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Geeks and Politics
You just don't find many tech geeks involved in politics. Sure, there are "politics geeks" who are really into the stuff that goes on in Washington. That's one of the things about being a geek: you're really into whatever it is you're into, often to the exclusion of other things. Thus many of us techs have no real idea how the machinery of Big Politics works. We may have some idea; after all, we're generally rather intelligent. (And of course, I don't really know, since I'm not involved in politics enough to know whether I'm right or not.) As Lawrence Lessig recently pointed out, these two worlds are starting to grind against each other. Violently. I see some of the problems as having two root causes: 1) the techs aren't involved in (and have little clue about) the political process and 2) the pols have little clue about the workings of technology. It is thus that we get laws that 1) have no relation to the reality of current technology, 2) are immediately obsoleted by changes in technology, or 3) unintentionally (?) hamper development of new technology in various ways. How to fix this? One suggestion is that techs get more involved politically. I'm not so sure this is the right thing. First off, I should say that I think everyone in the U. S. should be more politically involved. We as citizens tend to not speak out enough unless something directly affects our wallets. Compare the outrage over Enron, Worldcom, etc. with public outcry over hyper-aggressive airport security, stupid laws, or insane administrative policies. What I think Lessig and others might be suggesting is that more techs become heavily involved in politics -- taking an active role in shaping policy and legislation. While this might have benefits for our legislative future, it would certainly drain the brightest minds from the technology pool and slow down development in some areas. What weblog tool would I be writing with, for example, if Dave Winer had run for Congress in 1996 instead of writing software for the past six years? And would he alone have been enough to prevent such disasters as the DMCA? Probably not, although a few key amendments might have been able to make it slightly less offensive. I think that true, effective change will only start if there are at least a dozen tech geeks from different areas of the country in both the house and Senate -- and across party lines. And these people do not need to agree. Differing viewpoints, actual debate and discourse, and sometimes violent disagreements are what needs to happen for good legislation to be created. That would be good. But the cost: putting a dozen or more of the greatest innovators in the country into Congress? Yikes. Another suggestion I've seen tossed around in various venues is for more tech lobbying. I see this as a consequence of a misunderstanding of the political process. There's plenty of tech lobbying going on. It's just by the "wrong" people, and for the "wrong" causes. I say wrong in quotes because everybody's got their own causes, and two very knowledgeable people will often fall on different sides of an issue -- for good reasons. In many cases, there's certainly enough agreement about the symptoms of a problem. In fewer cases, there's agreement about what the actual problem is. And rarely is there any kind of consensus on the best way to solve the problem (or even remedy the symptoms in the case where we can't agree on the probelm). So what is the answer? If I had that answer, I'd be doing something else right now. What am I going to do? Keep writing my CongressMonkey in (probably vain) attempts to educate them on various issues. Vote. And run for Congress. comment []
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