Fort McMoney is a recently released ‘docu-game’ that combines extensive documentary footage of Fort McMurray, including interviews with residents, and various political and industry figures, with a game platform that asks players to explore the town themselves, interact with various characters, and also participate in an online political discussion about federal, provincial, and municipal policy concerning Fort McMurray and the oilsands. Players of the game have already made one big decision about their ‘virtual’ oilsands policy: that taxes on petroleum products should be higher. As the game proceeds over the course of four weeks, different policy questions will be put to referendum (This week’s: “Should oil be nationalized?”), and the results of the referenda will be put into effect in the virtual town of Fort McMoney. The game contains a simulator that demonstrates the results of the virtual political discussions and policies on the population of the town.

I played the game for a couple of hours on the day it came out, and was mostly impressed with the beauty of the photography involved, the complexity of the platform the developers and filmmakers have built to facilitate discussion, and the sensitivity with which the documentary makers have engaged the human stories behind Fort McMurray’s boom. Though the documentary makers claim that the game represents a neutral perspective on the questions at stake, a probably unavoidable bias does show through; often it seems as though the portrayal is gloomy or negative. To be fair though, when faced with real human suffering as is displayed in some of the stories and interviews, it is hard and maybe not even a good idea to adopt a neutral perspective. The documentarians do a fairly good job maintaining choice for the player in how to explore and interpret the world that they portray.

The idea of combining documentary, game, and political discussion has a lot of appeal to me, and I really hope that Canadians and others will become engaged in the project and in so doing gain a more nuanced understanding of Canada’s oilsands and of the people of Fort McMurray. As an Albertan, and someone who has friends and family living in Fort McMurray, I am often frustrated by the way in which people ignore the human aspects of the oilsands, vilify Albertans and the oil industry for their involvement, while also vastly oversimplifying the policy discussion surrounding the place of petroleum products and the oil industry in Canada. I am happy to see an online platform that asks people to engage with the issues more deeply and come to conclusions only after having done so.

More Links:

• CBC – “Fort McMoney lets players decide virtual fate of oilsands territory”
• CBC Radio Q – “Fort McMoney docu-game plays out complexities of oilsands” (with photos from the game)
• Northern Journal – “Ideas battle online for control of Fort McMoney”

In a recent Foreign Policy article, Ralph Langner summarizes his 36 page report that in turn was the result of three years of analysis on Stuxnet and the much more sophisticated attack that preceded it – and the result of all of this was the surprising information that the cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear program were actually much more sophisticated and more consequential for cybersecurity than most seem to think. The impact of this attack according to the report is very real; Langer estimates that the Iranian nuclear program lost up to two years of progress in particular areas as a result.

One of the most interesting thing that Langner points out about the Stuxnet attack is that while it was clearly the result of a coordinated effort by a nation-state, future attacks don’t necessarily have to be. He says that a lot of the expensive constraints on the Stuxnet attack were self-imposed by its makers; they weren’t aiming just for widespread damage, but specifically for damage that could be concealed as resulting from reliability problems inherent to the technology Iranian engineers were using. Absent the constraint of trying to conceal the presence of a cyber attack, a potential attacker would face much lower costs than those behind Stuxnet did. Furthermore, other potential attackers would probably focus on civilian rather than state-controlled infrastructure, which has the advantage of being more standardized and less protected. Essentially, the Stuxnet attack was a highly sophisticated, almost surgical operation, and other attacks may very well have no reason to be. Future attackers might just aim for indiscriminate destruction, and may even want their attacks to be immediately identifiable as cyberwarfare unlike the secretive nature of Stuxnet.

Langer also has particular insight into the place of the Stuxnet revalations in raising the profile of cyberwarfare in the 21st century. At some point in the development of the campaign, it became clear that “digital weapons work”. In the face of this growing understanding, it would have become important for the United States to identify themselves as dominant players in the world of cyberwarfare in the same way that they are in traditional warfare. The side-effect of revealing the true extent of Stuxnet is global recognition of the continuing preeminence of the United States in cyberwarfare, and this particular side-effect is probably not one that the United States would mind much. No matter what one’s opinion is of the idea of cyberwarfare, it is clear that military establishments around the world think that something big is happening, and the side effects for the rest of us will likely be consequential.

Much has been said about the some of the innovations of Barack Obama’s campaign team, particularly in their use of digital technology and data analysis. But now that the campaign is over, to what ends is this expertise being put? The New York Times recently did a profile of some of the “digital masterminds” of Obama’s campaign team, and it turns out that the intensive and expensive data analytics involved in the campaign and the young and motivated minds behind them seem more drawn to the private sector than to continuing to work in the less lucrative and more frustrating political world.

The article points out that political marketing usually tends to lag behind commercial marketing; in the words of the author, presidential campaigns, in commercial terms, are “start-ups aimed at a one-day sale” to commercial marketing’s “billions of dollars a year [spent] developing ways to make many more billions of dollars a year”. In the case of Obama’s second campaign, however, the resources put towards developing brand new data analysis tools were extensive. Once the campaign was over, the young minds that had been brought in for the campaign had to find somewhere where they could continue to engage in challenging, important work. They, naturally, would want to feel as though they were given sufficient freedom to work, and not have to worry that their work would be destroyed by ineffective bureaucracy. In profiling one of the young people behind Obama’s campaign, the article states the following:

“McLean treated his shift from selling Obama to selling Caesars as a small discomfort that was necessary if he wanted to keep working on the technological advancements he and his colleagues developed on the campaign. In a nonpresidential year, no political effort would have the money to finance what he described as the “huge R.& D. project” that the Obama campaign effectively became. The resources for that kind of project could now be found only in corporate America. If companies with big budgets wanted members of Obama’s team to do for them whatever it was that they did for the president, McLean couldn’t see why they shouldn’t answer the call.”

