Where The Magic Happens

'Kraken' lawyer Sidney Powell sketches out impossible vote-switching scenario https://t.co/LFQtqxmPva

— Raw Story (@RawStory) October 12, 2021

 "What I think really has to be discovered is that there is a secret server that all the votes go to where they manipulate the heck out of it," Powell said in an interview with The Ledger Report. Her interview covered her oft-repeated and baseless claims that voting machines helped fraudulently "steal" the 2020 presidential election from former President Donald Trump.

"What I think really has to be discovered"?  That's not an allegation, that's a wish. That's a line from Ferlenghetti, except he said it better: 

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

I like that better than Powell's statement, which only reveals someone who has no clue how the internet works, except that it involves "servers" and something called "algorithms."

I had a friend whose brother worked for the phone company as a repair technician.  He understood how phones worked, but even he said the connection to another phone was "where the magic happens."  He meant the machinery (later computers) that allowed one phone to connect to another out of the millions on the planet through the mere manual (at the time) operation of a dial (push buttons then, but I remember back to "direct dialing" with rotary dials).  None of us understand how phones work, even now.  We just rely on them, but it never occurs to us that they use "servers" and "algorithms," although odds are, they do.  We just never learned to talk about phone service that way.  You dial, the other person answer; that's "phone service."  We understand the internet no better than that, but now we pretend we do because we know words like "servers" and "algorithms."  And then we make wishes based on our ignorance:  "What I think really has to be discovered is" the little men inside the computers making them all work, connecting everything by magic through "lines."  Ley lines, probably.  Shit, for Sidney Powell, might as well be.

"We need to know where their servers are and what they're doing with them, and we need the data from them and we need the data from the machines," she continued. "But they're going as fast as they can, right now, everywhere they can to completely revamp the machines with new software that erases everything that shows what they did."

Because that's the other thing people do with computers:  they erase things.  And while the internet seems a spaceless zone where what I type on my computer is actually "received" on something (a "server"?) somewhere else in the world (or not?  Somewhere in the solar system?  Mars, maybe?) is then visible to you wherever you are.  That's the old "Cyber-space" model of cyberpunk, which we're now too sophisticated to take seriously (though for awhile it seemed like the "internet" had to be somewhere; it coulnd't be everywhere and nowhere.  Why not "cyberspace"?  That's a place, right?*).  Just as those who would keep us terrified reach back to communists (the old but gold standard of Boomers) for a shibboleth, they also need something more concrete than the internet (which is more metaphor to most of us, than physical reality).  Enter "servers" and "algorithms," although the latter are more abstract than concrete, and the former are simply a name for computers used for a specific purpose.

But the computer is "where the magic happens," and that magic is controlled, and conducted, by "algorithms."  Which, as we know, do devious things.  What magic doesn't?

During her interview with Ledger, Powell claimed that the U.S. Army had issued a grant to a New Jersey university to develop an algorithm that would weigh votes to help predetermine the outcome of an election.

Additionally, she claimed that the Department of Defense had a patent with the National Institutes of Health "to inject false voter identifications and votes into our voting system and allow remote access enough central server."

"That is the recipe for disaster that we have today," Powell said.

It's fun to watch the 1950's monster movies about giant ants or giant gila monsters, all produced by "radioactivity" (another idea we didn't understand at the time; radioactivity produces cancers and death, not growth into giant monsters).  Inevitably the military is called out, and comes rolling through the streets in jeeps and trucks full of cannon fodder...er, soldiers.  Frankly, they might as well all be wearing red Star Fleet jerseys, and we all know it.  It's what they're there for.  But this display of military power is not seen as the rise of martial law; in a country where the entire citizenry was just in the military or working in factories for the war effort (or so, again, it seems from the movies of the '40's), the military is not "them," it's Us.

Well, it was until Vietnam.  Corporations followed shortly after, the military and corporations losing their sheen as the saviors of America.  Vietnam brought Agent Orange and napalm and soon we distrusted both the military and the corporations, and they were "them" against "Us."  "Alien" is the classic metaphor of the age:  a savage creature bent only on killing sentient life (and probably the cat, if he'd ever bothered), sought out by the very corporation that employed the crew of the "Nostromo."  Their lives willingly sacrificed (unbeknownst to them) to recover the creature as a weapon it could market to the military.  The perfect marriage of nightmare, the logical outcome of Eisenhower's warning of a 'military-industrial complex.'

So now the DOD works with the NIH to use the pandemic to undermine democracy, or at least wrest power from the people, because sure, that's how it works.  And all those movies and TV shows about conspiracies and ruthless government agencies that sprang up like mushrooms in the decades after 1975, made fallow the ground for "Q-Anon" and Sidney Powell and Donald Trump.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.  He's also nutty as a fruitcake.  Well, some of them are.  The rest of us, I think, are actually a bit more sensible than that.  When we come across what Sidney Powell said to some obscure website/podcast, we can agree she's got more than a few burnt out bulbs in her chandelier, and her elevator doesn't make it to the top anymore.

*This actually parallels the development of the narrative voice in Western literature.  When the novel came along, a third-person narrator telling you, a stranger to the narrator, what other strangers were doing and thinking in what were then private lifes (we started giving that up long before the telephone, much less the personal computer), was literally inconceivable.  Early novels were "epistolary."  The first fiction was that you were reading someone's mail, their private letters.  The idea of publishing famous (dead) people's letters came from that.  It took a few decades to get to Dickens' and famous statements like "Marley was dead, to begin with.  Scrooge knew he was dead?"  In the early 19th century that statement would have been indecipherable and uninterpretable.  Not long after that Dickens could write an entire first-person narrative novel, and nobody blinked at the narrator telling the story of his private life.  The fiction of the narrator, first-person or third, was quickly established, and the need for a more "recognizable" excuse for the narration, abandoned.  "Cyber-space" connected us to the familiar dimensional world of vision, so important to binocular primates.  Now we accept that the internet exists simultaneously on our phones and screens and also on everyone else's, and yet is not contained by either of those classes of things.  Now it's just something we "connect" to, now it's just "out there" and "in here" at the same time. But still, servers and algorithms, right?