#fair fights

But the transformation of the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four” has made turned technical standards-setting into a game of moneyball, overseen by conflicted refs who have few checks on their calls.

Take the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body that is justly famed for its long history of making high-quality, fair web standards in a transparent and open way. As web companies gobbled each other up and browsers became the purview of two giant companies, one charitable foundation, and a handful of very small companies with nearly no market share, the W3C’s role has increasing shifted from keeping browser companies honest to servicing their most important, powerful members.

The big tech companies can pay full-time wages for “volunteers” to staff key roles in every important standards committee, and when that fails, the W3C’s process allows the director to simply override the members’ objections. That’s a great power to have when the consortium’s members need the W3C more than the W3C needs their dues — but as the sector dwindled to a handful of large companies, the ability of one person to unilaterally override the members’ popular will became a serious — catastrophic — liability.

It’s not that the W3C isn’t a good institution. When the W3C sets out to standardize a technology that the big tech companies don’t care to capture, it does an outstanding job. Look at ActivityPub, the standard behind Mastodon, which is technically brilliant.

But the tech firms didn’t care about ActivityPub, so they didn’t bother to bigfoot it at the W3C. The W3C isn’t a bad institution, but it is a comparatively weak institution.

The problem is that as large, powerful, strong institutions fail, the battleground shifts to the weak institutions that sit beneath them. When a elections are rigged through voter suppression or gerrymandering, the real election moves to the in-party nomination process, which was never designed to be the locus of the kind of contestation that we see in a general election.

That’s how California ended up with so many terrible, corporate Democrats in state office: in many of California’s races, the winner is whomever gets the Democratic nomination, and those nomination processes lack the kinds of limitations on outside spending, dark money, or voter suppression that attends our general elections.

At the extreme end of this, you get hereditary political offices. Take Dan Lipinski. He’s an anti-Choice, anti-union, anti-LGBTQ “Democrat” from Illinois who stepped into his father’s Congressional seat without even winning the nomination, his father stepped down after winning the nomination, handing it over to his son.

Lipinski was arguably the worst Democrat in the Congressional caucus, but he’s held his seat from 2004-2021, while being showered with money by the railroad industry, and voting consistently to dismantle the already inadequate rail safety regs.

Lipinski’s congressional district was such a Democrat safe-seat that the Republicans don’t even bother to mount a serious candidate to run against him — the GOP nomination process for the district is so poorly attended that Lipinski’s opponent in the 2020 race was an avowed Holocaust-denier.

Political parties are weak institutions. In contested elections, parties whose nomination process is corrupt or inadequate lose to parties with better nominations, and are spurred to clean up their act.

But when a seat is safe, the real election takes place in a smoke-filled room with little scrutiny or due process, and it doesn’t matter, because the candidate wins anyway.

Remember the 2016 Democratic primary, when the Sanders campaign sued the Democratic National Committee over last-minute rule-changes that cinched the nomination for Hillary Clinton? The DNC’s defense was that the Democratic Party was a private entity and it rules were a strictly internal matter.

They told the judge that they were within their rights to “go into a back room like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.” They disclaimed any obligation to choose their nominee on the basis of an “impartial” or “evenhanded” basis.

This is what a weak institution looks like: opaque and inscrutable, with zero obligation to deliver a fair outcome.

So I complained on Twitter. That’s what you do, right? I complained about the neighbors, the parking, the noise, the cocaine trafficking, the asbestos, and of course, my bloody useless councillor.

A couple days later, I was standing in line to buy a coffee from a cart in a park on the way back from dropping the kid at day-care when a guy approached me. He’d seen my tweets and had some useful intel.

“You know that Hackney is a Labour stronghold, right? So whomever is selected to be the candidate automatically wins the election. The real election is the party selection meeting — ” (that is, the nomination process) “ — and the meeting where your councillor was selected had twelve people in attendance. I was one of them. He was elected by seven people. He doesn’t care about you because he doesn’t have to. He just needs to make sure that a handful of party activists who are likely to show up to the next selection meeting think he’s doing a good job.”

Suddenly, it made sense. This guy wasn’t my elected representative: he was a seat-warmer selected by a party apparatus, and solving my problems wasn’t his job. It wasn’t that he liked the Spanish cocaine runners or the illegal parking or the death-trap hotel, but they weren’t his problem, and he had more important things to do.