down the back-yard steps, blaring music and demonstrating familiarity with one another’s last names. Jared was quick to laugh, which would have been his best quality were it not for the laugh’s resemblance to a hyena being choked to death by bubble wrap. His cackle was like one of those purposefully ugly sculptures, the kind of art that considers your irritation an accomplishment. Really, I can’t say enough bad things about it.

Smell is reportedly the strongest trigger of memory, but let us not underestimate the bone-chilling power of sound. The sound of cigarettes being packed against a table. The sound of tracks being skipped. The sound of a porch door banging. These were the harbingers, the sounds of my torturers clearing their throats. Sometimes Jared would leave the music on after he left, a tactic generally employed by war criminals. But mostly he and his friends stayed put, multiplying like gremlins.

Does it seem like I was spying? I was and I wasn’t. This was not so much a “Rear Window” situation as it was a window situation. If I was home, I was on an involuntary stakeout. If I was out, some perverse part of me hoped they would be in the yard when I returned, because then I could stop worrying about them being in the yard. Anthropologically, I was fascinated. Never in my life have I had a social circle as wide or as regular as Jared’s. Then again, I also have never lived in a five-story town house. It’s hard to say how much the house itself factored into Jared’s popularity. Surely his cohorts—preppy boys with laughs that died in their throats, and coltish girls with sea-level self-esteem—slumbered in comparable accommodations.

Very occasionally it was just Jared, alone in the back yard, pouring out the decibels. The mother would appear at the top of the stairs, mumbling something about homework. And he’d tell her to fuck off, which she fully deserved. Jared was a menace, true, but who had let him get that way? I remember with a haunting clarity lying in bed one night, being kept conscious by Biggie Smalls, when the mother screamed Jared’s name. My heart fluttered. Finally. An adult. An authority figure. A savior with her finger on the allowance button.

“Jared!” she shrieked. “Where’d you put the corkscrew?”

Of course I did. Of course I asked them to be quiet. Hey, guys, sorry to be a buzzkill, but can you keep it down? Hey, guys, can you take it inside your mansion, because I have nowhere to run? To which they apologized in a tone that suggested “sorry” was more of a password than a feeling. So I bought a white-noise machine and fancy headphones. I slept on my side to deafen one chosen ear. None of it worked. Finally, I bit the bullet and called 311, a placebo service for cranks on the brink. Operators forward complaints to local police precincts, at which point the police have eight hours to take action, assuming they’re done mocking you. Also: An eight-hour window? Even Jared didn’t party from midnight until 8 a.m. He lived in a town house, not a warehouse.

I pretended to write down my service-request number because, for some reason, it’s impossible to admit you don’t want your service-request number. Alas, help was never sent—a bad sign for me, a worse one for my fellow-citizens who actually needed it. (...)

Out of helpfulness or exasperation, friends floated suggestions. “Why don’t you—”

“Shoot them?” I interrupted. “I can’t shoot them—”

“Move out.”

It hadn’t occurred to me. Rather, it had occurred to me that murder was more of an option than moving—a true test of a New Yorker if there ever was one. I was fully aware there were other apartments I could live in, other boroughs I could go to. But to live in New York is to weigh your traumas, and moving is a formidable one. Plus, while I might not have been here first, I was here truest. I respected my apartment. I did not litter it with beer cans and try to set the furniture on fire. Instead, I begged for mercy. Please be quiet. Please please please. I did this sparingly, concerned about its diminishing effects but mostly concerned about something utterly mortifying: Jared’s impression of me.

by Sloane Crosley, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Bianca Bagnarelli

Democracy: Russia Style

This Sunday Vladimir Putin will win his fourth term as Russian president. One of the only uncertainties ahead of the vote is how big the turnout will be. The Kremlin had initially set a target of a 70 percent result for Putin with 70 percent turnout, though it may have backed off on that in the past few days.

Still, why does Putin care about these numbers at all? Isn’t he going to win no matter what? Won’t he remain the near-Tsar of today’s Russia no matter how many people vote for him, or don’t? Yes and yes. But…

Elections in Russia are not an exercise in democratic accountability but a test of legitimacy — a regular assessment of how good the Kremlin is at shaping a particular narrative about Putin, and the ability of the “system” to reflect it.

The Kremlin will be keen to see if local, political and economic bosses are able to get out the vote without ham-fistedly messing with the tallies in a way that invites protests.

This kind of test matters because in fact Russia’s political system is a lot messier than you’d think.

• Personal relationships and opaque power networks are often more important than formal procedures, parties, and laws.

• At the center of it all is a kind of spell — if everyone believes that the system is holding together, then so it is.

• In a somewhat paradoxical way, the basic tool of democracy — elections — are the best way to gauge the effectiveness of that rather undemocratic spell.

What happens if the Kremlin falls dramatically short of the original 70/70 target?

Nothing immediately. After all, Putin will still comfortably win the election. But it would sow an unwelcome seed of doubt about Putin’s ability to continually master the theater of Russia’s politics.

by Alex Kliment, Axios | Read more:
Image: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images