Meanwhile, some of Obama’s campaign have been involved in more ‘civic-minded’ work, such as the Chicago data analysis firm Civis Analytics, which has been working on a project to map census tracts with the most uninsured people in order to improve outreach efforts for Obamacare, and in the future to help smaller community groups working in health law outreach. In this case, digital technology and data analysis are still being put to use in the political and non-profit arena, but still with the backing of a major government policy campaign. One can imagine this kind of analysis making a big difference in campaigns regarding other social issues, but it will require someone to put the necessary resources behind the task.

The power of data analysis that really takes advantage of digital technology has the potential to change the world in a lot of ways, whether it’s electing a politician who relies on a traditionally less active demographic, rooting out causes and symptoms of poverty, or disrupting the world of TV advertising in order to get casino customers back at the slots. However, outside of a presidential campaign, with a popular candidate that draws in fundraising money, the rising world of “big data” may remain mostly  within big industry.

“When confronted with a maddening user interface, human beings tend to throw up their hands and stop trying. So many people “hate computers” just because every modern operating system is so poorly designed, they don’t ever feel capable of making them do what they want them to do. Well, judging by voter turnout statistics, roughly half this country “hates democracy.”

Who could blame them?“

I recently came across a game entitled “Apathy” designed to spark conversation on some of the issues facing America’s democracy. In the artist’s statement, the game’s creator, Zacqary Adam Green, calls representative democracy the “user interface of America”, and seeks to make apparent some of the frustrations of that user interface by envisioning America’s democratic system as a video game. The game itself is frustrating by design; actions in the game (such as making a call to your Congressperson) have unclear results, the goal of the game, to achieve policy changes, seems to have no motivating force, and the end result of the game changes very little regardless of what strategy the player employs. In short, it is a bad game, but purposefully so.

Green also has an interesting perspective about the idea of games as art, saying that “for a game to truly be art, it needs to make its point not with the aesthetics, but with the game mechanics.” To me, an online videogame critiquing modern democracy is simply an incarnation of the long tradition of artists making political statements through their artistic expression. Right now, I would argue that many people would discount this kind of thing as art, but I think that in the future videogames that are also clearly artistic expressions will gain a higher profile. This has implications when it comes to political discussion on the Internet, given that online games probably have more potential for mass engagement and mobilization than, say, an artistic installation in a gallery.

Finally, the game is a welcome and refreshing take on some of the issues with our democracy. Green asks himself why, in a world where people with minimal resources and equipment can become Youtube stars overnight, we don’t seem to have any of the same kind of efficacy in the political realm. Given that the technological means are there for the vast majority of people to be much more active participants in politics than they are now, why isn’t this participation happening? But more importantly, why aren’t those with the power to do so actively seeking to build systems that facilitate this participation? The obvious answer this is simply that is isn’t in their interest, and the reason it isn’t in their interest is because there are not enough people loudly and openly pointing to the flaws in representative democracy. The flaws, at least to me, are clear and obvious, and action is needed. But Green makes this point much better than I do:

“The point is, our system of representative democracy is a usability nightmare. If the point of democracy is to empower people, we’re doing a terrible job of it. Perhaps our democracy is like Windows — it’s trying to be new and hip, but it’s held back by all this bloated code from the DOS era. Or in our case, from an agrarian society without 300 million people, without the 24-hour news cycle, and without the Internet.”

While social media has certainly changed many people’s political consciousness, and their means of gaining political information, this does not necessarily mean that information gained through social media will be accurate, or even better than traditional means.  This post is written in response to a post by a classmate, “social media leads to smarter voters”.

In the post, the author argues that since Twitter and Facebook users follow celebrities and their friends and get political news from them, these social media users are better informed than they would be otherwise. The author also argues that though the level of information received through this source is imperfect, it is better than nothing and that this is an improvement for voting and democracy. Finally, the post points out that social media facilitates a greater connection to politicians, since they join social media sites, connect with voters, and provide platform information on these sites.

However, I think there still remain some very big questions about the way that social media, and digital media more broadly affect voter knowledge and by extension, voting behaviour. First of all, the possibility that social media displaces rather than augments traditional sources of information is concerning. It’s possible that since social media makes voters feel informed, it prevents them from seeking out additional information when it comes time to inform themselves about their vote. Furthermore, informing yourself through digital media and social media subjects you to systemic biases that don’t exist within traditional media sources.

One Internet activist, Eli Pariser, argues that certain forms of digital media, such as Facebook’s personalized newsfeed or in some cases Google searches, subject users to a “filter bubble”. Over time, as information become more personalized to the user’s previous habits, they will be mostly subjected to information that is consistent with their existing opinions and understandings. Confirmation bias, though it also applies in traditional media, becomes more powerful when the user is able to filter out information that is inconsistent with their beliefs by unfollowing someone on Twitter, or blocking someone from their Facebook Newsfeed. These biases mean that a user subject to them would become more set in their ways, and less likely to respond intelligently to policy debates. To the extent that social media makes users feel comfortable in their level of knowledge, and in so doing displaces traditional media, it perpetuates biases that make people less informed and more set in their ways.

This is not to say that social media has no positive impacts on voters’ political awareness. Following politicians on social media certainly is a more personal means of connection than reading their comments in a newspaper, and there might be some people who never would have read news outside of what comes across their Twitter feed who are now informed. We should just make sure that we remain aware of some of the problems that come with relying on social media as our only source of political news, discussion and debate.