

Programmers: The New Political Elite - capkutay
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/meet-the-new-political-elite-computer-programmers/2010/12/20/gIQAfcg9nP_blog.html

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tejaswiy
I don't get it. When did programmers and reddit / 4chan users become the same?
If anything, this article speaks about the power of the internet in general,
nothing to do with programmers.

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nextparadigms
It's not the programmers. It's the whole Internet waking up. It's the people
living and breathing the Internet who want the status quo politicians to stop
trying to mess with it. And the vast majority of them are not programmers.

~~~
wladimir
Indeed. It's not about (power-hungry) programmers. Programmers _are_ important
right now because they make things possible, but in the end it's about humans
connecting to humans in ways, and at a scale, never before possible. People
are suddenly connected across borders, bypassing and outmaneuvering the old,
slow, hierarchical institutions. Though I don't think traditional politics
will go away any time soon, this is bound to have far-ranging unexpected
effects in the future (what we're seeing right now is only the beginning).

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itmag
Hmmm... isn't lawyer supposedly the most common prior profession for
politicians? (Except in Sweden, where it's "high school dropout").

A shift from laywers to programmers doesn't seem so bad to me :)

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redthrowaway
Depends _which_ programmers. I've run across a few in Enterprise that would
scare me worse than Lamar Smith.

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itmag
Hehe, suddenly I imagine legislators writing laws called
SOPAFactoryHelperMultiplexerWhalesemenAbstractBaseclassTemplateDongleSingleton.
_shudder_

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redthrowaway
You already have
UnitingandStrengtheningAmericabyProvidingAppropriateToolsRequiredtoObstructandInterceptTerrorismAct.
_Someone_ in Congress knows Java...

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Swizec
Programmers _suck_ at politics. Always have, always will. Programmers are so
far removed from the wants and needs of the average human we need translators
(managers) to even speak with them.

It is even common in programmer culture that we _enjoy_ this great divide
between ourselves and the "lusers". We _make fun_ of people who couldn't code
their way out of a wet paper bag.

Similarly, your average programmer couldn't lobby their way out of a wet paper
bag. Looking at the average HN/twitter/etc. comment, most of us can't even
lobby for a nice office with a view, let alone influence a whole bunch of
politicians to change their minds.

The reason 4chan and reddit even remotely get anything done is because there
are billions of them. And even they have so far shown practically no real
political influence. The two biggest offline influences have been getting Moot
to be person of the year and sparking the Wall Street protests ... which have
been completely ineffective in getting anything done.

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JoshTriplett
I think you haven't quite reached the core problem. Many programmers
understand "the wants and needs of the average human" just fine; that doesn't
really cause as severe a problem as you suggest. We support non-programmers
and non-experts, and we mostly frown upon people who attack newbies. More
generally, beyond programming, we often have decent solutions for political
and social issues, usually generated by ignoring the baggage associated with
them and just dealing with the actual issues.

The fundamental problem, in my opinion: as programmers, we hold rationality as
a core value above most other things. We expect rationality from others, and
we cope very badly with irrationality. To the extent programmers manage to
understand irrationality at all, we have an almost moral inhibition against
exploiting it. That makes us utterly awful at politics, which currently
requires expert-level manipulative tactics to deal with the majority of
voters, who don't deal with political and social issues in rational ways.
Anyone who refuses to use such tactics will lose to those who do.

A political hacker would need to have expert-level skill in rhetoric, not just
in rational argument and problem solving. This doesn't seem like an impossible
goal, but we first have to understand and accept the fundamental problem, and
get over the constraints we've hamstrung ourselves with.

~~~
gldalmaso
>> _That makes us utterly awful at politics_

But makes us fairly good activists that don't just use hype but real arguments
(and in some cases real action).

Proper activism may not be able to change political scenes all the time, but
it does usually leave a dent.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I agree. However, if we could ever manage to master both hype _and_ real
arguments and action, we could much more effectively change the world.

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ianso
As a lot of people have pointed out, this is a rather confused article. I
think what the author Dominic Basulto is trying to get at is that the Internet
and new applications/platforms are being used to exert political influence in
new ways.

For me this is the logical consequence of the increasing "digitization" of the
structure of our society, i.e. social networks etc. Basulto has jumped from
this to Rushkoff's "program or be programmed" idea. But in the large scale the
"programs" that define new social spaces is actually written by a very, very
small number of people mostly in California, and have nothing to do with
campaigning for anything.

moocow01 is correct to say that people going to Codecademy to learn how to
launch online campaigns will be disappointed. This is partly because we don't
have an API layer for programs that organise social interactions, and this is
one reason why I'm working on a project that does just that.

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RyanMcGreal
This is a dismal puff piece written by someone who barely knows anything about
programming or programmers and has just cobbled together a mishmash of
disjointed references to recent events without a coherent understanding of the
dynamics.

This, in particular, made me cringe:

"The Internet 'hive-mind' is suddenly everywhere in cyberspace..."

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moocow01
I'd say doubtful. There definitely are some network effects that can be
leveraged by 'coders' but look while we're all twittering and signing digital
petitions you know who is actually exerting real political influence...

\- Lobbyists who work face to face with politicians

\- Corporations with buckets of money

\- And most importantly, protestors who can't be ignored by shutting down a
computer

Technologists may be building tools around which people can engage in
discussion and bond to create a channel for political activity but if you
think were going to code our way to a better political structure within the US
I would guess you may be disappointed.

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waterlesscloud
Programmers are far too literal minded to succeed in politics, as the comments
here prove. ;-)

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crdoconnor
This is a hit piece by the washington post.

~~~
pjscott
Are you sure? It's confusing enough -- and confused enough -- that I'm not
sure what they're trying to hit.

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andreadallera
> Code is becoming the new lingua franca of Web activists around the nation

No, it's not. The sentence doesn't even make sense.

> If you can code, you can launch new movements, upend traditional campaign
> dynamics and pressure candidates in a low-cost, high-tech and highly
> effective way.

Your power to start a movement online has absolutely nothing to do with if
you're a programmer or not.

Honestly, I've stopped reading after this.

~~~
microcentury
Completely agreed on both points. The first line is so baffling I read it
twice. Do they think programmers talk to each other in this mysterious 'code'?
The writer of this article would be deeply disappointed by a glance at Code
Academy.

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funkah
SOPA is actually a perfect example of how programmers have very little clout
at all. Basically the entire internet industry has relentlessly and loudly
pointed out what a terrible idea it is on so many levels, and yet the people
in Congress who support the bill are saying it has only a few opponents. I
really don't think they're scared at all.

